Happy New Year, and welcome to the first year of the Twenties. May they Roar!
In case you’ve been overwhelmed by headlines and internet trends, here’s a few happenings you may have missed over the past few days. For those of you who have been avoiding all media but this, I’ll mention a couple of recent events that everyone else will recognize. I’m sure they won’t mind.
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I was posed a question over Christmas. It was respectful and well-meaning, but the gist of it was, “Why do you bother to do this? You’re no expert, and sometimes you’re wrong.”
And that’s perfectly true: I have no degree in political science, nor even one in journalism. From time to time I’ll make a mistake — sometimes an egregious one. It’s even possible that the entire premise of an article might be completely off-base. These are all quite valid points, and it’s worth remembering them when you read: I might be wrong.
On the other hand, it’s occasionally possible everyone else is wrong.
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In early July, we released an exhaustive article on COVID-19 trends. It was meticulously researched, with dozens of subordinate links to data sources. In it, we cited our earlier prediction that, unless Americans were to act with unprecedented foresight and responsibility, we were looking at between one and six million deaths by the end of autumn. Our tracking gave us cause for cautious optimism.
Winter officially begins in one week, and the official COVID-19 death count just passed 300,000. Given the standard two to six week lag time in reports combined with a 3000+ person daily increase, the final numbers will be closer to 400,000 by that point. Advances in hospital treatment protocols combined with local lockdowns and responsible behavior in much of the country have prevented, at great cost, the loss of millions of American lives. Our optimism has proven justified.
(more…)I’m going to be frank with you, and I want you to know why.
The thing is, we spend so much time pussy-footing around dangerous thoughts and ideas these days because we feel we can’t discuss them openly. Cancel Culture has taken its toll; the list of former celebrities only ever grows. Attrition is less among politicians, but pundits and journalists vanish almost daily, because they say something that society refuses to accept — there’s invisible lines, and they cross them, and that’s just something that cannot be borne.
Without judging this phenomenon, I want to acknowledge it and explain in terms accessible even to the meanest understanding why it does not dissuade me from being brutally open and honest about this topic.
(more…)The election is over, and Biden/Harris made the cover of Time Magazine. COVID deaths are up and vaccines are being approved for rapid distribution. You know all this already; it’s not news. It’s olds.
So here’s a few things you might not have known:
(more…)Congress has been fighting for months over the size of the next stimulus package. Now that the election has been more or less decided, there remains a chance that the lame-duck session might pass something in time for Christmas. But should they, and if so how much?
(more…)It was half past one on a rainy Thanksgiving morning, and I’d been rudely awakened by an urgent telephone message. “We need your help,” they said, and when my country calls I’m there.
(more…)The Not Fake News has been operating under the Buy Me A Coffee model for the past year, and all things considered it’s worked out fairly well for us. More than thirteen hundred dollars have come in, and, while expenses are still higher than income (thanks to the New Hampshire primaries), we’re getting closer to break-even.
(more…)I wish to preface this with the only opinion that matters: Mine.
Which is to say, My opinion about what other people call me is the only one that matters, and I don’t happen to identify as LatinX.
So why am I opining on the topic? You may well ask.
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The Not Fake News 
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