Fumbling

It’s not like I didn’t know who Aaron Rodgers was before all this. I mean, he’s engaged to Shailene Woodley!

Kidding.

Not about the engaged part but the fact that, not being much of a football fan or someone who generally follows sports (Note: Though I do like watching a great tennis match), I wouldn’t know or care about a famous NFL receiver .

Kidding again!

I know he’s a halfback. Um, fullback.

Okay, yes — QUARTERBACK!

But truly, on this issue and in this news cycle, who cares???

Last night I made dinner for two vaccinated friends and we three multi-vaxxed gay guys all of a certain age talked about three different ways to lie.

Before I tell you what the three are it’s worth noting upfront we’ve all spent our lives in the entertainment industry where over the years, whether you like it or not, you receive a master class in learning how to recognize and, yeah okay, sometimes execute all three types of untruth-telling.

#1 – Make stuff up. That’s just saying a lot of unvarnished sh-t that you know isn’t true because it helps you and, well, because you can.

#2 – Lying by omission. This is when in answer to a question, or in making a statement, you knowingly leave out facts you are aware are essential and that, if revealed, would prove the exact opposite of the argument you are making or the impression you are trying to make.

#3 – A hybrid of #1 and #2. Using language that is vague enough to answer a question and technically tell the truth but in just enough of a wiggle room kind of way that enables you to get the reaction and response you want.

Of course, even if you succeed, being this kind of expert wordsmith doesn’t make you George Washington. Rather, you’re just a more polite version of Donald J. Trump.

Someone who joyously engages in #1 (Note: See my crowd size and we won the election by A LOT) but tried to govern us through a pandemic with #2 and various side dishes of #1. Yeah, it really is that simple.

Even though it can get incredibly complicated, especially when you’re not a natural born Trumpian-like liar.

Rodgers, the three time NFL MVP who has so far led the Green Bay Packers to a 7-1 winning season, told reporters and media outlets back in August regarding COVID-19 vaccine requirements, that he’d been immunized prior to the season beginning. (Note: #3) Then quickly, he added:

There’s guys on the team that haven’t been vaccinated and it’s a personal decision. (I’m) not going to judge those guys. (Note: #2. Soooooo #2).

This week, sadly, Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 and had to come clean and admit he was unvaccinated.

And then he had to do some cleanup. Actually, A LOT of cleanup.

In the entertainment business, this is usually the time a studio head gets gently ousted into an independent producing deal or a director or star leaves a project due to artistic differences.

Though if you’re super “A” list, like Rodgers currently is, they might just weather the storm by hiring some expensive damage control experts. Another way is for you to apologize, tell the absolute unvarnished truth, take the consequences and then try to use your platform to do some future good by learning from your mistake (Note: Attempting to make the world a slightly better place in some small, benevolent, role model-y kind of way).

Rodgers so far seems to be taking a third road that judges across the world warn against – serving as your own defense attorney and refusing to admit to the screw up that got you into all this trouble in the first place.

The Packers’ current star QB seems convinced his primary transgression right now is merely choosing to follow his own protocol of protection against COVID-19. He simply doesn’t get that it’s the lie that almost always brings you down.

Except when you get away with it. Which, in this case, he hasn’t.

See, it’s Rodgers’ belief that because he played this season by following all of the protocols for unvaccinated players that he is the VICTIM here. So instead, he proclaims:

..I’m in the crosshairs of the woke angry mob right now… So, before my final nail gets put in my cancel culture casket, I think I would like to set the record straight on so many of the blatant lies that are out there about myself.

Then, in classic client as his own ill-advised attorney style, he goes on to mansplain his vaccine lie. How the media was on a witch hunt (Note: Yes, he went THAT Trumpian) for unvaccinated players in August and that accounted for his use of the word “immunized.”

How they’ve (his fellow players) all endured Draconian measures…not based on science, such as undergoing daily COVID-19 testing that must be negative before entering the Packers’ facilities; wearing a mask inside and around vaccinated people; physically distancing; not leaving his hotel and other travel restrictions.

In other words, behaving like a working human who cares about others and the future of humanity in the midst of a global pandemic.

As if that wasn’t enough, Rodgers went on to whine that he was tested over 300 times and was negative every time before finally testing positive this past week.

Well, um, yeah, that is the way it works.

As we three gay guys of a certain age would have gladly told him.

We had lots and lots of friends who were healthy and HIV negative before, one day, they contracted HIV and tested positive. Then, they got sick with full-blown AIDS. And in the eighties and nineties, like too many with full-blown COVID-19 in 2020 and, still, into 2021, sadly died.

That’s how viruses roll. You become positive AFTER you were negative for months…or even…years.

To further buoy his explanation, Rodgers brought 500 pages of research he compiled to appeal his non-vaccination status to the NFL. It’s a cornucopia of information of #1s, #2s and #3s that you can read about here.

But basically he presents it to support his claim that he needs an alternative to a shot because he’s allergic to an ingredient in the MRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna). This despite the view from the head of the American College of Allergy Asthma and Immunology’s COVID Vaccine Task Force that “you’re as likely to get struck by lightning as you are to have an allergic reaction to a COVID vaccine.”

(Note: Not to mention anecdotal evidence from our own internal study — The Chair has allergies to countless pathogens, gets regular allergy shots, has asthma and is OLD(er). Yet he has been thrice vaccinated thus far with nary a serious reaction).

Oh, one more thing. Rodgers says he also hesitates to get the J & J shot because he’s heard of multiple people who have had adverse events, including leaving themselves open to sterility, which is something he greatly fears because the next great chapter of my life, I believe, is being a father. (Note: There is zero link between these vaccines and sterility. 00000.00000%).

It is not for us to say that it might be a good idea for Aaron Rodgers to delay fatherhood a bit. But as a blogger and non-football fan, I am free to write it on behalf of the families of the 750,000 dead Americans and all those AT RISK that he might have infected had his team not required him to take the COVID protocols he so vehemently and so publicly continues to resent.

Green Day – “American Idiot”

10.31.21

by notesfromachair

It’s So Meta

The most frightening thing I watched this Halloween weekend was not any one horror movie, in a marathon of movies, but the Mark Zuckerberg replacement of reality with the Metaverse.

This isn’t an anti-gaming crusade or even an anti-Facebook rant against Zuck and his many friends.

Nor is it meant to reinforce the mean girl curated social media image of his supposed alien-like appearance.

not that there’s anything wrong with that #channelingmyReginaGeorge

Nor is it even a knock against his status as one of the five richest MEN in the world.

(Note: He’s at $97 B, trailing Bezos ($177 B), Musk ($151 B), Arnault ($150B), and Gates ($124 B) )

It’s a WARNING to everyone that FACEBOOK has NO INTENTION of NOT enabling FAKE NEWS.

Instead, they want to take this further and build us into a FAKE WORLD.

In essence, the plan is to invest his many billions to capitalize on a virtual reality universe where Facebook backs, empowers, sells and controls as much of the marketplace as possible.

… the same thing we do every night, Pinky

A planet where we each sit alone in our rooms but live in a pretend state of traveling the world daily.

An existence where we spend our real money on fake things that only the more, or even less, pretty AVATAR version of us can use.

A personally curated (Note: with a lot of help from Facebook and its holdings) version of our life where we believe that what we SEE or HEAR or PARTICIPATE IN through our glasses, headsets and brain harnesses are truly us.

What Zuck is advancing, and putting his many billions behind, is humanity existing in a space that is now so technologically advanced that real and virtual will merge to the point where which is what will be truly indecipherable.

And the majority of the goods and services and technological manipulators of this plane will be Facebook financed, controlled or backed derivatives.

In his two-hour mind-numbing video where he officially attempts to rebrand Facebook as META, Zuck admits that in many ways this sounds like a science fiction movie.

But he attributes that merely to the fact that technology has not yet advanced far enough on a massive scale for us to be able to truly experience and appreciate what he has in mind.

I beg to differ.

Though I’m far more technologically challenged than Zuck (Note: Though as a fellow pale-skinned N.Y. Jewish guy, he does make me look positively sun-kissed, so I do win on that), I get it.

I truly do.

What he is proposing is a 2021 reboot of the 1978 remake of a classic 1950s horror film, one that I watched this Hallow’s Eve weekend on Turner Classic Movies –

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.

I actually had NEVER seen the quite compelling and now also classic 1978 film starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum, based on the 1954 horror novel. But I was familiar with its plot.

A San Francisco health inspector (Note: It’s a doctor in the original) and his female co-worker discover over a few days that humans are being replaced by alien duplicates that are perfect copies of them BUT devoid of human emotion.

In the film this is done through human exposure to tiny, irresistibly fragrant pink flowers, each of which has initially miniscule alien pods with the secret capacity to replicate into ANY ONE OF US if given a googol of a chance.

It’s an insidious little m-f-cker because it was specifically designed to smell that damn good to all of humanity AND can infiltrate that damned fast through the human subconscious.

And if all of this DOESN’T sound familiar perhaps you are already one of these pod people and the Body Snatchers story was never fiction at all.

Sadly, the longer I live through the 21^st century, the more I am sure of exactly that.

Not to bring down the room or tempt any flower on my patio, or virtual reality device within 500 yards…um.. miles.

In any event, here’s what all this, that movie and, consequently, the reimagined Meta of it all, tells me:

Zuck has learned NOTHING from the last four years of misinformation and insurrection enabled by Facebook.

Check that, he’s a smart guy so he has learned something. And that is how to take advantage of what we perceive to be his mistake of allowing a virtually rule-free platform of false information, since doing so might curtail ad revenue from lucrative sources and lower his profit margins.

So basically what he has decided to do is make it far more difficult for us to spot disinformation since, with extended exposure to this new, proposed Meta lifestyle, our reality will become our Facebook generated Avatar reality.

And with all of his billions behind all his planned technological advances, this fake existence will become far easier to enable and far more difficult to disengage from (Note: It’s worth noting that the 10 minute section of his presentation addressing policing offers no concrete plans for any enforcement whatsoever but merely advanced the idea that it will take us all TIME to figure this out and that some controls are indeed, encouraged).

Oh, Zuck.

Meanwhile, this new world he touts where we won’t be experiencing the world through videos and social media posts but where YOU WILL BE IN THE EXPERIENCE is pretty darn sparkly. And in true 21^st century entrepreneurial style it will take advantage of where VR is now and harness all of it to make YOUR LIFE FULLER.

Though, I don’t know, is fuller the same as BETTER???

Just asking for a friend.

Nevertheless, with the wave of a hand, the flick of a wrist, or merely moving your fingers an eighth of an inch on your pants leg, you will be able to transport your hologram self to Europe in a second, attend a John Baptiste concert with your buddy on the opposite coast AND go to the after party with her (Note: Yes, Mr. Baptiste appears in that video), or type an email merely by thinking about it. That is if you’ve got the right Ray Ban sunglasses on (Note: Yup, they’re tied in, too.) or the correct mini device on your physical body channeling your brain waves.

Could we use some billions to like… do anything else?

It’s the perfect setup where you can have even the most casual (or business) interactions without ever having to commute and sit in traffic because your AVATAR will do it all while you experience it. Well, sort of. And he or she or its non-binary version, if you prefer, can navigate in a nanosecond. You will feel like you are LIVE…and A-live….with anyone.

But you won’t be. You will be communicating through IT or, perhaps, a proposed hologram, and begin to believe, through repetition, that this IS…YOU. Much in the way that many of us believe, through repetition, that a fake news story that isn’t real IS REAL because it’s been repeated so many times.

Sounds tempting, no?

Not to this still barely human being who admittedly IS spending too much time at home still because of the global pandemic.

On the other hand, by the time this all happens en masse my breed and me will likely be long gone or, at least, on our way out.

So we won’t be much of a factor.

But don’t say I didn’t warn you about virtually everything. Assuming you can even remember we had this…um…conversation.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers Scream