Thursday night.

Today was the kind of busy workday where I forgot to even glance at my email, even during my lunch break. As a result, I missed an email from the vaccine trial people. How symbolic is that? I’ll call them first thing tomorrow, and all should be well, but this is just another reason the “work/life harmony” thing is a sham.

Good news: days are getting longer – today’s sunset was at 6:11pm. Bad news: I no longer wake up just in time to see the sunrise: now the sun just blasts me straight in the eyes. Heh.

In the US, there was a sufficiently convincing threat of a new attack on the Capitol. As a result, all the congress-critters took today off. Nothing happened, but all the domestic terrorists out there scored a big symbolic victory. The most powerful government in the world went into hiding (if only for a day) because of a violent threat from a cult/militia. (It’s hard to tell where one starts and the other one begins.) Yeah, that’s a perfectly normal day in the life of a nuclear superpower… I expect there will be more insanity along the lines: this, today, happened less than two months after the initial coup attempt. Lack of consequences is just an invitation to keep trying.

In covid news, Biden got fed up with Republican governors who are opening up and abandoning masks prematurely (it’s not just Texas now) – in his own words, “The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking.” That, of course, set off a lot of performative outrage – apparently, one guy took that as an attack on white people and his personal Neanderthal values, and his angry rant is being passed around as today’s biggest joke. Poor Neanderthals don’t deserve such ugly comparisons.

In other covid news, this New York Times article on the situation in Brazil is genuinely scary. Bolsonaro is still very committed to killing his own people by disparaging vaccines, science, and modern medicine in general. There are few tests. There will be very few vaccines. Their official covid death toll is currently 259,000 – and climbing. Their indifferent (well, actually, more than that – militantly idiotic) leadership allowed the virus to spread like wildfire, and somewhere along the line the Brazilian variant known as P.1 has popped up. It’s hard to tell for sure but it looks like the new variant is reinfecting those who had already survived and recovered from Covid Classic. The worst part is that there’s no help on its way. Brazil is likely to continue generating horrific headlines like they did a few months ago when hospitals ran out of oxygen.

It makes me wonder… Had Trump won the second term (or somehow succeeded in his attempted coup), would the US have been doomed to a similar fate? Allegedly, there was no vaccination plan at all when Biden took over, and the new administration had to set everything up from scratch. The FDA still would’ve approved covid vaccines but would the rollout have been as fast and successful? It’s absolutely wild that the lives of hundreds of millions of people can defend on the whims of just one person.

I’ve just found a fun little interactive vaccination tracker over yonder. According to its data, the US has vaccinated a total of 80.5 million people already, and 1.9 million of those were today. Canada has vaccinated 2.1 million people; about 70,000 were vaccinated today. Worldwide, 275.8 million have been vaccinated; 6.3 million of them got vaccinated today. Those are impressive numbers, but we still got a long way to go – and I really, really hope that Canada will be able to scale things up. The US has roughly nine times more people, but they’ve administered roughly 27 more doses just today alone. Gotta stay patient, I suppose…

Good night, y’all.