Saturday Tabs
You know the drill.
- Your headline of the day via The Daily Beast: Greasy, Nude Florida Man Goes on Drug-Fueled Robbery Spree, Police Say.
- Speaking of Florida Man, via the Tampa Bay Times: Florida health officials removed key data from COVID vaccine report.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced in October that young men should not get the COVID-19 vaccine, guidance that runs counter to medical advice issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
His recommendation was based on a state analysis that showed the risk of cardiac-related deaths increased significantly for some age groups after receiving a vaccine. It has been criticized by experts, including professors and epidemiologists at the University of Florida, where Ladapo is employed as a professor.
Now, draft versions of the analysis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show that this recommendation was made despite the state having contradictory data. It showed that catching COVID-19 could increase the chances of a cardiac-related death much more than getting the vaccine.
[…]
Four epidemiologists who reviewed the drafts said the omission is inexplicable and flawed from a scientific standpoint. They said that, based on the missing data, Ladapo’s recommendation should be rescinded.
Twitter added a “state-affiliated media” tag to NPR’s main account on Tuesday, applying the same label to the nonprofit media company that Twitter uses to designate official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.
NPR operates independently of the U.S. government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.
This is just Musk, yet again, demonstrating irresponsibility at best, and something more sinister at worst (and the worst is more likely than the best).
- This is just a little odd, I have to say: via the Washingtonian: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler Artifacts. I mean, on the one hand just owning things like that does not mean anything in particular. I used to own a bunch of Nazi-era stamps as part of a broader collection (which were, along with some from Weimar Germany, accidentally thrown away years ago). But the displaying of such stuff, depending on how it is done, does seems a bit off. Likewise the dictator statue garden.
- More from a 2014 DMN piece: History abounds inside Harlan Crow’s home.
As voluble as Crow is about this private depository he would like to present to the public one day, he winces at questions about the other half of the PCHPS tour route. Visitors will exit the house onto the rear lawn to descend to the estate’s lower reaches. There, among towering magnolias and broad live oaks, stand the likenesses of despots and dictators of the modern world rendered in stone and bronze.
Crow, a very wealthy man, has taken hits for this collection. It is not an art collection, he explains, but a historical nod to the facts of man’s inhumanity to man. To men, and a few women, whom democratic societies — if they know the history of the 20th century — call evil personified.
I mean, it really isn’t out of the question to wish to preserve these items as historical artifacts, but it still gives off a bad vibe. I would be curious to know how all this stuff is displayed.
In Floriduh? Say it ain’t so! This state lives and dies by their data. Just look at how they’ve honored a former health department analyst.
We could try the Buggs Bunny solution to Florida.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s beyond bizarre that The Guardian didn’t include the details of what were in Jones’s sons texts. They were known a day before the guardian published this article.
IIRC, Jones was a #resistance grifter.
@Neil Hudelson: I really don’t know the details of it all (i certainly don’t trust anything coming thru the DeSantis filter) but here in Misery (I speak from first hand experience) when a child is arrested, the first people they call are the parents, so they are involved from the gitgo.
As far as what the child said or didn’t say, all I have read is that he repeated some internet memes.
The details of what is actually going on are sketchy, to say the least. But I for one do not trust a gawd damned thing coming from the DS admin.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Multiple news sources have reported the threats. Neil is correct. They were violent.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think Jones an unreliable narrator.
I would like to see the actual incident report. The few articles I viewed didn’t link to it.
@OzarkHillbilly: it looks like a case where two things are true: DeSantis has used the power of the state to punish an opponent in the past, this opponents kid was spouting off violent threats and police had to act.
I don’t know about Rebecca Jones being a grifter, as some are claiming. Can’t say I really followed her, but I vaguely remember a gofundme after she was fired.
I do know that in a country with more guns than people, you have to take threats seriously until you know whether it is an idiot kid mouthing off, or an idiot kid with an actionable plan to kill people.
One eyebrow has been momentarily raised and then relaxed.
It wasn’t a stamp collection that got tossed, it was several years of expense receipts that I was dutifully saving for the recommended seven years per the IRS.
“Why did you do that?”
“They were 3 0r 4 years old.”
The kicker was that several years later when we were cleaning out the drawers of her desk so she could use it to file records for a new business she was starting we found old receipts of payments that she had made for insurance for a car she had sold and utility bills at a past residence and the veterinarian. The dog had been dead for years.
“Why did you save all these?”
“My mom always told me that I had to have a piece of paper to prove payment.”