I don't know exactly what this portends…

…but under the circumstances I'm defaulting to "not good."

More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016

Plain and simple

From NBC News:

QAnon is a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory alleging that President Donald Trump is engaged in a secret war against a cabal of Satanist child abusers in government, entertainment and the media. The conspiracy — which has spread to millions of users in Facebook groups during the pandemic — has been linked to several violent crimes and was last year labeled a potential domestic terror threat by the F.B.I.

There's no more immediate example of how what happens on social media affects "real world" events.

And the disturbing question is, if some random collection of wackos can, via social media, cause dustups in the streets, what could the people—or the nations—who own those media platforms and the algorithms they run on do?

I don't advocate censorship, but handling with care would be a good idea.

Saying it like it is

Things spin totally out of control

 Really. There was an op-ed piece in the (paywalled) Washington Post this morning (no need to link, I don't even remember what the article was about) that contained the following:

When you no longer trust Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s most revered infectious-disease expert, who else would you turn to…

 Now tell me. When was the last time you revered an infectious-disease expert? Any? Ever? Want to take a minute?

Can you even name another (OK, more than one other) infectious-disease expert?

I get it. Fuaci is a big story these days. But swoon?

For "Peanuts" fans

Contemplation

Good to see you again, discombobulated, it's been a while

Normal isn't normal any more

 Coronavirus is Breaking AI; Models Discombobulated

Covid-19 is the “kryptonite” of AI, breaking its brittle models with outlier data that becomes the new normal, suggests a scientist writing in the Nature Public Health Emergency Collection effort of the National Library of Medicine, NIH.

Of course Covid-19 isn't the only thing I can think of that's not normal these days. As a rule I'm on the side of not normal, but under the circumstances I'm persuaded to make an exception for the whole of 2020.

Bitch now

 If you've got something to complain about do it right away because something even bigger is right around the corner. Yikes.

California's Wildfire and Covid-19 Disasters Just Collided

Since Monday, almost 400 wildfires have broken out, most of them sparked by lightning. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated across Northern California, and 350,000 acres have burned so far.

Ahmad Jamal…

…is a jazz pianist who was a big favorite in the late 1950's and whom I haven't thought of in decades until this afternoon, when an album of his popped up in my Apple Music. Here it is. If you don't get your music from Apple you can almost certainly find it elsewhere—and it's definitely worth a listen.

https://music.apple.com/us/album/ahmad-jamal-at-the-pershing-but-not-for-me/1445769114

Don't go

Ending August

Toxic positivity!

 Yet another thing to worry about in 2020 according to, well, experts, of course.

The paywalled Washington Post reports…

“While cultivating a positive mind-set is a powerful coping mechanism, toxic positivity stems from the idea that the best or only way to cope with a bad situation is to put a positive spin on it and not dwell on the negative,” said Natalie Dattilo, a clinical health psychologist…

[Byline Allyson Chiu]

Grumps rule.

Bookstore

Light along the wall

Been around a while

Some things are still pretty good

If this isn't Ironic I don't know what is

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Tufts Health Plan and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care report millions in gains as pandemic sidelined health care spending

Worldwide pandemic knocking people off right and left and there's less cost to the health insurance companies, hence more profit. This seems eerily similar to laying off a bunch of employees and seeing the company's stock price go up. Maybe if we could just get everybody unemployed and sick we'd all be rich.

Noted

Michigan bowling centers want to be able to reopen – and for you to stop calling them 'bowling alleys'

"We are facilitators of recreation in many aspects, so we’d like to be called bowling centers."

Not a bad weekend at that

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

 No kidding. There is an article at the website Lexico (formerly Oxford, they say, go figure) entitled What Is The Longest English Word? that decrees the word above, which I am not going to try typing again, is.

Which is nonsense, of course. Everybody knows the longest word in English is smiles, which has a mile between its two s's.