"too little, too late"

And unevenly distributed. There are folks who look around and cannot even comprehend why something like this might be necessary even as others, such as the NYT, realize that they're in the middle of a five-alarm fire.

See? The obvious conclusion is that there shouldn't be debates!

It makes you wonder why the New York Times is printing stuff like this in the first place. Are they trying to distract us away from... DONALD TRUMP?!?

Personally, I don't think that medical treatments should be debated at all.

This isn't House.

What does the president of Wesleyan know anyway? Wait, lemme google "Wesleyan"... it's probably a Christian thing... yep. Named after John Wesley. OH! A Methodist to boot!

Yeah, he can probably be dismissed along with anybody who agrees with him or has any sympathies whatsoever to his point about insular thinking in the academy.

You'd think that there'd be a sherbet or something, though... lemme google.

It's apparently the name of a strain of weed.

Okay, there are a couple of pinky-extended small-batch artisanal places that make it. But it ain't common. Get rainbow instead, I guess.

Oh, jeez. And now Zeynep Tufekci has an article: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.

If you like the passive voice, you will thrill as you read this one.

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.

Oh, and the answer to the question "why are you still talking about this?" is in the conclusion of the piece:

"We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third."

From The Daily Mail: Labour minister 'rubbished' spy chief's secret dossier on Wuhan lab leak theory during pandemic despite Boris demanding probe... to 'avoid offending China'

A Labour minister was last night at the centre of an explosive row over claims he rubbished high-level intelligence pointing to Covid's origins in a Chinese laboratory.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.

But Lord Vallance, the science minister who was the Government's chief scientific adviser at the time, is accused of ignoring the report, possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding.

A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.

We will soon be at "why are you still talking about this?"

Oh my gosh! Playing EU4 with an AI buddy! That's absolutely nuts! I love it!

My favorite review of EU4 was "I mostly watch tutorials on Youtube".

Eh, a million years ago, we had (reportedly, anyway) two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

A democrat was in office, however, and so we were treated to a bunch of essays about how we shouldn't use "two consecutive quarters of negative growth" as an indicator of a recession. We got new definitions of "recession" and a bunch of people acting like they'd never heard that definition ever before. Like it was brand spankin' new.

Anyway, you say "Jaybird, you say sh*t like this assuming people know what the f*ck you’re talking about, but no one ever does, because the thing you have linked it to when you evidentially end up having to explain is _extremely obviously_ not the same thing at all." and, from where I sit, I think "I was just talking about how two consecutive quarters of negative growth meant that we were in a recession".

And, suddenly, I'm being asked to defend my definition of "recession" and when I say something like "two consecutive quarters of negative growth", they look at me like I'm growing a second head.

Anyway. I digress.

"Deja vu", I'm trying to say. No, not the gentlemans' club.

Okay. We saw Novocaine. It was a fun dumb movie. IT WAS RATED R!!! So, like, if you've seen the trailers and wonder "how hard of an R is it?"

Well, on the drive home, Maribou and I hammered out that it was "Action-Comedy with a *LOT* of Body Horror".

So it's a Body Horror Comedy Action movie. If your response to that is "oh, good! I was hoping they'd make one of those!", this is a good one. I mean, if you see it with your doctor friend, he's going to be like all of the computer guys who went to Live Free or Die Hard and explained that "that's not how computers work".

But if you can get past the fact that that's not how computers work, you're going to enjoy a pleasantly dumb movie that is glad that you bought a ticket and wants you to come to Novocaine 2: Lidacaine.

They're all beneficiaries of the funding. The kids setting up barricades *AND* the ones going to class. Or not going to class. The ones chasing tail. The ones listening to Aqualung on vinyl on Friday night because they don't have dates.

Each and every student is a beneficiary of the funding.

Which means that some of the beneficiaries of the funding are preventing other beneficiaries of the funding from going to class and, theoretically, *NOT* benefitting from the funding.

Now, you may say "well, they're just *SAYING* that they care, they really only care about crushing dissent!"

That may be true, but the whole thing about some students complaining about other students building a barricade opens the door a crack because now the Poindexters can claim that their rights are being violated.

"Rights". Try to get a date instead of using your right so much, amirite?

I think the US government has to care because of funding.

I think that if we were able to just divorce the funding from the university, everybody would be happier. They'd have as much Free Speech as they could handle and we could ask anybody and everybody "why do you care?" about anything that happens on campus.

Rand Paul was a principled Republican vote making the opposition to the cloture bipartisan.

Spring Sale? But it's the middle of Lent! They can't have the sale yet!

Out of the 51 available games on my wishlist, 50 of them are on sale.

13 are at 50% off or more.
3 are at 60% off or more.
1 is at 70% off.

Slow-rolling punishment for seniors is, effectively, no punishment at all.

Though, I agree, it makes for something that you can argue. "Hey, we're doing something! It just takes a while because we believe in Freedom of Goodness and Light. You believe in Freedom of Goodness and Light, don'tcha?"

By my lights, we're about 10-15 years away from fully socially acceptable anti-Semitism and it's right around there that we'll see MattY explain that the Orange Hitler wasn't that bad, all things considered, and he's not supporting Barron because he thinks that Barron is *GOOD*, just that he's *BETTER* than David Hogg.

My theory is that they wanted to do this last year but didn't have organizational cover.

Now they have it.

Please, Republicans on Twitter, keep insisting that the Trump administration do something it cannot possible do, because there is no real ‘list’ that hasn’t been released.

Yeah. But they can’t talk about the list. They can’t talk about why they can’t talk about the list. They can’t talk about why they can’t talk about why they can’t talk about the list.

Going to war with their students is possibly the stupidest thing Columbia could possibly do.

There are a bunch of students on campus including students who are thin-skinned enough to think that Columbia is at war with them by taking the side of the building occupiers.

"The kids who just want to be 3 minutes tardy to class and then go back to the dorm to have AI write their assignments." Those kids.

I remind people, the government has no ability to demand a private organization punish people for violating the law. That would be utterly insane, on top of violating freedom of association.

Oh, is that the case? Man, I sure hope that a precedent wasn't set earlier! It might result in absolutely *ZERO* sympathy!

This used to be something that a lot of people here worried about, how public universities would have codes of conduct that stopped this sort of thing, and it was pointed out that public universities are not really ‘the government’, they are organizations that happen to owned by the government but have to have the same sort of rules as any sort of housing and workplaces and education, general rules about harassment and safety and things.

"Guys, why are you insisting on using the same rules we insisted on when we won the argument last time?"

Seems like they *CAN* negotiate with Trump and quite effectively. "Yeah, sure. We wanted to do that last year, actually. And you'll turn the spigot back on? Sweet!"

Didja see how Columbia has announced disciplinary measures for the occupation of Hamilton Hall last year, ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions?

I was talking about Kash's tweet, Dave. And then talking about how everybody responded to it with "WHERE IN THE HELL IS THE LIST".

If you wanted to talk about how Kash's accomplishments ain't all that and are overshadowed by his failures, might I suggest you read my comment again? Maybe?

Background info: This comic is from March of 1915.

You may know Joseph Jackson as "Shoeless" Joe.

Mr. McInnis is probably "Stuffy" McInnis.

Eddie Collins was a successful 2nd Baseman.

John J. Evers is the Evers in "Tinker to Evers to Chance".

Lawrence Doyle was about to enjoy a season in which he would win the Batting Crown.

Henry Zimmerman, affectionately called "Heinie", won the Triple Crown in 1912 and never played baseball again after 1919 where he was accused of fixing games.

Oh yeah? Well, here's Matty!

Sixteen thoughts on an averted shutdown. The subhed? "A bitter pill that Schumer is correct to swallow"

Point the twelveth:

I really want to emphasize that even if you disagree with me about this, if your reaction to these events is to get mad at Chuck Schumer, you are to a large extent getting played. Lots of people are engaging in cheap position taking in favor of a “no” vote on cloture, but neither House Democrats nor the people voting “no” in the Senate nor the people getting mad on Twitter have an actual strategy for getting what the base wants out of this, which is some kind of act of Congress saying that Trump and Musk need to conduct the government differently.