The Calm Before the Calm
BREAKING NEWS:
For all the latest news all the time, check out the 24/7 website the Walking Duck.
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Thanks to those of you who kicked in with new annual, voluntary paid subscriptions on Saturday.
Sunday is (also) a good day to join up and become a paying subscriber or contributor to support my daily work.
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Today could be the day that changes.
I’ve got a feeling.
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Other than the death of Desmond Tutu, there isn’t much brand new news to report or analyze, so let’s go straight to the Wide World of News Dashboard ® for the latest from across the globe:
FLIGHT CANCELLATIONS
HOSPITALIZATIONS
SCORES
MUSIC
SINGAPORE TRAFFIC
WEATHER
COVID TEST AVAILABILITY
ILLINOIS TESTING SITES
Speaking of which, there’s a Washington Post op-ed piece by a public health expert that warns it might be too soon to reach an omicron verdict:
Remember: It has been at most a week or two since almost any part of the world started to see omicron infections in any significant number. You would not expect hospitalizations to follow this quickly. That’s not how covid works. The comparison with delta is misleading because it took delta longer to reach a critical mass of cases. We thought delta was fast, but it became dominant over a couple of months. During that prolonged period, a certain percentage of people who had been infected early got sick enough to require hospitalization. With omicron, we are not talking months but weeks; the case growth has been so compressed, there hasn’t been time for disease progression in those who were sickened early on. We need to wait two or three more weeks until we can make even a tentative judgment on disease severity. And by that time, many more people will have been infected.
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That Oregon dad who said “Let’s go, Brandon” to the First Couple on Christmas Eve is both unapologetic and a spinner extraordinaire:
A Central Point father of four who wished President Joe Biden and the first lady a wonderful Christmas and added “Let’s go, Brandon,” at the end of a live streamed Santa tracker call told The Oregonian/OregonLive that he didn’t intend his parting message to be vulgar.
“At the end of the day, I have nothing against Mr. Biden, but I am frustrated because I think he can be doing a better job,” said Jared Schmeck, 35, who works for an electric company and was previously a Medford police officer for six years until he resigned in July 2018. “I mean no disrespect to him….”
Schmeck called his remark a “joke,” and a reflection of his frustration with Biden’s policies, including the federal vaccine mandates, inflation and global supply chain problems that have caused shortages in consumer products.
“And now I am being attacked for utilizing my freedom of speech,” Schmeck said, adding that he’s been receiving some vague but threatening phone calls since the Santa tracker call.
“I understand there is a vulgar meaning to ‘Lets go Brandon,’ but I’m not that simple minded, no matter how I feel about him,” the 35-year-old father said Christmas morning. “He seems likes he’s a cordial guy. There’s no animosity or anything like that. It was merely just an innocent jest to also express my God-given right to express my frustrations in a joking manner...I love him just like I love any other brother or sister.” (Oregonian)
To paraphrase the great one: You can fool many of the people some of the time, but not one reader of Wide World of News this time.
