Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Today in Evil

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Memos have been released showing that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis actively deceived the public about the spread of Covid for political gain.

We already knew that he was a miserable excuse for a human being, but now we have proof:

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced, a South Florida Sun Sentinel investigation has found.

DeSantis, who owes his job to early support from President Donald Trump, imposed an approach in line with the views of the president and his powerful base of supporters. The administration suppressed unfavorable facts, dispensed dangerous misinformation, dismissed public health professionals, and promoted the views of scientific dissenters who supported the governor’s approach to the disease.

The DeSantis administration’s approach to managing COVID-19 information carries costs. It supports a climate in which people proudly disdain masks, engage in dangerous group activities that could spread the disease, and brush aside information that conflicts with their political views. With partygoers packing Florida bars and holiday travelers filling hotels and guest rooms, the state faces a few difficult months before the possible relief of vaccines.

These findings are based on interviews with more than 50 people, including scientists, doctors, political leaders, employees of the state health department, and other state officials, as well as more than 4,000 pages of documents:

  • The Florida Department of Health’s county-level spokespeople were ordered in September to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election.
  • The DeSantis administration refused to reveal details about the first suspected cases in Florida, then denied the virus was spreading from person to person — despite mounting evidence that it was.
  • State officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, relenting only under pressure or legal action from family members, advocacy groups and journalists.
  • The DeSantis administration brushed aside scientists and doctors who advocated conventional approaches to fighting the virus, preferring scientists on the fringes who backed the governor’s positions.
  • The governor’s spokesman regularly takes to Twitter to spread misinformation about the disease, including the false claim that COVID was less deadly than the flu.
  • The governor highlighted statistics that would paint the rosiest picture possible and attempted to cast doubt on the validity of Florida’s rising death toll.

“The governor is a smart, educated guy,” said Thomas Unnasch, co-director of the Center for Global Health and Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “But he also is a politically savvy guy. He is encouraging people who are of the opinion that the virus is not as severe and profound as others say it is and putting politics before science.”

………

Don’t issue news releases or write social media posts about COVID, they were told, according to three health department county spokespeople who asked not to be identified. Instead, talk about flu shots, hearing-loss screenings — anything but the virus.

“It is all part of the top-down control of messaging from the governor’s office,” said a senior official in the health department.

The order came from Alberto Moscoso, communications director for the state health department. It’s unclear who told Moscoso to issue the order. He left the department on Nov. 6 and declined comment for this report.

This is ineluctably evil. 

In a just world, he’d be facing impeachment right now, but we are talking about Florida.

Am I A Bad Person for Laughing?

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Because my reaction to learning that Rudy Giuliani has Covid-19 was a hearty guffaw.

I know that the conventional wisdom is that no one deserves to catch Covid-19, but yes, dripping Rudy deserves to have caught the disease.

He’s been a walking and talking super-spreader, and any concerns I have are with those who he might have exposed, not him:

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has tested positive for Covid-19 and is being treated in hospital.

The president wrote in a tweet: “Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!”

Mr Giuliani, who has led the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to the election results, is the latest person close to the president to be infected.

The president and his team have been criticised for shunning safety guidance. Mr Trump was ill in October.

Mr Giuliani, 76, was admitted to the Medstar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC on Sunday, according to US media reports.

Ha ha.

A Correction

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Yesterday, in writing about the poo flinging between Senator Marsha Blackburn and various personalities in Chinese media, I quoted something that I had believed was originally said by Clarence Carrow Darrow.

I was wrong.  The quote was made by American writer and humorist Harry Golden. 

Additionally, I got the quote wrong:

While Anglo-Saxons were still roaming the forests of Great Britain, painting their bodies blue and eating wild strawberries, the Jews already had diabetes.

My apologies for misinforming my reader(s).

Not Good

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US Job growth was about ½ what was forecast last month, 245,000 versus forecasts of around 440,000.

The unemployment rate ticked down, but a lot of that is people who have stopped looking:

U.S. job growth slowed sharply in November, suggesting the labor-market recovery is losing steam amid a surge in coronavirus cases and new business restrictions.

Employers added 245,000 jobs last month, down from 610,000 jobs in October, the Labor Department reported Friday. The unemployment rate edged down slightly to 6.7% in November from 6.9% a month earlier, but that was partly because fewer Americans were seeking work.

………

Employers boosted jobs in transportation and warehousing last month, likely reflecting holiday hiring for e-commerce roles. Government payrolls declined by nearly 100,000, largely reflecting the roll-off of temporary workers hired for the 2020 census. Employment also fell in the retail category that includes bricks-and-mortar stores.

………

Economists say there are persistent risks of labor-market scarring. Many individuals, facing increased child-care responsibilities or limited job opportunities, have stopped looking for work altogether during the pandemic. The labor-force participation rate, or the share of Americans working or looking for work, was 61.5% in November. That is up from April’s trough, but remains near the lowest level since the 1970s.

The number of individuals out of the labor force who want a job increased in November to 7.1 million, Friday’s Labor Department report said.

The best metric we have for all of this is workforce participation, and it remains down.

In fact, it reached its peak 20 years ago, though the aging of the workforce has something to do with this.

From the perspective of the average job seeker, we have been in a recession for 20 years, which might explain and Trump Evil Minions™.

A Feature, Not a Bug

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It appears that Facebook (and as an aside, Google, Amazon, IBM, and the rest of them) have been using the various foreign worker programs to pay their employees less,which is in direct conflict with the black-letter law.

The Justice Department on Thursday sued Facebook over allegations that it discriminated against Americans in the way it hired temporary foreign workers for thousands of well-paid positions.

The lawsuit contends that Facebook failed to properly advertise at least 2,600 jobs — and consider applications from U.S. citizens — before it offered the spots to foreign workers whom the tech giant was sponsoring for green cards granting permanent residence.

Facebook’s practices violated federal laws that require employers to demonstrate that there are no qualified U.S. workers available before it offers positions to temporary foreign workers it is sponsoring, the Justice Department said. The government sought unspecified monetary damages and other penalties against the tech giant for the alleged violations, which occurred in 2018 and 2019.

“Our message to workers is clear: if companies deny employment opportunities by illegally preferring temporary visa holders, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable,” Eric S. Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

Facebook said it could not comment on the now-pending litigation, but spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement the company had been cooperating with the Justice Department fully on its probe and disputes the allegations in the complaint.

………

Facebook, in particular, long has sought to expand the ranks of high-skilled foreign laborers in the United States, including programs such as the H-1B visa, as they aim to recruit the critical talent necessary to power their highly technical operations. Trump, however, has sought to restrict such programs in recent months — announcing in October, for example, new limits on the visas that later drew broad corporate blowback.

In its complaint, the Justice Department said Facebook has eschewed its traditional hiring process in cases where it wanted to hire an employee on an H-1B visa for a permanent position. When a temporary visa holder sought such a job, Facebook “diverged from its normal recruiting protocols,” according to the government, opting in some cases against “advertising the position on its external website.”

If a U.S. worker applied for one of these jobs — and Facebook determined they were qualified — the company appeared to hire them in a different capacity, the lawsuit found. Federal law generally only allows a company to sponsor a temporary worker for a permanent position in cases where there is no qualified U.S. applicant.

This is not how the system is SUPPOSED to work, but it is how it ACTUALLY works.

Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, the H1B and L1A programs are used to hire cheap, not hiring people with skills unavailable elsewhere.

This has been an open secret since at least 1982, when I was told by someone at what is now the Massachusetts DUA not to even bother applying.

Your Monolith Update

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The “whacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real,” has weighed in on this whole monolith thing.

I suppose that it was inevitable that the Christo-Fascist right would decide that we were being too nice to aliens.

No, I don’t mean foreigners, I mean that they are bigoted against, “With her pink antenna and her polka dot skin And the 24 dimples on her chinny chin chin, And the hydrogen sulfide of her hair,” people.

They tore down the metal menhir, and erected a wooden cross.

I guess we should be grateful that they did not set the cross alight:

The new California monolith was torn down overnight by a group of right-wing young men who livestreamed their vandalism in a grainy video posted on the blockchain streaming site DLive.

In the video, a group of three men are seen pushing the statue over and chanting “America First” and “Christ is King.” The men, one of whom was wearing a “Make America Great Again” headband, called part of the monolith’s construction “gay” then replaced it monolith with a wooden cross. It is a decidedly bleak turn in the ongoing monolith saga that has generally been a delightful distraction for a world wracked by a pandemic.

“Christ is king in this country. We don’t want illegal aliens from Mexico or outer space,” a man in the video says. “So let’s tear this bitch down.”

Seriously, this monolith has had the shortest life cycle of any meme ever.

This

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Airbnb went to the Canadian government looking for Covid aid. The Canadian government made moves to end Airbnb’s tax evasion instead.

For the uninitiated, this is called, “Good government,” and we need to see more of this:

It’s about to get a lot more expensive to stay at short-term rentals in Canada as Ottawa announced a new tax on Airbnb and other short-term accommodation platforms.

“In order to ensure that the GST/HST applies consistently and effectively with respect to supplies of short-term accommodation in Canada facilitated by platforms, the Government proposes to apply the GST/HST on all supplies of short-term accommodation in Canada facilitated through a digital platform,” according to the federal government’s fiscal update released on Monday by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland[1].

Platforms themselves will now be required to collect and remit those taxes in cases where property owners fail to do so.

“In these circumstances, the accommodation platform operator would be deemed to be the supplier of the short-term accommodation,” the update reads. “This approach recognizes their necessary and fundamental role in making these supplies, and limits administrative and compliance costs for the parties involved.”

One reason that short-term rentals have been cheaper than hotels is because hotels had to collect and pay sales tax while Airbnb didn’t.

Provinces or British Columbia, Quebec and Saskatchewan already apply a sales tax on Airbnb accommodation.

………

The tax will come as a major blow to Airbnb, who had asked for the government to bail out the platform’s hosts in April.

The Parliamentary Secretary for Housing Adam Vaughan dismissed that request with one word: “No”.

Good.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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Initial unemployment claims fell by 75,000 this week:

New applications for unemployment benefits fell last week after a recent jump, an indication that layoffs are easing but remain high as the labor market continues to recover from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and related restrictions.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 75,000 to a seasonally adjusted 712,000 in the week ended Nov. 28, the Labor Department said Thursday. That follows two consecutive increases and comes amid evidence that the economy continues to recover from the spring’s shutdowns, but at a slower pace. Last week’s level was only 1,000 more than the lowest level recorded since March, and well down from this year’s peak of nearly 7 million—but was still higher than any level recorded before 2020.

Several economists said they see the latest decrease as a possible anomaly related to last week’s Thanksgiving holiday. The data tends to be volatile around holidays, which affect states’ ability to process claims.

I’m not sure how accurate the numbers are going to be the rest of the year, but they remain historically high.

Ohio

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The Ohio Health Department has recommended that Ohioans avoid travel to Ohio. 

I am not sure exactly how this is supposed to work:

According to News 5 Cleveland, the Ohio Department of Health has expanded the list of states on their COVID-19 travel advisory list. But one new addition to the list was confusing: Ohio itself.

“Ohio has been added to the Ohio Department of Health’s COVID-19 Travel Advisory map, meaning the state is recommending Ohioans avoid traveling to Ohio, and those entering Ohio after traveling from Ohio are advised to self-quarantine in Ohio for 14 days,” reported Ian Cross. “Obviously, outside of The Matrix or a Christopher Nolan movie, this is physically impossible.”

“It should also be noted that while Ohio appears on the ODH travel advisory map, it is not listed in the ODH news release which recommends the 13 actual states that Ohio residents should avoid or self-quarantine if traveling from,” continued the report. “To be clear, you are free to move about the state.”

D’oh!

For Facebook, Fraud is a Feature, Not a Bug

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For a number of years, I have noted that Facebook has knowingly been defrauding advertisers.

So, when Mark Zuckerberg’s monster is forced to admit that its advertising models and tools had been cheating them, I am disinclined to believe that this was an accident.

Whenever we hear about these “mishaps”, they ALWAYS seem to accrue to the benefit of of Zuckerberg’s wallet.

They are only making an apology because they got caught:

Facebook Inc. is offering millions of dollars in credits to some advertisers after discovering a glitch in a tool that tells advertisers how effective their ads may be in driving results, such as getting consumers to download an app or purchase a product.

Facebook’s “conversion lift” tool overestimated some campaign results for 12 months, the company quietly told its advertisers this month. The glitch skewed data that advertisers use to decide how much money to spend with the company.

It isn’t the first problem Facebook has discovered in its systems to measure advertisers’ campaigns, and it is not likely to dent Facebook’s ad revenue. But some ad buyers said the latest gaffe has hurt confidence in the company’s metrics at a time when many businesses are navigating the pandemic by trying to cut costs and make sure their ad spending performs.

………

The issue is particularly acute for certain categories such as retail, where marketers are spending as much as 5% to 10% more on Facebook and other performance-centric advertising channels to recover business lost during the early stages of the pandemic, said the chief executive of one digital agency that spends hundred of millions of dollars advertising on Facebook every year.

………

Facebook’s offer of credits extends to some advertisers that used the tool when the error went undetected, from August 2019 through August 2020.

………

“More so than past measurement problems with Facebook’s ad platform, this error has the potential to be extremely serious,” the agency wrote in the note to clients. “The fact that it led to a systematic overstatement of ad performance, combined with the yearlong duration of the error, likely misinformed media budget allocations. These misallocations came at the expense of both advertiser media efficiency and Facebook’s competitors.”

So it harmed Facebook’s competitors?  Imagine that.

Facebook, which said it fixed the error in September, told advertisers about it this month, according to a memo that Facebook sent clients. The company is basing the amount of credits it is issuing to advertisers on an analysis that shows how much the error may have affected their actual investments during the period following the lift study.

Some ad buyers are also questioning the analysis Facebook is using to determine advertisers’ compensation—criticizing the tech giant for not being transparent enough in how it determined who receives ad credits and how, exactly, compensation was calculated, as well as details on steps Facebook is taking to ensure such errors don’t occur again.

“This can’t just be covered with a one-time compensation in credits,” said OMD’s Mr. Adamski. “It needs that reconciliation for every single client on how did it influence the investment decisions we made.”

Marketers aren’t likely to turn away from Facebook despite the incident, said Kevin Simonson, vice president of social for digital marketing agency Wpromote LLC, which spends more than $100 million a year on Facebook ads on behalf of clients.

“This particular error would impact strategy regarding what creative to use and what audiences to spend against, which could be significant to some extent, but it’s not going to be significant to a degree that’s going to cause any brand (in this day and age) to not do Facebook,” Mr. Simonson said in an email. “It’s more like to what degree.”

News of the glitch was reported last week by industry publication AdExchanger.

 For Facebook, the only crime is to get caught.

This Is Not a Bad Thing

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It appears that the City of London’s position as money launderer to the world is threatened by Brexit.

Financial companies are moving their EU operations to nations that will stay in the EU.

While the PTB in the UK are freaking out about this, this is actually a good thing.

The average Briton has been harmed by the growth of the UK financial industry, much in the same way that US citizens have been harmed by the US financial industry.

Above a certain size, a bloated financial industry reduces growth and becomes parasitic.

London will become more affordable for people who do productive work, and the resources and brain power that have been devoted to financial engineering will go to productive pursuits.

If these people move to Paris, or Frankfurt, or Brussels, it will make the lives of the people there worse, and the lives of the people in south east England better.

The UK will end up a more humane and more equal place as a result.

This Sh%$ is Getting Completely Out of Hand

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First Utah, then Romania, and now a mystery monolith has appeared in California.

This is getting old:

The local newspaper in the small town of Atascadero, on the central California coast, reported that the silvery column had been found atop Pine mountain where dozens of local hikers made the trip to view it – and post their pictures on the internet.

“The three-sided obelisk appeared to be made of stainless steel, 10-feet tall and 18 inches wide. The object was welded together at each corner, with rivets attaching the side panels to a likely steel frame inside,” the Atascadero News reported.

🚨 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨 🚨

There is currently a monolith at the top of Pine Mountain in Atascadero!!

(Photos by @Atownreporter) pic.twitter.com/0vPhEWYkeY

— Connor Allen (@ConnorCAllen) December 2, 2020

This has gone from the most intriguing mystery out there to ……… Well ……… Planking in about 2 weeks.

The Ukraine Being the Ukraine Again

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In news that should surprise no one, a Ukrainian Jewish professor was fired for protesting a monument to a man who organized murderous pogroms against Jews.

Guys, you need to stop this.  You are making the Russians look like David Ben Gurion:

A Jewish journalism professor says he was fired from a Ukrainian university for his opposition to a statue honoring a militia leader whose troops killed Jews in pogroms.

The case is a rare example of real-life implications stemming from the heated debate in Ukraine on nationalist memory that has stayed for the most part in the realm of theoretical exchanges.

Zoriy Fine, a photographer from the city of Vinnytsia, says he was fired from the Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University just two weeks after he was appointed to work there as a lecturer on journalism in 2017, according to an 11,000-word account he published last week.

Fine says his former employers told him he was dismissed for speaking out against a statue of Simon Petlyura, a politician and militia leader who fought for Ukrainian independence in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Some of Petylura’s loyalists killed 35,000 to 50,000 Jews in a series of pogroms between 1918 and 1921.

………

The university denies Fine’s claims. He resigned “of his own will” and the university had no intention of firing him, a spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Fine says the experience made him leave Ukraine for Poland, where he lives as a “21st century dissident,” he wrote.

According to Fine, he was dismissed shortly after publishing on his website a letter to his late father telling him that “it’s good that you didn’t live to see” the veneration of Petlyura, whose militiamen killed Fine’s paternal great-grandfather in 1919.

Fine says he has remained silent on the affair until now for fear that speaking out might harm the chances of his daughter graduating from medical school, he wrote. He published his story upon her graduation.

It should be remembered that the worst of the Ukrainian body politic was specifically empowered by  the Obama administration, in particular Victoria Nuland, as a matter of policy.

Collaborating with Nazis never works out well.

Again?

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It looks there will be new elections in Israel for the 4th time in as 2 years. 

This is a mark of the bitter decisiveness of Netanyahu’s (יִמַּח שְׁמו) politics as well as the inability of the opposition to offer the electorate a positive reason to vote for them. (Sound familiar?)

Israel faced the prospect of political chaos once again Wednesday when lawmakers approved a preliminary measure that would dissolve the turbulent coalition government, putting the country on a path to its fourth election in two years.

The vote of 61 to 54 to advance the proposal marked another escalation of a political crisis that has left the country with only a caretaker government for more than a year and a largely dysfunctional unity coalition during the mounting coronavirus pandemic and accompanying economic collapse.

………

But the push to topple the coalition got a major boost when Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White party that shares power with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, announced he would support ending the government.

Gantz, who battled Netanyahu to inconclusive results over three previous elections, agreed to join his rival in a coalition government in April as coronavirus cases were beginning to spiral. He became both the defense minister and an “alternate” prime minister scheduled to rotate into the top job in autumn 2021.

But after seven tumultuous months, he effectively declared the power-sharing effort sharing a failure, accusing Netanyahu of bad-faith political maneuvers meant to prolong his grip on power.

This is not a surprise.

In addition to being outrageously evil, Netanyahu is outrageously crooked, and he knows that when leaves his post as PM, he will be in the dock, and in jail shortly after that.

My advice to the opposition is to actually have a platform beyond, “Netanhahu bad,” because you need to offer voters a reason to vote FOR you beyond the fact that the other guy is a corrupt evil SOB.

Crap

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While waiting to be demolished, as it was deemed irreparable, Puerto Rico’s giant Arecibo radio telescope has collapsed.

So not only can the United States not build big things any more, not only can the United States not maintain big things that it cannot build any more, but it cannot even demolish them in a timely manner:

A huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century collapsed on Tuesday, officials said.

The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet below.

The US National Science Foundation had earlier announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100ft gash on the 1,000ft-wide (305m) reflector dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.

………

The telescope was built in the 1960s with money from the US defense department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. It had endured hurricanes, tropical humidity and a recent string of earthquakes in its 57 years of operation.

This sucks.

We Are Doomed

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Just interviewed the head of a major progressive group who said that the Biden transition team reached out after the Tanden nomination to say “aren’t you happy, we met your demands, we brought in a movement leader”

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) December 1, 2020

Biden-world isn’t being cynical with this pick, they actually believe that they are throwing a bone to progressives because they imagine progressives like Neera Tanden. Team Biden really thinks they are picking lots of progressives. https://t.co/5OgJvuJFKe

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 30, 2020

It appears that senior staff in the Biden campaign have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie, because they think that picking Neera Tanden is a favor to liberals.

This actually explains a lot.  

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), now largely alumni of the Obama administration, honestly believe that your life story is your politics, which explains why they pushed the hapless Amy McGrath so hard. 

McGrath was literally the worst political campaigner that I have ever seen in my life

Neera Tanden is not, and has never been a progressive, she’s been a party apparatchik, and the thoroughly despised overseer of a Podesta brothers’ lobbying shop that masqueraded as a think tank.


This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.*

Biden and his Evil Minions™ are going to lead the Democratic Party into an electoral catastrophe that will make 2010 look like Johnson in 1964.

Midterms are base elections, and they think that kicking the base in the nuts is doing said base a favor.

*What, you’ve never seen Ruthless People? Great movie.