And that's not even including the long-term disabilities that result from things like increased chance of developing diabetes, chronic fatigue, appendicitis, etc. And probably early onset dementia in a decade or so.
Yet society is expected to function normally despite more and more people either dead or too sick to work, for a week or so at a time or months or even permanently.
Most of the dead are old, so it's not like they contribute anything to the economy! (I am sure that is how a lot of people feel, sadly, tragically.)
But the willful ignorance of Long COVID is madness beyond words. But so is willful ignorance of global warming. The long term disability of millions will mesh well with the destruction of our infrastructure by floods and hurricanes and the like.
There was a program I watched on WWII from space, using graphics to show how the conflict progressed across the surface of the globe and one of the historians said at the end that the future would be determined by whether or not human beings could manage to not use the destructive potential they had developed and now had at their fingertips.
The human brain seems completely unsuited to comprehending large numbers and long time frames and yet we have developed the technology to influence far beyond our reasoning capacity. It reminds me of drivers who speed down a foggy road even though they are certainly outrunning their visibility and have no chance of spotting a deer in the road before they hit it, yet seem incapable of just slowing down so they are able to react.
And not surprisingly at all given how the virus continues to mutate and how far people are past their 2nd dose and even booster doses, the proportion of vaccinated people dying is increasing. The Washington Post ran a story last week and the data showed that as of February, 15% of deaths in a sample were not only vaccinated but also boosted. So no, it’s not as simple as “get vaccinated and you won’t die or get really sick” and it probably hasn’t been for over half a year now.
I understand the impulse behind the effort to minimize the stories of vaccinated people dying, since there are way too many dumb anti-vaxxers out there who will reach for anything as an excuse. But it contributes to the erroneous conclusion that the pandemic is anywhere near over.
Also, while I realize that the vaccines still make a difference (and they make a difference in how I personally live, too…I am doing a lot that I did not do in 2020) so it’s not apples to apples, I can’t help but notice that even if you look at the official case count which is hugely underreported thanks to at-home tests, we have more Covid cases right now than we had at almost any time in 2020 prior to November. And now most people don’t even feel the need to wear a mask when they go out.
Ive been holding off on getting my 2nd booster until probably September. I'm worried about the effectiveness waning more quickly with each successive boost, so I'm playing the long game and planning on waiting until closer to the probable fall-winter surge. I tried wading into 'researching' whether this is a good idea but got lost in the sea of bullshit surrounding the whole issue of vaccinations. Be safe and mask-up everyone!
This is what has been driving me crazy. The original strain is long gone and we'll almost assuredly never see it again. Future variants are far more likely to look more like Omicron than than the original Wuhan strain, so why not reformulate? Unless there's data suggesting that an Omicron-specific vaccine is not immunogenic, but that would surprise the hell out of me considering that there's at least some short-term immunity to Omicron infection (or else a surge would stay high forever).
Preaching to the choir. This part of the response has driven me crazy. The main benefit of RNA vaccines is the ability to quickly change the sequence to reformulate. Flu requires a huge amount of lead time because it's grown in fucking eggs, which is why we often read about manufacturers "guessing wrong." Why aren't we properly taking advantage of this new technology?
I was going to post something similar. I still see scientists and doctors saying they aren't sure we need a new vaccine. And I am so frustrated with Pfizer and Moderna for saying "we can have a new vaccine by March" when that wasn't the case (though I have no idea if they were exaggerating to boost stock prices, or just unrealistically optimistic in their estimates).
Their take right now is that the current vaccine with boosters does well enough to prevent hospitalization and death. My problem with that reasoning is that the vaccine is poor at neutralizing Omicron, so we're still getting lots of infections. And the cost of those infections is increased deaths and more long COVID.
I got my 2nd booster about a month ago, timed to max out my protection for my first in-person work related conference last week.
I went for a PCR test yesterday as I've felt like shit all week, with two negative rapid at home tests. Honestly don't think it's COVID, but I guess I'll know tomorrow.
The percentage of dead people who were vaccinated isn't the number to look at. That's necessarily going to increase as vaccination rates go up. If everybody was vaccinated, 100% of the dead would be vaccinated. Doesn't mean the vaccines don't work, just means that they're not perfect and that they don't prevent all death at all times. The number to look at is the inverse, percentage of vaccinated who die. Which has been and is very, very low.
Yes. And because there are still unvaccinated people, you can also compare the relative risk of death between vaxxed and unvaxxed (which is of course way higher for unvaxxed).
I don’t think we have a disagreement about what the numbers generally mean. My point is that we’ve been sold a bill of goods by the portion of this country that is desperate to pretend the pandemic is over. Because every return-to-office mandate, every removal of mask requirements, every removal of test/tracing requirements, is being justified based on the idea that vaccinated and boosted = basically zero risk of death (or as low as risk of death from a “normal” respiratory virus). That’s clearly false and most likely getting more false by the day, as people get further out from their last vaccine dose and as the virus mutates.
All this is why I still mask everywhere. And why I do my best not to be anywhere with unmasked people for long. And why I only tend to do any socializing with people who tested that day (as have we). And why I got a second booster (though it is going to start to wear off soon). I am still, for the most part, isolating. And I have no intention of changing that.
I'm double vaxxed and boosted and I got COVID last week. Unpleasant two days, but mostly just felt like a bad cold. I was sad to end my 25 month uninfected streak, but
I'm selfishly somewhat happy that I now presumably have natural immunity for at least a few months and can do more stuff around town.
I can at least see what they were trying to do with Jar Jar. The problem is they went too far in the "silly" direction, which didn't work with what they were trying to do with the rest of the movie.
What Mets game? It was raining all day yesterday in NYC and that 9-2 drubbing never happened, right? Seriously, Tylor Megill went into the fifth again without allowing a hit, in essence completing a nine inning no hitter, but one reason people don't care much for combined no hitters is that it's easier to get a team out twice than three times, and Megill clearly ran into problems the third time around. He's been a valuable part of the rotation, but he also is a poster child for why fifth starters usually don't go deep into games.
I think that beyond ongoing questions of COVID policy in the US - wouldn't it make sense for everyone to start wearing masks BEFORE a surge leads to hospitalizations? - we have devalued death. I am thinking about how during Bush's Wars, there came a point when it stopped being news when American soldiers died. It was just a statistic. Never mind how many people the US killed. Bit by bit, our leaders and the media and just the general public stopped really seeing death as anything but statistics with the exception of a few mass shootings. The same has happened with COVID. I am not sure Stalin actually said this, but "one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic" has never seemed more true. And even if we can find ways to make the pain felt - things like what I hear on NPR today trying to remember just plain individuals dead of COVID, or the efforts over the decades to turn the Holocaust into stories of people and not of a lump sum - I am not sure our society really wants to feel the pain. We are comfortably numb, and as much as we can blame Trump and his ilk for that, how many of us made a choice to be numb?
It's kind of amazing that wearing seat belts was normalized at all. The only other thing I can think of is raising the drinking age to 21 from 18, but that only affected a small percentage of the population.
It was normalized though due to laws (similar to motorcycle helmet laws) and auto makers putting in annoying alarms. These norms don't seem to happen organically due to actual proper risk assessment.
The reduction in smoking. That can probably be attributed to a combination of laws, health data, and societal pressures. I was on a plane last week and I still find it fascinating that you could smoke on a plane. And that it wasn't fully banned in the US until 1990.
Remember when magazines were full of cigarette ads and restaurants had smoking and non smoking sections? And there were ashtrays full of butts above all the public trash cans? Seems like a different world entirely.
Hey, I can remember when restaurants didn't have non-smoking sections at all. In movie comedies set more than 50 years ago there's sometimes a scene showing a doctor smoking, played for laughs. But I can actually remember being a kid in the mid-60s and my pediatrician setting his cig in an ashtray in the exam room before examining me. Different world indeed.
Part of my job involves working in a former hospital's medical library, and there are (very clearly) old "no smoking" signs in the stacks. Because of course people needed to be told not to smoke.
I remember going to the bowling alley with my mom, which I did for years from the early to late 90s, and it going from basically a cloud of smoke when you walked in to "OK, you can only smoke in this one room" to "OK, you have to stand outside the front door". It's been fully renovated at least once in that 20 years since, but I'm pretty sure if I walked in the door I'd still smell the smoke.
Yeah, I remember when I first moved to Dallas you could still smoke in Ft Worth, Arlington, Addison and I'm sure other towns around DFW. FW and Arlington have passed bans but you still can in Addison. Kinda blows my mind.
As a GenX kid from Idaho it was no small feat raising the drinking age or mandating seatbelts. Idaho refused to raise the drinking age until the federal government threatened to withhold maintaining interstate roadways. There was plenty of data on how many lives it would save (and how much $$ beer makers and bars would lose), but still a fight.
Seatbelts was an even harder normalization. It could be easier framed under "Freedom" as I hurt no one but myself. It was coached as a secondary ticket. Police couldn't pull you over for not wearing one, but there was a lot of ink spilled back then on it.
18 year old me - who didn't drive and wasn't going to drink - really disliked what he saw as coercion of the states and a denial of rights to people old enough to vote and to enlist. I suspect you heard a lot of that from people who were not 18. 18 year old me was, on this matter, a jerk.
i think that one big difference is that what was a "public health emergency" and "2 weeks to flatten the curve" is now an unending everyday existence. It's not sustainable to be in never-ending-emergency mode. So now, folks can/should mask when they see fit, and otherwise try to go about living their already-short lives.
Of course, it's easy to say "I am going to lose weight" - which is the underlying source of my comorbidities, according to my GP - and another thing to do it. But beyond that, I keep that mask on not just to protect myself but to protect my wife and moreover to protect my mother. And this gets into that always sticky question of "how much responsibility do we have for the well-being of others?" Because ideally, we are all responsible for each other and for society, but realistically, there are limits on what we can do.
What's frustrating to me is one of the single biggest things that would help, not just with covid but with ANY respiratory virus, is making rules for businesses and public buildings to clean their interior air. But that won't happen because they'll never spend money even if it keeps employees healthy and thus at work.
I mean waterborne illness was a huge problem until we invented an entire category of infrastructure (TWO if you count wastewater treatment separately from.drinking water treatment) with regulations to govern everything from building plants to testing the water to the grades of chemicals permitted to use in treating it to the specifications of instruments used to monitor it to the training and certification of operators who work in the field and now SURPRISE you don't see people slurping dysentery routinely from their kitchen sinks. What a concept.
But no, not only are people free to be publicly filthy but everyone around them gets to breathe in their aerial backwash because it just hangs in the indoor air without getting filtered out. Honestly I doubt I'll go out in public anytime soon without a mask (indoors) unless I'm with people I wouldn't immediately vomit at the thought of sharing a toothbrush with them. People are DISGUSTING.
I'm so frustrated that we didn't use this as an opportunity to update air filtration systems everywhere to just generally reduce illness. It was really nice to avoid a cold for that winter when everyone here was masking. And to appeal to fiscal conservatives, this would save money in the long run. The common cold alone costs the US $40 billion a year.
My parents personally knew at least two people who were hospitalized and subsequently died from COVID complications. The last time vaccines came up in a conversation my father was convinced they're bullshit being peddled by Big Pharma to make money. There is no correlation between micro and macro for some people.
It’s just funny to me how everything with Star Wars now is either set between III and IV, or post-Jedi. Massive universe and it’s almost always the same two eras (or the Clone Wars) with the same planets (fucking Tatooine again!!) and often the same characters. I half expect Fennec Shand and Greedo to show up here. Remember Greedo?
Good luck getting The New Adventures of Rey or Finn & Poe or Lando Moves To Florida. Why even bother going back to the sequels when they render the first six movies meaningless and when the sequels themselves really lent nothing new to the franchise? Should just go the “Halloween” route and say they’re non-canon. Or better: It was all a vision Luke had!
Remember visions!?
Also, Marty Foster had the red ass in the Yankees game when he and Aaron Boone got into it. Maybe it’s me living in Florida for too long but in instances like that, I’m always especially impressed when neither man smacks the other. Marty Foster looked like he was ready to shove his boot up Aaron Boone’s ass last night.
At this point, I am fully expecting a multipart series about Ponda Baba, the guy who existed solely to establish that light sabers are cool, going on a vision quest to find that he never really needed the arm Obi Wan cut off in the first bar scene. The action sequences will all look like they were animated at 4 frames per minute like Hanna Barbera cartoons from the early 70s.
You joke about making the sequel trilogy non-canon but there was internet chatter (take it with a grain of salt the size of a rancor) that Disney would use the World Between Worlds from the Rebels cartoon to basically say the ST took place in a different timeline. Now, it seemed like most of this came from the corner of Star Wars fandom that hates the ST not because it was clear the movies were made without any consistent story and it has a bad idea to let a hack like JJ Abrams do it, but rather there were too many girls in the movies. So it seems like wishful thinking from the mouth breathers.
The genetic engineering necessary to make pig or other mammal organs suitable for transplant seems like magic. So too are the nascent efforts at 3-D printing of artificial organs. May I live long enough to see the day when gene therapy can treat the cause before the need for transplant. In the meantime, register to be a donor.
...
Glad to see the Rangers efforts at addressing mental health. Despite how we collectively treat it, mental mental illness is as real as my rental disease and yet wrongly carries a stigma.
It is now four decades back but TEX was way ahead of the sabermetric curve, employing Craig Wright in the 1980s when Billy Beane was still playing minor league ball.
Alcides Escobar, who proved at least serviceable last year after Trea Turner was shipped out in the Great Nats Fire Sale of 2021, has been absolute dog shit this year both in the field and at the plate. Meanwhile, Luis Garcia, one-time and perhaps again Nats' shortstop of the future, is raking at AAA but won't be called up anytime soon. Fans suspect service time manipulation, Nats organization claims that he needs to get better at fielding the ball (and to be fair, he didn't show much in the majors during call-ups in 2020 and 2021, though he's still only 21).
Nats are on the verge of accomplishing something that's got to be close to a franchise record. Their pitchers have thrown 17 innings so far in Colorado during this series, and 15 of them have been by the two starters, including all 8 from Patrick Corbin last night. Usually they run through eight or nine pitchers per game there, even in games they win. One more game today, and then they're done in Colorado for the year.
(Guys were in a hurry last night, too. Game only took two hours and ten minutes.)
Sean Doolittle made the news around here. He and his wife, who make no secret of their left-leaning politics, were spotted among the crowd protesting at the Supreme Court the other day after the Alito decision leak. He got moved to the 60 day IL recently after having a plasma-rich platelet injection in his elbow, so he can't throw for six weeks anyway, so it's not like he's opening himself to criticism for not trying to work his way back.
He and Eireann just continually show up. When he was in Oakland, they did really great work supporting LGBTQ+ youth in the Bay Area. I love that they were there and not surprised at all.
I've said it before but it bears repeating: while I don't root for the end of DooDoo's pitching career, when it comes it will be softened by us getting to again see the unfiltered Eireann.
If you have the capacity to have "three people in [your] house doing separate therapy sessions via telehealth simultaneously," you probably have pretty good Internet, at least. So you've got that going for you. Which is nice.
Felt good to fanboy-out yesterday and really enjoy that Obi Wan trailer. I didn't like Boba Fett either, but we Gen-Xers grade modern Star Wars products on too tough a curve. We should all learn to stop worrying and love the Disney versions.
Yeah, at this point I treat Star Wars like the MCU. A series of stories that loosely tie together with obvious discontinuities and conflicts. Still, they can be a lot of fun if you just let them entertain you and stop trying to think about it too much.
"Meanwhile the Tiger bullpen, which entered the game with a major league-best 1.97 ERA, tossed four and two-thirds scoreless innings to reduce that number even further."
Years ago I saw a Valverde save live and in person in a playoff game and I still shudder at the memory. Couldn't tell you the opponent or even the year, but the feeling of terror as I watched through my fingers is as clear as if it were yesterday.
"but Bellino — who later said that Bumgarner was ejected for directing profanity at an umpire — seemed to be the one who escalated this, staring down Bumgarner, presumably because he didn’t like the pitcher jawing at Wills. As if that was his business to police there."
Yeah, that is his job to police. That's exactly what his job is. Umpires get graded on Game Management as well as any calls they make. It's one of the biggest things they get graded on.
Baumgarner was already arguing in the first inning about calls. Which everyone's beloved box on the screen showed were balls. That's an automatic rulebook ejection. It could have been done right then. But wasn't.
Since neither you or I know what was said between innings, I'm going to take a chance and say Bellino told him to knock it off (which is exactly his job to police) and Baumgarner started swearing about the home plate ump. Which correctly lead to his ejection. All right from the rulebook.
I believe Marine General Smedley Butler had relevant words on this subject. Perhaps he carries enough credibility for his opinion to matter to others on this thread.
I have never once in my entire life seen a player jawing about balls and strikes with a home plate umpire, watched the home plate umpire basically ignore it, and then see a first base umpire make an ejection over it. I am pretty certain neither have you.
"Since neither you or I know what was said between innings,"
I'll side with the umpire and not Baumgarner. You can see in the video that Baumgarner is jawing about something. I see the umpire respond to that, not instigate it. If he used the magic words directed at the umpire then he's gone, regardless of when it happened and who ejected him.
And yes, in the well over 1000 games I have umpired, I have seen it happen.
It is. My game management is good. That's not my comment. That's from evaluations by guys who have attended MLB's umpire school, the best in the world. Games move quick. Arguments are handled quickly and quietly. And a very consistent strike zone.
Your judgment on the field can't be that good if you couldn't even detect CCaylor's sarcasm. Also, LMAO at how cartoonishly full of yourself you are. Big Lucille Bluth eye roll right there, buddy.
The umpire who inspected his hand was staring at him directly in the face deliberately, probably trying to provoke him. You can see in the video that Bumgarner was a little surprised by the umpire's behavior.
there was more than that. The day before there was a weird fair call that ended in an argument. The fair call was made by yesterdays HP umpire and he is a rookie. Bumgarner seemed to be Working the umpire. This video is good. I recommend everyone follow
Not even close to unprecedented. Senior umpires regularly step up to let players know they can't get away with trying to intimidate rookie umpires. While doing that, Bumgarner said the magic words.
The hand inspection is a new policy. It allowed the incident between Bumgarner and the umpire to occur. Without it, Bumgarner would have gone back to the dugout and avoided anymore interaction with the umpires.
The magic words were said after the umpire provoked him by staring him in the face at very close distance. That's what men do when they are challenging another man to a fight. Everyone knows not to stare down a bull.
No, but I've certainly seen -- many times -- an older, more experienced umpire step into a dispute between a manager/player and a younger ump, to take the heat off the younger guy and provide some support. Which sometimes results in the intervening ump ejecting the player or manager, if the player or manager steps over the line. I think that's akin to what happened here. Pitcher was jawing at Wills, Bellino had the opportunity to interact with pitcher in the course of his normal hand-check job, tried to use it to chill the pitcher out a bit. Didn't work, obviously, but I think that was the dynamic here.
I'd buy that if Bellino had actually said anything. A staredown while aggressively handling a pitcher's primary tool was not an attempt to chill anyone out.
Especially when the first base umpire looked like he was giving him a hand massage instead of just the usual swipe. It’s a shame that MadBum wasn’t able to resist reacting but I do understand why.
Effective communication is not dependant on arbitrary and changing rules such as grammar or spelling.
'Wut up wit dat?' isn't really a sentence and is misspelled yet perfectly conveys a question better than the correct grammar and spelling does. If you are a writer it matters a bit but isn't absolutely necessary, but for the rest of us, it's just bullshit nit-picking to point out misspellings and slight grammar issues, especially as in this case, there were none.
Also, Wills is a pretty new and inexperienced umpire at the major league level (although he had around a decade in the minors), while Bellino's an established veteran who I believe was acting Crew Chief on the day. Not surprising he'd provide support for Wills there.
Well, of course you’re right that a little bitching is okay and should be ignored. Depends how it’s done, though. A player can get away with saying a lot if nobody, or only a couple of people, can see it. Like a catcher (or batter) at home plate. If you’re looking away from the ump, and nobody but the three of you knows what’s going on, you can say an awful lot. But if you’re standing on the mound making a spectacle of yelling at the plate ump about a call, that shit has to be nipped in the bud, especially if it’s the first inning, or it’s going to be a long, miserable day for everyone. Players notice that stuff and think, hey, if he can do that, so can I. And, you know, Bumgarner’s been around long enough to know this.
Now, from the video I’ve seen, it didn’t look like Bumgarner was particularly demonstrative on this occasion – this wasn’t Clemens-in-the-playoffs-in-Oakland stuff. So… I don’t know. Maybe there’s some history here we don’t know about. Bellino’s not particularly ejection-prone, only had one all last season.
I will add this, though – the super-slow video showing Bellino staring is kind of bullshit. If you watch it in real time it was just a few seconds. A tad longer than you often see on these hand checks, yes, but hardly the creepy stare that the super-slo-mo version makes you think.
Wow, the infamous 'prepared statement' that doesn't actually say that he did anything wrong. Because he didn't. Manfred obviously cares more about the public opinion of idiots who don't know anything about baseball than he does backing up his umpires for doing their job correctly. He just declared open season on them.
As good as Whitlock had been starting he really needs to be back in the bullpen. Put Houck out there as well. Try and ride that out until June and if Paxton and Sale get back and are effective maybe they can salvage the rest of the season.
And that's not even including the long-term disabilities that result from things like increased chance of developing diabetes, chronic fatigue, appendicitis, etc. And probably early onset dementia in a decade or so.
Yet society is expected to function normally despite more and more people either dead or too sick to work, for a week or so at a time or months or even permanently.
Most of the dead are old, so it's not like they contribute anything to the economy! (I am sure that is how a lot of people feel, sadly, tragically.)
But the willful ignorance of Long COVID is madness beyond words. But so is willful ignorance of global warming. The long term disability of millions will mesh well with the destruction of our infrastructure by floods and hurricanes and the like.
There was a program I watched on WWII from space, using graphics to show how the conflict progressed across the surface of the globe and one of the historians said at the end that the future would be determined by whether or not human beings could manage to not use the destructive potential they had developed and now had at their fingertips.
The human brain seems completely unsuited to comprehending large numbers and long time frames and yet we have developed the technology to influence far beyond our reasoning capacity. It reminds me of drivers who speed down a foggy road even though they are certainly outrunning their visibility and have no chance of spotting a deer in the road before they hit it, yet seem incapable of just slowing down so they are able to react.
When were you in space? ;)
Dork. 😄
That was the position of Lt Gov Dan Patrick here. Sorry old folks, but we gotta keep the stock market juiced.
Quite the transition from "Obamacare death panels gonna kill Grandma" to "Seniors need to sacrifice themselves for the god of wall street."
And not surprisingly at all given how the virus continues to mutate and how far people are past their 2nd dose and even booster doses, the proportion of vaccinated people dying is increasing. The Washington Post ran a story last week and the data showed that as of February, 15% of deaths in a sample were not only vaccinated but also boosted. So no, it’s not as simple as “get vaccinated and you won’t die or get really sick” and it probably hasn’t been for over half a year now.
I understand the impulse behind the effort to minimize the stories of vaccinated people dying, since there are way too many dumb anti-vaxxers out there who will reach for anything as an excuse. But it contributes to the erroneous conclusion that the pandemic is anywhere near over.
Also, while I realize that the vaccines still make a difference (and they make a difference in how I personally live, too…I am doing a lot that I did not do in 2020) so it’s not apples to apples, I can’t help but notice that even if you look at the official case count which is hugely underreported thanks to at-home tests, we have more Covid cases right now than we had at almost any time in 2020 prior to November. And now most people don’t even feel the need to wear a mask when they go out.
Ive been holding off on getting my 2nd booster until probably September. I'm worried about the effectiveness waning more quickly with each successive boost, so I'm playing the long game and planning on waiting until closer to the probable fall-winter surge. I tried wading into 'researching' whether this is a good idea but got lost in the sea of bullshit surrounding the whole issue of vaccinations. Be safe and mask-up everyone!
This is what has been driving me crazy. The original strain is long gone and we'll almost assuredly never see it again. Future variants are far more likely to look more like Omicron than than the original Wuhan strain, so why not reformulate? Unless there's data suggesting that an Omicron-specific vaccine is not immunogenic, but that would surprise the hell out of me considering that there's at least some short-term immunity to Omicron infection (or else a surge would stay high forever).
Preaching to the choir. This part of the response has driven me crazy. The main benefit of RNA vaccines is the ability to quickly change the sequence to reformulate. Flu requires a huge amount of lead time because it's grown in fucking eggs, which is why we often read about manufacturers "guessing wrong." Why aren't we properly taking advantage of this new technology?
I was going to post something similar. I still see scientists and doctors saying they aren't sure we need a new vaccine. And I am so frustrated with Pfizer and Moderna for saying "we can have a new vaccine by March" when that wasn't the case (though I have no idea if they were exaggerating to boost stock prices, or just unrealistically optimistic in their estimates).
Their take right now is that the current vaccine with boosters does well enough to prevent hospitalization and death. My problem with that reasoning is that the vaccine is poor at neutralizing Omicron, so we're still getting lots of infections. And the cost of those infections is increased deaths and more long COVID.
I got my 2nd booster about a month ago, timed to max out my protection for my first in-person work related conference last week.
I went for a PCR test yesterday as I've felt like shit all week, with two negative rapid at home tests. Honestly don't think it's COVID, but I guess I'll know tomorrow.
The percentage of dead people who were vaccinated isn't the number to look at. That's necessarily going to increase as vaccination rates go up. If everybody was vaccinated, 100% of the dead would be vaccinated. Doesn't mean the vaccines don't work, just means that they're not perfect and that they don't prevent all death at all times. The number to look at is the inverse, percentage of vaccinated who die. Which has been and is very, very low.
Yes. And because there are still unvaccinated people, you can also compare the relative risk of death between vaxxed and unvaxxed (which is of course way higher for unvaxxed).
I don’t think we have a disagreement about what the numbers generally mean. My point is that we’ve been sold a bill of goods by the portion of this country that is desperate to pretend the pandemic is over. Because every return-to-office mandate, every removal of mask requirements, every removal of test/tracing requirements, is being justified based on the idea that vaccinated and boosted = basically zero risk of death (or as low as risk of death from a “normal” respiratory virus). That’s clearly false and most likely getting more false by the day, as people get further out from their last vaccine dose and as the virus mutates.
All this is why I still mask everywhere. And why I do my best not to be anywhere with unmasked people for long. And why I only tend to do any socializing with people who tested that day (as have we). And why I got a second booster (though it is going to start to wear off soon). I am still, for the most part, isolating. And I have no intention of changing that.
I'm double vaxxed and boosted and I got COVID last week. Unpleasant two days, but mostly just felt like a bad cold. I was sad to end my 25 month uninfected streak, but
I'm selfishly somewhat happy that I now presumably have natural immunity for at least a few months and can do more stuff around town.
Read this morning it's estimated that 70% of Texans had COVID. Kinda want to take an antibody test and see.
I can at least see what they were trying to do with Jar Jar. The problem is they went too far in the "silly" direction, which didn't work with what they were trying to do with the rest of the movie.
What Mets game? It was raining all day yesterday in NYC and that 9-2 drubbing never happened, right? Seriously, Tylor Megill went into the fifth again without allowing a hit, in essence completing a nine inning no hitter, but one reason people don't care much for combined no hitters is that it's easier to get a team out twice than three times, and Megill clearly ran into problems the third time around. He's been a valuable part of the rotation, but he also is a poster child for why fifth starters usually don't go deep into games.
I think that beyond ongoing questions of COVID policy in the US - wouldn't it make sense for everyone to start wearing masks BEFORE a surge leads to hospitalizations? - we have devalued death. I am thinking about how during Bush's Wars, there came a point when it stopped being news when American soldiers died. It was just a statistic. Never mind how many people the US killed. Bit by bit, our leaders and the media and just the general public stopped really seeing death as anything but statistics with the exception of a few mass shootings. The same has happened with COVID. I am not sure Stalin actually said this, but "one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic" has never seemed more true. And even if we can find ways to make the pain felt - things like what I hear on NPR today trying to remember just plain individuals dead of COVID, or the efforts over the decades to turn the Holocaust into stories of people and not of a lump sum - I am not sure our society really wants to feel the pain. We are comfortably numb, and as much as we can blame Trump and his ilk for that, how many of us made a choice to be numb?
It's kind of amazing that wearing seat belts was normalized at all. The only other thing I can think of is raising the drinking age to 21 from 18, but that only affected a small percentage of the population.
It was normalized though due to laws (similar to motorcycle helmet laws) and auto makers putting in annoying alarms. These norms don't seem to happen organically due to actual proper risk assessment.
The reduction in smoking. That can probably be attributed to a combination of laws, health data, and societal pressures. I was on a plane last week and I still find it fascinating that you could smoke on a plane. And that it wasn't fully banned in the US until 1990.
Remember when magazines were full of cigarette ads and restaurants had smoking and non smoking sections? And there were ashtrays full of butts above all the public trash cans? Seems like a different world entirely.
Hey, I can remember when restaurants didn't have non-smoking sections at all. In movie comedies set more than 50 years ago there's sometimes a scene showing a doctor smoking, played for laughs. But I can actually remember being a kid in the mid-60s and my pediatrician setting his cig in an ashtray in the exam room before examining me. Different world indeed.
Part of my job involves working in a former hospital's medical library, and there are (very clearly) old "no smoking" signs in the stacks. Because of course people needed to be told not to smoke.
Around the flammable library books.
In a hospital.
I remember going to the bowling alley with my mom, which I did for years from the early to late 90s, and it going from basically a cloud of smoke when you walked in to "OK, you can only smoke in this one room" to "OK, you have to stand outside the front door". It's been fully renovated at least once in that 20 years since, but I'm pretty sure if I walked in the door I'd still smell the smoke.
You can still smoke in some bars in my hometown.
Yeah, I remember when I first moved to Dallas you could still smoke in Ft Worth, Arlington, Addison and I'm sure other towns around DFW. FW and Arlington have passed bans but you still can in Addison. Kinda blows my mind.
That's a good example. But still, I think indoor smoking bans did a lot of the work to help make smoking an annoying habit to start.
As a GenX kid from Idaho it was no small feat raising the drinking age or mandating seatbelts. Idaho refused to raise the drinking age until the federal government threatened to withhold maintaining interstate roadways. There was plenty of data on how many lives it would save (and how much $$ beer makers and bars would lose), but still a fight.
Seatbelts was an even harder normalization. It could be easier framed under "Freedom" as I hurt no one but myself. It was coached as a secondary ticket. Police couldn't pull you over for not wearing one, but there was a lot of ink spilled back then on it.
18 year old me - who didn't drive and wasn't going to drink - really disliked what he saw as coercion of the states and a denial of rights to people old enough to vote and to enlist. I suspect you heard a lot of that from people who were not 18. 18 year old me was, on this matter, a jerk.
i think that one big difference is that what was a "public health emergency" and "2 weeks to flatten the curve" is now an unending everyday existence. It's not sustainable to be in never-ending-emergency mode. So now, folks can/should mask when they see fit, and otherwise try to go about living their already-short lives.
Of course, it's easy to say "I am going to lose weight" - which is the underlying source of my comorbidities, according to my GP - and another thing to do it. But beyond that, I keep that mask on not just to protect myself but to protect my wife and moreover to protect my mother. And this gets into that always sticky question of "how much responsibility do we have for the well-being of others?" Because ideally, we are all responsible for each other and for society, but realistically, there are limits on what we can do.
What's frustrating to me is one of the single biggest things that would help, not just with covid but with ANY respiratory virus, is making rules for businesses and public buildings to clean their interior air. But that won't happen because they'll never spend money even if it keeps employees healthy and thus at work.
I mean waterborne illness was a huge problem until we invented an entire category of infrastructure (TWO if you count wastewater treatment separately from.drinking water treatment) with regulations to govern everything from building plants to testing the water to the grades of chemicals permitted to use in treating it to the specifications of instruments used to monitor it to the training and certification of operators who work in the field and now SURPRISE you don't see people slurping dysentery routinely from their kitchen sinks. What a concept.
But no, not only are people free to be publicly filthy but everyone around them gets to breathe in their aerial backwash because it just hangs in the indoor air without getting filtered out. Honestly I doubt I'll go out in public anytime soon without a mask (indoors) unless I'm with people I wouldn't immediately vomit at the thought of sharing a toothbrush with them. People are DISGUSTING.
I'm so frustrated that we didn't use this as an opportunity to update air filtration systems everywhere to just generally reduce illness. It was really nice to avoid a cold for that winter when everyone here was masking. And to appeal to fiscal conservatives, this would save money in the long run. The common cold alone costs the US $40 billion a year.
That bases loaded walk to bring in the first run? It was d’Arnaud’s first BB of the season. He had the most PAs without a walk of anyone.
My parents personally knew at least two people who were hospitalized and subsequently died from COVID complications. The last time vaccines came up in a conversation my father was convinced they're bullshit being peddled by Big Pharma to make money. There is no correlation between micro and macro for some people.
It’s just funny to me how everything with Star Wars now is either set between III and IV, or post-Jedi. Massive universe and it’s almost always the same two eras (or the Clone Wars) with the same planets (fucking Tatooine again!!) and often the same characters. I half expect Fennec Shand and Greedo to show up here. Remember Greedo?
Good luck getting The New Adventures of Rey or Finn & Poe or Lando Moves To Florida. Why even bother going back to the sequels when they render the first six movies meaningless and when the sequels themselves really lent nothing new to the franchise? Should just go the “Halloween” route and say they’re non-canon. Or better: It was all a vision Luke had!
Remember visions!?
Also, Marty Foster had the red ass in the Yankees game when he and Aaron Boone got into it. Maybe it’s me living in Florida for too long but in instances like that, I’m always especially impressed when neither man smacks the other. Marty Foster looked like he was ready to shove his boot up Aaron Boone’s ass last night.
https://youtu.be/GXkQ85_3W9I
At this point, I am fully expecting a multipart series about Ponda Baba, the guy who existed solely to establish that light sabers are cool, going on a vision quest to find that he never really needed the arm Obi Wan cut off in the first bar scene. The action sequences will all look like they were animated at 4 frames per minute like Hanna Barbera cartoons from the early 70s.
You joke about making the sequel trilogy non-canon but there was internet chatter (take it with a grain of salt the size of a rancor) that Disney would use the World Between Worlds from the Rebels cartoon to basically say the ST took place in a different timeline. Now, it seemed like most of this came from the corner of Star Wars fandom that hates the ST not because it was clear the movies were made without any consistent story and it has a bad idea to let a hack like JJ Abrams do it, but rather there were too many girls in the movies. So it seems like wishful thinking from the mouth breathers.
Today’s commentary seems Mostly Harmless.
...
The genetic engineering necessary to make pig or other mammal organs suitable for transplant seems like magic. So too are the nascent efforts at 3-D printing of artificial organs. May I live long enough to see the day when gene therapy can treat the cause before the need for transplant. In the meantime, register to be a donor.
...
Glad to see the Rangers efforts at addressing mental health. Despite how we collectively treat it, mental mental illness is as real as my rental disease and yet wrongly carries a stigma.
It is now four decades back but TEX was way ahead of the sabermetric curve, employing Craig Wright in the 1980s when Billy Beane was still playing minor league ball.
Alcides Escobar, who proved at least serviceable last year after Trea Turner was shipped out in the Great Nats Fire Sale of 2021, has been absolute dog shit this year both in the field and at the plate. Meanwhile, Luis Garcia, one-time and perhaps again Nats' shortstop of the future, is raking at AAA but won't be called up anytime soon. Fans suspect service time manipulation, Nats organization claims that he needs to get better at fielding the ball (and to be fair, he didn't show much in the majors during call-ups in 2020 and 2021, though he's still only 21).
Nats are on the verge of accomplishing something that's got to be close to a franchise record. Their pitchers have thrown 17 innings so far in Colorado during this series, and 15 of them have been by the two starters, including all 8 from Patrick Corbin last night. Usually they run through eight or nine pitchers per game there, even in games they win. One more game today, and then they're done in Colorado for the year.
(Guys were in a hurry last night, too. Game only took two hours and ten minutes.)
Sean Doolittle made the news around here. He and his wife, who make no secret of their left-leaning politics, were spotted among the crowd protesting at the Supreme Court the other day after the Alito decision leak. He got moved to the 60 day IL recently after having a plasma-rich platelet injection in his elbow, so he can't throw for six weeks anyway, so it's not like he's opening himself to criticism for not trying to work his way back.
I certainly support DooDoo’s right to protest. I only hope that if he was carrying a sign, he wasn’t using his damaged left arm.
Every picture here shows the sign in his right hand - https://russianmachineneverbreaks.com/2022/05/04/sean-doolittle-joins-protest-at-supreme-court-in-support-of-abortion-rights/
AHA! To quote Simon and Garfunkel, "nearly branded Communist 'cos I'm lefthanded: That's the hand they use, well, never mind!"
Signed, another lefty lefty. (That lyric refers to something less wholesome than baseball, right?)
He and Eireann just continually show up. When he was in Oakland, they did really great work supporting LGBTQ+ youth in the Bay Area. I love that they were there and not surprised at all.
I've said it before but it bears repeating: while I don't root for the end of DooDoo's pitching career, when it comes it will be softened by us getting to again see the unfiltered Eireann.
“Eat at Arby’s.”
If you have the capacity to have "three people in [your] house doing separate therapy sessions via telehealth simultaneously," you probably have pretty good Internet, at least. So you've got that going for you. Which is nice.
Exactly what I thought, too, TJ!
Felt good to fanboy-out yesterday and really enjoy that Obi Wan trailer. I didn't like Boba Fett either, but we Gen-Xers grade modern Star Wars products on too tough a curve. We should all learn to stop worrying and love the Disney versions.
Yeah, at this point I treat Star Wars like the MCU. A series of stories that loosely tie together with obvious discontinuities and conflicts. Still, they can be a lot of fun if you just let them entertain you and stop trying to think about it too much.
"Meanwhile the Tiger bullpen, which entered the game with a major league-best 1.97 ERA, tossed four and two-thirds scoreless innings to reduce that number even further."
NOW they get a bullpen. Jerks.
Tigers bullpen and major-league best ERA aren't words that usually go together.
No they certainly do not.
Years ago I saw a Valverde save live and in person in a playoff game and I still shudder at the memory. Couldn't tell you the opponent or even the year, but the feeling of terror as I watched through my fingers is as clear as if it were yesterday.
Yeah that jumped out at me too. There are just certain teams I associate with bad bullpens, and number one on that list is the Detroit Tigers.
"but Bellino — who later said that Bumgarner was ejected for directing profanity at an umpire — seemed to be the one who escalated this, staring down Bumgarner, presumably because he didn’t like the pitcher jawing at Wills. As if that was his business to police there."
Yeah, that is his job to police. That's exactly what his job is. Umpires get graded on Game Management as well as any calls they make. It's one of the biggest things they get graded on.
Baumgarner was already arguing in the first inning about calls. Which everyone's beloved box on the screen showed were balls. That's an automatic rulebook ejection. It could have been done right then. But wasn't.
Since neither you or I know what was said between innings, I'm going to take a chance and say Bellino told him to knock it off (which is exactly his job to police) and Baumgarner started swearing about the home plate ump. Which correctly lead to his ejection. All right from the rulebook.
Do you really think I'm ever going to respond to you again after the insulting things you said yesterday? Geez, you're stupid.
That's not what you said. Now you're a liar as well.
If that is what you had said, I wouldn't have objected, because I have made the same statements. You were disparaging and rude to the military.
I'm not going to respond to you says the guy who has already posted two direct responses in this thread alone.
Where's that mute function?
I believe Marine General Smedley Butler had relevant words on this subject. Perhaps he carries enough credibility for his opinion to matter to others on this thread.
Some people just pick fights. It's their disposition.
I think both Bellino and Bumgarner were being assholes. When two assholes meet, fireworks can occur -- that's science.
So that's how farts get set on fire then. Interesting!
I have never once in my entire life seen a player jawing about balls and strikes with a home plate umpire, watched the home plate umpire basically ignore it, and then see a first base umpire make an ejection over it. I am pretty certain neither have you.
"Since neither you or I know what was said between innings,"
I'll side with the umpire and not Baumgarner. You can see in the video that Baumgarner is jawing about something. I see the umpire respond to that, not instigate it. If he used the magic words directed at the umpire then he's gone, regardless of when it happened and who ejected him.
And yes, in the well over 1000 games I have umpired, I have seen it happen.
Never fails to let that authoritarian flag fly high.
I bet playing in a game umpired by you is a REAL treat.
It is. My game management is good. That's not my comment. That's from evaluations by guys who have attended MLB's umpire school, the best in the world. Games move quick. Arguments are handled quickly and quietly. And a very consistent strike zone.
Your judgment on the field can't be that good if you couldn't even detect CCaylor's sarcasm. Also, LMAO at how cartoonishly full of yourself you are. Big Lucille Bluth eye roll right there, buddy.
You must be new here. :)
If there was a mute function on this site, BS would be my first selection.
The umpire who inspected his hand was staring at him directly in the face deliberately, probably trying to provoke him. You can see in the video that Bumgarner was a little surprised by the umpire's behavior.
there was more than that. The day before there was a weird fair call that ended in an argument. The fair call was made by yesterdays HP umpire and he is a rookie. Bumgarner seemed to be Working the umpire. This video is good. I recommend everyone follow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNrJ2HqXZ5U
When have you ever seen pitchers hands regularly being inspected after innings for sticky stuff?
The conditions the incident occurred within are unprecedented.
Not even close to unprecedented. Senior umpires regularly step up to let players know they can't get away with trying to intimidate rookie umpires. While doing that, Bumgarner said the magic words.
The hand inspection is a new policy. It allowed the incident between Bumgarner and the umpire to occur. Without it, Bumgarner would have gone back to the dugout and avoided anymore interaction with the umpires.
The magic words were said after the umpire provoked him by staring him in the face at very close distance. That's what men do when they are challenging another man to a fight. Everyone knows not to stare down a bull.
Disagree.
No, but I've certainly seen -- many times -- an older, more experienced umpire step into a dispute between a manager/player and a younger ump, to take the heat off the younger guy and provide some support. Which sometimes results in the intervening ump ejecting the player or manager, if the player or manager steps over the line. I think that's akin to what happened here. Pitcher was jawing at Wills, Bellino had the opportunity to interact with pitcher in the course of his normal hand-check job, tried to use it to chill the pitcher out a bit. Didn't work, obviously, but I think that was the dynamic here.
I'd buy that if Bellino had actually said anything. A staredown while aggressively handling a pitcher's primary tool was not an attempt to chill anyone out.
Especially when the first base umpire looked like he was giving him a hand massage instead of just the usual swipe. It’s a shame that MadBum wasn’t able to resist reacting but I do understand why.
"Yeah, that is his job to police." Since police constantly escalate problems into much bigger problems, your description fits perfectly.
Craig's words, not mind. You should have learned how to read that sentence by the third grade at the latest.
My quote was accurate. You did write it as I quoted it and without attribution.
And what picky ass bullshit that is anyway!
It's called grammar. I can see where you have an issue with that.
Effective communication is not dependant on arbitrary and changing rules such as grammar or spelling.
'Wut up wit dat?' isn't really a sentence and is misspelled yet perfectly conveys a question better than the correct grammar and spelling does. If you are a writer it matters a bit but isn't absolutely necessary, but for the rest of us, it's just bullshit nit-picking to point out misspellings and slight grammar issues, especially as in this case, there were none.
"Do you really think I'm ever going to respond to you again after the insulting things you said yesterday? Geez, you're stupid."
Also, Wills is a pretty new and inexperienced umpire at the major league level (although he had around a decade in the minors), while Bellino's an established veteran who I believe was acting Crew Chief on the day. Not surprising he'd provide support for Wills there.
Well, of course you’re right that a little bitching is okay and should be ignored. Depends how it’s done, though. A player can get away with saying a lot if nobody, or only a couple of people, can see it. Like a catcher (or batter) at home plate. If you’re looking away from the ump, and nobody but the three of you knows what’s going on, you can say an awful lot. But if you’re standing on the mound making a spectacle of yelling at the plate ump about a call, that shit has to be nipped in the bud, especially if it’s the first inning, or it’s going to be a long, miserable day for everyone. Players notice that stuff and think, hey, if he can do that, so can I. And, you know, Bumgarner’s been around long enough to know this.
Now, from the video I’ve seen, it didn’t look like Bumgarner was particularly demonstrative on this occasion – this wasn’t Clemens-in-the-playoffs-in-Oakland stuff. So… I don’t know. Maybe there’s some history here we don’t know about. Bellino’s not particularly ejection-prone, only had one all last season.
I will add this, though – the super-slow video showing Bellino staring is kind of bullshit. If you watch it in real time it was just a few seconds. A tad longer than you often see on these hand checks, yes, but hardly the creepy stare that the super-slo-mo version makes you think.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33868753/umpire-dan-bellino-issues-apology-ejecting-arizona-diamondbacks-pitcher-madison-bumgarner-taking-full-accountability-decision
Huh.
Wow, the infamous 'prepared statement' that doesn't actually say that he did anything wrong. Because he didn't. Manfred obviously cares more about the public opinion of idiots who don't know anything about baseball than he does backing up his umpires for doing their job correctly. He just declared open season on them.
Dude, let it go. The man himself apologized. Find another hill to die on here.
As good as Whitlock had been starting he really needs to be back in the bullpen. Put Houck out there as well. Try and ride that out until June and if Paxton and Sale get back and are effective maybe they can salvage the rest of the season.
Its getting late early, 8 games out and now 5 behind the Rays.
A “baseball” blog that mentions Double Nickels on the Dime. That’s why I’m a subscriber.
And the politics match Boon's and Watt's, even if Hurley reportedly just wanted to go surfing.
Do you want baseball recaps, or do you want the truth? WHY NOT BOTH?
Check the double LPs in the White House record collection for Chip and Willie’s seeds and stems.
Remember seeds in your bag? Now they sell for 10 bucks apiece! I clone my plants.
Remembering seeds and stems is an indicator of sufficient age to have owned a Kenner Boba Fett action figure before he even appeared in a movie.
Double Nickels, man….it’s raining here, I guess it’s a flannel shirt to work kind of day.
that is bob dylan to me
Raining here but too warm for flannel. Basketball shorts and red dirt music kind of day.
Our band could be your life
What could be romantic to Mike Watt?
He baseball's econo
A kick ass Blue Oyster Cult cover?
Regarding mental health supports for pro athletes, please tell me I’m not the only one who immediately thought of Dr. Sharon and Jamie Tartt.
You're definitely not alone.