A diplomatic boycott
The U.S. draws attention to human rights abuses...
Just in case you have yet to receive the latest edition of Shit I Don’t Care About Monthly, let me be the first to inform you that the United States is going to stage a “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing Olympic Games which doesn’t affect U.S. athletes and they’ll still compete in the Olympics; it just means a bunch of people you never heard of and don’t care about won’t go to Beijing to attend banquets, toast each other and pose for photo opportunities.
Which will change the world as we know it.
And really pisses off the Chinese because as we all know that’s what the Olympic Games are all about: dignitaries getting free trips to exotic locations, drinking themselves blind drunk at boring dinners and hoping to get some on the side before they go back home because what happens in Beijing stays in Beijing unless what happens in Beijing is an STD.
Anyway…
The U.S. felt they had to stage this diplomatic boycott to highlight China’s poor record on human rights, which is kind of interesting for a country which 20 years after 9/11 still has people held in Guantanamo Bay.
And speaking of Guantanamo Bay: the Biden Administration recently transferred a guy named Abdul Latif Nasser out of Guantanamo and he’d been held there since 2002, but never charged with a crime. According to the New York Times, there are still 39 detainees there and 11 have been charged with war crimes, but 28 have never been charged with anything at all during the two decades they’ve been in custody.
Apparently we also don’t like the way China treats its civil rights activists, political dissidents and ethnic minorities, which might lead you to believe that somehow the entire U.S. Diplomatic Corp missed all the news footage from the Black Lives Matter protests because they were too busy planning meaningless boycotts.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, D-N.J. (and the “D” apparently stands for “Dipshit”) called the diplomatic boycott: “A necessary step to demonstrate our unwavering commitment to human rights.”
Which I really appreciate Bob saying because it teed up an easy cartoon for me.
(When political cartoonist Jeff MacNelly was asked where he got his ideas, he’d say he had the best comedy writers in the world working for him and most of them were based in Washington, D.C. because you just can’t beat politicians for saying pompous, silly shit unless it’s an open competition and you include actors who have just won an Oscar.)
OK, so the Chinese are so awful we won’t go to their banquets and we’re calling on other countries to join our diplomatic boycott, but unless they forgot to mention it while expressing their deep outrage about China’s human rights abuses, it sounds like we’re still going to buy our sneakers and phones from them. Hey, we’ll express our outrage by skipping a banquet or two, but let’s face it; sneaker prices are too high already.
Frankly, none of this seemed necessary because if we really wanted to punish the Chinese all we have to do is: let them hold the Olympic Games.
According to Reuters news agency, the Olympic Games will cost China $40 billion with a B and while their economy is in better shape to absorb that cost than say, Greece — which spent $15 billion for the Athens Games in 2004 and now owns a world-class collection of discarded Olympic venues — China and the rest of us are facing a surge in COVID-19 cases and spending $40 billion to import the Omicron variant sounds way more punishing than a bunch of diplomats throwing a hissy fit.
About once every four years someone in Kansas City will lose their damn minds and say: “Hey, we could host the Olympics and all we have to do is build a world-class natatorium (swimming) and a world-class velodrome (cycling) and move half the city and level a few neighborhoods and we’ll be in business!” which is an interesting idea for a city that can’t keep up with fixing potholes.
And speaking of letting people suffer the consequences of their own actions…
According to a new study by National Public Radio, people in counties that voted for Donald Trump are nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as people who live in counties that voted for Joe Biden and here’s what the article I read had to say about that:
The study only examined the geographic locations of Covid-related deaths. The political views of each person remain unknown. Nevertheless, according to NPR, “the strength of the association, combined with polling information about vaccination, strongly suggests that Republicans are being disproportionately affected”.
It turns out that people who live in rural Republican areas and White Republicans in general are less likely to get vaccinated and according to data from the Kaiser Family Fund (so google them and see if you want to believe it) the rate of COVID vaccination among Republicans has leveled out at 59% while 91% of Democrats have been vaccinated and that just might be the case because Republicans are also more likely to believe misinformation about COVID and the vaccines.
According to KFF (which makes me hungry for fried chicken and is a really revealing fact about how my mind works) 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID and the vaccines might be true and 46% of Republicans believe four or more false statements might be true and only 14% of Democrats believe four or more false statements might be true, probably because they live next door to a Republican who won’t stop talking about it when they’re out raking leaves and the only fact I made up is that last one about leaf raking.
If you want to read more about this from people who aren’t adding jokes, here’s the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/07/trump-voters-counties-more-likely-die-covid-study
So why should you care?
First off, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a lot of friends who are Republicans and when I see them make what I think are bad decisions related to COVID-19 it’s kinda like watching a buddy in his 60s plan to marry a 19-year-old stripper who has another man’s name tattooed on her left breast (which somehow implies the right breast would be OK) and every time your buddy leaves the room the 19-year-old stripper lets you know she wouldn’t mind showing you whose name is tattooed on her ass.
Which if you think about it – and I’m really hoping you won’t – is a very weird metaphor for Republicans choosing not to get vaccinated, but it’s the metaphor that came to mind and I wouldn’t want to overthink it and hope you don’t either.
So there’s the “not wanting to see anybody die because they believed some bullshit that Donald Trump and the people at Fox News promoted” but if you still can’t work up your inner humanitarian, there’s another good reason to care about the unvaccinated.
The unvaccinated are prolonging the pandemic
According to Healthline.com (a website that provides medical information and is peer-reviewed which sounds like a good thing unless your peers believe the Lizard People are taking over the World and in that case you might want to get some new peers) unvaccinated people are one of the reasons that COVID keeps developing variants like Omicron, Epsilon, Gamma, Lamda and Delta which are all actual variant names, but nevertheless makes it sound like college fraternities are somehow involved and for all I know they might be; check Fox News for a full report.
Anyway…
The millions of unvaccinated people are providing hosts for the virus and here’s an explanation from the Healthline people about how that works:
One of the key characteristics of the coronavirus is the spike protein that allows it to latch onto a host cell, penetrate it, and cause an infection.
That spike is what vaccines target to block the virus.
In the unvaccinated, however, the virus gets in, hijacks the cell, and turns it into a factory. It then makes thousands of copies of itself. If there’s a copying mistake or error, scientists call that a mutation.
Occasionally, a mutation can help the virus get into the body’s cells more easily. When mutations accumulate over time, new variants of a virus strain emerge.
OK, so the unvaccinated are acting as hosts and virus factories and if this were the Walking Dead we’d elect Norman Reedus president (assuming his character isn’t dead yet and I don’t know because I gave up on that show after about four seasons because I felt like “OK, I got it already” and they were running out of plot twists so pretty soon they were going to have zombie singing competitions in which B-List celebrities pretend to be excited about some recently-dead singer performing the theme from Man of La Mancha which now that I think about it, would be pretty damn entertaining) and maybe it’s time I stop exploring this theme right now or I’ll eventually advocate showing up at the local grocery store with a crossbow and we’ve got enough problems already.
Now here’s the link to the Healthline article:
OK, that’s it for today, but if U.S. Diplomats wanted to draw attention to human rights abuses I think you’ve got to give them credit because it certainly worked in my case.
Talk to you soon.
When I saw your headline, I wondered if you were calling on everyone to boycott MLB. But I would not be "diplomatic" about it if I did. So there.