F**king Mondays: Health Bro Bill, Trump's Easter Message, And Texas Is Cooking
Your dose of sanity for the week!
It’s that time of the week again, and another edition of “F**king Mondays”! In the round up today:
Bill Maher, infectious disease expert
I’m all ears when Bill Maher opines on politics or social issues. He’s funny, insightful and more often than not, right. He eviscerates Republicans and holds Democrats to account when they need to be. Maher also does his best to be fair to his guests even when he disagrees with them. He is a very necessary voice in an age of political extremism — even when you don’t agree with him.
When it comes to science, medicine, and public health however, Maher is about as reliable a source for information as RFK Jr. That is to say he is not only clueless, but actively dangerous.
Like many incredibly wealthy Californians, Maher is not only a health nut, he insists on proselytizing his “alternate” views on health to everyone he meets. Maher has a long history of espousing bonkers anti-vax views, believes fat shaming is the best way to make people lose weight, and has a weird and potentially dangerous dietary regime that consists of eating raw eggs and no carbohydrates.
On his show this past weekend, Maher reminded Americans why they should never listen to him on anything health related. During his “New Rule” segment, Maher called for a Covid Commission to look into everything the government got wrong during the pandemic. "When COVID hit we did a lot of stupid things," he said. "Because America never reacts, it only overreacts."
Maher then voiced support for the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China and questioned the effectiveness of mask-wearing guidance. “Because the last thing we'd want to do when a disease is afoot is get fresh air and sunshine and vitamin D,” he said sarcastically about advice to wear masks outside. “No, much better to stay locked up, stressed out and day drinking.”
Maher mocked measures like closing beaches, having people eat distanced meals in parking lots, and using plastic barriers to separate taxi passengers from drivers. "Some very bad ideas were embraced as the conventional wisdom, ideas that haven't aged very well," Maher stated. "A lot of the dissenting opinions that were suppressed and ridiculed at the time have proven to be correct."
I want to make a nuanced but important point here. On many of these issues, Maher is right. For the most part, masks are pointless outside. The lab leak theory turned out to be plausible (but still not likely as Maher suggested), and plastic barriers were entirely useless (and potentially made things worse).
The problem with Maher’s riff is that he neglects to mention any of the context. The truth is, we were dealing with a novel coronavirus that was killing millions of people around the world and pushing healthcare systems to breaking point. Scientists and public health officials made policy decisions based on the best available evidence at the time. In a desperate bid to stop the spread while avoiding economic collapse, a lot strategies were used to regain some sense of normalcy. This was an incredibly difficult balancing act made infinitely worse by jackasses like Joe Rogan (and Bill Maher) who were pulling health care advice out of their asses. No one knew what to do during the peak of the pandemic, and we went on best available evidence — not what some Jiu Jitsu bro on a podcast thought about vitamin D and doing pushups.
In time, a lot of what we think about health care today will probably be proven wrong. It’s fine to have alternative ideas about health, and to follow whatever diet/lifestyle protocol you think works for you. But if you haven’t studied infectious disease, aren’t a virologist, public health care official or published scientist, your views on a once in a lifetime global pandemic don’t mean a goddamn thing.
Trump’s heartwarming Easter message
Fresh off of the release of his $60 bible, Donald Trump sent a healing Easter message to America:
Trump’s strategy for 2024 appears to be centered on mobilizing the Evangelical vote. He’s doing this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Evangelicals are willing to bankroll his campaign and legal bills, and secondly, they’ll come out and vote for him. Data shows the uniquely American Christian movement is all in on Trump again, largely because they buy into the culture wars and believe he has been delivered by God to smash liberalism.
The fact that Trumps Easter message wasn’t immediately condemned by Evangelical leaders tells you everything you know about the movement.
Texas turns up the heat
MIT researchers have developed a new tool that allows users to see how many “outdoor days” (or number of days with moderate temperature) their region can expect to experience from now through 2100 if CO2 emissions are not reduced. Reports Tech Crunch:
For people in California or France or Germany, things don’t look so bad. The climate won’t be quite as hospitable in the summers, but it’ll grow a little bit more clement in the spring and fall, adding anywhere from a few days to nearly a month of outdoor weather compared with historical records. The U.K. will be even better off, gaining 40 outdoor days by the end of the century.
Not everyone will come out ahead, though. Some temperate places like New York, Massachusetts, China, and Japan will lose a week or more of outdoor days. Elsewhere, the picture looks even more dire. Illinois will lose more than a month of outdoor days by the 2080s as the summers grow unbearably hot. Texas will lose a month and a half for the same reason.
Texas of course is famous for not giving a flying crap about global warming. As Time Magazine reported, the most prominent politicians in the state are actively working to increase CO2 emissions:
Over the years, many of Texas’s leading politicians have denied the overwhelming science that humans—and the burning of fossil fuels—is to blame for rising global temperatures. Cruz, for example, asserted in a 2015 Senate hearing on climate change that carbon emissions had made the planet “greener” than it once was. And while Cornyn acknowledges that it’s a threat, last August he voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s climate bill (in essence voting against funding climate change adaptation projects outside of Texas), and in 2021 he dismissed advocacy for climate action and renewables as a “cult.”
Not just that, they have fought for policies that will likely exacerbate the problem. In March, Abbott vowed to “…exclude renewables from any revived economic incentive program,” and introduced five bills that would lower support for wind and solar projects and, worse, force renewable energy to subsidize fossil fuel expansion.
The anti-woke celebrities fleeing California to the freedom loving state have a lot to look forward to then: no reproductive rights, a brewing war with the federal government, and now a climate inhospitable to human life. But hey, they’ll have owned the libs!
See you next week!
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Masks outside can be useful against particulates and pollen for those of us susceptible.
Maher is as much my Friday night ritual as The Banter Roundtable Podcast is for my Sunday mornings. And like you, I agree with much of Maher's worldview: religion, culture wars, the threat of the GOP. where the Left can do better -- but my god does he get his knickers in a twist over COVID and trans rights -- not to mention he's a flaming old school Playboy Grotto dwelling misogynist. He constantly refers to trans women as "cutting their dicks off" while defending Chappelle's unfunny stand up routines (and for the record, Family Guy and South Park successfully send up the trans community same as they do everyone else). With COVID, he was pissed off lockdowns took down his two main sources of revenue -- standup touring and his show (his format tanks without a studio audience). So his whole issue was a personal grievance. You nailed it above -- we (society) did our best based on the facts at hand. No different than how doctors performed their crafts in the 1900's and before -- terrifying, absurd, primitive, and yet, society somehow made it to live another day.