Coronavirus week 39: More lies, more stupidity

I had predicted we'd pass 300K US deaths by the end of the year, months ago. Trump bragged that he was a stable genyus and so the US would never hit 1 million. I underestimated, and Trump may have overestimated, by the time this is all done. 

Yours truly went to Aridzona on a holiday vacation and can report in detail that small and midsized towns there have even more problems with maskless COVIDIOTS than similar-sized places here in Tex-ass. California DOES take it seriously (your author was there for half the trip) and ... has a much lower death toll.

• SocraticGadfly discussed ways that President Joe Biden could get a de facto federal mask quasi-mandate.

• Off the Kuff observes that the COVID vaccine rollout is pretty bumpy so far. 

• More than "bumpy" is the harassment of Tennessee nurse Tiffany Dover, who fainted after getting the vaccine. (Sidebar: The slime of Facebook is further illustrated, and it's time for me to get back off it for a while.)

• More Chinese coronavirus lies, including those by Winnie the Pooh himself, President Xi Jinping, have been exposed. These are again about covering up/ignoring the early days and weeks in Wuhan, including Xi's own lies about how quickly he intervened. (Next, he'll claim that Uyghurs in Xinjiang invented it and many leftists will lap that up.) China is also carefully guarding the research it conducts in-country.

• Schadenfreude meets stupidity: Just after Strangeabbott said the Texas Capitol would reopen to public visitors cuz, the Lege!, outgoing Speaker Dennis Bonnen had his 2020 end perfectly when he said he and his family had gotten it.

• The Texas Supremes said that Austin couldn't do a California-style lockdown on in-person dining over the New Year's holiday.

• Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo continues to battle COVID and conservatives.

• RIP to Congressman-elect Luke Letlow.

• Turns out, per the busted French rave, that many Europeans are like many Americans on coronavirus controls, which British PM Boris Johnson says will get stricter yet in the UK before they relax.

• The 1918-19 pandemic had its own version of "long haulers."

• More on the Wisconsin pharmacist who deliberately ruined the Moderna vaccine. Shorter? He's a nutter. And, his particular nutterness arguably reinforces my claims that horseshoe theory is real, at least on COVID related issues.