Just wonderful. The United States has a presidential candidate who seems to have major psychological and developmental problems. (Plus, he’s obnoxious.)
I couldn’t watch Thursday night. Turned on classical music on WQXR. However, I am vastly reassured by the latest reckoning by the Ouija Board people at the Times who have come up with odds on the presidential election. Hillary Clinton – we are told – has a three-quarters chance of winning the election. That sounds great. Then I read that this is the equivalent of the foul-shooting percentage in the National Basketball Association. I did not know that numbers people had a sense of humor and could drop a sly line like that in the middle of a story. We do use a lot of sports metaphors in this country, our brains perhaps terminally addled by reality shows and sports broadcasting.
Now there is the NY Times observation comparing Hillary Clinton’s chances with the NBA’s overall foul-shooting percentage -- .757 on this recently-concluded season. I was of course reassured by the prospect of Hillary Clinton, steely-eyed survivor of spurious charges, strong-minded debater who dribbled rings around Congressional pinheads like Trey Gowdy, fierce rebounder who held off Bernie (Mr. Elbows) Sanders in the primaries, now saving the day for humanity. In my fevered brain, in the championship final, Clinton gets fouled by Mad Dog Trump, the designated hacker from the Dark Side, who mysteriously never fouls out of games despite the dirty fouls he constantly commits. The ref signals: one shot. To let her think a bit, the Dark Side calls time out. Both teams repair to their benches. The joint is going nuts. Her supporters keep telling us that in the clutch Hillary never misses. (“You should have seen the time she threw the vase at me,” her husband often brags.) Coach looks at her and says, “Nothing to it, Big Lady. Over and in. Then we pop the Champagne.” In the stands, my knees start knocking like castanets. When do we wake up?
bruce
7/22/2016 11:36:20 am
George,
George Vecsey
7/22/2016 01:36:14 pm
Bruce, we here in the US of A don't have to take advice from little nations like Canada.
bruce
7/22/2016 03:14:57 pm
George,
George Vecsey
7/22/2016 06:46:25 pm
Bruce, are you saying somebody might key my car next time I park in front of TrumpHaus? It would be hard to tell on my junker. GV
bruce
7/22/2016 06:51:41 pm
George,
Joshua Rubin
7/22/2016 12:35:53 pm
George, I do love the image of HRC at the line shooting once with the game in the balance. She does seem to have ice water in her veins when grilled by GOP congressional committees,so a good choice to take the last shot. the overall scouting report: Deep knowledge of the game, prone to unforced turnovers, does not have good move to her left, likes to take the big shot.
George Vecsey
7/22/2016 01:41:35 pm
Josh, thanks.
Joshua Rubin
7/22/2016 02:04:22 pm
My apologies to The Worm.
Hansen Alexander
7/22/2016 02:55:59 pm
Well, George, my take comes from my version of Trump's speech from last night:
George Vecsey
7/22/2016 06:48:41 pm
Hansen, nice work, you capture the voice quite well. 7/22/2016 07:16:47 pm
At this stage of the presidential campaign, when polls are not normally as meaningful as those during the head to head phases, particularly in the final weeks---I am not comforted by Clinton currently poling at about 75%.
Brian Savin
7/23/2016 06:45:12 am
"Where have you done, Joe DiMaggio?" -- eh? I'm still pushing for the Sandy Alderson, Terry Collins ticket of GENUINE change on the Party like We Won voting line.
George Vecsey
7/23/2016 10:12:34 am
Brian, how many more years does Jackson get to expose Anthony? 7/23/2016 11:20:49 am
There's so much I could say about Trump and what fraud and a danger he is. But you've probably heard that over and over by now. So I'll we just make one very personal observation about him. He never would have survived in the Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up(mostly because he was a spoiled rich punk). He would have had his lunch money and his fancy shoes regularly taken away from him. Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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