Michael Spavor is Free

Michael Spavor, one of the two Canadian men who was arbitrarily arrested in China as retaliation for Canada detaining Chinese executive Meng Wanzhou, has been freed as Canada released Meng Wanzhou from house arrest and she returned to China.

He was recently in the news for receiving an 11 year prison sentence from a Chinese court.

I am not interested in discussing the nuances and politics of the issue right now, but here's what I know:

Michael Spavor is a good guy who didn't deserve this. I've met him a few times, and a few of my friends consider him a close friend. He's just spent 1000 days unfairly detained.

Michael's life has been horribly disrupted. whatever he had going on at the time of his arrest, who knows what the future holds for him, but I hope he finds something brilliant.

You can hear some of Michael's friends talking about him here on The Seoul Podcast, and what it means for him to have been imprisoned for so long. 

You can also drop a few bucks in the "Help Michael Spavor Rebuild his Life" GoFundMe page, if you'd like to contribute something more tangible.

Something For those Unvaccinated Culture Warriors (Satire)

Well, some people write earnest pleas when they are upset, sad or annoyed about something. I make jokes. 

As we watch Covid 19 take a second pass at the USA, extracting catastrophic hospitalization and death counts almost exclusively from unvaccinated americans, and that is somehow still not reason enough to convince people to get a free needle, it struck me that perhaps the problem here is that getting the vaccine basically means admitting your over-earnest libt**d coworker was right, and if anybody knows anything about a culture war, it's that you can never back away from a position once you've taken it.

But if you think about it, the anti-mask, anti-vaxx side of this culture war is getting a really raw deal: sure, the people on Fox News and the Truth About Demon Biden Facebook group call you brave, but the cost -- increased risk of flippin' death is just unreasonably steep just for scoring a few points and pissing off the libs.

So I've come up with a way to own the libs without backing away from the culture war a single inch!

Let's get on this! If a little re-brand is what it takes...

Listen. I get how weird, hard, and unpleasant this culture war is. I understand what's at stake. I actually really strongly don't think mockery is our way out of this, and those thoughts might show up on this blog sooner or later, because if we don't find a way out of this, we're screwed. But until then, if you're in the mood for a little black humor, I hope you like this. And whether you're in the mood for a little black humor or not, go get vaccinated if you haven't already! Take care of the people around you. That's the very least we can do.