A concession worker at Barclays Center last night was loudly barking at people that she "CANNOT" serve anyone who isn't masked (i.e. refusing service) even though arena policy doesn't require masks, and even though her own cloth mask was dangling below her nose and half her mouth
Note: it's not the worker's fault that the relevant policies are muddled. The arena, which already has a vax mandate per NYC law, "strongly recommends" masks, but doesn't expressly require them. And corporate officials are paranoid about having to potentially cancel more events
Still, it was interesting to observe an unusually vivid example of someone aggressively using mask-wearing as a point of moral leverage against others, meanwhile the manner in which they were personally mask-wearing had zero conceivable benefit
And no, of course I wouldn't identify the worker or seek to get her in trouble, regardless of how ridiculously she may have been behaving
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Alito couldn't have been more clear: he wasn't making any kind of "anti-vax" point, he was establishing that OSHA has never before imposed a regulation on workers that inflicts some risk of adverse health effects, however remote. But of course gets smeared as "anti-vax" anyway
Ironically, Alito expressly foresaw that he would be (deliberately) misunderstood in exactly this manner
Alito: "These vaccines and every other vaccine of which I'm aware, and many other medications, have benefits and they also have risks... some people who are vaccinated and some people who take medication that is highly beneficial will suffer adverse consequences"
Public schools were closed for at least 440,000 students in New Jersey as of today. That's over a third of the entire state's student population, and I probably under-counted. Definitely what you would have expected a full year into mass vaccination
Newark, Jersey City, Irvington, Elizabeth, Paterson, Bayonne, Union City, Hackensack, East Orange, New Brunswick, Hamilton, Camden, Trenton are among the larger districts closed. Some affluent districts too, but it's not hard to infer which students are mostly affected by this
Oh and by the way New Jersey public schools have received $4.3 billion in COVID funding from the federal government
Rutgers announced today that fully-vaxxed and now compulsorily "boosted" students are barred from returning to their dorms til at least January 29, and classes are remote again / events cancelled. But at least the students were wished "a very happy and healthy new year" via email
Reaction from Rutgers subreddit
It's one thing to have limited sympathy for students attending "elite" private schools, but students going to state schools (often the only plausible option for them financially) are straightforwardly sympathy-deserving for all this ridiculousness
Twitter's current "COVID misinformation policy," under which Marjorie Taylor Greene was just banned, effectively prohibits criticism of "official regulations" and "restrictions" -- even on the grounds of "efficacy." And then they wonder why people are cynical
The terms of the policy could of course just as easily apply to COVID-fanatical users: what about the "harm" caused by generating the "misleading" impression that children are at extreme risk? To take just one example of countless. But of course it's never enforced that way
As usual, Tech Officials have made themselves into unilateral arbiters of complex public debates -- like they're Philosopher Kings. But the one-sidedness of "COVID misinformation" rules, combined with the inherent ambiguity of the "harm" principle, takes it to a whole other level
If her shockingly dire predictions fizzle out, will this woman face any "accountability" for such extreme doom-saying? Professor at Johns Hopkins
This woman also works at the FDA. If you're using your governmental and university affiliations to give weight to such dire predictions, and they turn out to be bogus, should there not be some penalty incurred -- at least reputationally -- for doing a major public disservice...?
Would also note that the "disruptions" she's warning about seem not especially connected to the level of actual illness that is allegedly forthcoming, but rather the policies that cause things like staffing shortages for "testing positive"