These are the good fireworks, not the firecrackers the yahoos set off in the neighborhoods!
This one is for the pedants. Is it New Year’s Eve or New Years Eve? How about Valentine’s Day? Or is it Valentines Day?
Happy New Year, everyone!
by WaterGirl| 75 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
These are the good fireworks, not the firecrackers the yahoos set off in the neighborhoods!
This one is for the pedants. Is it New Year’s Eve or New Years Eve? How about Valentine’s Day? Or is it Valentines Day?
Happy New Year, everyone!
by WaterGirl| 99 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Can we have a thread for UGA vs THE OSU?
Yes. Yes we can!
‘Can we have a thread for UGA vs THE OSU?’ Yes We Can!Post + Comments (99)
by Adam L Silverman| 56 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Military, Open Threads, Russia, Silverman on Security, War, War in Ukraine
It is already 2023 in Ukraine. The New Year begins as the old year ended with Russian bombardment of non-military Ukrainian targets: civilian power generation and transmission, water treatment, hospitals, and residential areas.
I'm still in the bomb shelter, it's very cold and dark. I have almost no internet connection. Electricity and water were turned off.
— Daryna Antoniuk (@daryna_antoniuk) December 31, 2022
Just imagine being so petty – they are just launching meaningless air attacks just for the sake of spoiling New Year’s Night for some Ukrainians
— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) December 31, 2022
#HappyNewYear #Kyiv pic.twitter.com/puZzpVlC4r
— Tetiana Kozak (@TaniaKozak) December 31, 2022
Here is President Zelenskyy’s New Year’s address. Video below, English transcript after the jump:
War for Ukraine Day 311: The New Year at War – It is 2023 in UkrainePost + Comments (56)
This post is in: Open Threads
So John asked me today if I was making pork & sauerkraut tomorrow. I had never heard of that until Balloon Juice – where does that even come from?
I didn’t even know there even was such a thing as New Years Day traditions. At our house, New Years Eve was the big deal. I may have told you guys that my parents owned a tavern, and we lived in an apartment upstairs (actually, 2 apartments with the walls knocked out between them).
New Years Eve was a huge night in the tavern, with hats and noisemakers. We had those upstairs too, and we could hear the moment that it struck midnight from the outcry downstairs. But New Years Day was just a regular day at our house.
So what are your traditions for New Years Eve and New Years Day?
What were they when you were growing up, and what are they now?
Tell us about them, if you have them!
This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, Open Threads, Politics
Who’s up for a game of: How Smart Is Joe Biden?
I’ll start.
Joe Biden is so smart that he knew the answer to this question: “How do you make sure you can have a successful presidency and position your party well for 2024 – even if there’s a good chance that you could lose the House and the Senate in the midterms?”
Just a few months ago I was wishing that tangible results from all the great legislation that was passed had gone into effect BEFORE the midterms, when it could have potentially influenced votes, instead of 2023. So it’s a good thing I wasn’t home when Joe Biden called for my advice, because he plays the long game.
Answer: Biden made sure that some of the most popular parts of his legislation would take effect in Jan 2023, right after the midterms.
Win or lose – even if you lose the House and the Senate – you are suddenly helping people in undeniable ways – helping them in tangible ways – with things that matter, like the cost of insulin. Right or wrong, accurate or not, the President gets the credit or the blame for what’s happening, so this was a very smart play.
Any takers for this game? How Smart is Joe Biden?
This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Excellent Links
People who worked on pandemic preparedness anticipated the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of spring 2020. But many other things about the #Covid-19 pandemic have come as a surprise. I've chronicled some of them. https://t.co/yLtEtNM5cA
— Helen Branswell ???? (@HelenBranswell) December 27, 2022
Here’s a separate post, for the people who didn’t have time to read the link in my latest Covid Update Friday morning. Helen Branswell has been one of my go-to sources for pandemic information over the last three years:
People who study infectious diseases and who work in public health have long known a bad pandemic would one day come.
They knew such an event would overwhelm hospitals, strain supply chains, and place stresses on society that we would be ill-equipped to meet. Countries like the United States have for decades prepared to respond to such a crisis.
But despite all the planning, the Covid-19 pandemic has, in myriad ways, not played out as expected. Three years after the first reports of a novel virus emerged from China, these experts admit that the microbe and the world’s response to it have continuously deviated from their forecasts.
In the hope that important lessons for next time can be found in the things we didn’t anticipate this time, STAT asked 23 experts what had surprised them the most about the pandemic.
The TL;DR version: We have a lot of learning left to do.
Containment can buy time
… After China successfully slowed the spread of the new virus with draconian measures limiting individuals’ movements, many countries instituted some versions of what came to be known as “lockdown.” In some cases the actions were too late or too inefficiently implemented to make a big difference. But a number of countries deployed these measures with significant success; New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, among others, lost far fewer lives than peer nations. And of course China, where the pandemic began, kept Covid largely at bay until very recently, albeit with restrictions that would not be accepted in other parts of the world.The WHO pandemic flu response plan is being updated to incorporate what was learned about containment efforts during Covid. Cowling said it won’t advise long-term efforts to try to stop a new pandemic virus, but “temporary containment to buy time, actually, I think some places will consider.”…
How variable the illness was
Covid has killed millions around the world, including more than 1 million in the United States. But some people who have been infected have no symptoms at all. Others have the equivalent of a head cold.Some patterns are intuitive. Many of the deaths have been in people in their 70s, 80s, and beyond. Many have been in people with chronic health conditions that undermine their ability to fight off the infection.
But sometimes the variability of the illness makes little sense, a fact that has surprised Deepta Bhattacharya, professor of immunology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine…
How quickly people could be reinfected
While an ever-dwindling number of people have not yet experienced a Covid infection, some have been infected several times. For some, the interval between Covid bouts is amazingly short.“Anecdotally, I know several instances where infections occurred, the infection resolved clinically, and then the person became symptomatic again with SARS-CoV-2 positivity a few weeks after the initial infection,” said Stanley Perlman, a longtime coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa…
Excellent Read: <em>The Pandemic — What Even the Experts Didn’t See Coming</em>Post + Comments (115)
This post is in: Open Threads, President Biden, Proud to Be A Democrat
.@POTUS and @FLOTUS are currently taping an interview with @RyanSeacrest for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show. It’s being filmed remotely from St. Croix.
— Akayla Gardner (@gardnerakayla) December 30, 2022
.@POTUS has long held an unwavering vision that we can rebuild the middle class. And we’re making that vision a reality.
After building the most significant legislative record since LBJ, 2023 will be a big year delivering for the American people. https://t.co/yJAdHOnUYE
— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) December 28, 2022
President Joe Biden spent hours during his first foreign trip behind closed doors, attempting to reassure a shaken group of US allies that America was back. It was clear, he later told advisers, just how much work remained to convince them of the durability of that commitment.
Eighteen months after those meetings in Europe, Biden departed Washington on Tuesday for his year-end vacation, riding the momentum of historic legislative success and the defiance of political gravity that has reshaped the expectations for the critical months – and decisions – ahead. It’s a moment that Biden never seemed to doubt would come, even as his party – and some inside the White House – questioned or outright urged a change in approach to address political and economic headwinds driven primarily by soaring inflation that threatened to drag down his presidency…
Biden’s anticipated final major action before the end of 2022 serves as an almost poetic coda for his first two years. The $1.7 trillion bipartisan spending package he [has signed] will lock in key funding priorities and include an overhaul of the law his predecessor cited in the lead up to the January 6 riot.
The turn from aspirational goals to palpable accomplishments – highlighted over the last several months by Biden’s travel to major corporate groundbreakings in states like Ohio, Arizona and Michigan – underpins the sharp reversal for the White House. That turnaround serves as evidence of Biden’s steely belief in his strategies and policy proposals –an approach deeply rooted over his decades in public service.
“One thing that is foundational with him is if he says he’s going to do something, he does it,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving advisers, told CNN in an interview, underscoring an approach that has been defined by steady, and at times stubborn, persistence…
Saturday Morning Open Thread: New Year’s EvePost + Comments (144)