The Astros PR department rivals Sylvester Turner's comms department in utter ineptitude

Bowser, a former high school basketball standout who practiced with (and occasionally even saw a little game action for) Sampson’s beyond-depth-challenged early UH teams after football season ended, is swept up in the hoops success of his college.

// love this part and the shoutout sampson gave him recently

Heh

Of course

Angelo isn't wrong, but it's not going to happen

Effer

Okay, but the advice to “trust data-informed expertise” includes two catches in these circumstances. While I trust American health officials, few of us trust the Chinese government much at all, and all of us have many reasons to not trust them. Right now, the Chinese government controls a lot of the information about how the coronavirus is affecting their country. (Incidentally, why is there smog over Wuhan if most of the factories are closed and there are so few vehicles on the streets?)

Second, the message from those international health experts we’re supposed to trust changed quickly.

On January 22, the World Health Organization’s emergency committee convened under Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, and the committee “expressed divergent views on whether this event constitutes a [Public Health Emergency of International Concern] or not. At that time, the advice was that the event did not constitute a PHEIC, but the committee members agreed on the urgency of the situation and suggested that the committee should be reconvened in a matter of days to examine the situation further.”

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Eight days later, they agreed that it did constitute an emergency, but were quick to add, “The committee emphasized that the declaration of a PHEIC should be seen in the spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the frontlines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.”

Now, eleven days later, Ghebreyesus declared, “we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg,”

“we don’t properly understand its transmissibility or severity,” and “with 99 percent of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world.”

Like the GIF says: “Well, that escalated quickly.” Nineteen days ago, this wasn’t yet an international emergency. Now it’s a “very grave threat.” I want to trust the experts. But I can’t help but wonder if they soft-pedal any assessment that could irk the Chinese government.

// Sorry, but I'm not going to defer to a local agency that says a flu shot will "prevent" coronavirus and tags Sheila Jackson Lee in the idiotic proclamation.

Post-Merkel Germany is gonna get interesting!

Good lord

Nany and  Nicci met five years ago in Brazil, boarded a plane together and flew to Kansas to play basketball for a junior college, not knowing a single word of English.

// That Junior College, of course, was Highland, where my cousin saw the potential in these two and developed it.

A change in administration later, and those fuckers want him (and apparently stories like this) gone.