It's Time to Talk About 'Pandemic Revisionism'

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina discusses school closures, mask mandates and the pandemic response, on the Ezra Klein show, with guest host David Wallace-Wells, a New York Times science and public policy journalist

Political discussions today focus on school, shut-downs, lockdowns, masking, and whether the economic stimulus was too big. We’re not discussing the big question of whether we could have prevented 1.1 million deaths in the US alone.

Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist and the author of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. She argues that we’ve entered a new phase of the Covid-19 pandemic: “pandemic revisionism.” In her telling, the revisionist impulse seduces us into swapping cheap talking points for the thorny, difficult decisions we actually faced – and may face again with the next novel virus.

No maybe about it. We will face those questions again.

In the 2020 election, Biden rightly said that Trump was unfit for office because Trump’s handling of the Covid crisis resulted in 200,000 dead Americans. During the Biden administration, far more Americans have died than while Trump was in office, and many of those deaths were preventable

Biden’s Covid policy has been to pretend that the vaccine solved the problem. 900,000 dead Americans disagree.

My 20-year-old self-inking return-address stamp still works. That is some seriously well-made self-inking technology.

Continuing with decluttering my home office. Can all the drawers in all the furniture be junk drawers?

Hi, @mtt! Thank you for the nice work on the Tiny theme and plugins. Regarding the Summary Posts add-in: Would it be possible to configure the add-in so that titled posts are not truncated by default–only truncated when manually adding the relevant code to a post? Thanks!

How can we learn to speak alien? On Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.

If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they’re saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet… and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon.

As TikTok Ban Looms, ByteDance Battles Oracle For Control Of Its Algorithm

Emily Baker-White at Forbes:

The relationship between ByteDance and Oracle has become deeply untrusting and adversarial, according to five sources. One source with knowledge of the companies’ actions characterized Oracle’s stance toward ByteDance as a “counterintelligence operation,” rather than a normal customer relationship. Meanwhile, some ByteDance employees wonder if Oracle just wants to run up their bill. The TikTok contract, known internally at Oracle as Project Telesis, has made ByteDance one of Oracle’s most lucrative customers.