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The Supreme Court’s Vexing Mixed Message on Vaccine Mandates - Two rulings reveal just how hard-conservative the core of the Court is. - link
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From Vox
The Supreme Court can’t get its story straight on vaccines -
Justice Neil Gorsuch. left, talks with Chief Justice John Roberts on the steps of the Supreme Court following his official investiture at the Supreme Court June 15, 2017, in Washington, DC. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
The Court is barely even pretending to be engaged in legal reasoning.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a pair of unsigned opinions that appear to be at war with each other.
The first, National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, blocks a Biden administration rule requiring most workers to either get vaccinated against Covid-19 or to routinely be tested for the disease. The second, Biden v. Missouri, backs a more modest policy requiring most health care workers to get the vaccine.
There are some things that differentiate the two cases. Beyond the fact that the first rule is broader than the second, the broader rule also relies on a rarely used provision of federal law that is restricted to emergencies, while the latter rule relies on a more general statute.
But the Court gives little attention to substantive differences between the laws authorizing both rules.Instead, it applies an entirely judicially created doctrine and other standards in inconsistent ways. The result istwo opinions that are difficult to reconcile with each other.
The NFIB case relies heavily on something known as the “major questions doctrine,” a judicially invented doctrine which the Court says places strict limits on a federal agency’s power to “exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.” As the NFIB opinion notes, the vaccinate-or-test rule at issue in NFIB applies to “84 million Americans” — quite understandably a matter of vast economic significance.
But, if this manufactured doctrine is legitimate, then it’s not at all clear why it doesn’t apply with equal force in both cases. As Justice Clarence Thomas points out in a dissenting opinion in the Missouri case, the more modest health workers’ rule “has effectively mandated vaccination for 10 million healthcare workers.” That’s still an awful lot of Americans!
What if the Biden administration had pushed out a rule requiring 20 million people to get vaccinated? Or 50 million? The Court does not tell us just how many millions of Americans must be impacted by a rule for it to count as a matter of “vast economic and political significance.” And it’s hard to draw a legally principled distinction between 10 million workers and 84 million.
Similarly, in NFIB, the Court notes that the agency which created the broad rule at issue in that case is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) which, as its name suggests, deals with health threats that arise in the workplace, and Covid-19 is not unique to the workplace. “COVID–19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather,” the majority opinion notes.
But, as the three liberal justices point out in dissent, OSHA regulates threats that exist both inside and outside the workplace all the time, including “risks of fire, faulty electrical installations, and inadequate emergency exits.” It’s not at all clear why Covid-19 is any different. And the only explanation that the majority opinion gives — that a vaccination “cannot be undone at the end of the workday,” unlike the donning of fire-safety gear — applies with equal force to both the OSHA rule and the narrow health worker’s rule that the Court refused to block. Doctors’ vaccinations can’t be undone any more than an office worker’s can be.
The Court, in other words, appears unable to articulate a principled reason why some vaccination rules should stand and others should fall.
In the past, when the Court was unable to come up with principled ways to separate good rules from bad ones, it deferred to the federal agencies that promulgated those rules. The Court reasoned that it is better to have policy decisions made by expert agencies that are accountable to an elected president than to have purely discretionary decisions made by unelected judges with no relevant expertise.
But the one thing that is apparent from NFIB and Missouri is that this age of deference is over. The opinions suggest that the Court will uphold rules that five of its members think are good ideas, and strike down rules that five of its members think are bad ideas.
The Court is fabricating legal doctrines that appear in neither statute nor Constitution
To understand the two vaccination cases, it’s helpful to start with the specific statutory language the Biden administration relied upon when it issued both rules.
In the NFIB case, a federal law that generally requires OSHA to go through an arduous process to approve new workplace regulations also gives the agency the power to devise an “emergency temporary standard.” It can do so to protect workers from “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful” if such a standard is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.”
Meanwhile, in the Missouri case, a different federal law instructs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to issue rules that it “finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services” in institutions that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding (a category that includes most health providers and pretty much all hospitals and other major providers).
There are striking similarities between these two statutes. Both use open-ended language, delegating powers that could be wielded in a wide variety of circumstances to protect against a wide variety of health threats. And both also state that the relevant federal agencies should only issue rules that are “necessary” to protect against such threats.
And yet the Court analyzes these two very similar statutes in strikingly different ways.
As mentioned above, NFIB relies heavily on the so- called major questions doctrine, a judicially created doctrine that is not mentioned in the Constitution or in any other federal law, and that sometimes limits federal agencies’ power to issue especially consequential regulations. “We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance,” the Court declares in NFIB, quoting from a decision last August that struck down a moratorium on evictions.
Historically, this doctrine has been used primarily to help the Court interpret vague or ambiguous statutes delegating regulatory power to a federal agency. When it is unclear whether a particularly ambitious regulation falls within an agency’s statutory authority, the Court would sometimes err on the side of saying that the regulation is not permitted.
But the issue in NFIB isn’t really that the statute is vague. As the three liberal justices note in a co-authored dissent, the six conservative justices in the majority do “not contest that COVID–19 is a ‘new hazard’ and ‘physically harmful agent’; that it poses a ‘grave danger’ to employees; or that a testing and masking or vaccination policy is ‘necessary’ to prevent those harms.”
Rather, the majority appears to believe that, because OSHA is not engaged in an “everyday exercise of federal power,” the Court must look for reasons to strike its actions down. As mentioned above, the NFIB majority justifies doing so by claiming that OSHA’s authority is limited to the workplace, and the threat of Covid-19 “is untethered, in any causal sense, from the workplace.”
Thus, unlike previous decisions that applied the major questions doctrine only when a statute is vague (that is, if it is unclear whether Congress intended to allow an agency to regulate), NFIB suggests that this doctrine applies to any open-ended statute that gives an agency broad powers. And it applies even if it’s apparent from that statute’s language that Congress intended to give the agency broad, open-ended authority.
That’s a sweeping change. But say we take it at face value, and then look at the decision in Missouri. Under NFIB, the major questions doctrine only applies to matters of “vast economic and political significance.” But the Missouri opinion provides no explanation of why a rule that impacts 10 million workers does not qualify as a question of such significance.
And if the major questions doctrine does apply, then the CMS rule appears to be just as vulnerable to this doctrine as the OSHA rule. If anything, the text of the CMS statute is even more open-ended than the language at issue in NFIB. OSHA’s statute for emergency regulations only permits it to address a “grave danger” and only when that danger arises from a “physically harmful” substance or agent that intrudes upon the workplace. CMS’s statute, by contrast, gives it far more sweeping authority to act in the “interest of the health and safety of individuals” who receive health care in facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid funding.
And yet the major questions doctrine goes unmentioned in the Missouri opinion.
Similarly, in NFIB, the Court swipes at OSHA’s broad rule because, it claims, “OSHA, in its half century of existence, has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind.” But in Missouri, the majority opinion concedes that CMS’s “vaccine mandate goes further than what the Secretary has done in the past to implement infection control,” and it also notes that state governments, not CMS, have historically imposed vaccination requirements on health care workers.
The two opinions cannot even agree on the significance of when the two rules were issued. In NFIB, the fact that there was “a 2-month delay” between when President Joe Biden announced that OSHA would issue a rule and when OSHA actually issued the rule is mentioned as a subtle dig against the administration. But in Missouri, the majority has no problem with a two-month delay.
The Missouri opinion, in other words, appears to have been drafted by someone who was blissfully unaware of what the Court had to say in NFIB. The two opinions simply cannot be reconciled. They apply completely different legal rules and make no effort to explain why the analysis in one opinion does not apply in the other.
At best, the Court is unable to keep track of what it is doing. At worst, it appears to have started with the result it wanted in both cases, and then worked backward to come up with some kind of reasoning to justify those outcomes.
The Supreme Court wants to be President Biden’s boss
In fairness, there is some language in the NFIB opinion that the Biden administration might find comforting. Although the Court rejects OSHA’s broad rule, it does indicate that OSHA could issue a narrower rule in some cases. “Where the virus poses a special danger because of the particular features of an employee’s job or workplace,” the Court writes, “targeted regulations are plainly permissible.”
Similarly, NFIB rejects the slash- and-burn approach to curtailing OSHA’s authority that is favored by the very mostconservative members of the federal bench. The majority opinion concedes that “Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers.”
So, small victories: The opinions in NFIB and Missouri suggest that the Court will still permit the Biden administration to govern some of the time. But they also suggest that the Court will exercise a broad veto power over this administration’s regulatory actions.
As Judge Jane Stranch wrote in a lower court opinion backing the OSHA mandate, the major questions doctrine that the Court relies upon to strike that mandate “is hardly a model of clarity, and its precise contours — specifically, what constitutes a question concerning deep economic and political significance — remain undefined.” The same can be said about other legal doctrines (such as one known as “nondelegation”) that the Court has also floated as justification to strike down federal regulations in recent cases.
The elevation of these doctrines is dangerous. When courts hand down such vague and open-ended rules, they effectively transfer power to themselves. As the NFIB and Missouri cases show, doctrines like major questions are hard to apply in a principled way, and very easy to apply selectively. And they can justify striking down nearly any significant rule that a majority of the justices dislike.
The justices, in other words, have set themselves up as the final censors of any regulatory action. The Biden administration may still propose new rules, but those rules are likely to stand only if five justices agree with them.
The pipeline at the center of geopolitical drama -
View of pipe systems and shut-off devices at the gas receiving station of the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline. | Stefan Sauer/picture alliance via Getty Images
Nord Stream 2 is looming over escalating Russian-Ukraine tensions.
In this frightening morass, there’s one low-key wild card: a long-running energy infrastructure project that some consider an economic project, others consider a geopolitical tool of Russia, and that is a combination of all of those and more.
The project in question is Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion Russian-owned pipeline that has Washington in a difficult position with some of its European allies, divided other European countries among themselves, and weakened Ukraine.
When it’s up and running, Nord Stream 2 will bring natural gas from Russia to Europe. It is laid alongside Nord Stream 1, which flows from Russia along the Baltic Sea and directly into Germany. Experts said the pipeline will not dramatically increase Russian natural gas imports to Europe, but it could reroute it — meaning more natural gas will flow directly to Germany and potentially bypass other existing pipelines that run through other European countries. Most significantly, Ukraine.
The United States sees the pipeline as a Russian geopolitical tool to undermine Europe’s energy and national security. Ukraine definitely sees it this way too and wants the pipeline stopped. Once Nord Stream 2 is online, Russia will no longer need to pay transit fees to send gas through Ukraine, and both Russia and Europe have less need to rely on the pipeline that runs through Ukraine. “The thinking is that as long as that remains a critical transit corridor for Russian supplies to get to market, Russia maybe is less likely to interfere or to disrupt that source of transit,” said Emily Holland, assistant professor in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College.
Germany has framed Nord Stream 2 as a “commercial project” essential to German industry and wants to see it operational. Some of Europe agrees; some of Europe doesn’t, or doesn’t really want to say too much either way. Add in corporate and financial interests, energy demand, and costs, and things get even messier.
And Russia, in case you haven’t figured out, wants all of those things — a geopolitical tool to get leverage over Europe, a vulnerable Ukraine, and a payout from the pipeline.
All of this has taken on an additional urgency as Russia builds up troops along the Ukrainian border, and the very real threat of war intensifies. And because of that, Nord Stream 2 is increasingly seen as leverage in negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, though there are divisions on exactly how to use it as such. (That question of just how to use it played out in the Senate Thursday over a failed effort by Sen. Ted Cruz to impose sanctions on the pipeline now.)
All these fractures — between transatlantic allies, European nations, and US and European populaces themselves — mean Nord Stream 2 has already achieved at least one of Putin’s political goals: sowing discord.
“It already has paid back for Moscow,” said Stefan Meister, head of the program on international order and democracy at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Even if it’s not online, it already worked quite well because it has divided US-Europe-German relations. The Europeans, it has divided. The Germans [themselves], it has divided. So what else [does] Moscow need? It’s already a big success story.”
The controversial birth (and sort-of life) of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline
Before there was Nord Stream 2, there was Nord Stream 1. Before there was Nord Stream 1, there were pipelines that brought Soviet, later Russian, gas to Europe. Among these pipelines is one that runs through Ukraine that, at its peak, transited as much as 80 percent of Europe’s Russian gas imports. But in 2005, Germany and Russia inked a deal for Nord Stream 1, a roughly $6 billion pipeline through the Baltic Sea that would make Europe less reliant on this particular land route through a volatile region.
In 2015, a few years after the original pipeline opened, Germany signed a deal for a Nord Stream 2 to expand capacity along this route. But it drew fierce criticism: It was owned fully by Gazprom, Russia’s state-run gas company. The proposed second pipeline would further undermine the need for Russia to pay transit fees to move gas through the Ukrainian pipeline. And, well, timing: The agreement came after Russia had annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel defended Nord Stream 2 as a “commercial project,” essential for Germany’s all-important industrial sector. As experts said at the time and still say today, sure, it’s a commercial project, but anything involving a Russian state-owned gas company is going to inherently be political.
Germany also looks at Russia through a slightly different lens and has a strong legacy of engagement with Russia, said Meister of the German Council of Foreign Relations. Berlin has traditionally tried to balance its commitments to Western allies with this desire to have productive relations with Moscow, and it often sees business and economic interests as a good venue for cooperation. Germany has relied on Russian gas for decades, and so Germany sees this project as a reliable and practical bet.
The idea that this is a “commercial project” isn’t meaningless. Some European companies and other interests have a lot to gain from the pipeline — or lose, if the project is killed, especially at this late stage. One reason the pipeline proceeded despite objections was “the power of those economic groups that are benefiting from this, and I think that power is gigantic,” said Margarita Balmaceda, professor of diplomacy and international relations at Seton Hall University and author of Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union.
All of that helped Nord Stream 2 get built, despite objections from the United States and other allies who said it would make Germany and Europe even more reliant on Russian natural gas and so more vulnerable to the Kremlin.
The rest of Europe was similarly divided with very legitimate concerns about this pipeline being a source of Russian leverage running up alongside the reality that some countries would financially benefit from Nord Stream 2, and others see opportunity in weaning Germany and other western European countries off their Russian energy needs. “The problem with European energy security is there is no European energy security,” Holland said. “Every state has its own energy security needs and interests, and they’re completely distinct from their neighbors.”
And then there is Ukraine, caught in the middle — and whose fate is potentially intertwined with that of Nord Stream 2.
How Nord Stream 2 became a flashpoint in Ukraine’s future
In May 2021, the Biden administration waived Congressional sanctions on the company behind Nord Stream 2. The bipartisan legislation passed in 2019, a move that angered Germany and piled on to strained relations in the Trump years. (Trump’s own takes on Nord Stream 2 didn’t help.) This was part of the administration’s larger overture toward Germany to help repair the damage of the Trump years. But Biden got pushback from Congress, including from Senate Democrats, who saw Biden as acknowledging the US wasn’t or couldn’t stop the pipeline from moving forward.
Ukraine also deeply opposed this decision, given it has the most to lose from Nord Stream 2 coming online. Again, Europe isn’t getting more gasfrom Russia through Nord Stream 2, but it offers another option to move that natural gas. And that means Russia and Europe need Ukraine’s pipeline a lot less.
Ukraine sees this as a major threat. Russia pays Ukraine approximately $2 billion in transit fees to send gas through its territory.
But really, the big thing is that Ukraine sees the pipeline infrastructure as its own insurance policy, both with Russia and Europe. Russia wants to sell its gas to Europe; Europe needs to buy Russian gas. As long as Ukraine is in this mix, it may, at the very least, give Russia pause before sending tens of thousands of troops onto Ukrainian soil — and keep Europe a little more invested in its security.
“Taking Ukraine out of the transit equation further marginalizes Ukraine from an already pretty marginal role in the European consciousness,” Balmaceda said.
None of this is really a secret, and, to be clear, this is exactly the scenario Russia wants. “That’s why I can view Nord Stream 2 as more of a geopolitical project because it is designed to give the Russians the option to move as much gas as they can around Ukraine,” said Steven Pifer, nonresident senior fellow in the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
The United States and Germany recognize this. Angela Merkel previously said that gas must keep flowing through Ukraine after Nord Stream 2, and the current Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated that position in December. In a July agreement between, US and Germany say they “are united in their belief that it is in Ukraine’s and Europe’s interest for gas transit via Ukraine to continue beyond 2024.” That agreement also promises Germany will try to seek sanctions if Russia uses “energy as a weapon.” But experts said the agreement is pretty vague on what that entails. Especially since Russia is arguably using energy as a weapon right now, by not increasing exports to meet the current European demand for natural gas in what some analysts see as an attempt to pressure Germany to restart the approval process for Nord Stream 2.
Germany and its partners do have some sway over Russia because Russia wants Nord Stream 2. But this leverage only lasts for as long as Nord Stream 2 stays offline. “If the Transatlantic community waits until Nord Stream 2 is operational, then a significant deterrent effect would be lost, since at that point the Kremlin will have one less dependency in Ukraine to keep in mind,” said Benjamin Schmitt, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Nord Stream 2 is tearing just about everyone apart — including inside the US
This is why Nord Stream 2 is tied to efforts to avert a Russian military invasion of Ukraine. In the lead-up to talks this week, Russia made security demands of the United States and NATO, many of which are nonstarters for allies. The US has threatened harsh sanctions and other punitive measures, but Biden administration officials also say they see Nord Stream 2’s limbo as a bargaining chip.
Not everyone sees it this way, though. Some US politicians and experts think the best way to stop the pipeline and deter Russia is by sanctioning Nord Stream 2 now. This is why Sen. Cruz and other Republicans pushed to reinstate sanctions on Nord Stream, a bill that put Senate Democrats — especially those who’ve previously backed these penalties or are in tough reelection battles this year — in an uncomfortable position. (It also didn’t help that Cruz got this vote by holding up Biden’s national security nominations for months.)
But the Biden administration sees it differently and advocated against the legislation, saying imposing sanctions right now would mean they lose any deterrent effect. Or as Pifer put it: It may be the equivalent of “shooting the hostage.”
Senate Democrats largely rallied around the administration’s position, and as a consolation, have proposed their own legislation to impose sanctions if Russia advances military into Ukraine. This includes steps for more penalties on Nord Stream 2, and for now, that was enough to convince some Democrats to reject Cruz’s bill. Russia has.
But the division within the United States reflects the even larger fractures over Nord Stream 2, made worse by the Ukraine crisis. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, when asked about Nord Stream 2 this week in Brussels, reiterated a line her boss Antony Blinken said earlier this month: “From our perspective, it’s very hard to see gas flowing through [the] pipeline for it to become operational if Russia renews its aggression on Ukraine.”
But the question really is where Germany stands. Scholz has indicated serious reprisals are on the table if Russia invades Ukraine, but he has also maintained that Nord Stream 2 is a “private sector” project. Even within the German government, rifts exist. The leadership of the Greens, Scholz’s coalition partner, have long opposed Nord Stream 2. “This government, they have to find their approach on Russia, on energy, on Nord Stream 2, and so they are still in a period where they have to find their positions,” Meister said.
Russia’s troop buildup against Ukraine is putting pressure on Germany to find its position fast, along with the rest of Europe. Right now, any escalation of the conflict in Ukraine could further threaten European gas supplies, making for a potentially difficult winter in Europe. Still, some experts told me this idea of Russia turning completely turning off the spigot of natural gas to Europe is a bit overblown, and that is largely the view in Germany. Europe has been relying on this gas infrastructure for decades, through lots of turmoil, and it also goes against Russian interests to a degree — Gazprom means a lot to Putin and his oligarch friends.
That doesn’t mean Russia can’t exploit the situation, manipulate in more subtle ways, or use energy as a pressure point, as it’s doing now. Nord Stream 2 gives Russia another avenue to do so. This will prove critics right who say Germany and others are too reliant on Russian natural gas imports. But it’s also hard to ignore the reality that Russian gas is just a lot cheaper than some other current alternatives for Western Europe. Those trade-offs are not unique to Europe.
Nord Stream 2’s current not-quite-completed status will be seen as both a deterrent to war in Ukraine and a punishment option in the event there is one. If Russia invades Ukraine, it is very likely Nord Stream 2 will be dead; the pressure from the European Union, the US, and other allies will be difficult to overcome. “If the Russians do that, and the Germans don’t kill Nord Stream 2,” Pifer said, “then I expect that the Biden administration would say, ‘Fine, we’re not waiving any sanctions. Mr. Cruz, pass your legislation.”
Correction 1/14, 7:00pm: A previous version of this story referred to Gazprom as a Russian state-owned oil company. It is a state-owned gas company.
The intimacy of the TV star death -
Betty White (center) starred as Rose Nylund for seven seasons on The Golden Girls. | ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
When we mourn Bob Saget and Betty White, we’re also mourning a younger version of ourselves.
Shortly before his death in 2016, Alan Thicke, who played Jason Seaver, the dad on the long-running sitcom Growing Pains, told me how often people would come up to him to talk about how his work on the show had affected their lives.
“I like that there’s a whole generation of people that still come up to me and say, ‘You raised me. You’re my dad, I grew up on you.’ I’ll say, ‘Well, I hope you turned out all right,’” Thicke said.
Thicke seemed alternately amused by this impulse on the part of those who approached him and a bit humbled by it. When you’re a viewer of a TV show that runs long enough, you really do feel like you build relationships with those characters. I was sad when Thicke died, because Growing Pains was my favorite show when I was a kid. I don’t think I would have described Thicke as “my dad,” but I did feel like I had built a relationship with him, no matter how inaccurate that statement is.
There is an intimacy to the death of the TV star that I’m not sure quite exists with the deaths of other artists. When a musician or a movie star dies, we might be gutted, sure, but our popular culture places those figures up on a pedestal in ways that make them ever so slightly unapproachable. Bruce Springsteen is my favorite living rock star; I’d never think to consider him my dad.
Bob D’Amico/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
Bob Saget played the perfect TV dad on Full House.
It’s just different with TV. Especially in the era when the main four broadcast networks were inviting the same people into our homes, week after week, it wasn’t all that hard for viewers to find a kind of comfort in our favorite shows. We knew Alan Thicke or Betty White (who died a few weeks ago) or Bob Saget (who died a few days ago) would be there to do the same things over and over, sometimes literally in reruns.
The outpouring of grief from people in the wake of the recent deaths of White and Saget stems from how beloved they were as pop culture figures. White was your raunchy grandma, and Saget was your dad who loved a good dirty joke. But both of those personae were arrived at via television. They’re more or less transmuted versions of the most famous characters each played, amalgams of Rose Nylund and Danny Tanner and Betty and Bob, both of whom were always game for a joke.
White wasn’t a rapacious lover like her Mary Tyler Moore Show character or a dim bulb like her Golden Girls character, and Saget almost certainly wasn’t your dad. But getting to see them every week made them feel more knowable on some level.
We approach our TV characters with a certain intimacy in other ways, too. It’s not uncommon for viewers to talk about the characters from, say, Succession or Ted Lasso as though they’re real people whose choices we have a vested interest in.
That tendency pops up in other forms of serialized fiction, certainly — as evidenced by online discussions about the characters in Marvel movies — but it’s so baked in to TV discussion that it’s as old as the medium itself. People loved when I Love Lucy wrote Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy into the show because Ball, as always, was one of the first to understand something powerful about television: It makes you think you know the people you watch every week.
I’m uncomfortable calling what develops between us and our favorite TV stars a relationship. But it’s surely relationship adjacent. And, yes, it’s a form of parasocial interaction — wherein a non-famous person feels like someone they know mostly via their public persona is a kind of friend — but there’s an added wrinkle here, because fiction gets wrapped up in our feelings. On an intellectual level, I know that I didn’t know Alan Thicke, even though I interviewed him. But I do feel a little like I knew Jason Seaver.
That we come to think of TV characters as our friends and family, more or less, is an observation many, including me, have made many times before. And that tendency explains why, say, we greet the endings of our favorite shows with such melancholy, even if we stopped watching them long ago. A long-running TV series puts brackets around a particular time in your life, when you were a particular person. You watched this show in this apartment, or you watched that show every week with your sibling before they moved out of the house. It’s a medium that prompts a certain immediacy of nostalgia.
That means when the people we loved for their work on television die, we’re not just grieving their deaths but also the ways in which those characters became a part of particular parts of our lives. Saget and White’s deaths remind me of when I was a tiny child, watching TV in the basement, hoping neither of my parents would catch me watching Golden Girls (yes, I wasn’t allowed to watch Golden Girls).
What’s more, the deaths of famous TV stars mark our own aging. I’m not even close to a tiny child anymore, and Saget was only about 25 years older than me. To lose a celebrity is to lose whatever potential future work they might have given us, but also to be made aware, all over again, that time won’t start going backward.
Death freezes people and allows us to forever define who they were. So do TV shows. Actors who become strongly defined with a role so often struggle to escape that role. Once we’ve settled on who a person is, we so rarely want to reconsider those notions, a thing that is true in both reality and fiction.
But that element of being frozen has certain benefits too. What nostalgia I have for my childhood has shifted as my relationship to my younger self and her life has too. But Full House is always going to be Full House. As we grow older and grow more cognizant of the shadows and empty spaces in our own homes, the house we watched every week on TV remains colorful, bright, and full.
From The Hindu: Sports
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Bhavani Devi loses, India’s campaign in individual events ends in Fencing World Cup - The 28-year-old from Chennai secured victories in four matches in the group stage, while lost one. One match was called off
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From The Hindu: National News
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From BBC: Europe
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Novak Djokovic: Tennis star detained ahead of deportation appeal - The tennis star will hear on Sunday whether he can stay in the country and compete unvaccinated.
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Danish spy scandal: Ex-minister accused of state secrets leak - The case against Claus Hjort Frederiksen comes after an ex-intelligence chief faced similar charges.
Lisbon council fined for sharing protester details with foreign embassies - City Hall shared data of protesters demonstrating in front of embassies, including Russia’s.
From Ars Technica
North Korean hackers stole nearly $400 million in crypto last year - “Banner year” thanks to skyrocketing cryptocurrency values, vulnerable startups. - link
Harken back to the late 1990s with this re-creation of the dialup Internet experience - Check out what happens when you try to visit modern websites using Windows 98. - link
Netflix cites “more entertainment choices than ever,” raises prices again - Tracking 11 years of price hikes—now as part of the competitive 2022 streaming world. - link
Shkreli’s infamous 4,000% price hike gets him a lifetime pharma ban - New York’s attorney general celebrated with Wu-Tang Clan references. - link
Intel “mega-fab” coming to Ohio, reports say - Massive $20 billion site would be like “a little city.” - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Five surgeons are discussing who makes the best patients on the operating table. -
Five surgeons are discussing who makes the best patients on the operating table. The first surgeon says, “I like to see accountants on my operating table because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered.” The second responds, “Yeah, but you should try electricians! Everything inside them is color coded.” The third surgeon says, “No, I really think librarians are the best; everything inside them is in alphabetical order.” The fourth surgeon chimes in: “You know, I like construction workers…those guys always understand when you have a few parts left over at the end, and when the job takes longer than you said it would.” But the fifth surgeon shut them all up when he observed: “You’re all wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on. There’s no guts, no heart, and no spine, and the head and butt are interchangeable.”
An 18 year-old Italian girl tells her mother she missed her period for two months… -
Very worried, the mother goes to the farmacia (drugstore) and buys a pregnancy test. She brings it to her daughter who takes the test. The test result shows that the girl is pregnant. Shouting, cursing, crying, the mother says, “Who was the pig that did this to you? I want to know!”
The girl picks up the phone and makes a call. Half an hour later, a Ferrari stops in front of their house. A mature and distinguished man with gray hair and impeccably dressed in an Armani suit steps out of the of the Ferrari and enters the house. He sits in the living room with the father, mother, and the girl and tells them:
“Good morning, your daughter has informed me of the problem. I can’t marry her because of my personal family situation but I’ll take charge.”
“I will pay all costs and provide for your daughter for the rest of her life. Additionally, if a girl is born, I will bequeath a Ferrari, a beach house, two retail stores, a townhouse, a beachfront villa, and a $2,000,000 bank account. If a boy is born, my legacy will be a couple of factories and a $4,000,000 bank account.”
“If twins, they will receive a factory and $2,000,000 each. However, if there is a miscarriage, what do you suggest I do?”
At this point, the father, who had remained silent, places a hand firmly on the man’s shoulder and tells him, “You fuck her again.”
… and saw a guy walking around with a big stick. So I asked: “Are you a pole vaulter?”. He replied: “No I’m German, but how did you know my name is Walter?”
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