23 October, 2021

The bottom line for now: If you were vaccinated at least six months ago with the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna shot and you’re at higher risk for Covid-19 based on your age, job, or medical history, it’s recommended that you receive a booster. So should anyone vaccinated at least two months ago with the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to the FDA.

Who is recommended for a booster shot?

The FDA has approved booster shots of the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and J&J vaccines, and the CDC has finalized matching recommendations for who should receive a booster.

Under the FDA’s authorization, the following people are eligible for an additional Covid-19 vaccine dose:

The lists of medical conditions and occupations that qualify for a booster shot extend eligibility to a lot of Americans. Those medical conditions include not only heart disease, diabetes, and cancer but also depression and pregnancy. High-risk jobs include the people in the food and agriculture industry, nursing home workers, and US Postal Service employees. Check the list — more people are eligible than you may think.

Age is the strongest indicator for a booster shot, according to the experts I’ve spoken to. Even those who think the case for booster shots for younger and healthier people is not as strong agree that people over 65 would likely benefit from an additional dose. Most experts also support boosters for immunocompromised people, though the vaccines are still not as effective for those people to begin with.

There is less consensus among experts about workers in jobs considered to be high risk, if they don’t already qualify because of age or health. Experts stress that research continues to show strong protection against severe illness for younger people without any significant medical conditions. But senior government health officials have insisted on including those workers in the groups eligible for a booster shot.

For the eligible people whose first doses were either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, they can receive their next dose at least six months after their initial vaccine course was completed, the FDA said. For people whose first dose was the J&J vaccine, they can get a booster shot two months after their first shot.

The federal guidance matches what many experts have said is appropriate based on the current scientific evidence. There have been indications of the Covid-19 vaccines waning in effectiveness over time and against the delta variant. But the protection they provide against severe disease — resulting in hospitalization or death — remains strong for many people.

The exceptions are older people, who have seen a greater drop in efficacy over time, and people with compromised immune systems, for whom the vaccines are often not as effective to start with. They are the focus of the booster guidelines, along with workers in higher-risk settings.

What about mixing and matching different shots?

All of the Covid-19 vaccines offer good protection against severe illness, but they are not equal.

The Moderna vaccine has held up the best over time, including since the delta variant became dominant. Pfizer/BioNTech performs the next best, while Johnson & Johnson was the weakest of the three in its original one-dose regimen (though it has not seen much waning over time).

Those differences have led some people — J&J recipients, in particular — to wonder whether they should get a dose of one of the better-performing vaccines for their booster shot.

As the Atlantic reported last week, research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found the people who received a first dose of J&J and a second dose of Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech showed higher antibody levels than the people who got J&J for both doses. Antibody levels are not the only metric by which immunity is measured, but they are a useful proxy.

The evidence is not as clear about whether it’s better to get a Moderna booster if you previously received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (or vice versa) because the NIH study used a full dose of the Moderna vaccine for its booster, whereas, in the real world, the Moderna booster will be a half dose.

The new FDA guidance does say that people should be okay mixing and matching different vaccines. Generally speaking, they can get whichever booster shot they like if they fall in one of the subgroups recommended for an additional dose and sufficient time has passed: again, two months for J&J recipients or six months for Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna recipients.

Different vaccines also have different side effects, another consideration for booster shots. Younger men who receive the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccines have been found to be at a slightly higher risk of heart inflammation. Younger women who receive the J&J vaccine may be at a somewhat elevated risk of a rare blood-clotting problem.

Both of those side effects, though serious, have been rare, and the FDA said the expected benefits of a booster shot for each of the vaccines outweigh the risks.

Should I get a booster shot?

First off: The vaccines work. Recent waves of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths have been concentrated in the remaining unvaccinated population. People who receive a vaccine are less likely to contract Covid-19 in the first place, much less likely to develop severe symptoms, less likely to transmit the virus to other people, and less likely to develop long Covid.

But the vaccines aren’t perfect. There are going to be breakthrough cases. For some people, they don’t work as well. The recent death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell — who was fully vaccinated but immunocompromised because of blood cancer — served as a reminder that some people remain at risk so long as the virus is still circulating.

The current federal guidance is concentrated on those people, to provide them more protection ahead of the winter. In the best-case scenario over the next few months, at-risk people get this additional immunity, more people get their first vaccine dose, and the virus slows down without new variants emerging. We should see fewer deaths than we did during last winter’s devastating wave.

Still, Covid-19 isn’t going to disappear entirely, and experts expect booster shots may eventually be authorized for most people. A lot of Americans had already gone ahead and gotten an extra dose before the FDA officially approved it.

Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University, told me she thought people who are already eligible should get their booster “as soon as possible.”

Other people might consider it, she said, if they were expecting to congregate with a lot of others during the holiday season or if they have to spend a lot of time around unvaccinated people or individuals whose vaccination status they don’t know.

Covid-19 is here to stay, and booster shots are a reflection of that reality. They are one way to make it more palatable to live with this disease.

I’ve seen The French Dispatch twice, and I felt that aura, too. But both times, watching it was like smacking into one of those white limestone walls that line most Parisian streets. I struggled to care about its characters or stories or journalism more broadly. Somewhere in my soul, I feel this ought not to be.

If you’re a Wes Anderson fan and you’re mad at me now, I’m sorry! Kind of. Let me try to explain.

For Wes-heads, The French Dispatch is likely satisfying. It’s like a greatest hits album, with many of his favorite themes: loneliness, friendship, family, love, death. Every intricate tableau and winking nod to his influences feels like a nudge to the audience, an invitation to be in on the joke.

Anderson’s New Yorker stand-in was started by Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), scion of the owner of the Kansas Evening Sun, who more or less conned his way into putting out a “little-read Sunday supplement” to that paper for five decades. He posted up in Ennui-sur-Blasé as a youth in 1925 and ended his tenure when he died in 1975, whereupon the French Dispatch shut down — paying, of course, a handsome bonus to its already handsomely paid staff writers. (Nearly 50 years in the future, we who write for magazines on paper and otherwise can only dream of that kind of life.)

On his staff are celebrated journalists like Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), and Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright). They write about art and history, food and culture, protests and poetry. After revealing to its audience that Howitzer will have died by the end of the movie, The French Dispatch moves backward slightly to see Howitzer gruffly guiding them through the editing process (there’s a strictly enforced “No Crying” sign above his office door), inquiring about their expense reports and helping shape their prose. Based on an amalgam of New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross and his successor William Shawn, Howitzer is the kind of hands-on editor you don’t see much anymore. When he dies, the movie tells us, he receives “an editor’s burial.”

The French Dispatch is arranged as if it’s the final edition of Howitzer’s Sunday supplement, the one he was working on when he died. It’s an anthology film, with small segments that furnish the “articles” — one on the outsider artist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and his prison guard muse (Léa Seydoux); one on the leader of roiling student protests (Timothée Chalamet) and the girl he falls for (Lyna Khoudri); one on the author’s (Jeffrey Wright) encounter with a curious corner of French cuisine; and one by a roaming cyclist-reporter (Owen Wilson) on Ennui-sur-Blasé itself. There’s also an obituary for Howitzer, written by his staff.

Stylistically, The French Dispatch is Anderson working at the height of his powers. A delightful sequence near the beginning of the film features just a close-up of the hands of an expert preparing coffee and cocktails for the magazine’s staff on a rotating silver platter, then a wide shot of a waiter maneuvering the platter up an intricate set of staircases and doorways to reach the offices and deliver the drinks. He moves from black and white to color, playing delightedly with framings and image composition. Sometimes Anderson seems to be making a Jacques Tati movie; at others, he’s channeling Truffaut or Hitchcock or Visconti.

That may be the problem. The French Dispatch is so referential that the pastiche overwhelms, delivering a swirling vortex of references that don’t quite add up to anything in particular. Watching it reminded me of legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s response to Anderson when, in 1998, he showed his film, Rushmore, to his then-retired hero. “I don’t know what you’ve got here, Wes,” Kael said.

I don’t know what he’s got in The French Dispatch, either. There’s a strand of arguing for the essential joy of things that can’t be easily commodified, whether they’re old markets in French towns or a painting that can’t be easily transported or cuisine that can’t be easily located or little-read Sunday supplements to Midwestern newspapers. Anderson’s films are, themselves, part of this heritage of impracticality — his brand of fussiness is not easy or cheap to replicate.

But his world is a fantasy one, an imagined ideal that can be fun to sink into yet doesn’t leave a lot of room to walk around and think in. I felt like I was being distracted from something while watching the movie, my attention turned away from the bigger tragedy — the slow death of magazines — that’s hiding underneath.

Maybe it’s just the fact that the fantasy of the kind that The French Dispatch weaves feels a lot more like calamity if you work inside the world of magazines. Just this week, the announcement that The Believer, one of the few remaining staunchly impractical French Dispatch-like magazines out there, will cease publication next year, as part of a “strategic realignment” within the Black Mountain Institute, which publishes the magazine. The “little magazines” that shaped American thought during the last century have been slowly dying off, as have legendary alt-weeklies and local journalism. Most writers barely get paid enough to live on; workers at magazines and newspapers (including the New Yorker) are fighting for fair pay; those of us lucky enough to have jobs are always watching our backs, having seen friends lose theirs over and over again.

The New Yorker, for now, endures. (May it live long and prosper.) But watching market forces eat away at this kind of nourishing, curious, resolutely unlucrative but vital writing is soul-crushing. I can’t help but wonder if the frantic pastiche and rampant nostalgia of this film weakened my ability to enjoy it. It feels hollow.

One single moment in The French Dispatch did worm its way into my heart, however. Roebuck Wright, the amalgamation of James Baldwin and food writer A.J. Liebling played by Jeffrey Wright, is asked by an interviewer (Liev Schreiber) why he, an accomplished writer who’s covered many topics, has so often returned to writing about food.

Wright responds, slowly and thoughtfully, that the life of being a journalist is difficult and lonely. “I chose this life,” he acknowledges, before explaining that, at the end of the day, there’s always been a table somewhere for him, with a chef and a waiter ready to warm his heart and fortify him with a good meal. “The solitary feast has been very like a comrade,” he says.

Which I read, just a little, as Anderson’s statement about the feast that an issue of a great magazine has been to him. Or a great movie or, indeed, a literal feast. Something that sustains and delights the soul. So if I feel blasé about The French Dispatch — and despite my best efforts, I do — at least I admire and know what it’s getting at. Everybody’s feast is movable, and with movies and writing and art, there’s no accounting for taste.

The Court still won’t stop Texas from banning abortions, but it wants to bring this saga to a final resolution quickly.

The Supreme Court handed down a pair of very closely related orders on Friday concerning SB 8, a Texas law that effectively bans all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. The punchline is that the ban on nearly all abortions in Texas remains in effect, but the justices appear very eager to resolve the very unusual legal questions presented by this law.

The Court held in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that “the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the state” is protected by the Constitution. A fetus becomes “viable,” meaning that it can survive outside the womb, around the 24th week of pregnancy. And, again, SB 8 effectively prohibits abortion after the sixth week — before many people even know they’re pregnant.

The Court’s decision to allow SB 8 to take effect in September despite it contravening that precedent was widely viewed as a sign that the Court is likely to overrule — or, at least, gut — Roe. Neither of the new abortion orders disturb that September decision. So SB 8 remains in effect. And the constitutional right to an abortion still appears to be in jeopardy.

Yet, while SB 8 remains in effect after the two new orders, the Court did take two steps suggesting that it wants to bring the litigation over this Texas law to a close fairly soon. The Court ruled that both the Whole Woman’s Health case and the Texas case will receive a full briefing and a full hearing before the justices — though it limited both cases to the question of whether the abortion providers or the United States is allowed to pursue these lawsuits.

Just as significantly, the justices plan to consider these cases on an extraordinarily expedited basis. The parties in both cases have just days to write their briefs — briefing must be completed by October 29, and the justices will hear oral arguments on November 1.

It’s worth noting, moreover, that the justices also plan to hear another abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which asks the Court to overrule Roe in its entirety. It’s notable that the justices scheduled arguments in Whole Woman’s Health and Texas a month before the argument in Dobbs. That suggests that, at the very least, the justices want to resolve the question of whether either lawsuit against SB 8 may move forward very soon.

Again, nothing in these orders should give comfort to supporters of abortion rights. Texas passed an extraordinarily aggressive ban on abortions, and that ban remains in effect despite the fact that it violates Roe and Casey. But the two new orders do suggest that the Court is eager to resolve the very unusual procedural questions raised by SB 8.

So why is there any doubt about whether anyone can sue Texas to block SB 8?

Briefly, under a doctrine known as “sovereign immunity,” private parties are rarely allowed to sue a state directly in federal court. Instead, they typically must sue the state official tasked with enforcing the law that the plaintiff wishes to challenge.

But SB 8 explicitly forbids any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing it. Instead, it may only be enforced through private lawsuits. These lawsuits may be filed by “any person” who is not an employee of the state against anyone who either performs an abortion or who “aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” Plaintiffs who prevail in these lawsuits receive a bounty of at least $10,000, which must be paid by the defendant. In short, you can’t sue to stop SB 8 from being enforced because there’s no one to sue.

The abortion providers argue in their case, among other things, that they did sue a state official charged with enforcing the law. Even if executive branch officials in Texas may not enforce SB 8, state court judges must still issue the orders requiring abortion providers to pay a bounty, and these orders must be docketed by state court clerks. So the abortion providers argue that these judges and clerks are the proper defendants.

In its September order permitting SB 8 to go into effect, the Supreme Court refused to answer this question of whether state court judges and clerks may be sued. But that issue is now likely to be resolved.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department argues in its suit that there must be some way to vindicate the “supremacy of federal law and the traditional mechanisms of judicial review,” even if the abortion providers aren’t allowed to pursue their lawsuit. DOJ’s argument is if no one else can sue to block SB 8, then the United States must be allowed to do so in order to vindicate the principle that all states must obey the Constitution.

The Court will now decide whether either of these parties is allowed to sue — although it is less clear whether the Court will immediately resolve the question of whether to strike down SB 8 or require the parties to jump through additional procedural hoops in the lower courts.

SB 8 created a crisis for abortion providers in Texas and in neighboring states

In the Court’s order agreeing to hear the Texas case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a partial dissent arguing that the Court should have also blocked SB 8 while this litigation is pending. “For the second time,” Sotomayor writes, referring back to the September order allowing SB 8 to take effect, “the Court is presented with an application to enjoin a statute enacted in open disregard of the constitutional rights of women seeking abortion care in Texas.”

And, “for the second time, the Court declines to act immediately to protect these women from grave and irreparable harm.”

As Sotomayor explains, the Court’s September order created a crisis for abortion providers. In Texas, between 85 and 95 percent of abortions are now illegal. Moreover, Sotomayor notes that abortion “providers are ‘seriously concerned that even providing abortions in compliance with S.B. 8 will draw lawsuits from anti-abortion vigilantes or others seeking financial gain.’”

Meanwhile, nearby states are flooded with pregnant people from Texas seeking abortions in places where it is still legal. “An Oklahoma provider, for example, reported a ‘staggering 646% increase of Texan patients per day,’ occupying between 50% and 75% of capacity,” Sotomayor writes. Similarly a Kansas clinic “reported that about half of its patients now come from Texas.”

It is likely that the five conservative justices who voted to let SB 8 take effect in September are quite happy with this state of affairs. Many, if not all of them, owe their seats to a concerted effort by the Republican Party to build an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court. Former President Donald Trump, who appointed a third of the Supreme Court, promised to fill it with justices who will overrule Roe.

And, as Sotomayor writes in her dissent, the impact of SB 8 on Texas and nearby states offers a preview of what the country will look like if Roe is overruled. “Those with sufficient resources may spend thousands of dollars and multiple days anxiously seeking care from out-of-state providers so overwhelmed with Texas patients that they cannot adequately serve their own communities,” Sotomayor writes.

Meanwhile, “those without the ability to make this journey, whether due to lack of money or childcare or employment flexibility or the myriad other constraints that shape people’s day-to-day lives, may be forced to carry to term against their wishes or resort to dangerous methods of self-help.”

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit

It’s my cake day, so I wanna share my favorite joke :-) -

Jack wakes up with a huge hangover after attending his company’s party. He is not normally a drinker, but the drinks didn’t taste like alcohol at all. He didn’t even remember how he got home from the party. As bad as he was feeling, he wondered if he did something wrong.

He forced himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he sees is a couple of aspirins next to a glass of water on the side table. And, next to them, a single red rose!!

He sits up and sees his clothing in front of him, all cleaned and pressed! He looks around the room and sees that it is in perfect order, spotlessly clean. So is the rest of the house. He takes the aspirins, cringes when he sees a huge black eye staring back at him in the bathroom mirror. Then he notices a note hanging on the corner of the mirror written in red with little hearts on it and a kiss mark from his wife in lipstick: ‘Honey, breakfast is on the stove, I left early to get groceries to make you your favorite dinner tonight. I love you, darling! Love, Jillian’

He stumbles to the kitchen and sure enough, there is hot breakfast, steaming hot coffee and the morning newspaper. His 16 year old son is also at the table, eating. Jack asks, ‘Son. what happened last night?’

‘Well, you came home after 3 A.M., drunk and out of your mind. You fell over the coffee table and broke it, and then you puked in the hallway, and got that black eye when you ran into the door.’

Confused, he asked his son, ‘So, why is everything in such perfect order and so clean? I have a rose, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me??’

His son replies, ‘Oh THAT… Mom dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your pants off, you screamed, ’Leave me alone, I’m married!!’

submitted by /u/wolf72886
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The woman says: “Doctor, I don’t know what to do. Every day my husband seems to lose his temper for no reason. It scares me.” -

The Doctor says: “I have a cure for that. When it seems that your husband is getting angry, just take a glass of water and start swishing it in your mouth. Just swish and swish but don’t swallow it until he either leaves the room or calms down.”

Two weeks later the woman comes back to the doctor looking fresh and reborn.

The woman says: “Doctor that was a brilliant idea! Every time my husband started losing it, I swished with water. I swished and swished, and he calmed right down! How does a glass of water do that?”

The Doctor says: “The water itself does nothing. It’s keeping your mouth shut that does the trick…”

submitted by /u/YZXFILE
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Tonight I was walking home late when I see a woman in the shadows. “Twenty bucks,” she says. -

I’ve never been with a prostitute before, but decided what the hell.

We are going at it for a minute when all of a sudden a light flashes on us - it’s a policeman.

“What’s going on here, people?” asks the officer.

“I’m making love to my wife,” I answer indignantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says the cop, “I didn’t know.”

“Well,” I said, “to tell the truth neither did I until you flashed that light on her face.”

submitted by /u/blackshadowed
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An 80 year old grandma wants to join an outlaw biker gang -

The gang leader says “Well, do you have a bike?”

“Sure! I just bought a new Harley!”

“Are you ok with drugs?”

“I should hope so, I take 20 pills a day!”

“Last question, have you ever been picked up by the fuzz?”

“No, but I got swung around by the tits once!”

submitted by /u/Fubai97b
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Just been talking to an old guy, ex-soldier. -

He explained to me he had been exposed to mustard gas and pepper spray, it was nice chatting to a seasoned veteran.

submitted by /u/Tintovic
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Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

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