Per the Washington Post:

“Calling Trudeau a “far left lunatic,” Trump said in a statement Friday that “insane covid mandates” are destroying Canada and urged the convoy to come to Washington to protest the United States’ public health measures.”

US Covid deaths per 100K*: 275.88
Canadian Covid deaths per 100K*:  92.7

American % fully vaccinated*: 64.4
Canadian % fully vaccinated*: 80

*source: Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_WRL  and https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths

Who’s the lunatic now?

Wow, just wow.

On January 6, 2020, the deadliest attack on the Capitol in 200 years took place, in which a mob stormed the complex, attacked police officers, and interrupted the proper certification of a presidential election by sending lawmakers fleeing. Nine people died in connection with the attack and more than 150 police officers were injured. But in a resolution censuring Reps. Kinzinger and Cheney, the Republican party’s “National Committee” today labeled the January 6 attack “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”  They incidentally declared that Democrats in Congress “have embarked on a systematic effort to replace liberty with socialism.”  They are a party that calls removing Covid misinformation from social media a “violation of free speech and first amendment rights” (misinformation the propagation of which has resulted in the unnecessary loss of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of American lives), yet is more than happy to ban books and the teaching of factual information regarding the institution of slavery in the U.S.

This party will apparently do anything to maintain its grip on power; no lie is too big, no distortion of reality, however damaging, unacceptable. I find these RNC leaders contemptible beyond measure.  It’s time for this party to go away.

Mitch McConnell is a man with no moral standards;  rather, they are standards of convenience.  This was well illustrated with his treatment of Obama’s supreme court nominee — “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”  Oops, different take when the election was only 2 months away in 2020; President Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg “will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”   And now we have his contrasting takes on voting rights. Here he is in 2006 on the Voting Rights Act: “America’s history is a story of ever-increasing freedom, hope and opportunity for all. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 represents one of this country’s greatest steps forward in that story. Today I am pleased the Senate reaffirmed that our country must continue its progress towards becoming a society in which every person, of every background, can realize the American dream.”;  McConnell’s stance now: “This is not a federal issue; it ought to be left to the states.”

He and Lindsey Graham (“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”) can vie for the congressional hypocrisy prize.

Gina Kolata and Benjamin Mueller of the NYTimes do a very nice job of relating the development history of the successful mRNA Covid Vaccines.  Read: Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made

Congratulations to NASA, the ESA, and the CSA today as the Webb Space Telescope hit a major milestone – the 5 solar shields had previously unfolded and positioned, and today the 18 hexagonal segments comprising the primary mirror completed a successful deployment and locked into place.  One more burn before it gets to L2!

R.I.P., E.O.Wilson.  Thank you for your many contributions.

Randall Munroe strikes again at XKCD.com:

Matt Levine, giving you one way to think about NFTs in the Me elsewhere/NFT Stuff section of his December 20 column:

‘Meanwhile there is another strand of thinking that is like “human life takes place increasingly online, and whereas people used to get meaning out of being seen promenading in the plaza in fancy clothes, now they get meaning out of being seen promenading on Twitter with fancy Bored Ape avatars, and we are finding ways to create artificial scarcity and gradations of status there and sell those gradations for a lot of money.” And here, I mean, I see the point of “human life takes place increasingly online,” but I do not really see the point “so I have spent $20,000 on a pixelated JPEG of an ape to use as my Twitter avatar because people will think that’s cool.” It’s possible that I am just not cool, though! In 10 years maybe everyone will spend thousands of dollars on their avatars and only crusty weird nerds will be like, “No, I will just wear a burlap sack to promenade in the plaza, it keeps the wind out, that’s all I need.”’

I love his sense of humor.  He goes on to say:

“…these relatively sophisticated ways of thinking about NFTs reflect of course a tiny minority of NFT projects. Most are just “let me scam some crypto bros who have too much money.” I would not buy those.”

Matt Levine’s Money Stuff is a wonderful reminder of the madness inherent in our modern world.  He’s brilliantly dissected the TMTG SPAC PIPE and in today’s post has an incredibly funny take on Big’s Peloton-related fate in HBO Max’s “And Just Like That…”.   A totally fictional streaming video episode manages to cause a billion dollar shift in PTON’s real-world market value, forcing the company to issue a statement with a cardiologist’s post mortem re. the real (?fictional) cause of death. What a crazy world we live in.

For more, see Birds Aren’t Real in the Times…