Oh please! Comparing a mere $50K political donation, split between a party and a candidate, by an owner of a hedge fund that happens to own a newspaper to actually putting people on the board of a newspaper whose mission includes determining coverage and influencing editorial policy is not even a close analogy. Besides - unlike the Sun-Times, which still has local reporters covering actual local news - the former self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Newspaper is largely just a forum for reprints from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Associated Press today.
LOL. Perhaps I am more high-minded, but the older I get the more misanthropic I get, so I try not to advocate executing people just because they are effing irritating.
I would really like to meet the guy who came up with that Council of Nicea tweet, however.
I dunno whether or how the election might have been stolen. The logical conclusion to Joe Biden’s response to the question as to whether the 2022 election will be valid (i.e. not unless the Leftist voting rights bill is passed) implies his belief that all past elections were rigged. I and most thinking people wave away Trump’s foolish assertions about voting machines and servers in China and etc. But we do believe that mail-in voting, indiscriminate and unsolicited mailing of ballots to addresses (not people), unsecure drop boxes, ballot harvesting et al subvert chain of custody and auditability. If you think mail-in voting is secure, then you should start paying your bills thru the US Mail in cash with “Cash Enclosed” written on the envelope. When the money is stolen you will have no way to prove that you ever sent the cash.
Was Jan.6th led by Leftists? You and I can agree that notion is indeed certifiably insane. That “democracy” could be overthrown by those fools is also indeed certifiably insane. Could we agree that the Leftists in Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago et al had as their objective a desire to subvert government authority and law and order in an attempt to undermine our government and that they were much smarter to play the long game toward that goal?
The Brownshirts and Nazi’s in 1930’s German were expressing “growing anger and frustration” with those who they believed were responsible for all the things they feared. Good Germans who supported them did too, or at least they looked the other way, Good Germans didn’t think what happened could happen but totalitarianism starts small.
Regarding vaccinations, as I have said in the past, look at the data. The data support the “goofy, selfish unscientific belief” that healthy people, and particularly those under 50, have very little to fear from Covid. Children especially. And deeper analysis of the data also show that the data itself has been unobjectively reported in order to scare people and achieve desired ends. Even Supreme Court justices are quoting false information.
You seem to believe you are the only non-partisan person around. Mandatory vaccines for polio, a devastating disease that strikes the healthy and unhealthy indiscriminately with much lower recovery rates? Yes. For Covid? No.
You say these measures won’t be enacted. You may be right. But similar measures were enacted in Australia. Lots of German Jews never left Germany because they didn’t believe what was being said would ever happen.
I like your Picayune, Eric. I will continue to subscribe. You have a right to your opinions, and I respect them. And I respect and will abide by your right to edit and censor what you post. But my comments seem to hit a nerve and bring out impatience and pejorative name-calling in your responses. With my WSJ excerpt I was trying to point out, without comment, that there is an attitude among our fellow citizens that is disturbing and dangerous. Your reaction was “whataboutism”, where I expected something more akin to your final paragraph. Maybe that’s what I got. Neither side has clean hands. But I had to endure the insults along the way.
As a B cell blood cancer survivor who has been vaxed and boosted, I would like to see everyone vaccinated. Because of the chemo and stem cell transplant I had 14 years ago which compromised my immune system, I have no antibodies from the vaccines, and would be seriously I’ll if I got Covid. So I have to give up my freedom to go to indoor gatherings, restaurants, anywhere the unvaccinated are - so they can exercise their freedom to be unvaccinated. My question is when did Americans become so self centered? Do these unvaccinated people understand that the longer Covid is out there, the more it will mutate?
Heather Cherone interview is interesting and helpful. Just the kind of info I want to know so I can guide my middle school students. Thank you for emphasizing her educational career.
Re: your exchange with Joe P where you both cited polls. I'm so tired of polls being pointed to as something meaningful when IMHO they only serve to inflame or influence people and/or cause hand wringing. Very seldom are the actual number of people surveyed revealed or where they were drawn from. When I dug down to the "About the Study" section of the Ipsos Reuters poll you linked, the sample was 2007 people randomly from "online panels" and then Ipsos extrapolates. Where do these people come from, how do they find them? Personally, I've never been asked to participate in any political poll and if 2016 showed us anything, it's that polls are irrelevant.
Eric, whoever said bad things come in three’s must have seen Spencer. Three times critics have lauded must-see films this year and three times I’ve been burned. First the Lost Daughter (self absorbed woman with angst, kids who get the shaft and a lot of closeup’s to make up for lack of plot.). Then The Last Duel (i live John Williams and trusted his recommendation on Mincing Rascals. Why???!!!I Then Spencer (self-absorbed woman with angst, kids who get the shaft, and closeups to make up for the lack of plot). See Encanto. Weak plot but beautiful animation and incredible Lin Manuel Miranda music.
Thanks for the Cherone interview -- heard/saw her many times, nice to "meet" her via PS. I had similar journalistic dreams -- same age. I too watched Kurtis and Jacobson as a kid and read the papers and thought all that was exciting and interesting and romantic. I subsequently got a little taste of the life -- Medill cherub program (cover the parade!), Daily Northwestern (school board meetings! arraignments! will they build the parking garage?!), lady friend interning at the Toledo Blade (Toledo!) -- and got less of a taste *for* the life. I've always admired journalists' work ethic and professionalism in the face of not very much money and less thanks.
Incidentally, "Assorted Misdeeds in the Suburbs" would make an excellent title for something, I'm thinking true crime podcast?
I found the poll response on 'stay at home' orders for the unvaccinated interesting. Eric believes that the poll respondents are reasonable, concerned people that were expressing anger and frustration and were using their response to send a message and not in support of an actual policy. A very likely and nuanced interpretation of a group one identifies with and are in sympathy with. But the poll numbers and Eric's interpretation also made me think about who the respondents imagined to be isolated. Hicks, rubes, and Trumpian crazies are appealing targets of anger and derision. But would the response have been the same if they had been told the policy would fall disproportionately on Blacks and was therefore racist? Blacks have the lowest vaccination rate (40%), followed by other POC's, then whites, with the highest rate for Asians. What did they envision in the word 'unvaccinated'? 77% of Americans have one shot, 64% are fully vaccinated, 40% are fully vaccinated and had a booster - so did the respondents imagine confining 23% of the population or 60%? 55% of 12–17-year-olds are fully vaccinated and 20% of 5-11-year-olds. Did they imagine isolating 80% of grade schoolers? A very large percentage of the unvaccinated children must have vaccinated parents. Maybe we should just accept the fact that people don't have a common risk assessment, and don't have a common perception of the 'obviously' correct behavior. And trying to group them as Democrat or Republican is not very useful. Finally, the rate of acceptance for the covid vaccine is no different than it has been for past vaccines. The measles vaccine, 1963, took twenty years from introduction to reaching 90% of the population and has stayed at that rate since. Measles was hoped to be 'eliminated' by 1982, but was not 'eliminated' until 2000. Expecting covid to be contained in one or two years is optimistic to say the least.
Excellent newsletter today , Eric. And brief!
Oh please! Comparing a mere $50K political donation, split between a party and a candidate, by an owner of a hedge fund that happens to own a newspaper to actually putting people on the board of a newspaper whose mission includes determining coverage and influencing editorial policy is not even a close analogy. Besides - unlike the Sun-Times, which still has local reporters covering actual local news - the former self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Newspaper is largely just a forum for reprints from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Associated Press today.
LOL. Perhaps I am more high-minded, but the older I get the more misanthropic I get, so I try not to advocate executing people just because they are effing irritating.
I would really like to meet the guy who came up with that Council of Nicea tweet, however.
Hi Eric,
I dunno whether or how the election might have been stolen. The logical conclusion to Joe Biden’s response to the question as to whether the 2022 election will be valid (i.e. not unless the Leftist voting rights bill is passed) implies his belief that all past elections were rigged. I and most thinking people wave away Trump’s foolish assertions about voting machines and servers in China and etc. But we do believe that mail-in voting, indiscriminate and unsolicited mailing of ballots to addresses (not people), unsecure drop boxes, ballot harvesting et al subvert chain of custody and auditability. If you think mail-in voting is secure, then you should start paying your bills thru the US Mail in cash with “Cash Enclosed” written on the envelope. When the money is stolen you will have no way to prove that you ever sent the cash.
Was Jan.6th led by Leftists? You and I can agree that notion is indeed certifiably insane. That “democracy” could be overthrown by those fools is also indeed certifiably insane. Could we agree that the Leftists in Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago et al had as their objective a desire to subvert government authority and law and order in an attempt to undermine our government and that they were much smarter to play the long game toward that goal?
The Brownshirts and Nazi’s in 1930’s German were expressing “growing anger and frustration” with those who they believed were responsible for all the things they feared. Good Germans who supported them did too, or at least they looked the other way, Good Germans didn’t think what happened could happen but totalitarianism starts small.
Regarding vaccinations, as I have said in the past, look at the data. The data support the “goofy, selfish unscientific belief” that healthy people, and particularly those under 50, have very little to fear from Covid. Children especially. And deeper analysis of the data also show that the data itself has been unobjectively reported in order to scare people and achieve desired ends. Even Supreme Court justices are quoting false information.
You seem to believe you are the only non-partisan person around. Mandatory vaccines for polio, a devastating disease that strikes the healthy and unhealthy indiscriminately with much lower recovery rates? Yes. For Covid? No.
You say these measures won’t be enacted. You may be right. But similar measures were enacted in Australia. Lots of German Jews never left Germany because they didn’t believe what was being said would ever happen.
I like your Picayune, Eric. I will continue to subscribe. You have a right to your opinions, and I respect them. And I respect and will abide by your right to edit and censor what you post. But my comments seem to hit a nerve and bring out impatience and pejorative name-calling in your responses. With my WSJ excerpt I was trying to point out, without comment, that there is an attitude among our fellow citizens that is disturbing and dangerous. Your reaction was “whataboutism”, where I expected something more akin to your final paragraph. Maybe that’s what I got. Neither side has clean hands. But I had to endure the insults along the way.
If you want objective news, don't listen to WBEZ. Or at least balance it out by listening to FOX News and The Onion as well.
As a B cell blood cancer survivor who has been vaxed and boosted, I would like to see everyone vaccinated. Because of the chemo and stem cell transplant I had 14 years ago which compromised my immune system, I have no antibodies from the vaccines, and would be seriously I’ll if I got Covid. So I have to give up my freedom to go to indoor gatherings, restaurants, anywhere the unvaccinated are - so they can exercise their freedom to be unvaccinated. My question is when did Americans become so self centered? Do these unvaccinated people understand that the longer Covid is out there, the more it will mutate?
Thanks, Eric. Love your newsletters.
Heather Cherone interview is interesting and helpful. Just the kind of info I want to know so I can guide my middle school students. Thank you for emphasizing her educational career.
Re: your exchange with Joe P where you both cited polls. I'm so tired of polls being pointed to as something meaningful when IMHO they only serve to inflame or influence people and/or cause hand wringing. Very seldom are the actual number of people surveyed revealed or where they were drawn from. When I dug down to the "About the Study" section of the Ipsos Reuters poll you linked, the sample was 2007 people randomly from "online panels" and then Ipsos extrapolates. Where do these people come from, how do they find them? Personally, I've never been asked to participate in any political poll and if 2016 showed us anything, it's that polls are irrelevant.
Eric, whoever said bad things come in three’s must have seen Spencer. Three times critics have lauded must-see films this year and three times I’ve been burned. First the Lost Daughter (self absorbed woman with angst, kids who get the shaft and a lot of closeup’s to make up for lack of plot.). Then The Last Duel (i live John Williams and trusted his recommendation on Mincing Rascals. Why???!!!I Then Spencer (self-absorbed woman with angst, kids who get the shaft, and closeups to make up for the lack of plot). See Encanto. Weak plot but beautiful animation and incredible Lin Manuel Miranda music.
Thanks for the Cherone interview -- heard/saw her many times, nice to "meet" her via PS. I had similar journalistic dreams -- same age. I too watched Kurtis and Jacobson as a kid and read the papers and thought all that was exciting and interesting and romantic. I subsequently got a little taste of the life -- Medill cherub program (cover the parade!), Daily Northwestern (school board meetings! arraignments! will they build the parking garage?!), lady friend interning at the Toledo Blade (Toledo!) -- and got less of a taste *for* the life. I've always admired journalists' work ethic and professionalism in the face of not very much money and less thanks.
Incidentally, "Assorted Misdeeds in the Suburbs" would make an excellent title for something, I'm thinking true crime podcast?
I found the poll response on 'stay at home' orders for the unvaccinated interesting. Eric believes that the poll respondents are reasonable, concerned people that were expressing anger and frustration and were using their response to send a message and not in support of an actual policy. A very likely and nuanced interpretation of a group one identifies with and are in sympathy with. But the poll numbers and Eric's interpretation also made me think about who the respondents imagined to be isolated. Hicks, rubes, and Trumpian crazies are appealing targets of anger and derision. But would the response have been the same if they had been told the policy would fall disproportionately on Blacks and was therefore racist? Blacks have the lowest vaccination rate (40%), followed by other POC's, then whites, with the highest rate for Asians. What did they envision in the word 'unvaccinated'? 77% of Americans have one shot, 64% are fully vaccinated, 40% are fully vaccinated and had a booster - so did the respondents imagine confining 23% of the population or 60%? 55% of 12–17-year-olds are fully vaccinated and 20% of 5-11-year-olds. Did they imagine isolating 80% of grade schoolers? A very large percentage of the unvaccinated children must have vaccinated parents. Maybe we should just accept the fact that people don't have a common risk assessment, and don't have a common perception of the 'obviously' correct behavior. And trying to group them as Democrat or Republican is not very useful. Finally, the rate of acceptance for the covid vaccine is no different than it has been for past vaccines. The measles vaccine, 1963, took twenty years from introduction to reaching 90% of the population and has stayed at that rate since. Measles was hoped to be 'eliminated' by 1982, but was not 'eliminated' until 2000. Expecting covid to be contained in one or two years is optimistic to say the least.