Good Monday morning, C&C! Welcome to the second week of the new year. Your roundup today includes: Another U.S. player dramatically collapses live, on air, during play; prodigal atom weight MMA fighter throws her last punch; former NBA star SADSly loses his mother; Canadian TV reporter has an on-air senior moment; Reuters sheds a tear for China’s zero-covid policy; new House committee will have power to hear about “ongoing criminal investigations;” Capitol Police crack down on jaywalkers; the tech implosion continues; and the CDC provides a handy party-planning checklist.

🗞*WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

💉 Mere days after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin dramatically collapsed on the field and suffered two heart attacks, Old Dominion University sophomore guard Imo Essien stumbled and then collapsed on the basketball court, clutching his chest, during the first half of Saturday’s game against Georgia Southern. He wasn’t tackled though. He was just standing there.

TruthOnly @panajeck

Members of the Old Dominion men’s basketball team watched in shock, and many held back tears, as their teammate Imo Essien collapsed during play in the first half of the contest.

1:50 PM ∙ Jan 8, 2023

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According to Fox News, Essien was helped to his feet and managed to walk off the court. It did not appear as though the obviously-suffering player ever lost consciousness, and later he rode the bus home with the rest of the team.

According to WKTR News’ Marc Davis, Essien won’t be attending practice today, but rather is scheduled for an evaluation with a cardiologist, which seems like a prudent idea. We wish him a good report.

Totally unrelated, Old Dominion requires all students to be fully vaccinated. As you already guessed.

💉 Hawaiian MMA rising star and atomweight title holder Victoria Lee, 18, was KO’d by the Grim Reaper the day after Christmas, when the young athlete died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Victoria is widely described as a martial arts prodigy, a stand-out since she was 11 years old. She died at the pinnacle of her short career.

No cause of death has been released, nor any details about her passing. It’s just a mystery.

💉 Former Chicago Bulls player Tristan Thompson lost his mother Andrea Thompson last week, when she died suddenly and unexpectedly AT HOME in Toronto. Andrea had a heart attack and could not be resuscitated. It could have been excessive gardening.

Andrea Thompson had two grandchildren, as Tristan is married to Khloe Kardashian. It’s just another tragic and baffling case of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.

💉 Recently, a young Canadian TV reporter had a sudden and unexpected live, on-air senior moment:

Hodgetwins @hodgetwins

Why does this keep happening…

3:14 AM ∙ Jan 9, 2023

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Weird! But don’t get all conspiratorial. It can happen to anybody.*

(* results may vary with vaccination status.)

🔥 Zero-covid is collapsing. Reuters ran a story this weekend headlined, “China reopens borders in final farewell to zero-COVID.” Buh bye.

China is now pursuing a herd immunity approach. This may be the largest, most fantastic failure of public health in the history of the world, ever since public health experts recommended keeping mice as pets to prevent bubonic plague, or wearing birdlike plague masks, or whatever halfwitted advice they were giving people back then.

Anyway, despite its current covid outbreak, yesterday China lifted all its international travel bans as well as the mandatory quarantine requirement for incoming travelers. China also resumed issuing passports and travel visas for mainland residents, as well as ordinary visas and residence permits for foreigners. Covid-zero is just about done.

Corporate media’s reaction is totally hilarious. Reuters breathlessly reported the W.H.O. accused China of under-reporting covid cases and hospitalizations! Reuters reported that with a straight face. Oh, PLEASE.

For the last three years, Reuters, the W.H.O., and every other corporate media pretender credulously slurped up all the ridiculous data China was pushing. Sometimes media would comment something like, “accurate numbers are hard to obtain from the communist superpower,” but they never ever dismissed China’s figures outright.

Until now!

In fact, China’s rock-bottom covid figures were cited by insane Western public health experts to “prove” that the U.S. “never really tried lockdowns.” In other words, they claimed have no covid cases and no deaths — just like China — if we only had the political courage to weld people into their apartments and use social credit systems to curtail travel and stuff.

But NOW, now that China — still reporting the SAME low covid infections — is pursuing a different covid strategy, a strategy they don’t like, NOW corporate media tells us China is lying about the numbers.

Just. Shut. Up.

We are on to you corporate media clowns. You lie about covid numbers worse than China. I say this as a lawyer who has personally audited hundreds of covid death records. You’re not credible. We’re not listening to you anymore.

🔥 Politico ran a story yesterday headlined, “Proposed GOP Select Panel Would Be Empowered to Review ‘Ongoing Criminal Investigations’.”

A proposed subcommittee to investigate “weaponization” of the federal government — a key demand of “chaos caucus” conservatives who delivered the gavel to Speaker Kevin McCarthy — will be given sweeping investigatory powers including explicit authority to review “ongoing criminal investigations.”

This is significant, because “ongoing criminal investigation” is the excuse that law enforcement agencies always use to refuse to answer otherwise legitimate questions. The authorization would allow House representatives to brush that excuse aside. In other words, fine, let’s hear about the ongoing investigations.

My guess is they’ll hear that lame excuse a LOT less.

The new committee will be organized similar to the January 6th Committee. What remains to be seen is whether new Speaker McCarthy will adopt the “Pelosi system” of exercising veto powers over minority committee members. You might recall that Republicans refused to participate on the J6 Committee after Pelosi refused to seat several of the GOP’s selections.

Then Pelosi handpicked Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who both broke with the GOP and joined Pelosi’s odious committee. Both fake Republicans were primaried and are no longer in Congress, although Kinzinger is suddenly but NOT unexpectedly a brand-new “senior political consultant” at CNN.

🔥 Last Friday, on the anniversary of the January 6th Capitol protests, a crack squad of highly motivated Capitol Police arrested Ashli Babbit’s mother. For jaywalking.

CaitlinSinclairTV @CSinclairtv

WATCH: Ashli Babbitt's mom arrested for "jaywalking" outside of the Capitol on the 2 year anniversary of her daughter's killing. Unbelievable.

7:50 PM ∙ Jan 6, 2023

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Thank goodness for the Capitol Police. Am I right?

🔥 The Tech sector is collapsing. Last week, Business Insider ran a story headlined, “Amazon and Compass Are Slashing Thousands of Workers, as a Wave of Layoffs Continues Into 2023.” Uh oh.

In a memo to employees, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy announced a lay off of 18,000 workers, explaining it was due to “the uncertain economy.” Although not a significant number of its global workforce, the layoff is the largest in Amazon’s history. It is also about twice as large as the 10,000 workforce reduction figure that Amazon had previously signaled to analysts.

On January 3rd, the Wall Street Journal ran a related story headlined “Tech Layoffs Are Happening Faster Than at Any Time During the Pandemic.” It reported that collectively, employers in the struggling tech sector cut more than 150,000 jobs in 2022.

There are two ameliorating factors. First, the tech industry grew quickly during the pandemic, when demand for at-home services skyrocketed. But now that things are (mostly) back to normal, a natural correction is occurring. Second, tech went all-in for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) over the last few year, mushrooming payrolls with goofy social justice professionals.

Tech employers may have overshot the mark. A ‘DEI hangover’ of some kind appears to be emerging, as pandemic profits dry up, making DEI departments an easy target for payroll savings.

Here’s part of a recent post from a Salesforce employee on Glassdoor, a website where employees anonymously review their own employers:

I had to look up “Ohana.” It’s a woke buzzword, a Hawaiian idiom meaning “no one gets left behind” or something. As far as I can tell, it represents the idea that you still get a promotion even if you’re totally incompetent, as long as you can check a grievance box. For example:

CARL: “Oh my gosh! Why would they put Amiko in charge of quality assurance? She’s never even managed a climate change table, much less a department with 5,000 developers. And have you SEEN the inside of her car?”

KAITLYN: “Well, she identifies as a tri-binary, genderless member of an ancient Native American tribe that would have lived in Utah if they hadn’t been wiped out by other tribes that were later wiped out by settlers. So. Plus, OHANA.”

CARL: “I guess that makes sense. I’m taking a mental health day.”

For some reason, I don’t think Ohana is going to catch on after all.

🔥 You might have missed it, but the CDC published a handy-dandy party-planning checklist, for your New Years’ Eve party planning needs, and for any other socially safe event you might like to host for your friends and loved ones. The important thing is to have fun — and don’t kill grandma!

That’s the CDC’s job.

EDIT: Alert commenters pointed out that this was actually produced by a pro-masking group called the “People’s CDC.” They got me!

The CDC really outdid itself this time. THREE “universals!” Universal pre-event testing, universal masking, and universal post-event testing. Sounds like fun! I think they’re floating “universal” as a possible sporty new replacement for the oppressive and widely-hated old term, “mandatory.”

As you can see, you have a LOT of work to do before you throw any dinner parties. You’ll need to stock up on rapid tests so you can easily enforce universal post-event testing. Nobody leaves without a test! The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll be all done and ready to party.

You might be thinking that asking for your friends’ vaccine pass at the door, handing out mandatory face masks, testing kits, making them go outside, and requiring sign-ins for contact tracing could be a party downer, but you’re not thinking right. Have fun with it! It could be kind of like a non-anonymous version of Eyes Wide Shut. Of course, that one didn’t turn out too well and somebody died. But you get the idea.

Have a marvelous Monday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow for more delicious Coffee & Covid.

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