Tuesday Clutter: Gag Rule Repealed, Facebook Outage, French Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal, U.S. Supreme Court, Boston Red Sox, House of the Dragon, John Cena, Dave Chappelle, Oasis, and more
10/05/2021
Hi everyone,
Welcome back! How are you? I see we all survived the great Facebook outage yesterday. (More on that later.) Before I forget, something has come up, and I'm pretty sure we won't be here tomorrow, but we will be back on Thursday. Given that it's Tuesday, you know today's schedule includes a trip to the bookstore. There are two new releases I think BDH and Little Buddha would like, so now we just have to see if the store carries them. If yes, great. If not, the guys still have about 250 pages left to their current book, so they should be good for a little while longer.
The big news that they want to share with you is that our new face masks are now on sale! The guys designed it all by themselves, and they think it looks pretty cool. However, the masks are only available until October 18, so order yours after we're done here. Now, the coffee is ready, so grab yourself a nice medium DD, because it's time to clear out some Clutter.
It's great to see the Biden administration finally repealed the ban on abortion referrals by federally funded family planning clinics. This is known by some as the so-called "Gag Rule." Hopefully that will spur the return of 1,300 facilities that left the program in protest of the Trump mandate. Family planning clinics provide fundamental health care to low-income individuals, and every time they come under attack, it's really yet another assault on these vulnerable individuals. Conservatives have got to stop interfering in a person's ability to look after their own health. The problem is that the entire Republican platform depends on keeping as many people as economically fragile as possible so they'll take whatever crumbs the wealthy decide to provide them.
The war on women's health care has got to stop. (pic via gpb.org)
In case you haven't heard, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for about seven hours yesterday, and that was a wee bit of an issue for people around the world. There was all sorts of speculation about what could have caused such a massive and extended outage. The company says it was due to, "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers." We won't begin to pretend we're IT experts, but anything Facebook ever says is always taken with a grain of salt. The fact that this outage came the day after the 60 Minutes interview with the Facebook whistleblower doesn't feel like a coincidence.
Also, the idea that one company having a bad IT day can cause such global chaos is a strong argument for antitrust action to move forward against Mark Zuckerberg and company, despite Facebook's arguments to the contrary.
A new report estimates that members of the French Catholic clergy, and church-associated individuals, sexually abused over 330,000 children between 1950 and 2020. Given that the report was financed by the French Catholic Bishops conference, it seems entirely possible even these numbers are still an under-count. This is not a case of a few bad apples. This is yet another story of systemic abuse running rampant through the Catholic Church in France like it has throughout the United States. The question now is, where do we go from here? Simply revising canon laws isn't nearly enough. The guilty should be given life sentences in prison, and the survivors should be compensated.
The U.S. Supreme Court started its new term yesterday by denying Washington D.C. residents a representative in Congress. Do you think for a second that would have been the ruling if the Washington representative would likely be a Republican? Not for a second. They would have decided D.C. residents deserved a vote. The conservative justices are just like Mitch McConnell and the rest of them - if you're not part of their base, they have no use for you.
One person won this week's Powerball lottery, making them about $700 million richer. How's your week going so far? We just double-checked the winning numbers and wouldn't have had one of them, so no great opportunity lost there. We'll use the $3 we would have spent on tickets at the bookstore instead. Seems like a win.
This Boston Red Sox team made the 2021 season about as much of a roller-coaster ride as possible, but they've made it to tonight's AL Wild Card game against the New York Yankees, so cheers to them. It should be a terrific pitching match-up, as Nate Eovaldi takes the mound for Boston against New York's
Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer is a distraction for his team? Who could have seen that coming?
Former Sopranos star Michael Imperioli shared some thoughts about how The Many Saints of Newark made him take a new look at his character, Christopher Moltisanti. We have a hunch that this movie's reputation will improve as the years go by. The more you dig into it, the more it expands the Sopranos story.
Talk to us, friends: The first teaser trailer for House of the Dragon was just released. We didn't see any of Game of Thrones, but former Doctor Who star Matt Smith seems to have a big role in the new series, so we want to check it out. However, will we be completely lost without having watched GoT first?
We've also got a teaser for the upcoming Peacemaker series with John Cena reprising his role from this year's Suicide Squad movie. This is something we might check out on HBO Max on a quiet night when nothing else is on, but it wouldn't take much to get us to change the channel. Cena is pretty wooden in his acting performances, but it looks like he's being mocked for that in this clip, so we'll see:
The official trailer for tick, tick...BOOM is here. The movie is a musical about the life of Rent creator Jonathan Larson. It stars Andrew Garfield as Larson, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is the director. It comes out in theaters and on Netflix on November 19, and we're putting it on the watch list after seeing this clip:
Consider us intrigued by this review of the new CBS sitcom, Ghosts. It sounds like something BDH and Little Buddha might like. Hopefully the Red Sox will be playing the Tampa Bay Rays when the show debuts this Thursday, but we'll set the DVR.
We can't quite sign off on the use of the word "goofy" here, but we do agree with this article praising Lucifer's "unusual" episodes. Everyone involved seemed to have a great time going off into the wilderness for those stories.
Dave Chappelle has a new comedy special out on Netflix today:
Looks like we've got plenty of entertainment options coming our way.
Okay kids, that's going to do it for now. Time to go hit the bookstore. Here's Oasis to close things out with, "Don't Look Back in Anger" for today's, "Song of the Day."
Thanks for stopping by, everyone. It was great to see you, as always. Hold on...BDH and Little Buddha say you're welcome to come back tonight if you want to watch the Red Sox game with them. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your day, be good, and we'll catch up with you again soon. Until next time, that's today's Clearing out the Clutter, and we are outta here.
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