July 29, 2021

Olympic Women's All-around Gymnastics spoiler

Suni Lee keeps American all-around victory streak at Olympics intact

https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/en/news/suni-lee-keeps-american-all-around-victory-streak-intact



The teenager is the sixth U.S. woman to claim the all-around title at the Olympic Games. Suni Lee has kept the American streak alive. Coming into these Games, an American woman has won the women's gymnastics all-around title in each of the last five Olympic Games. "It feels super crazy, I definitely didn't think I would be here in this moment with a gold medal," Lee said. "I haven't really let it sink in yet because I feel like it's not real life."

She totaled 57.433 for gold, holding off Brazil's Rebeca Andrade (57.298) and ROC's Angelina Melnikova (57.199). Lee joins U.S. greats Mary Lou Retton (1984), Carly Patterson (2004), Nastia Liukin (2008), Gabby Douglas (2012) and Simone Biles (2016) as the only U.S. women to win the all-around title at the Olympic Games. Lee is the first Hmong American gymnast. Andrade's medal is the first for a South American woman in the women's all-around final. Prior to Thursday, the best finish by a Brazilian woman was Jade Barbosa's 10th place finish in 2008.

"I am very, very happy," said Andrade. "I'm very thankful to all the people who have supported me." After a disappointing Rio 2016 that found a talented Melnikova on the outside of the all-around final looking in, the 21-year-old said she had completely transformed in the five years since those Games.

"When the score came up, all my dreams came true. This time [Tokyo], I knew that I was going for a medal and I was way more confident [than Rio]," she said. "I was 16 in Rio, so this was very different." Melnikova, who was also part of the winning ROC team Tuesday, stars in the Olympic Channel original series All Around, which has chronicled her journey to gold and bronze in Tokyo 2020.

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July 29, 2021

The Antivaxxers Are Ruining It For Everyone

Something needs to happen, and soon, to save us from the rising tide of idiocrats.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-antivaxxers-are-ruining-it-for



WASHINGTON, DC -- I’m old enough to remember May 2021. It was the month when my second Pfizer vaccination kicked in and it seemed like we were emerging from four years of darkness -- the final year being the darkest. In particular, I was looking forward to returning to the gym, maybe a road trip to the shore for a weekend -- there was a long list of things on my post-COVID to-do list, suffice to say. It turns out, the New Roaring ‘20s ended up lasting about 20 days (give or take) before warning signs began to materialize on the horizon. Like the worst kind of coitus interruptus, it really felt like we were on the verge of escaping the disease. For a moment we tasted freedom, and now it’s being ripped out from under our feet. We were on the verge of being released from prison but at the last minute a gaggle of a-holes framed us for crimes we didn’t commit and now we’re back for another sentence. We’re being held hostage by some of the worst people in the world: chronological adults who are incapable of acting responsibly, mainly because they don’t know how to digest information or to see this as not a personal issue, but as a community one.

They’ll never grasp that getting vaccinated isn’t about them personally, it’s about the community of people around them and, more than anything else, it’s about the urgent process of collectively eradicating the virus from our lives. The antivaxxers are ruining it for everyone, and there’s no sign they’re going to change, not until it’s too late. One of their primary excuses against getting vaccinated, they say, is due to the emergency use authorization to release the vaccines to the public without the usual FDA testing process. As we all know, vaccinologists had been developing the mRNA process for years, so it’s not like the vaccines were devised and manufactured within the span of the pandemic. But what antivaxxers don’t understand is that the hospital treatments specific to COVID were also brought to market under emergency use authorizations. In other words, both the COVID vaccines and the COVID hospital treatments arrived without the usual clinical trials process.

So, if a guy refuses to get vaccinated because he stupidly believes the vaccines are unsafe, he’s likely to get COVID, landing him in a hospital where doctors will apply equally “unsafe” treatments to save his life. Only now, he has COVID, too, and he’s taking up a valuable hospital bed. He could’ve been vaccinated in the first place, like a grownup, and avoided all of it, but now he not only has the disease but he’s being treated with medicine that was just as quickly rushed to market. And if he decides to get vaccinated later, it’ll be too late. Duh. Perhaps equally as confused are the members of the kneejerk rodeo clown caucus that continues to proudly tweet in defense of “medical privacy” and “medical freedom.” Madison Cawthorn is the most recent one. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire just signed a bill protecting medical freedom, aimed at vaccines and masking. Ironic that the anti-choice, anti-women faction is suddenly all about retaining the freedom of medical choice -- a constitutional right to privacy (except for women, trans people, etc).

At some point soon, I’m betting at least one prominent Red Hat will tweet that the Fourth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy. My money’s on Charlie Kirk. (Of course, the Fourth Amendment is the basis for the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision.) Not for nothing but the “freedom” people are making sure the rest of us will have to, once again, curtail our own freedom to stay healthy. States are reporting everything from upticks to large-scale waves of new variant cases due to antivaxxers and COVID shirkers who refuse to do the right thing -- the adult thing. These people are variant factories, pumping out new iterations of the virus around the clock, each one more powerful than the original. And until they’re snapped back to reality, we’ll never be rid of this pandemic, and I’m not feeling particularly hopeful at the moment. Something needs to happen, and soon, to save us from the rising tide of idiocrats. Not only are they killing themselves, but they’re risking the lives of the responsible ones, you and me, by manufacturing variants that can blast right through vaccine immunity. The culture war is quickly turning into germ warfare, and unless Republican leaders get their houses in order, the forthcoming winter is going to be especially chilling.

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July 29, 2021

fucking sheep

July 29, 2021

The 34 Hottest IPAs in America Right Now

Exciting collabs, one-offs, mainstays, and everything in between.

https://www.thrillist.com/drink/nation/best-ipas-in-america



“IPAs are so hot right now!” That sentence is so 1996. And 2019. And probably 2030, if we make it that far. As long as craft beer has been a thing, IPAs have dominated, bringing drinkers in flocks to their favourite beer bars, turning naysayers into beer snobs, and sending rabid collectors across state lines. That makes picking the best IPAs quite a task, especially in the summer: The best at any given time can be mainstays, one-offs, and everything in between. To keep our bead on this ever-moving target, we’ve assembled beer experts to name what they deem to be the most attention-worthy IPAs at this very moment. We will revisit the list in the months to come to add new beers and subtract the ones lost to time, so that you always have your finger on the proverbial IPA pulse. Raise a glass. It’s a good time to be an IPA lover. It always is.

















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July 28, 2021

Siriusmo - Mein Neues Fahrrad (Boys Noize Edit)

Label:
Boysnoize Records – BNR021, Boysnoize Records – BNR21
Format:
Vinyl, 12", Mini-Album, 33 ⅓ RPM
Country:
Germany
Released:
25 Feb 2008
Genre:
Electronic
Style:
House, Electro

July 28, 2021

The 40 American Ice Cream Shops You Need To Try Right Now

Few things are better than an ice cream cone on a hot day.

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/best-ice-cream-shops-in-america



It’s quite possible that we are living in the golden age of ice cream innovation, one where old-school creameries are churning out vanilla bean masterpieces honed over generations while creameries are tossing the term “chef” into the mix to challenge the very notion of what ice cream is. It’s a win-win for everyone, especially when temps outside begin to spike. These ice cream shops represent everything that is well and good: new-wave artisan shops challenging the very notion of what should be placed on a cone (or stick, or between cookies), old-school parlours learning new tricks, new-school parlour trying to remind you of old-school ones, plant-based creameries, and much more. Booze and asparagus are both represented along with rocky road and salted caramel. Grab a napkin. It’s going to be a glorious mess.





See the top ice cream shops in all of Austin.





See the top ice cream shops in all of San Francisco.





See the top ice cream shops in all of Dallas.

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July 28, 2021

It's Time To Make Vaccines Mandatory

Here's the argument we need to make to those refusing to take the Covid-19 vaccine.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/its-time-to-make-vaccines-mandatory



Last week, a maintenance worker came to my apartment to take a look at our HVAC. This was not unusual since my building is old and things break down somewhat regularly. What was unusual was that he wasn’t wearing a mask. My eyebrow went up, Spock-fashion. I asked him if he was vaccinated. He responded that he didn’t have to tell me that, which meant “No”. Since I was standing in the doorway and his chances of getting past me were somewhere between zero and “watch the pretty snowball melt in the fiery pits of Hell”, I just stared at him for a few seconds, waiting. “I can get a mask from my car. Would you like me to do that?” I was wearing my mask so he could not see my deep frown of disapproval but presumably my narrowed eyes and continued silence were enough. “I’ll go get a mask.” Six weeks ago, I would not have done that. But that was before Delta. Now? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Delta Is Just Getting Started

Everyone in my family has both shots so I am not particularly concerned about one of us casually picking up Covid from a random passer-by on the streets. But having an unmasked and unvaccinated person in the apartment for twenty to thirty minutes, huffing and puffing? Yeah, we are not doing that. Even before Delta that would not have been a great idea. With the far more contagious variant that can also get past vaccination immunity? No thank you. This new reality is, quite literally, what I was writing about back at the beginning of May. I had heard anecdotal evidence that Delta (still called the Indian Variant at the time) was extremely infectious compared to previous variants. Specifically, I was told that it was hitting younger people much harder than previous versions of Covid had. This, in part, is why I had my 11-year-old daughter vaccinated 6 months before she was actually eligible. The difference between 11 and a half and 12 is non-existent but the difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated is everything. To be clear, there is no evidence that children, specifically, are more susceptible to Delta. But because this variant is so much more contagious and virulent, it is infecting and harming far more children than previous strains of the virus. Now that children (and teens and early 20s) are no longer kind of, sort of, protected, the number of infections is rapidly rising as is the number of severe cases.

NBC News reports:



Once schools are reopened, two things are going to happen. First, a very large number of children, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands, are going to get sick in very short order. Second, there will be a new wave of Covid panic. The first is entirely predictable. Before Covid really got going last year the nation wisely yanked the kids out of school. It was a tough year but it kept most kids safe. At the same time, the original Covid and its initial variants were not virulent enough to present a serious threat to kids. The result? We let ourselves believe that Covid was only a danger to the elderly and minorities, i.e. people America does not care about. Now we are going to let about 56 million kids go back to school, at least 30 million of them unvaccinated, right when a variant that is a threat has become the dominant strain in the United States. In high schools where most of the kids are vaccinated, there may be some breakthrough infections. Where Republican parents have chosen to put their teens in harm’s way? It will run rampant. In middle schools, 6th grade has a lot of kids who are still under 12 and therefore can’t get the shot (unless, of course, their parents do what we did and just lie about their child’s age). Delta will spread if the larger community is not well-vaccinated. And possibly even if it is.

Elementary school is a disaster waiting to happen. At least middle and high schoolers can make an attempt at social distancing, washing their hands, and wearing masks. It will be impossible to do this with Pre-K through first grade. Even second and third grade is pushing it. If you are rolling your eyes at this or plan on blaming teachers, you have clearly never tried to keep a single 5-year-old clean, much less a roomful of them. Once the headlines start rolling in, “100,000 Children Infected With Delta In 4 Weeks!” (and that is wildly optimistic), that’s when the second wave of panic will set in. People, naturally, get really freaked out when their kids are in danger. Some are already anticipating this. There are a lot of solid theories about why the Republican Party and parts of Fox News are suddenly discovering their belief in science and vaccines but I do not think it’s that much of a mystery. Previously, Covid was killing a lot more Black, Latino, and Native Americans than White people. And it was hardly touching kids at all. As far as Republicans were concerned, this was awesome.

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July 27, 2021

The 'Founding Fathers' Were Surprisingly Pessimistic

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/opinion/us-founding-fathers-constitution.html




By Jamelle Bouie

It is old hat to note that Americans have deified their “founding fathers” as saints — secular or otherwise. What is a little less obvious is how that deification has frozen them in time. We hail the Thomas Jefferson of 1776, not the one of 1806; the James Madison of 1787 rather than the one of 1827. We remember George Washington the triumphant military leader of 1783 more than George Washington the reluctant president of 1793. The extent to which the founders are frozen in time is most apparent in how they’re used for present-day political purposes. Truth of the matter aside, when speakers say, “This is what the founders intended,” they tend to mean, “This is what the founders intended at the Philadelphia Convention.”

The problem is that the men we call the founders did not stop thinking or writing or acting in politics with ratification of the Constitution. Nor did they stop after serving in office. Even when retired from public life, they continued to comment on current affairs, to express their highest hopes and aspirations as well as their deepest fears and apprehensions. Those fears and apprehensions are the subject of a recent book by Dennis C. Rasmussen, a political scientist at Syracuse University. In “Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders,” Rasmussen walks readers through the later-in-life correspondence of Jefferson, Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, each of whom feared for the fate of the American republic following their service in the government they created. And for good reason.

“There were few precedents or fixed poles to guide the nation’s lawmakers,” Rasmussen writes, “and the very fate of republican liberty seemed to them to hinge on their every decision.” A “sense of crisis pervaded the era” and the founders’ correspondence was “littered with predictions of imminent collapse.” Washington, Rasmussen notes, was consumed with fear of “faction” — political parties and their consequences for the future of the republic. “Until within the last year or two,” he told Jefferson in a July 1796 letter, “I had no conception that Parties Would, or even could go, the length I have been Witness to.” Over the previous year, Washington had been embroiled in a swirling political storm over the Jay Treaty. Negotiated by John Jay, then the chief justice of the United States, the treaty attempted to resolve a number of issues still outstanding after the end of the Revolutionary War. Attacked as a brazen giveaway to Britain, the treaty inspired furious reaction from Washington’s Republican opposition, which emerged in his second term under the leadership of Jefferson and Madison. “The backlash against the treaty,” Rasmussen writes, “was like nothing” Washington “had experienced before.”

The Republican press turned its sights squarely on the once-untouchable president, using every term of abuse it could muster and levelling every charge it could concoct, no matter how implausible. Washington was senile; he was a blasphemer; he was a womanizer; he had embezzled public funds; he was a tool of the British crown or desired a crown of his own; Hamilton not only controlled him behind the scenes but was somehow also his illegitimate son; Washington had been a secret British agent during the Revolutionary War, and his efforts to betray the patriotic cause were foiled by Benedict Arnold beating him to the punch. Washington’s famous farewell address — in which he warned against faction — was as much about the circumstances of his own administration as it was a warning to future Americans. In his final year, however, Washington seemed to surrender to the reality of parties and factionalism. Asked to consider a third term for president, he told the governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull, that he was “thoroughly convinced I should not draw a single vote from the Anti-federal side” and that character was irrelevant to the outcomes of elections. “Let that party set up a broomstick, and call it a true son of Liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto!”

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July 27, 2021

Michael Enzi, Long-Serving U.S. Senator From Wyoming, Dies at 77

A four-term senator, Mr. Enzi was a consistent conservative with a consensus-seeking style. He died after a bicycle accident in Gillette, Wyo., the city where he began his political career.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/us/politics/senator-mike-enzi-dies.html



Michael B. Enzi, a long-serving United States senator from Wyoming who had a reputation as a low-key, consensus-seeking conservative and who led the Senate Budget Committee for several years before he retired in January, died on Monday, days after a bicycle accident. He was 77.

A former spokesman, Max D’Onofrio, confirmed Mr. Enzi’s death to The Associated Press. He had been airlifted to the UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies, in Loveland, Colo., after an accident in Gillette, Wyo., on Friday.

Mr. Enzi was consistently conservative. He voted against marriage equality and abortion rights, and he regularly defended the energy industry, supporting off-shore drilling and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other public lands to private oil companies. But he also sought compromise at times, and he occasionally opposed members of his own party — as when he supported efforts to impose a uniform tax on interstate commerce online.

He served four terms in office, overwhelmingly winning re-elections. He easily fended off a primary challenge in 2014 from Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, despite her national name recognition and greater fund-raising ability.

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July 27, 2021

Breaking Olympic gymnastics spoiler

Simone Biles Out of Team Final for U.S.

Simone Biles faltered badly on her vault, putting the Americans behind against Russia. Then she left the floor briefly before pulling out of the team final.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/27/sports/gymnastics-olympics-results