NY Expands Absentee Voting Following Defeat of Ballot Measure (Maria)
The author writes, “New Yorkers can again choose to vote by absentee rather than face the risk of catching COVID-19 at polling sites through the rest of 2022 under a bill that Gov. Kathy Hochul signed Friday. The Assembly passed the bill 100-45 on Wednesday, and the Senate passed the bill last week with a 42-21 vote. One Democrat in the Senate and two Democrats in the Assembly opposed it.”
Washington Attorney General Sues Google Over Location Tracking (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is suing Google in an effort to change how the company handles users’ personal data. Ferguson joined attorneys general in Texas, Indiana and the District of Columbia in filing a lawsuit Monday alleging the company misled consumers about its location-tracking services and, at times, collected data without their consent.”
Do Vaccine Mandates Actually Work? (Gerry)
From The Economist: “One in five American adults have not yet got a COVID-19 vaccine. This recalcitrant fifth remains despite behavioural nudges, vaccine lotteries, and schemes that pay people to get jabbed. On January 13 the Supreme Court blocked a harder-nosed approach — a vaccine-or-test mandate on over 80m workers — from going into effect. How much might it have helped? The recent, successful experience of America’s northern neighbour sheds some light.”
Inside Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Unlikely Rise And Precipitous Fall at Liberty University (Russ)
The author writes, “On August 24, 2020, Falwell resigned from Liberty in the wake of a sensational tabloid scandal that could have been dreamed up in the writers’ room of The Righteous Gemstones. A former Miami pool boy named Giancarlo Granda claimed he had a nearly seven-year affair with Falwell’s wife, Becki — and that Falwell often liked to watch them have sex. Granda went on a national media tour — he gave interviews to ABC News, CNN, Reuters, Politico, and The Washington Post — and said the Falwells began ‘grooming’ him when he was 20 and bought his silence with luxury vacations, rides on Liberty’s private jet, and an ownership stake managing a Miami Beach hostel.”
Trauma Can Be Hard to Talk About. It Can Also Be Hard to Hear (Bethany)
From The Fuller Project: “Here I am sitting in the living room of someone I’ve never met in person before, asking her about the worst and best moments of her life. And here she is, telling me. I’m there to report on the foster care system in Minnesota and its impact on Native mothers like Shana, but we spend hours enmeshed in conversations about our worldviews, religion, history, and culture. There’s something about sitting across from someone at a kitchen table who’s as interesting as Shana, that makes me eager to talk about more than the questions in my notepad.”
Men in Power Seem to Have a Serious Zipper Malfunction Problem (Mili)
From KevinMD.com: “It has been more than 20 years since our former commander in chief, President William J. Clinton, endured a most public airing of his zipper malfunction during his impeachment hearings. While US presidents from the time of the country’s founders are rumored or confirmed to have had extramarital affairs, President Clinton’s was the first to threaten his job. This should have been a wake-up call among politicians to act with more propriety or at least get better-designed trousers. But in the years since Clinton, the tally of men believing their power and influence was immune to the fate that befell other weaker zippered men has continued to multiply. A quick Wikipedia search of ‘federal political sex scandals’ yielded 39 instances of politicians’ sexual misadventures since President Clinton, including another US president.”
New Model Predicts We’re Probably the Only Advanced Civilization in the Observable Universe (Sean)
From Phys.org: “In the decades since Enrico Fermi first posed the question that encapsulates this paradox (‘Where is everybody?’), scientists have attempted to explain this disparity one way or another. But in a new study conducted by three famed scholars from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, the paradox is reevaluated in such a way that it makes it seem likely that humanity is alone in the observable universe. The study, titled ‘Dissolving the Fermi Paradox’, recently appeared online. The study was jointly-conducted by Anders Sandberg, a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute and a Martin Senior Fellow at Oxford University; Eric Drexler, the famed engineer who popularized the concept of nanotechnology; and Toby Ord, the famous Australian moral philosopher at Oxford University.”
