Random News and Notes 28 August
We start with a cautionary tale today. A woman learned a valuable lesson about texting and driving. Watch:
The reaction at the end is just
The Russians seem to want to play Cold War games again. For the fourth time in a week, the VKS (Vozdushno-Kosmicheskiye Sily, the Russian Aerospace Forces) have flown surveillance aircraft into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). The most recent incursion was an Ilyushin il-20M (NATO codename COOT).
This is an old game, one that dates back to the immediate post WWII era. The difference now is that US F-22s – which were notably absent from the intercept – can splash any Russian aircraft capable of making the flight to the US from beyond visual range without being detected by the Russians.
A couple of weeks ago I told you about the idiot who threw a sandwich at ICE agents in DC. Well, a grend jury has decided Sean Dunn’s fate. The DC jurymen returned no true bill, and did not indict Dunn on the charges levied against him.
The issue, as I and many others, see it isn’t that the charges were weak, or that Dunn shouldn’t have been indicted, it’s that a jury in DC is so hopelessly tainted that the DC circuit should probably be disbanded and folded into either VA or MD.
Dunn has not escaped punishment though. He was a federal employee. Once word got to his supervisors, he got shitcanned. So we got that going for us. . .
There has been a bit of a bloodbath at the CDC in the last 48 or so hours. The first domino to fall was the CDC director herself. Susan Monarez, who had been on the job less than a month, was fired for not going along with the Trump administration’s agenda. That opened the flood gates.
Dr. Debra Houry, Chief Medical Officer, resigned citing concerns over the politicization of public health and the rise of vaccine misinformation, an excuse you’ll see repeated. Dr. Daniel Jernigan, Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, resigned citing the “current context in the department” and concerns over politicization. Dr. Jennifer Layden, Director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, resigned but there has been no publicly released reasons for her departure. Finally, there is Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who resigned stating he could no longer serve due to the “ongoing weaponizing of public health.”
Daskalakis is most of the reason for this bit. You might remember him as the ‘Monkeypox czar’.
I fail to understand how this freak lasted as long as he did. Welp, he’s gone now. Oh, and I’d tell everyone who just resigned that they are the reason public health has been politicized as much as it has been. They lied to the American public too loudly and too often for us to take it any more.
