Gallows Poll

The brewing vaccine disaster, and Go Giants!!!

It's pretty bad when you're vaccinated, everyone you love is vaccinated, and you know full well how important Covid vaccinations are, but you still keep cravenly pretending mandates and other efforts to get past this pandemic are attacks on freedom and 'merica because stirring up falsehoods among your rabid base is more important than saving lives. But it's actually worse than that. Just as false attacks on the election of 2020 are damaging not only to trust in that election but also to trust in democratic institutions writ large, attacks on the Covid vaccines not only lower support for those life-saving, borderline miraculous vaccines, they also lower support for the other vaccines that have been saving our lives for a long time. Do you think parents should be required to have their children vaccinated against infectious diseases? That used to be a question that received similar answers across party lines. Until 2021, when 85% of Democrats answered yes and only 46% of Republicans answered yes. WaPo (Gift Article for NextDraft Readers): The slippery slope of the GOP’s anti-vaccine-mandate push. It's America's slippery slope from Jonas Salk to Kyrie Irving.

2. Over Before It Starts?

"When it comes to closing the divide between cuts promised by countries and the cuts needed, 'We will hopefully be moving very close to that…though there will be a gap and…we’ve got to be honest about the gap, and we have to use the gap as further motivation to continue to accelerate as fast as we can.'" So said U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. He also explained that, even after a year of climate diplomacy (and climate-enhanced natural disasters), crucial U.N. climate talks next month are likely to fall short of the global target for cutting coal, gas and oil emissions.

3. Gloom, Boom, and Doom

"Weekly grocery bills can equal months of a typical family’s income. Banks are refusing to let people withdraw money. Basic medicines are often unavailable, and gas-station lines can last hours. Every day, many homes lack electricity ... It’s a shocking turnaround for a country that was one of the Middle East’s economic success stories in the 1990s." NYT on a big story that's getting little attention: Lebanon’s Crisis.

+ 6 killed in Beirut clashes as tensions over blast probe soar.

4. Inside Job

"Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle." The Atlantic's always excellent McKay Coppins: A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms. (Luckily, they didn't gut The Atlantic, or they might be secretive, and still a secret.)

5. Absence With Malice

"The Select Committee will not tolerate defiance of our subpoenas, so we must move forward with proceedings to refer Mr. Bannon for criminal contempt." Steve Bannon has defied the Jan 6 Commission's subpoena. And they just might do something about it. (Interesting. Laws that are enforced would be a nice change of pace when it comes to Trump's traitors.)

6. Natural vs Nurture

"All residential consumers should expect to pay more for heat, but officials say the type of fuel you use will determine how much extra you'll have to shell out. Nearly half of U.S. households heat their homes with natural gas, and they will pay 30% more on average this winter, while homes warmed with electricity will pay 6% more." (Luckily, my family has so many screens on at once, the house basically heats itself.)

7. Tightwads

"We can't tell them what to do. COVAX can't tell them what to do .... There's a singular unique power that the U.S. government has." Moderna is under fire for not doing enough to vaccinate the world, particularly low-income countries — and the Biden administration is being criticized for not doing enough to force Moderna's hand.

8. Smoking a Dubai

In case you needed any more evidence of the evil stupidity of drug laws, here's a story for you. A 24-year-old British football coach has been jailed for 25 years in Dubai after police found a small amount of CBD vape oil in his car.

9. !!!!!

I'm sure you noticed that the first letters of today's headlines spell out Go Giants! Like every baseball fan in the state of California, my mind is elsewhere today as I am in full stressmode for tonight's de facto World Series championship between the Dodgers and the Giants. The two bitterest baseball rivals who happen to also be the two winningest teams ever to face each other in the playoffs will meet in their biggest game ever on Thursday night. FiveThirtyEight: "Giants-versus-Dodgers is one of the sport’s oldest and greatest rivalries, with 2,539 matchups spanning over 130 years of history. And this season’s battle felt especially personal. Even if it took them 168 games to do it, a Dodger victory would be the culmination of Los Angeles’s seasonlong bid to hunt down its bitter rival to the north, restoring the pecking order we all assumed would exist between the teams before the season started. For San Francisco, a victory would be one final confirmation of exactly who owned the rivalry, the division and maybe the entire league this season — expert picks and 106 Dodger wins be damned." Game 5’s Winner Will Be In The World Series Driver’s Seat. (That's a minor detail compared to how badly we want to beat each other.)

+ Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts said. "If you have a pulse or you’re a sports fan, you better be watching Dodgers-Giants." I actually agree with Dave Roberts. That's how out of sorts this pressure has me...

10. Bottom of the News

If you've spend any time driving around the streets of San Francisco, you know that Waymo cars are everywhere. If you live at the dead-end of 15th Avenue, you really know it. Dead-End SF Street Plagued With Confused WayMo Cars Trying To Turn Around Every 5 Minutes.

+ While we're in the neighborhood: meet the man who pulled nearly 100 snakes from under an SF Bay Area home.

+ Yesterday's last link was bad. Here it is: North Korea: Soldiers smash bricks, bend iron rods in combat display.