Sunday Morning Schadenfreude

How sweet it is:

The Aaron Rodgers revenge tour has officially been canceled. After months of lamenting the “woke mob,” vaccine mandates and even taking a recent shot at the “fake White House,” cancel culture finally got the Green Bay Packers quarterback. 

His undoing was of the more traditional variety, coming by way of poor special teams play and an offensive deflation that will leave the 2021 season as a bitter memory of unfulfilled potential. A year of promise was whacked in the most familiar of ways.

At the hands of the San Francisco 49ers, yet again. And with Rodgers failing to put his best game onto the field.  [snip]

Instead, the Packers looked flat after a week off, not to mention horribly mistake-prone on special teams, which was an area many suspected might be a postseason Achilles. That point came Saturday, ushering a 13-10 loss that drops Rodgers’ postseason record to 0-4 against the 49ers. A missed opportunity that might rank as one of the worst postseason losses in Green Bay history, considering the Packers had the best record in the NFL and were considered the best team in the NFC by a wide margin.

Now they’ll be remembered for tripping against a 49ers team led by a lame duck quarterback in Jimmy Garoppolo, just before an offseason of potentially sweeping change on the roster. It's the kind of defeat that Rodgers said left him feeling “a little numb.” And rightfully so, after he failed to throw a touchdown pass in a playoff clunker that will cast a shadow over an exquisite regular season that is likely to deliver another regular-season MVP award.

To be clear, we've been Packers fans all our lives, as was our father.  We were Aaron Rodgers fans until he revealed himself to be a very public anti- vaccine, it's- all- about- me "free thinker" who seems to get most of his free thoughts from Joe Rogan, when he's not doing his own research.  With his high profile, to the extent he's influenced any of his fans to try various Rogan- endorsed quack remedies in lieu of safe and effective vaccinations, he's done harm.  So, Aaron "Dunning- Kruger" Rodgers is free to have his free thoughts, of course, but we heartily wish he'd have those free thoughts in another NFL franchise just so we can go back to rooting for the Packers (who might then have a chance to go to the Super Bowl again).

BONUS:  Here's what the free thinker had to say about President Biden and the pandemic, and some Twitter reactions to Rodgers' downfall:

Tomorrow Aaron Rodgers is going to say he “did his own research” and found out the Packers actually won.

— Jack Cocchiarella (@JDCocchiarella) January 23, 2022

 

If there were a vaccine for choking in big games, would Aaron Rodgers get it?

— Greg Olear (@gregolear) January 23, 2022

 

For the same reason you’re great and Green Bay hasn’t won the Super Bowl in ten years pic.twitter.com/Y7hZz808Hl

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) November 10, 2021

 

Maybe @AaronRodgers12 would have played better if he listened to science @49ers #NinerGang pic.twitter.com/8AWnx6dOo1

— david f shor (@itsmedasho) January 23, 2022

 

 

More tweets here.

"Wack Packer"

 

Folks (including us) aren't quite done with exposing sneaky anti- vax, over- concussed (?), 37-year-old bro' Green Bay Packers QB Aaron "Error" Rodgers for his selfish, irresponsible actions and subsequent bizarre, doubling- down defense of his decision not to get vaccinated for COVID-19 (btw, 94 percent of NFL players have been vaccinated).  It's already cost this rich, entitled jackass a health care partner and, though they still carry him as a spokesperson, State Farm Insurance has reduced the rotation of his ads from 25 percent to 1.5 percent.  It seems corporate America (Rodgers' "woke mob"?) gets to choose who it wants to be associated with.  Unfortunately for Rodgers, if he weren't so high- profile and egregiously dissembling, this negative attention would likely have been all over by now.  So, we'll try to leave it behind ourselves with this -- Jimmy Kimmel on the "Wack Packer:"

 

BONUS:   Scientists discuss the harm Rodgers is doing.

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal) passed late Friday, and the President and much of his Cabinet will be out in the country over the coming weeks touting it.  If you're curious how your state will benefit from the act, go here.

As the COP26 climate summit meeting in Glasgow winds down, the Washington Post is reporting that some of the country-level climate data that's been provided so far is "flawed":

Across the world, many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, a Washington Post investigation has found. An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.

The plan to save the world from the worst of climate change is built on data. But the data the world is relying on is inaccurate.

“If we don’t know the state of emissions today, we don’t know whether we’re cutting emissions meaningfully and substantially,” said Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. “The atmosphere ultimately is the truth. The atmosphere is what we care about. The concentration of methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is what’s affecting climate.”

So, as if the problem wasn't imminent and existential enough, the data that's been relied on is (pardon the expression) cooked.  The Post's report is a long but essential read.

Will Bunch says Democrats have to fight the culture war Republicans engage in every election cycle, but one based on our values:

I know it’s Political Punditry 101 to decry the tribalism in modern American politics, but that feels ridiculous when the Republican tribe has made it clear it will never disarm. It’s much better for the Democrats to proclaim that they, too, are a tribe — and that its tribal values of expanding democracy and citizenship rights, valuing objective learning and knowledge, and addressing problems with actual governing are the truest American values. [snip]

These voters will turn out to fight for their culture — if they are called upon — because we’ve seen it happen before. Young folks and Black and brown voters turned out for Biden in 2020 less because his platform called for expanding child care and more because he pledged to fight for “the soul of America” against Trumpism. Democrats can bring these voters back next year by reminding decent, democracy-loving Americans that their party is the thin blue line between them and book burning, a culture of ignorance, and the end of free and fair elections. That would mean an end to watching the culture war from the sidelines. It means actually fighting to win — and to kill all the bastardization of real American values.

NFL Hall of Famers unloaded on conspiracy- curious crank Aaron Rodgers in their Fox pre- game broadcast Sunday:

“I’ll give Aaron Rodgers some advice,” [Terry] Bradshaw said. “It would have been nice if he had just come to the Naval Academy and learned how to be honest. Learned not to lie. Because that’s what you did, Aaron. You lied to everyone. I understand ‘immunized.’ What you were doing was taking stuff that would keep you from getting COVID-19. You got COVID-19. Ivermectin is a cattle dewormer. Sorry, folks, that’s what it is. We are a divided nation politically. We are a divided nation on the COVID-19, whether or not to take the vaccine. And unfortunately, we’ve got players that pretty much think only about themselves. And I’m extremely disappointed in the actions of Aaron Rodgers.”

(Bradshaw, by the way, stars in a new State Farm commericial that is scheduled to debut today. Rodgers and State Farm have a longstanding partnership.)

Michael Strahan, whose Fox platform is supplemented by a weekday seat at the Good Morning America table, chastised Rodgers for his verbal “workaround” by using the term “immunized.”

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s deceptive and it’s wrong,” Strahan said. “And the presentation that he did did not help.”

Strahan also pointed out that this was not an appropriate occasion to quote Martin Luther King, Jr., something Rodgers did on Friday to justify his refusal to comply with the mask rules for unvaccinated players.

[Jimmie] Johnson said that he’s “disappointed” by the play on words, and by Rodgers’s “selfish actions.” Long focused on the public health risks that Rodgers created, along with jeopardizing the team’s chance to secure the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoff field.

ICYMI, here are some of Rodgers' greatest hits.

Finally, a trip over to Infidel 753's link round-up is always recommended for the best collection of links to posts from around the Internet.  Also, check out his essay "Enemy Economics," where he dissects a "conventional view of how economics is supposed to work" as presented by CNN.  Nailed it.