Today is Sunday, January 23, 2022. Today I would like to recap what I heard on the first Bill Maher show that returned to HBO after a two-month absence. I had incorrectly mentioned on this page that he had been off the air for only three weeks, so I apologize for the gaffe. So this show on Friday kicked off Season 20 of the program Real Time with Bill Maher and he certainly delivered the goods after being on hiatus for so long. An online article about this first show appeared in Decider magazine written by Michael Haskoor in “Bill Maher says We Have to Ease Restrictions & Learn to Live With COVID-19 On HBO’s ‘Real Time.'” During his opening monologue, he told his studio audience that it was “wonderful to see your beautiful masks again.” So we are immediately thrust into the acerbic host’s mind-set right away.

Most of the one-hour episode was devoted to discussing the ongoing pandemic and the fatigue and frustration that many are facing as a result. Maher and his panel guests did examine the arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron variant that surfaced here in December.

Those on his panel included New York Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) and author/journalist Bari Weiss. Weiss is the host of the “Honestly” podcast and editor of the newsletter “Common Sense” on Substack. Torres is a rising Democratic star: at age 25, Torres became New York City’s youngest elected official and the first Afro-Latino LGBTQ member of Congress. I was taken by his wide smile and sparkling set of white teeth.

At one point, Maher mentioned that there’s “A reset going on in the world. We have to live with (the coronavirus). It’s not going away.” Congressman Torres agreed.

In his monologue, Maher took aim at the medical establishment, primarily Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is the public face of the pandemic, for telling the rest of us what to do throughout the course of the pandemic. He did not express much confidence in this country’s medical establishment, saying that he doesn’t think they know what they’re doing. He acknowledged that we don’t know “too much about how the human body works.” Maher said that the “virus is still a dominant issue” in our lives right now despite the advice from Dr. Fauci and fellow medical experts, and shouldn’t be such an issue anymore. I think here Maher fails to grasp how woefully vaccinated this country still is at this point and how this contributes to the ubiquitous problems associated with the virus.

The host of this politically incorrect show tested positive himself for COVID-19 last May and added that medical experts have been wrong about “a lot” over the years. Here he mentioned how his teeth had been drilled with mercury when he was a child and how wrong that was from a medical viewpoint later on and how people 50 years from now would look back at us in 2022 and be appalled at things we’re doing right now.

As for his own position regarding the pandemic, Maher said he was “never scared” of the pandemic, despite the emergence of the Delta and Omicron strains. Instead, he said, “I was always scared of the reaction to it, and as this has played out that only proved to be more true for me.” Maher added, “It was never that virulent a threat, I thought, to people who were in good health.” This has been a bugaboo of the HBO show host: that the country’s medical experts have never focused on how unhealthy many Americans really are and how this has contributed to comorbidities in those persons who are vulnerable to the pathogen.

The second guest, Weiss, said that she’s done with COVID. She also noted, however, that “We haven’t gotten back to normal. And it’s ridiculous at this point.”

Here Maher referred to Florida, where restrictions have not been enforced at all by the dimwitted governor, but to Maher, the state has a different vibe than other states, particularly on the coasts. I’m glad that Torres pushed back on Maher’s seeming endorsement of this governor’s lack of leadership during the pandemic, as the Congressman reminded Maher, who lives in California, about the early stages of the pandemic in New York, which were tragic, resulting in overcrowded emergency rooms, mass graves, and people fleeing New York State. Finally, Torres said, “I reject the notion that the response has been worse than the disease itself.”

Maher then pointed out this evolving reality arising from the panacea of vaccination: that it “does not stop you from transmitting it. It just stops you from dying when you do get it. That’s a huge difference, and counteracts that we need the vaccination to protect other people. It protects you, so it’s just about you.”

Another topic that the panel discussed was soaring crime in the country. Torres pointed a finger at the proliferation of guns on the street as the root cause of the crime wave, but Maher countered that by saying, “Guns were always there.” Maher then mentioned the easing of certain legal restrictions by progressive district attorneys around the country as a contributing factor to the soaring crime rate. Torres didn’t agree, saying that “The soft on crime critique is is a caricature rather than a fair characterization.” Here he insisted that more guns on the street are causing more crime. Nobody discussed bringing commonsense gun control initiatives here in Congress by members on the panel.

It’s getting late here since Elliot and I spent an evening with our good friend, “Mark,” at his apartment, where we ordered dinner in from an Italian restaurant in Rego Park and had a liberal helping of good conversation about family and friends. Earlier, I had breakfast out with my Astoria friend, “Seth,” at Jackson Hole.

Another highlight was talking to an Apple technician earlier in the afternoon who helped me remove the annoying pop-up that I was still getting, despite having a virus protection program that should have detected the message that said I might have viruses embedded in the computer. The technician had me on for about twenty minutes, sharing the screen with me, and eventually detected the problem as having a corrupt version of Google Chrome since the message registered on this platform. Thus the solution was to delete this version of the program and reinstall it. I did it with no issue, and voila, the pop-ups disappeared. I thanked the expert enthusiastically and enjoyed the prospect of returning to a virus-free screen. So the lesson I learned is not to ever click on some email that looks suspicious, even though the original message I did open lacked this feature overall. I would imagine then that this phenomenon occurs quite frequently in Computerworld more so than we would expect.

So have a good week. Let’s hope this is not too inclement a week. When we left Mark’s place, it was snowing, actually. I parked the car in the garage, of course.

Stay safe and be well.