Month: September 2020

Very Fine People Doing Their Job

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I am referring, of course, to the construction workers and engineers who have just removed a Confederate memorial statue from in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse.

They are doing God’s work:

Engineers in Charlottesville, Virginia worked to remove a 900lb Confederate statue on Saturday, a moment of symbolic reckoning in the university town that was rocked by a white supremacist march in August 2017.

The statue taken down was not that of Robert E Lee, which extremists said they were defending in clashes which led to the murder of a counter-protester. Instead, Charlottesville removed a bronze figure of a Confederate soldier, known as “At Ready”, that has stood for 111 years outside the Albemarle county courthouse.

Around 100 people cheered from behind barricades as bronze plaques were taken off the sides of the monument and a cannon was removed, the Washington Post reported. Police stood by.

………

Donald Trump provoked outrage in 2017 when he said there were “very fine people” on both sides of clashes in which Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when an extremist drove his car into a crowd.

………

Albemarle is the first locality to use a process for removing statues that was approved by the state’s general assembly. But activists have said they are disappointed that “At the Ready” will be re-erected elsewhere.

“We feel like it’s just basically toxic waste disposal in another community,” Jalane Schmidt, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, told the Post.

(emphasis mine)

This Court Decision Matters

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This has been black letter law since the 3⁄5 compromise was overturned by the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution in 1868:

A federal court on Thursday rejected President Trump’s order to exclude unauthorized immigrants from population counts that will be used next year to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives, ruling that it was so obviously illegal that a lawsuit challenging the order need not go to a trial.

The court, a three-judge panel in Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Mr. Trump’s proposal exceeded his authority under federal laws governing the census and reapportionment. The specially convened panel said there was no need to consider a second claim in the lawsuit that the president’s order violated the Constitution’s requirement to base apportionment of the House on “the whole number of persons in each state.”

“The merits of the parties’ dispute are not particularly close or complicated,” the judges wrote in granting summary judgment to the plaintiffs, a view that was broadly shared by legal scholars. Two of the judges, Richard C. Wesley and Peter W. Hall, were named to the bench by President George W. Bush. The third, Jesse M. Furman, was nominated by President Barack Obama.

The case involved lawsuits brought by two sets of plaintiffs, one a group of state and local governments and the United States Conference of Mayors, and the second a coalition of advocacy groups and other nongovernmental organizations. The groups argued that Mr. Trump’s order would cause some of them to lose representation in the House and would damage all of them by leading to a less accurate census.

Since the first census was taken in 1790, the number of seats each state holds in the House of Representatives has been based on counts of everyone living in the United States regardless of citizenship or legal status, except for slaves and “Indians not taxed” during the nation’s early years. Former slaves gained citizenship in 1866; all Native Americans did in 1924, although they were counted in regular censuses beginning in 1900.

Mr. Trump tried to scrap that process in July, telling the Commerce Department in a memorandum that the Census Bureau should produce two population counts — one the same as those taken every decade, and the other an estimate of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in each state.

I do not expect that the Supreme Court to rule on this before on the election.

Rats Turn on Each Other

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The police officers charged in the Georgy Floyd murder are beginning to turn on one another.

What can I say but, “Pass the Popcorn.”

The four former Minneapolis police officers charged in George Floyd’s killing appear to be turning on one another, with each offering significantly different versions of the infamous arrest that acknowledge Floyd should not have been allowed to die that day but also deflect the blame to others.

The four men have said in court documents that they all thought someone else was in charge of the scene on May 25 — with rookie officers arguing they were deferring to a veteran, and the veteran saying he was simply assisting in an arrest that was in progress. All have said in court documents that the relationship between the veteran officer — Derek Chauvin — and the others is at the heart of the issue, as each officer perceived their role, and who was in charge, quite differently. Chauvin was the officer shown with his knee on Floyd’s neck as he struggled to breathe in videos of the ill-fated arrest.

“There are very likely going to be antagonistic defenses presented at the trial,” Earl Gray, a lawyer for Thomas K. Lane, wrote in a legal motion filed here this week. “It is plausible that all officers have a different version of what happened and officers place blame on one another.”

It’s nice when people who are ordinarily beneficiaries of the corrupt “Thin Blue Line” start turning against each other.

Here’s hoping that they all screw each other into a jail cell.

Osama bin Laden Won

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QED

It’s September 11, and it’s been 19 years since the attacks, and I thought that this would be a good time look back and try to figure out what it all means.

I keep going back to Eric Frank Russell’s science fiction classic book Wasp, in which the protagonist is sent behind enemy lines to provoke reaction, and it is that reaction which harms the enemy.

Bin Laden knew that he could never defeat the United States, but that he could provoke a response that would cripple the country.

Think of the statecraft equivalent of anaphylactic shock or a Cytokine storm.

Al Qaeda won in the years following 9/11.

You could argue that he won when Bush invaded Iraq, trapping the US military in a quagmire, but I think that it happened when Barack Obama, who ironically enough presided over bin Laden’s killing, normalized the excesses of the Bush administration’s policies of drone terror against brown people and the pervasive surveillance state.

In either case, what has followed in our society has flowed from that day, and out society is by far the worse for this.

We were on an unsustainable path before the attacks, and the descent has only accelerated since then.

The Affluenza Defense

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In the latest twist in the fraud case against disgraced former head of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes, it appears that she is bringing in a high priced psychologist in an attempt to get out from under the charges against her.

This is pretty clearly an Affluenza defense, “I’m to young, too pretty, and too white to go to jail.”

She has a right to this defense, but the judge has made what is a routine ruling, that the prosecution has the right to conduct a psychological examination as well, and that they can tape her sessions, and if the prosecution is not playing to lose, a big if will a well connected white defendant, then they should be able blow this defense out of the water.

Holmes spending at least 5 years, and better yet a decade, behind bars is the singles best thing that should ever do for society:  Be an abject lesson to others who would rely on privilege to defraud people:

Elizabeth Holmes—the disgraced founder and ex-CEO of the now-defunct blood-testing startup, Theranos—may use a mental condition as a defense against a slew of federal fraud charges, according to a court document filed this week. Holmes and Theranos’ former president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were charged in June 2018 with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Federal prosecutors allege the pair—who were romantically involved during the alleged crimes—engaged in conspiracy to defraud Theranos investors out of more than $100 million and defraud doctors and patients into falsely believing the company’s faulty blood-testing technology could reliably perform accurate health tests with just drops of blood from a finger-prick.

According to the court document filed this week, Holmes—who is now being tried separately from Balwani—notified the court last December that she plans to submit “expert evidence relating to a mental disease or defect or any other mental condition” that has bearing on the issue of guilt. The expert providing such evidence was named in the document as psychologist Mindy Mechanic, of California State University, Fullerton.

According to Mechanic’s faculty website, she focuses on “psychosocial consequences of violence, trauma, and victimization with an emphasis on violence against women and other forms of interpersonal violence.” The site also notes that Mechanic “frequently provides expert testimony in complex legal cases involving interpersonal violence.”

The strategy here is clear, her legal team will assert that her former business partner, and former personal partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani is a darkly complected man of South Asian extraction, who worked some sort of “Voodoo” over an innocent white girl, and made her defraud stupid rich folks.

………

In response to Holmes’ plans to provide mental health evidence, federal prosecutors requested that they should also be able to examine Holmes’ mental state and provide their own psychiatric evidence in court as a fair rebuttal.

The judge in the case, US District Judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California, agreed with the prosecutors. As such, he ordered Holmes to undergo up to 14 hours of psychological testing and psychiatric evaluation by two government-appointed doctors over the course of two consecutive days. Davila also ordered that the government’s evaluation of Holmes be recorded on video—over Holmes’ objections. 

It’s nice that the judge made this ruling, and I really hope that the prosecution is serious about calling bullsh%$ on this strategy.

Unemployment Numbers out Today

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This is not a recovery

Initial claims were unchanged at 884,000, which is still really awful:

The number of people seeking and collecting unemployment benefits has remained at historically high levels in recent weeks, a sign the labor-market recovery is losing steam six months after the pandemic struck the U.S.

 Unemployment claims were unchanged at 884,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims fell steadily for weeks after hitting a peak of about 7 million in March, but the pace of descent has slowed and claims remain above the prepandemic record of 695,000.

The number of workers collecting state unemployment benefits also has dropped from highs reached earlier in the pandemic, but is still elevated. So-called continuing claims increased to about 13.4 million at the end of August.

………

The increase in the number of job postings, a real-time measure of labor-market activity, has markedly slowed since late July, and last week stood about 20% below 2019 levels, according to data from job-search site Indeed.com.

And remember, the pump priming of the original aid bill has ended, and Mitch McConnell has no interests in passing another bill, he just want to score political points, and as the heating season begins, and internal becomes drier, Covid will be more contagious.

We are f%$#ed.

Yes, This is Fascism

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They have filed a conspiracy charge because she spoke at a protest against a confederate monument.

Lavrentiy Beria would be proud of them:

The felony case against Virginia’s most senior Black lawmaker, state Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), is a preposterous example of rogue local police making a mockery of justice.

Almost nothing about the charges against Ms. Lucas, the first African American and female president pro tempore of the 244-year-old state Senate, contains an iota of sense. Portsmouth police brought the charge of conspiracy to topple a Confederate monument without the assent of state prosecutors, which is highly unusual. No grand jury was convened to seek an indictment. The case involves Ms. Lucas making public statements, including to the police. Her statements may or may not have been wise; the idea that they amounted to taking part in a felonious conspiracy is farcical.

If Ms. Lucas committed any offense, it was to stick her nose into a matter over which she had no direct authority, which is more or less a state legislator’s job description.

The incident in question occurred around midday on June 10, amid protests that swept the nation following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. Racial justice protesters and community leaders in Portsmouth, a majority-Black city, were intent on covering and defacing a prominent Confederate monument downtown, whose removal had been debated for several years. The monument — an obelisk ringed by statues of four military figures — had been covered by protesters the previous day, without police interference, then uncovered overnight. When two local NAACP leaders returned that morning to re-cover it, they were arrested.

………

That night, hours after Ms. Lucas departed, protests intensified, and the monument was defaced and vandalized. One of the soldier statues was pulled down, falling on a protester and gravely injuring him. At that point, police intervened. (The monument has since been dismantled and placed in storage.)

It was not until Aug. 17, more than two months later, that police got around to charging Ms. Lucas with conspiracy. That was after the local commonwealth’s attorney declined to do so — and no wonder, given the absence of evidence.

Ms. Lucas’s defenders contend that the case against her is payback for her advocacy of tough reform measures for law enforcement. There’s no evidence for that, either. Just as likely, it could be retribution by the police chief, whose resignation Ms. Lucas called for after the monument was pulled down while officers stood watching.

In fact, they waited until the Senate was coming into session to deal with comprehensive police reform, so this was more about trying to sabotage a vote on police accountability, a nakedly and corruptly political ploy:

Greene announced the warrants one day before Lucas was due to join other legislators in Richmond for a special session of the General Assembly called, in part, to address issues of racial inequity and police brutality raised after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in May.

Lucas was not in police custody and intended to attend the session, according to several Democrats who said they spoke with her on Monday.

These is no excuse for this.

The Portsmouth PD needs to be shut down,

This Will Not End Well

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Nothing to see here ……… Move along

There have been some very odd, and VERY large movements in the US stock market driven by a huge purchase of equity derivatives (Warren Buffet defined derivatives, “Financial weapons of mass destruction.”) of tech stocks.
Someone has been making huge, and risky, speculative bets.

A cynic might think that some deep pocketed operator is attempting to use their deep pockets to move the market, and then cash out in a classic, “Pump and dump.”

Well, now it seems that Softbank, whose whole model is to pump up some hair-brained operation (**cough** WeWork **cough**) and then find some idiots to buy their stake, is the “Nasdaq whale”.

Let’s be clear, when you are nicknamed a whale in finance, it does not bode well. Just ask JP Morgan Chase’s, “London Whale,” Bruno Iksil.

The problem is that it is likely that the taxpayers are going to be paying out when this all goes pear shaped:

SoftBank is the “Nasdaq whale” that has bought billions of dollars’ worth of US equity derivatives in a series of trades that stoked the fevered rally in big tech stocks before a sharp pullback on Thursday and Friday, according to people familiar with the matter.

………

The aggressive move into the options market marks a new chapter for the investment powerhouse, which in recent years has made huge bets on privately held technology start-ups through its $100bn Vision Fund. After the coronavirus market tumult hit those bets, the company established an asset management unit for public investments using capital contributed by its founder, Masayoshi Son.

Now it has also made a splash in trading derivatives linked to some of those new investments, which has shocked market veterans. “These are some of the biggest trades I’ve seen in 20 years of doing this,” said one derivatives-focused US hedge fund manager. “The flow is huge.”

………

One person familiar with SoftBank’s trades said it was “gobbling up” options on a scale that was even making some people within the organisation nervous. “People are caught with their pants down, massively short. This can continue. The whale is still hungry.”

………

The overall nominal value of calls traded on individual US stocks has averaged $335bn a day over the past two weeks, according to Goldman Sachs. That is more than triple the rolling average between 2017 and 2019. The retail trading boom has played a big part in the frenzy, but investors say the size of many recent option purchases are far too big to be retail-driven.

………

The size and aggressiveness of the mysterious call buyer, coupled with the summer trading lull, has been a big factor in the buoyant performance of many big tech names as well as the broader US stock market, according to Mr McElligott. This week, he warned that dynamics around options meant the heavy purchases forced banks on the other side of the trades to hedge themselves by buying stocks, in a “classic ‘tail wags the dog’ feedback loop”.

Meanwhile, people are dumping Softbank stocks, because it is self-evidently clear that what they are doing now is bat-sh%$ insane.

I’m not sure if this is a, “Put your money in a bank account,” moment, a, “Put your money in cash,” moment, a, “Put your money in gold,” moment, or a, “Put your money in canned goods,” moment.

In any case, don’t go long on anything if you might need that money in the short term.

We are in a Wile E. Coyote moment right now.

Boeing Still Can’t Make Airplanes

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It now appears that issues at Boeing’s union-busting plant in South Carolina are bad enough for the FAA to take notice:

Production problems at a Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliner factory have prompted air-safety regulators to review quality-control lapses potentially stretching back almost a decade, according to an internal government memo and people familiar with the matter.

The plane maker has told U.S. aviation regulators that it produced certain parts at its South Carolina facilities that failed to meet its own design and manufacturing standards, according to an Aug. 31 internal Federal Aviation Administration memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

As a result of “nonconforming” sections of the rear fuselage, or body of the plane, that fell short of engineering standards, according to the memo and these people, a high-level FAA review is considering mandating enhanced or accelerated inspections that could cover hundreds of jets.

………

But that slip-up combined with another recently discovered assembly-line defect prompted Boeing to take the unusual step in late August to voluntarily tell airlines to ground eight of their 787s for immediate repairs. Since then, Boeing has publicly confirmed the eight planes weren’t safe to remain in service.

………

The manufacturing slip-ups mark the latest production problems for the troubled plane maker and present a test for Chief Executive David Calhoun and a revamped safety-review process after two fatal accidents of its narrow-body 737 MAX. The crashes took 346 lives.

THIS is what happens when you let finance guys run things.

This is Batsh%$ Insane

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As you may, or may not, be aware, there is a segment of fan-fiction called “The Omegaverse”, which is one part Supernatural fandom, and two (or maybe three) parts bad wolf science.

What you may not be aware of, unless you read the rather incomplete New York Times story, which tended to focus on a genre of literature that features, estrus, involuntary impregnation, involuntary sex, male pregnancy, and a lot of other stuff that makes Furries look like Mike Pence.

I understand why the Times focused on this, it’s salacious, and salacious sells.

It’s also kind of dull, unless it’s your thing, at least to me.

I am a cat person, thank you very much.*

What I find interesting is the use, and in this case abuse, of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) take-down provisions for a clearly unlawful purpose.

Well, that, and one the principals in the dispute committing perjury and lying to her fans, but again that is simply salacious, and does not address the larger issues here.

As many of you (OK, both of you) are are aware, the DMCA contains a safe harbor provision which says that so long as a platform responds promptly in response to a take down notice to material posted by a user, they cannot be held liable, much in the same way that you cannot sue a bookstore for a book that is defamatory, just the author and publisher.

What the process means is that there is very little upside for platforms to investigate whether or not an actual copyright violation occurs.  They will simply take the material down when a DMCA complaint, and if the complaint is in error, or maliciously wrong, it is no skin off of their nose.

What this has resulted in is DMCA take down notices being issued to coverup evidence of anti-union activity, corrupt politicians covering up their behavior, to extort YouTube channels, for profit academic journals moving against professors who posting their own research, and, of course, Dr. Who fan Ood Knitters.

What happened in this case was that the author, whose innovation appears to be bringing heterosexual relationships into the Omgaverse, and her publisher, went after another author for literary features of the genre, rather than any actual plagiarism, and sent out dozens of DMCA take-down notices to attack a rival in the genre.

It’s a classic case of misusing the DMCA for non-IP purposes.

Well, Lindsay Ellis gives a hysterically funny description of what went down here, and why what happened was wrong, and why the DMCA needs to be fixed.

It’s an hour long, but it’s well worth the watch.

*No, not THAT sort of cat person, NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT, at least not from a literary perspective.

The Rugged Individualist

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I am referring, of course, to Elon Musk, whose empire has been subsidized to the tune of almost $5 billion.

The actual number is likely far higher, given the indirect subsidies received, such as allowing PayPal, where he made original fortune, function like a bank without having to follow banking regulations, “Because ……… Internet.”

All of these fortunes have resulted from government subsidies, whether it’s Amazon’s early ability to evade sales taxes, Google’s military funding, etc.

The reporters at the LA Times have almost certainly missed some of the subsidies, because many, if not most, of them are indirect:

Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.

And he’s built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies.

Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.

………

Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.

And he’s built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies.

Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.

These are not long-shot startups.  These are meticulously constructed to extract maximum subsidies.

Also, SolarCity was not a long-shot, it was a corrupt bailout of his cousins who had run the company into the ground.

But public subsidies for Musk’s companies stand out both for the amount, relative to the size of the companies, and for their dependence on them.

“Government support is a theme of all three of these companies, and without it none of them would be around,” said Mark Spiegel, a hedge fund manager for Stanphyl Capital Partners who is shorting Tesla’s stock, a bet that pays off if Tesla shares fall.

Yes, they are short sellers, but that should not mask Musk’s hypocrisy in preaching rugged individualism while meticulously constructing his companies to maximize taxpayer subsidies.

Analogy of the Day

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The US Economy is Having a Wile E Coyote Moment

—Financial Times

The lead paragraph says it all:

In the well-known Looney Tunes cartoon, Wile E Coyote regularly runs off a cliff in pursuit of the Road Runner and is suspended in mid-air temporarily. When he looks down and realises his predicament, he falls into the canyon below. In real life, US consumers and businesses have just run straight off a cash cliff, now that extra federal assistance to small companies and unemployed workers has ended.

We are screwed, particularly when the heating season begins, and humidity drops, and viral infectivity increases.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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The Justice Department is taking over the defense in the E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump.

She alleges sexual assault, and has stated that she is lying and she has never met her. (There are multiple pictures of them together)

The government is claiming that even though the (alleged) rape occurred in the mid 1990s, that his denial of meeting her was made when he was President, so the DOJ should defend him at taxpayer expense, and that the case should be moved to federal court.

This is a transparent attempt to delay the case.

It is also the single most corrupt thing that any US Attorney General has ever done, because this could not have proceeded without Bill Barr specifically directing this:

The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

In a highly unusual legal move, lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers — in effect underwritten by taxpayer money.

Though the law gives employees of the federal government immunity from most defamation lawsuits, legal experts said it has rarely, if ever, been used before to protect a president, especially for actions taken before he entered office.

“The question is,” said Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, “is it really within the scope of the law for government lawyers to defend someone accused of lying about a rape when he wasn’t even president yet?”

The motion also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election. A state judge issued a ruling last month that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump being deposed in the case before the election in November, and Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have also requested that he provide a DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material is on a dress that Ms. Carroll said she was wearing at the time of the encounter.

Bill Barr makes John Mitchell look like Perry Mason.

This is real banana republic sh%$#.

Support Your Local Police

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So, a mother calls because her 13 year old, who is on the autism spectrum, is having a meltdown because of separation anxiety.

The cops promptly escort her out of the house, (great way to deal with a separation anxiety freakout) and almost as promptly shoot the boy multiple times.

Clearly, we should expect a statement from the police that this kid was no angel.

Bastards:

A 13-year-old boy with autism was shot several times by police officers who responded to his home in Salt Lake City after his mother called for help.

Linden Cameron was recovering in a Utah hospital, his mother said, after suffering injuries to his shoulder, both ankles, his intestines and his bladder.

Golda Barton told KUTV she called 911 to request a crisis intervention team because her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was having an episode caused by “bad separation anxiety” as his mother went to work for the first time in more than a year.

“I said, ‘He’s unarmed, he doesn’t have anything, he just gets mad and he starts yelling and screaming,’” she said. “He’s a kid, he’s trying to get attention, he doesn’t know how to regulate.”

She added: “They’re supposed to come out and be able to de-escalate a situation using the most minimal force possible.”

Instead, she said, two officers went through the front door of the home and in less than five minutes were yelling “get down on the ground” before firing several shots.

“He’s a small child,” she said. “Why didn’t you just tackle him? He’s a baby. He has mental issues.”

In a briefing on Sunday, Sgt Keith Horrocks of Salt Lake City police told reporters officers were responding to reports “a juvenile was having a mental episode” and thought Cameron “had made threats to some folks with a weapon”.

………

Regarding the incident in Salt Lake City, Neurodiverse Utah said in a statement: “Police were called because help was needed but instead more harm was done when officers from the SLPD expected a 13-year-old experiencing a mental health episode to act calmer and [more] collected than adult trained officers.”

Barton launched a fundraiser to cover her son’s medical bills. She described Cameron as a typical young boy who loves “video games, four wheeling and long-boarding”. She also demanded answers about why her son was not subdued.

Let’s be clear, this was not just violence, it was extreme cowardice.

These cops are cowards, and they are trained to be cowards, living their lives in bed wetting fear.

That’s what all the hyper violent training, including the notorious Killology, is all about maintaining a state of hypervigilance reinforced by a willingness to use hair-trigger violence.

It is not just cowardice, it is a recipe for creating PTSD, and I do not want peace officers to have PTSD.

Over 260,000!!!

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We now have an estimate on the total number of Covid-19 cases from the idiots who whent to the Sturgis motorcycle rally, over 260,000, or nearly half of all of the new cases over the past few weeks:

Last month’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally drew upwards of 450,000 attendees to the small city of Sturgis, South Dakota, marking the largest physical gathering since the pandemic began. While many feared the Sturgis would prove to be a “super spreader” event, the true magnitude of the spread is only now becoming known. And it isn’t pretty.

A new study published by health economists Dhaval Dave, Andrew Friedson, Drew McNichols, and Joe Sabia concluded that Sturgis is responsible for 260,000 new cases of COVID-19 – or, 19% of the total number of US cases during the month of August — and $12 billion in new medical care.

………

In the case of Sturgis, attendees generally did not wear face masks and congregated in confined spaces (restaurants, bars, Smash Mouth concerts, etc.) over the course of 10-day event, and did not self-isolate once the event was over. As a result, an estimated 263,708 cases of COVID across the country can now be attributed to the rally. Already, one person who attended the rally has died from the virus, but unfortunately that number is also expected to grow.

As the Japanese say, “バカにつける薬はない.”*

*There is no medicine for stupidity.

Arizona, It’s the New Florida, Man!

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In Tucson, Arizona, a “Christian” group has organized protests at a McDonalds against a statue of a dinosaur, because ……… Ummmm ……… It’s not in Genesis, I guess?

This is not The Onion:

A Tucson landmark won’t be going extinct anytime soon. Attempts to remove a fiberglass dinosaur statue outside of a McDonald’s have been thwarted.

A group called Christians Against Dinosaurs denounced the T. rex statue on its Facebook page and called for its followers to rally in an effort to remove the statue.

“Please help! This McDonald’s has this dinosaur and refuse to remove it!” according to the Arizona Daily Star. “This is in Tucson, Arizona. Call the manager and demand the removal of this blasphemy!”

………

When reached via Facebook, Christians Against Dinosaurs told Patch that the group’s mission is no joke.

“We’re fed up with everybody acting like the people of Tucson are imbeciles and we want to help,” a spokesperson for the group said. “Having a big dinosaur outside a cultural hub like McDonald’s makes Tucsonians look like they’re mentally deficient and that isn’t right.”

No, YOU are making, “Tucsonians look like they’re mentally deficient.”

If You Cannot Do Your Job with Slave Labor, You Are Doing Your Job Wrong

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Clearly this is a matter of fact, but there is an underlying issue here that is being ignored, which is that California’s fire-fighting infrastructure is dependent on prison labor at $1.00/hour.

I understand how this is convenient, but it is also profoundly evil:

As a historic set of wildfires sweeps across California, sparked by lightning and stoked by record heat and drought resulting from climate change (Mercury News, 8/19/20; Scientific American, 4/3/20), many news outlets have drawn readers’ attention to an additional problem the state faces in fighting the fires: shortages of the prison labor that it normally relies on for firefighting crews.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — known as Cal Fire — “has roughly half as many inmate fire crews than it originally had to work during the most dangerous part of wildfire season,” thanks to prison quarantines and Covid-related early-release programs, reported CNBC (8/21/20), and “rotating out firefighters isn’t an easy option because there’s already a significant shortage of workers available.” Insider (8/20/20) wrote that “the coronavirus pandemic is creating a shortage of inmate fire crews to battle the wildfires,” noting that California has “relied on incarcerated firefighters as its primary ‘hand crews’ since the 1940s.” The New York Times (8/22/20) declared that losing inmate labor “has been the difference between having the manpower to save homes from wildfires — or not,” and that “hiring firefighters to replace them, especially given the difficult work involved, would challenge a state already strapped for cash.”

It’s a gripping story, certainly, of a state unable to respond sufficiently to one disaster because of steps taken to ward off another. But the coverage all danced around a key problem with framing this as a labor shortage: There are plenty of workers available in a state with 2.5 million people currently unemployed — no doubt including many of the fire-trained inmate workers who were released early by Gov. Gavin Newsom in order to free them from the threat of getting sick in California’s Covid-ravaged prisons. The main difference: Unlike prison laborers, regular citizens have to be paid more than pittance wages.

There are far too many people and institutions profiting from the carceral state, and one of them is the state of California.