Mass shootings are back.
First, a mass shooting in Glendale, Arizona, and then another at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.
It’s like flowers blooming in the spring.
If you find this reassuring, then you are a psychopath.
Year: 2020
Stupid
Trump has withdrawn from the Open Skies Treaty, which allowed a number of countries, most notably the US and Russia, conduct unarmed surveillance flights over each other’s territory.
This is a truly stupid move, but it fits with the philosophy of many within the US foreign policy establishment, particularly on the right, that any agreement that is truly reciprocal is not for the US:
President Trump has decided to withdraw from another major arms control accord, he and other officials said Thursday, and will inform Russia that the United States is pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty, negotiated three decades ago to allow nations to fly over each other’s territory with elaborate sensor equipment to assure that they are not preparing for military action.
Mr. Trump’s decision may be viewed as more evidence that he is preparing to exit the one major arms treaty remaining with Russia: New START, which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear missiles [The reporter got this wrong, the limit is nuclear warheads, and not nuclear missiles] each. It expires in February, weeks after the next presidential inauguration, and Mr. Trump has insisted that China must join what is now a U.S.-Russia limit on nuclear arsenals.
Considering the fact that France has more deployed nukes than China, and the UK probably has more deployed nukes than China, I would expect that this is not going to viewed with any enthusiasm by the civilian and military leadership of the People’s Republic.
Mr. Trump’s decision, rumored for some time, is bound to further aggravate European allies, including those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who are also signatories to the treaty.
They are likely to remain in the accord, which has nearly three dozen signatories, but have warned that with Washington’s exit, Russia will almost certainly respond by also cutting off their flights, which the allies use to monitor troop movements on their borders — especially important to the Baltic nations.
Russia can literally do nothing but complain if they see something in the US, if European nations see a troubling mobilization on their borders, they can take immediate countermeasures.
You tell me who loses more from this.
Morons.
Yet More Evidence that Natural Gas is Worse than Coal
It’s not the carbon per unit of energy, where natural gas excels, but in the leaks from wells and pipes, where the methane has 84 times the anthropogenic climate change impact of CO2 in the decades following release.
The leaks are so bad in some places that it is killing trees in cities:
Natural gas leaks from underground pipelines are killing trees in densely populated urban environments, a new study suggests, adding to concerns over such leaks fueling climate change and explosion hazards.
The study, which took place in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a low-income immigrant community near Boston, also highlights the many interrelated environmental challenges in a city that faces high levels of air pollution, soaring summer temperatures and is now beset by one of the highest coronavirus infection rates in the nation.
Dead or dying trees were 30 times more likely to have been exposed to methane in the soil surrounding their roots than healthy trees, according to the study published last month in the journal Environmental Pollution.
“I was pretty blown away by that result,” said Madeleine Scammell, an environmental health professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who co-authored the study. “If these trees were humans, we would be talking about what to do to stop this immediately.”
The study measured soil concentrations of methane and oxygen at four points around the trunks of 84 dead or dying trees and 97 healthy trees. For trees that had elevated levels of methane in the surrounding soil, the highest concentrations were found in the dirt between the tree and the street, suggesting that the gas had leaked from natural gas pipelines, which are typically buried beneath roadways.
………
Stephen Leahy of the Northeast Gas Association, a natural gas utility group, said he had not reviewed the current study in detail but noted that “there are multiple factors that could be involved in tree damage, from disease to age to road traffic to methane.”
Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is approximately 84 times more potent in warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20 year period, making plugging even small gas leaks important when trying to tackle climate change.
A recent study found so much methane escaping or intentionally vented from wells in the Permian basin of Texas and New Mexico that the climate impact associated with burning natural gas from the region was likely greater, over a 20-year period, than burning coal.
Gas, and particularly fracked gas replacing coal is not a bridge fuel, it’s toxic waste.
When Ajit Pai Seizes the Moral High Ground………
Of course, when your competition is Elon Musk, it’s a low bar to clear.
Pai just called out Musk’s play for government subsidies by labeling his Starlink satellite network high latency:
The Federal Communications Commission is not convinced that SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network will be able to deliver the low latencies promised by CEO Elon Musk. As a result, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing limits on SpaceX’s ability to apply for funding from a $16 billion rural-broadband program.
While traditional satellite broadband generally suffers from latency of about 600ms, Musk says that Starlink will offer “latency below 20 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast-response video game at a competitive level.”
Everyone expects Starlink to offer much lower latency than traditional satellites because SpaceX satellites are being launched in low Earth orbits ranging from 540km to 570km. By contrast, geostationary satellites used for broadband orbit at about 35,000km.
“SpaceX claims that because its low-Earth orbit satellite system operates at ‘an altitude of 550 kilometers,’ it can deliver roundtrip latency at less than 50ms,” according to a public draft of Pai’s proposed rules for the $16 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund distribution. But the FCC plans to classify SpaceX and all other satellite operators as high-latency providers for purposes of the funding distribution, saying the providers haven’t proven they can deliver low-latency broadband.
………
SpaceX and other satellite operators are also being ruled ineligible for a gigabit tier. Both the latency and gigabit decisions would put SpaceX at a disadvantage. As Pai said in an announcement, his plan “prioritizes bids offering to provide even faster speeds (up to a gigabit) and lower latency by giving those bids greater weight in the auction and awarding support to the bidder offering the best combination of speed and latency in each area.”
SpaceX has made demonstrations, but they are breadboards conducted under optimum conditions.
Once Starlink is in service, and is serving customers in the real world, that decision can be revisited, but my guess is that the claims of high bandwidth and low latency will be as much of an illusion as Tesla’s claims of self driving cars being just around the corner.
F%$# Zuck
Once again, Mark Zuckerberg takes something that sounds like a good ideal, aork from home, and turns it evil, announcing that if you are working remotely, and end up in an area that is not as expensive as the Bay Area, they will cut your pay, and they will spy on you, and if they catch you living some place less expensive, they will fire you:
Mr. Zuckerberg said that location would affect employee compensation, both for new hires and for those who relocate. He said that Facebook will monitor employees’ locations and those who mislead the company would face “severe” penalties.
“If you live in a place where the cost of living is dramatically lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Seriously, they saving you office costs, and you have to find another way to screw with your employees.
What, did Jeff Bezos beat you at the International Association of Evil Bastards picnic sack race last year o or something?
Go Sweden!
Sweden’s handling of the Coronavirus is so bad that its neighbors are considering strengthening a cordon sanitaire around the Nordic nation:
Denmark, Finland and Norway are debating whether to maintain travel restrictions on Sweden but ease them for other countries as they nervously eye their Nordic neighbour’s higher coronavirus death toll.
Sweden has the highest mortality rate per capita at this stage of the epidemic, according to a Financial Times tracker that uses a seven-day rolling average of new deaths. It has overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium in recent days.
Frode Forland, specialist director in infectious diseases at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, told the Financial Times keeping borders closed had “a certain infectious-disease logic” while a big difference in infection rates remained between countries. “The situation is quite different now between Norway and Sweden,” he said.
………
“Norway, Denmark and Iceland have managed to stabilise their situation, but in Sweden the situation is more alarming,” she said last week.
The Swedes are now doing worse than the UK.
Your actions make Boris Johnson look smart by comparison.
What the f%$# is wrong with you?
What, Another Silicon Valley Sharing Economy Scheme Revealed to be a Fraud?
Inspector Renault Says………Round up the usual suspects, it turns out that food delivery companies are using their piles of venture capital money to dominate the market, and then they will be able to extract monopoly rents:
Ranjan Roy has a great article on Substack about DoorDash and “pizza arbitrage”: Roy’s friend was first annoyed to discover that DoorDash was providing delivery services for his nondelivery pizzeria: taking web orders without his knowledge, phoning in for takeout and sending a DoorDash delivery worker to pay and pick up the food, and often delivering to a customer who would be annoyed that the pizza arrived cold. And then he was surprised to see DoorDash was selling his $24 pizzas for only $16. This meant he had an arbitrage opportunity: Order his own pizzas at $16, sell them to DoorDash for $24 each, and pocket the difference. This worked even better if he didn’t put real pizzas in the delivery boxes. But how on earth was DoorDash ever supposed to make money selling his pizzas at a loss?
Delivery via smartphone is one of those venture-funded sectors where business executives appear to have taken seriously the old joke about “losing money on every transaction but making it up on volume.” Normal rules of capitalism about maximizing profits do not apply. This has led to a strange situation where restaurants feel squeezed by the fees charged by delivery services (when, unlike Roy’s friend, they participate voluntarily on a delivery platform) and yet the delivery services themselves manage to keep losing money. Why is this even happening?
………
I think the missing element for profitability is different: productivity. The hope with a lot of business models that bring app intermediation to a preexisting element of the economy like ride services or food delivery is that technology will make workers more productive. You can see instances where this is obviously true: a Peloton instructor who teaches a class to tens of thousands of people is more productive than a SoulCycle instructor who can only teach about 60 people at a time. But with a lot of apps, the promised boost to productivity never materializes. The worker still has to render personal service to one customer at a time, and the app doesn’t do much to reduce the worker’s downtime or help him or her complete the task faster. As such, the productivity boost that is needed to make the financial model pencil — paying the worker a high enough hourly rate while charging a fee the customer is willing to pay and still having a positive profit margin — does not materialize.
Consider a few examples. In the traditional model, restaurants use their own employees to deliver food. DoorDash and its competitors offer a different approach: DoorDash contracts with the delivery person, sending him or her to whatever restaurant has orders at any moment. In theory, this should lead to better matching of labor to work: Restaurants don’t get backed up with too many orders, because DoorDash can send over extra staff as necessary; the restaurant also never has to pay a worker to sit around and not deliver food. But there are offsetting disadvantages to this outsourced model. A restaurant-employed delivery person knows the menu and can tell quickly whether a bag appears to contain what is listed on a receipt. He has a rhythm with the staff he’s picking up from. He knows the neighborhood and knows the addresses of frequent customers. He has the right equipment — if he’s delivering pizza, he has an insulated bag so the pizza is hot when it gets to the customer. A third-party delivery person is more likely to screw these things up: slower, less accurate, lower-quality delivery. At the very least, this mutes the productivity gains from better staff matching; it could offset them entirely.
………
But what if the main reason the value proposition for these services has changed is that a third party is weirdly willing to lose money on the transactions? That doesn’t seem like a sustainable situation — and yet it has been sustained for years at this point. If it ends, if investors in app-based service companies start demanding profits, then we should expect the size of the personal-service part of the economy to contract. Some restaurants that came to rely on app-based delivery may find it makes sense to take delivery in-house. But others may find delivery isn’t worth it if they actually have to employ the delivery person. And then customers, revealed to be unwilling to pay the true economic cost of having their food delivered, may have to go pick it up.
What is going on here is that eventually, one of these companies will be the last one standing, and then they hope to extract even more from fees, with the threat that if your restaurant isn’t a customer, then they will deliver cold pizzas stuck to the top of the boxes and ruin your reputation, because they will hijack your Google and Yelp listing anyway.
This is not innovation, this is a f%$#ing Ponzi scheme.
2.4 Million Initial Jobless Claims
That is 4 times worse than the record before this all started byt it’s seen as a sign of hope, which means that were screwed.
Something that I didn’t realize though, was that in addition to the 37.1 million initial claims since this all started, there is an additional 1 million claims that were through a federal program than had not been counted:
The numbers: More than 2.4 million unemployed Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week using the traditional method of reporting initial claims, but the real number was almost 1 million higher if applicants made eligible through a new federal relief program are included.
First-time filings for unemployment insurance totaled 2.44 million last week on the traditional seasonally adjusted basis. While still way above pre-coronavirus levels, new claims have declined for seven straight weeks following the apparent peak of 6.9 million seen in late March.
………
What happened:Since the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns started in mid-March, some 35.5 million people have applied for jobless benefits through their states, based on actual or unadjusted totals.
Roughly 8.1 million new claims have been filed via a new federal program that has made self-employed workers and independent contractors such as writers or Uber drivers eligible for the first time ever.
Total new claims since mid-March: almost 44 million.
We are f%$#ed.
Now is Not the Time to Apologize
With Trump’s hydroxychloroquine insanity, where he is claiming to take the drug, and doctor is almost certainly giving him sugar pills, Nancy Pelosi let loose the following take-down:
He’s our president, and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group, and in his, shall we say, weight group: ‘Morbidly obese,’ they say.
Nancy Pelosi just said to Republicans, “Yo President so fat ………,” and the SJWs on the net are complaining that she is, “Fat shaming,” Trump.
Bullsh%$. She is TROLLING Trump, and this is well calculated to make his orange head explode.
Nancy Pelosi should not apologize, and if someone confronts her about this, she should tell them to kiss her ass, and if they complain about THAT she should reply, “I’m a Democrat, I’m not going to tell you to kiss my elephant.” (Credit Frank Mankiewicz for that last bit.)
Trump is overweight, and the overweight are at higher risks of complications from the malaria drug. That is an objective fact.
If you have a problem with that, get the f%$# off of the internet, and out of the gene pool.
Getting Your Priorities Straight
In order to deal with public health issues relating to the pandemic, the government is buying mass quantities of riot gear and related weapons, because, after all, you have to protect the top 1% from their victims:
The federal government has ramped up security and police-related spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including issuing contracts for riot gear, disclosures show.
The purchase orders include requests for disposable cuffs, gas masks, ballistic helmets, and riot gloves, along with law enforcement protective equipment for federal police assigned to protect Veterans Affairs facilities. The orders were expedited under a special authorization “in response to Covid-19 outbreak.”
………
The CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion stimulus legislation passed in late March, also authorized $850 million for the Coronavirus Emergency Supplemental Funding program, a federal grant program to prepare law enforcement, correctional officers, and police for the crisis. The funds have been dispensed to local governments to pay for overtime costs, purchase protective supplies, and defray expenses related to emergency policing.
The CESF funding may be used for a range of coronavirus response efforts by law enforcement, including medical personal protective equipment, overtime for police officers, training, and supplies for detention centers. The grants may also be used for the purchase of unmanned aerial aircraft and video security cameras for law enforcement. Motorola Solutions, a major supplier of police technology, has encouraged local governments to use the new money to buy a range of command center software and video analytics systems.
It’s a matter of priorities.
If you are a Republican, or a Neoliberal Democrat, there is, to quote Margaret Thatcher (יש”ו), “No society,” so the only purpose of the state is to protect the wealthy looters.
Prehistoric Percussion Proficiency
Archaeologist Dr. Jean-Loup Ringot specializes in prehistoric music, here he demonstrates a Lithophone. 🔊 pic.twitter.com/xqaov8Q8LZ
— Daniel Holland (@DannyDutch) May 16, 2020
A stone vibrophone. My percussionist son was impressed.
Tweet of the Day
I'll just remind you that the same tech community that hasn't been able to solve simple computer virus issues for the last 35 years, or create secure systems, or usable crypto, or even keep their shit running consistently isn't likely to swoop in and fix an actual virus.
— Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) May 19, 2020
It does seem to me that people who make money by breaking the law (Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Lime, Bird, PayPal), overselling AI (Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Waymo), spying on people and claiming that they don’t (Google, Facebook), or actually engage in fraud about their medical technology (Theranos), are not well equipped to save us from a pandemic.
Finally, CDC Excess Death Data
Excess Deaths Chart Porn
Here.
I have been saying for some time that the best metric for Covid-19 deaths is excess deaths, which is made from counting total deaths, and comparing to historical data to show how many deaths might result from a particular massive disaster.
You can go to the link, and get excess death numbers, generate charts, and download the underlying data.
The data is incomplete, but what they have so far shows at least 65K excess deaths from mid-march through out the end of April.
This number is likely to increase as more death data makes its way to the CDC.
This is My Shocked Face
Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, in whose name Roe v. Wade was filed, and who, for the past 20 some odd years, has been a poster-child for the people who want to criminalize abortion, has it was all a lie she was paid to make by the Christian right:
In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself—real name, Norma McCorvey—to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term.
McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or safe abortion in the state of Texas. Her willingness to lend her experience to the legal case for abortion led to the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortions in all 50 states (though red states do all they can to get around this; recently, several have even used the COVID-19 pandemic to make abortions functionally impossible to procure). But conservatives had a field day in the mid ’90s when the assertive, media-savvy pro-choice advocate and activist McCorvey became an anti-abortion born-again ex-gay Christian with the help of leaders of the evangelical Christian right, Reverend Flip Benham (of the infamous Operation Rescue) and Reverend Rob Schenck. A conservative film, Roe v. Wade, starring Jon Voight and Stacey Dash, will dramatize McCorvey’s “conversion.”
But those filmmakers, and the rest of the pro-life evangelical community, have another curveball coming. In the final third of director Nick Sweeney’s 79-minute documentary, featuring many end-of-life reflections from McCorvey—who grew up queer, poor, and was sexually abused by a family member her mother sent her to live with after leaving reform school—the former Jane Roe admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was “all an act.”
“This is my deathbed confession,” she chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.” “Do you think you would say that you used them?” Sweeney responds. “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.” She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. “I’m a good actress,” she points out. “Of course, I’m not acting now.”
………
Reverend Schenck, the much more reasonable of the two evangelical leaders featured in the film, also watches the confession and is taken aback. But he’s not surprised, and easily corroborates, saying, “I had never heard her say anything like this… But I knew what we were doing. And there were times when I was sure she knew. And I wondered, Is she playing us? What I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we’re playing her.” Reverend Schenck admits that McCorvey was “a target,” a “needy” person in need of love and protection, and that “as clergy,” people like Schenck and Benham were “used to those personalities” and thus easily able to exploit her weaknesses. He also confirms that she was “coached on what to say” in her anti-abortion speeches. Benham denies McCorvey was paid; Schenck insists she was, saying that “at a few points, she was actually on the payroll, as it were.” AKA Jane Roe finds documents disclosing at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts” from the anti-abortion movement to McCorvey.
So, the anti-abortion terrorists and their pet were running a scam on each other, and on the American public.
What the People of Amsterdam Have Discovered
They have discovered that they are sick of these motherf%$#ing tourists in their motherf%$#ing city!!!
Amsterdam has been catering to tourists, for the weed, for the sex shops, the canals, and for the wonderful architecture, for years, and now its citizens have discovered that they like their city a lot better without the hoards of overbearing tourists:
Amsterdam’s historic Red Light District is rife with English-language city signs admonishing tourists: “Don’t pee in the street”; “No alcohol in public spaces”; “Put your trash in the bin”; “Fine: 140 euros.”
But the cartoonish black-and-red warnings on the 17th-century canals look strangely out of place these days. There are no visitors to heed them.
Beginning in mid-March, when the Netherlands went into semi-lockdown to combat the covid-19 pandemic, tourism vanished from Amsterdam almost overnight. A social and economic crisis has hit the country and its capital hard. But for residents of Amsterdam’s historic city center, there is a clear silver lining: temporary relief from the burden of overtourism.
………
Nowhere is the difference more clear than in the now-deserted alleys of the Wallen, as the red-light district is called. It is a major tourist draw, famous for the sight of sex workers soliciting from behind their windows and the many coffee shops where visitors can light up a joint. Here, noise is permanent, and nuisance a given. Tourists often leave trash and urinate in public.
………
“It’s just lovely. I’ve lived here five years, and I’m now getting to know neighbors I didn’t know I had. They used to blend into the crowd,” she says. “Now, when the sun is out, people take a chair and sit out front. It’s so gezellig,” she continues, using the common Dutch adverb that translates to “having a good time together.”
………
“It’s like the city is ours again,” she says, echoing a common sentiment among Amsterdammers who feel like their interests had become subordinate to those of visitors.
………
Seeing the pristine metropolis, many citizens feel like they are wandering through the Amsterdam of the past. Tim Verlaan, an assistant professor of urban history at the University of Amsterdam, draws a parallel to what it looked like in the 1970s and ‘80s.
“The lockdown, of course, is unprecedented. But many Amsterdammers are reminded of a time when the city first and foremost was a place to live, and not to consume or play tourist,” he says.
………
Through a combination of economic prosperity, a lowered crime rate and shrewd marketing, tourism to Amsterdam exploded. Global trends contributed further. Airfare became ever cheaper as the traveling middle classes of Europe and the United States were joined by those in Asia.
From the 21st century on, the balance in the inner city was definitively skewed toward visitors. Hotel rooms multiplied, streets felt permanently overcrowded. The canal cityscape became the domain of tours, ticket offices and souvenir shops. And perhaps the biggest offense to locals? The ever-multiplying sellers of ice cream and waffles sauced with Nutella chocolate, now the dreaded symbol of a monocultural tourism industry.
Last year, 9 million tourists, mostly foreigners, visited Amsterdam, a city of 820,000 people.
………
With tourism down and out, many are hoping things will be different after the current crisis.
“This is such an opportunity to reflect on where we go from here,” says Els Iping, spokeswoman for VVAB, an organization that protects cultural heritage in the inner city and has been a vocal advocate of restoring the balance in favor of residents. “We are proud of our city, and we like to see others enjoy it. But the superficial type of tourism that has people pay pocket change to fly out here has to stop.”
………
“You’ll likely see changes already in the making accelerated by this crisis,” Verlaan says.
To be on the safe side, Iping’s organization is already petitioning the city to stick to its guns. “Some in the tourism industry, of course, will now want to reverse these policies, citing the need for economic recovery,” she says.
“But almost everyone else agrees that Amsterdam should seize this moment to never return to the old situation again.”
I’ve wonder if the people who live in colonial Williamsburg feel the same way.
If you wonder why people live in tourist traps seem to hate tourists, this is it.
Arthur
We now have an early start to the named storm seasion, with Arthur reaching tropical storm status, which makes a named storm before the normalstart of hurricane season for the 6th time in 6 years.
Nope. No anthropogenic climate change driven weirdness here:
The Atlantic hurricane season’s first named storm formed late Saturday night off the eastern coast of Florida, when its sustained winds reached 40mph.
Named Tropical Storm Arthur, the system should move north-northeast for the next couple of days. Although there is a fair amount of uncertainty about this motion, Arthur should come near, or just over, coastal North Carolina, where tropical storm warnings have been raised. After this Arthur is likely to bend due eastward, away from the mainland United States and out to sea.
Because of low wind shear and moderately warm waters, Arthur may remain a tropical storm and even strengthen a little before succumbing to cooler waters later this week. The National Hurricane Center forecasts the system to reach maximum sustained winds of 50mph on Monday.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins two weeks from now, on June 1, and runs through November 30. Historically, it is not all that unusual for a tropical or subtropical storm to form before June 1 and become named after reaching sustained winds of 40mph. This happens, on average, about every two to three years.
However, this is now the sixth year in a row that a named storm has developed prior to the June 1 date. And according to data compiled by University of Miami hurricane scientist Brian McNoldy, the average date of the first named storm is steadily moving earlier. In 1970, it typically came in early July, but now the average date of the first storm is about one month earlier. There has been some discussion in the hurricane community about moving the start of the Atlantic season up to May 15 to match the beginning of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season.
We are in a world of hurt if we do not act.
Here is a Useful Resource
The good folks at Payday Report have COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map.
This is a profoundly useful resource:
You can zoom in and clicks on the strikes 
and protests 
to get the details of all of the labor actions.
This is worth checking out, as is the whole Paycheck Report, a publication dedicated to covering the labor movement
OK, This is Wierd
Ben Smith of The New York Times has just come out with a an article excoriating Ronan Farrow.
The thing is, there is not a whole bunch of “There” there.
Smith suggests that Farrow sees himself as a crusading reporter with an attitude, rather than an ideology free automaton, something which Farrow freely admits, so this is not what one would call a big reveal.
I’ll be honest, my first reaction to NYT publishing a bizarre hit piece on Ronan Farrow is that he’s working on something they want to preemptively discredit.— Shannon 🩸🦷 (@TheStagmania) May 18, 2020
The question is why, and why now?
I think that there are a number of reasons that this story might have run.
The most banal reason for this would be that the priesthood at the The New York Times is simply offended by Farrow’s success and notoriety for what they would see as garbage journalism.
They are the “Karens” of journalism, and this is a profoundly “Karen” moment for them.
While this is a behavior that is typical of the Times hive mind, it does not typically end up in the news section. It typically ends up in the the snark sections, OP/ED or media criticism, and not in news.
A more laudable, but by no means laudable, motivation might they want to throw Farrow off of his stride because they have a competing scoop, and they want to get there first, so they pulled this out of their back pocket. (A stick in his bicycle spokes, so to speak.)
Not nice, but journalism ain’t tiddly winks.
Assuming this is not a product of the two above scenarios, then we need to go a little bit tinfoil hat, and conclude that they have gotten word of a story that they (whoever “they” are) never want to see the light of day.
I don’t buy this, but if it is either hyper competitive journalism or a conspiracy theory, then the likely stories would cover 3 general areas:
- A revelation related to the crimes of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
- A revelation related to someone close to the publisher of the New York Times. (tinfoil hat only)
- A revelation related to sexual misconduct that rhymes with Poseidon.
My guess is that we going to see an Epstein story in the next few weeks, and my money is that Farrow will get there first.
Note that I have what might be the worst prediction this side of my dad, so I’m probably wrong.
Headline of the Day
South Korean Soccer Team Apologizes for Filling Stands with Sex Dolls
We are living in profoundly weird time.
Linkage
- Scientists Find The First Animal That Doesn’t Need Oxygen to Survive (Science Alert) It resembles a little jellyfisn.
- Nearly 2 million chickens at Eastern Shore farms set to be destroyed because of coronavirus-related plant shortages (Baltimore Sun) A potential solution would be to break up the meat-packing monopolies and oligopolies.
- David Sirota Joins the Jacobin Team (Jacobin) I look forward to this.
- Joe Biden’s Garbage Career: A Timeline (Rampant) Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of every major legislative initiative over the past 40 years.
- Biden Can’t Return Things To Normal, Because Trump Is A Normal US President. That’s The Problem. (Caitlin Johnstone) A rather dire, and depressingly accurate, take on the nature of the modern US presidency.
- Sears’ Headquarters Was Supposed to Turn a Sleepy Suburb Into a Boomtown. It Never Happened. (ProPublica) Tax incentives never EVER pay for themselves.
- This Guy Got Hit By Lightning and Became a Concert Pianist (VICE) The human brain is weird.
John Oliver on the US Post Office, and calls out Postal banking