Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Kill it With Fire

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In response to the anti-trust lawsuit filed against it, Google will no longer give favorable placement to media outlets that use its AMP HTML dialectt.

This is a good thing.

First, AMP sucks, second, it was an invitation for Google to violate user privacy and extend its ad and search monopolies, and third, AMP sucks:

Four years after offering special placement in a “top stories carousel” in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring.

“We will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results,” Google said in a blog post.

The company had indicated in 2018 that it would drop the preference eventually. Last week’s announcement of a concrete timeline comes less than a month after the Department of Justice called Google a “monopoly gatekeeper to the internet” in a lawsuit alleging antitrust violations and as pressure mounts on officials in the European Union, which has already fined Google more than $9 billion for antitrust violations.

“I did always think AMP posed antitrust concerns,” said Sally Hubbard, author of the book “Monopolies Suck” and an antitrust expert with the Open Markets Institute. “It’s, ‘If you want to show up on the top of the search results, you have to play by our rules, you have to use AMP.’ ”

………

Whatever prompted the timing of the change, some news sites are relieved that they won’t have to keep using Google’s preferred mobile standard.

“We are encouraged to see Google beginning to outline a path away from AMP,” Robin Berjon, head of data governance at The New York Times, said in a written statement in response to questions from The Markup. “It’s important Google addresses the core challenge with the format, so that it is no longer a requirement for news products and performance ranking.”

News publishers and others have been griping about AMP for years. Some called it Google’s attempt to exert the same kind of control over the larger web that Facebook exerts over posts in its closed system.

That’s because AMP is more than just a set of formatting rules. Once a website sets up an AMP page, Google copies it and stores it on Google servers. When users click on the link for an AMP page in search results—or its news reading app—Google serves up that cached version from its servers.

“AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google,” read a 2018 open letter signed by more than 700 technologists and advocates. “At a scale of billions of users, this has the effect of further reinforcing Google’s dominance of the Web.”

………

In an analysis published by The Markup earlier this year of 15,269 popular searches on Google, we found that AMP-enabled results appeared often, taking up more than 13 percent of the first results page. Google took another 41 percent of the page for its own products.

………

As the news industry struggled over the past decade, with dropping newspaper subscription rates and ad revenue and plateauing online traffic leading to massive job losses, many publishers adopted AMP in hopes that it would help their bottom lines. Most of the roughly 2,000 members of the News Media Alliance, a trade organization that represents newspapers, use it.

“They don’t really feel there is a choice,” said Danielle Coffey, the group’s general counsel and senior vice president.

Her opinion is widely shared.

“We essentially have a coercion by Google upon publishers to allow people to host their content,” said Andrew Betts, a former member of the Technical Architecture Group at the international web standards organization W3C, who has written about his concerns with AMP. “And publishers who decide they don’t want that to happen because they want to serve their own content, thanks very much, will not ever appear in the first set of search results.”

………

And AMP sometimes causes issues that publishers lack the power to fix on their own. In one prominent example, publishers discovered there was no way to allow users to opt out of having their data sold, a requirement under the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect this year.

Talk about burying the lede.

AMP allows Google to take control of user data from media outlets.

Now we know why Google pushed it so hard, they wanted to slurp up more user data.

Trump and His Evil Minions™ Are Melting

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They are melting like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy threw water on her.

It’s a sight: 

Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer who is spearheading the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, held a bizarre news conference on Thursday that quickly devolved into chaos.

At one point, Giuliani’s hair dye could be seen running down his face. At another, the former New York City mayor quoted the comedy film “My Cousin Vinny” to support his arguments.

Much of the press conference consisted of Giuliani rehashing the same conspiracy theories the president has amplified: that mail-in ballots are fraudulent, that election machines were illegally tampered with, that ballots were secretly dumped, and that Democrats masterminded a vast election-rigging scheme to simultaneously win the White House and get destroyed in down-ballot and state legislative races.

………

At one point in the news conference, Giuliani did an impression of Joe Pesci’s character from “My Cousin Vinny” to back up the Trump campaign’s claim that Republican election observers were not allowed to properly watch the ballot counting.

Later in the presser, Giuliani’s hair dye started dripping down his face.

This is a metaphor for something, but I am not completely sure what.

Ajit Pai Does Something Right

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Well, knock me over with a sledge hammer.

The FCC has voted to take back about 75% of the spectrum that it allocated to the auto industry for self driving cars because:

  • It really can not work, because you cannot get deer to wear transmitters.
  • All the technology demonstrations have shown that you do not need anything near a full 75 MHz for this technology.

The automobile industry fought this tooth and nail, because they want to use the space to bombard drivers with advertisements, but the FCC unanimously voted to reduce the allocated bandwidth from 75 MHZ to 30 MHz.  

The intent is to reallocate the spectrum to rural broadband and the like.

Full press release after break:

Public Knowledge Applauds FCC Reclaiming Spectrum to Help Close Digital Divide

By  Shiva Stella   November 18, 2020, , , , ,

Today, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously adopted an Order reclaiming the 5.9 GHz spectrum band from the auto industry in order to help close the digital divide.

In 2004, the agency gave the auto industry 75 MHz of spectrum exclusively for “Dedicated Short-Range Communications” (DSRC) for the purpose of improving public safety. After 20 years of waiting for the industry to deploy DSRC, the FCC will phase out DSRC and replace it with a new, more efficient technology called C-V2X (cellular communication to vehicles (C-V2V) and infrastructure (C-V2I), collectively “C-V2X”).

Based on the record, the auto industry will require only 30 MHz of spectrum for collision avoidance and safety purposes. Rather than allowing the auto industry to use the remaining 45 MHz of free spectrum for commercial purposes such as location-based advertising, under this proposal the FCC will repurpose 45 MHz for rural broadband and next generation WiFi needed to support telemedicine and other high-bandwidth applications.

The 5.9 GHz band sits next to the existing “unlicensed” spectrum band at 5.8 GHz. Adding the 45 MHz to this band will allow existing equipment to support gigabit WiFi necessary for telemedicine, multiple education streams, and other valuable services. Furthermore, access to this additional spectrum will allow wireless internet service providers in rural areas to dramatically increase the stability and bandwidth of connections to the home.  

The following can be attributed to Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge:

“Today’s FCC action is a win for closing the digital divide, a win for closing the homework gap, and a win for auto safety. The addition of 45 MHz of unlicensed spectrum will create a WiFi channel capable of supporting WiFi 6. This will enable wireless providers to dramatically increase the speed and reliability of rural broadband. It will dramatically increase the power of public hotspots and mobile hotspots on which many low-income families rely for access to school and work during the pandemic. Because this relies on already existing technology, the expansion and change to WiFi 6 can happen relatively quickly through software upgrades once the rules become effective. 

“In addition, the FCC will phase out the outmoded vehicle communication technology selected as the standard 20 years ago and will phase in a modern, more efficient technology requiring substantially less spectrum for collision avoidance and safety. The FCC has quite properly denied the auto industry desire to repurpose the excess spectrum for infotainment, behavioral advertising, and other commercial purposes that rely on collecting more and more of the public’s personal data and information. The auto industry should not be allowed to commercialize spectrum intended for public safety — especially when doing so would come at the expense of tens of millions of Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide and the homework gap.”

Oh Lindsey………

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Last week, I wrote about reports that Lindsey Graham was pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out mail-in ballots from counties with large minority populations using signature matching as a pretext.

It appears that there was at least one other witness to this:

………

In an interview Monday with The Washington Post, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, accused the senator of trying to pressure him into tossing out legally cast ballots. And Tuesday, after Graham mistakenly told reporters he had spoken with secretaries of state in Arizona and Nevada, those officials rejected that assertion.

“I have not spoken to Senator Lindsey Graham or any other members of Congress regarding the 2020 election,” Barbara Cegavske, the Nevada secretary of state, said in a statement. Cegavske and Raffensperger are Republicans.

 ………

Old friends and colleagues issued warnings Tuesday that there is a line Graham cannot cross with state election officials.

“If all he’s trying to do is get information, people are entitled to do that. If he’s trying to influence the way they perform their duty, that becomes a bit problematic,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former state attorney general.

In Georgia, state officials showed additional irritation Tuesday with Graham’s intrusion into their world. Gabriel Sterling, a senior staffer in the secretary of state’s office, held a news conference to explain what he heard on the call between Raffensperger and Graham.

“What I heard were discussions of absentee ballots — if there were a percentage of signatures that weren’t truly matching, is there some point where we could go to court and throw out all the ballots,” Sterling said.

Such an action would have disenfranchised many legally cast ballots.

(emphasis mine)

This is not a good look for you, Mr. Graham.

 

Could Someone Please Confirm this Bit of US Senate Minutiae?

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According to this account, the power of the Senate Majority Leader is a matter of tradition in the US Senate, and so the president of the Senate (the Vice President of the US) can simply recognize some other member of the body to bring a motion to the floor.  (A quick Google finds similar arguments here.)

This is intriguing, but I do not think that this is particularly realistic.

Joe Biden pines for the “good old days” of the Senate, and I don’t think that Kamala Harris would be particularly interested in presiding over the Petri Dish for narcissistic sociopaths that is the US Senate 4 days a week, but it would be useful to raise this possibility on the down low, and when questioned, issue a non-denial denial, to move things along.

This would be analogous to what happened during various showdowns about the US debt limit, the Obama administration denied that it was going to use seigniorage (the platinum coin of arbitrary value) to make an end run around Republican demands, but it does appear that the buzz around the concept did moderate reactionary intransigence:

Even if the Democrats don’t win control of the Senate, there is a wayto strip Mitch McConnell of his power for good: priority recognition.

According to Article I, Section 3, Clause 4 of the Constitution, the Vice President is also the President of the Senate. The Majority Leader is not a position that exists anywhere in the Constitution. The reason that the Majority Leader has near-dictatorial powers to control floor votes is because of a tradition that dates back to 1937. The tradition is that the Vice President gives the floor leaders priority recognition. Most notably, this is not a rule in the Senate.

As President of the Senate, Vice President Harris could give any senator priority recognition. That senator could then decide on all legislation that is brought before the entire Senate. Even with a minority in the Senate, Vice President Harris could simply give Chuck Schumer priority recognition. He could decide what is voted on and what isn’t.

This would change everything. Without Mitch McConnell to hide behind, the moderate Republican Senators would be forced to vote down every Cabinet member, bill, resolution, everything that Harris would want done. Without McConnell, anything even remotely popular with at least two [Republican] senators would pass. Including getting a cabinet assembled.

Given that Mitch McConnell is indicating that he will be even more obstructionist and intransigent about Biden than he was about Obama, the threat of this sort of action needs to be on the table as a subtext at the very least.

1 Part COVID Plus 1 Part Trump Fatigue Equals………

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The motion to end debate on gold-standard whack job Judy Shelton failing today.

Charles Grassley is out, having tested positive for Covid-19, and Rick “Bat-Boy” Scott was quarantining after having been exposed to someone who tested positive, so there were not enough votes to approve her:

Judy Shelton’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was blocked in the Senate on Tuesday, with bipartisan opposition to the controversial economist and GOP absences prompted by the coronavirus imperiling her candidacy.

The vote had been expected to be razor-thin for Shelton, who was nominated by President Trump despite her past criticism of the central bank and her unorthodox views of monetary policy. But after the vote was scheduled, two Republicans, Sens. Rick Scott (Fla.) and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), announced they were quarantining themselves after being exposed to the coronavirus and could not attend. (Grassley on Tuesday evening announced he had tested positive for the virus.) Two Republican senators voted against advancing Shelton on Tuesday; a third GOP senator who does not support her, Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), was not in attendance for the vote Tuesday.

The last-minute shifts proved too much for Republicans to overcome, at least for now. Although the GOP holds 53 seats in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was able to muster only 48 Republican senators to end the filibuster on Shelton’s nomination. In the end, he voted against moving the nomination forward as well, a procedural move that allows him to bring up Shelton’s nomination at a later time.

………

Apart from Lael Brainard, Trump has put every other Fed governor in his or her current post. But the seven-seat board has been operating with two vacancies for a few years, and Trump has struggled to get his final nominees through. In 2019, two of Trump’s picks, Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, withdrew their bids after intense scrutiny for their past remarks and views about women jeopardized their chances at confirmation.

Oh, right.  Nominating someone whose qualifications for the position was that he ran a pizza chain.  I remember that now.

Shelton’s nomination was particularly controversial given her calls for a return to the gold standard, which the nation fully abandoned in 1971. She advised Trump’s 2016 presidential run and has been outspoken against the Fed as an institution. She also was criticized for altering some of her views to appear in closer agreement with Trump’s aggressive push for lower interest rates, which some senators worried would insert politics into Fed decisions.

………

Underscoring how critical every Republican vote will be in the waning weeks of this year, McConnell urged senators during a private party lunch Tuesday to be careful and healthy so the GOP-controlled majority can finish work that remains to be done, such as confirming nominees to the circuit courts, according to three people directly familiar with his closed-door remarks.

Am I a bad person for hoping that the chef at this party was brewing a case of Coronavirus, and coughed all over the food?

In perhaps an indication of the Republicans’ middling enthusiasm for Shelton, no GOP senators spoke on the Senate floor in favor of her nomination on Monday or as of Tuesday afternoon. McConnell praised the slate of judicial nominees that the Senate was on track to confirm, but said nothing about Shelton directly.

His counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), was not as tight-lipped.

“Judy Shelton is not only unqualified for the job; she is a threat to our economic recovery and doesn’t belong on the Fed,” Schumer said Tuesday. “And thanks to the bipartisan coalition that opposed her nomination today, she isn’t any closer to being there.”

The election is over, Trump has the attention span of a gnat on a meth binge, and the business elites are not impressed by Shelton.

It’s no surprise that the Republicans are not going to the wall for this one.

Holy Dueling Narratives, Batman

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Last week, I wrote about how the CEO of Pfizer may have timed their vaccine announcement to maximize his profit at prescheduled stock sales.

Today I discover that it wasn’t just Pfizer, it was Moderna and Novavax as well:

Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax: executives at several American laboratories developing COVID-19 vaccines have recently pocketed millions of dollars by selling shares in their companies—raising questions about the propriety of such a move in the midst of a national health crisis.

On the very day that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced preliminary data showing its vaccine was 90 percent effective against the coronavirus, its chief executive Albert Bourla sold shares worth $5.6 million.

There was nothing illegal about this, Pfizer said: the sale took place according to rules allowing company heads to sell shares under predetermined criteria, at a date or for a price set in advance, to avoid any suspicion of insider training.

Under the same rules, several Moderna officials have sold shares worth more than $100 million in recent months.

That company has not placed a single product on the market since its creation in 2010, but the federal government has committed to paying it up to $2.5 billion if its vaccine proves effective.

………

Accountable US, a nonpartisan taxpayers’ advocacy group, has calculated that from the start of the federally coordinated effort to develop vaccines on May 15 until August 31, officials at five made more than $145 million by selling shares.

Meanwhile, over at Moon of Alabama, we have an account of how Anthony Fauci, big Pharma, and the FDA conspired to f%$# Donald Trump’s reelection chances. 

Personally, I’m on the side of greedy pharma execs, because of Occam’s Razor, but I am a cynic:

………

During the summer Trump had been hopeful that a vaccine against the Covid-19 disease could be announced before the election. It would have been proof that his strategy to (not) fight the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had at least one success. The announcement of a vaccine was part of President Trump’s planned ‘October surprises’ to win the election.

Trump’s summer hope that a vaccine success could be announced during October was not unreasonable. Two important vaccines candidate, one from Pfizer with BioNTech and one from Moderna, had been successful tested in their first phases and were ready launch their large phase 3 trials.

In a phase 3 vaccine trial several ten thousand people are put into two groups. The people in one group receive the vaccine, the people in the other one a placebo. One then has to wait and see how many people will get the disease. At certain points a statistical team will look at those cases and check how many occurred in each group. The differences of the number of people in each group who catch the disease is a scale for the vaccines efficacy. For a known group size one can estimate in advance after how many disease cases determinations should be made to show statistical significance.

………

The time plan, on which Trump was certainly briefed, foresaw that the first interim analysis would likely occur in late September or early October.

However Pfizer did not publish any results when the first two interim analysis points were met. On November 9, after the election, Pfizer announced very positive results at the third interim analysis point:

As an aside, I read Moon of Alabama regularly, they regularly have top drawer commentary, particularly on the Middle East, and while they are sometimes contrarian for its own sake, Michael Kinsley disease, and it sometimes tends to be just a bit conspiratorial, they are well worth the read.

World Class Snark

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Loretta Donelan explains that it’s unfair to forgive student loan debt, because if it is, “How Will I Have An Automatic Advantage Over My Peers?”

Recently, I’ve heard a lot of politicians talking about cancelling everyone’s student loan debt. Some people are for it, some people are against it, some people already paid off their loans and don’t want others to have better lives than them, but there’s one thing that no one is talking about: if all my peers’ student loan debt is cancelled, how will I personally have an automatic advantage over them?

It’s maybe a 5 minute read, and it is hysterical.

Today in Mediocre French (With Subtitles)

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Always fun to get RT’d but we’re about ten minutes away from actual French people coming in here and telling me all the mistakes I made (I’ve counted three so far!!)

— Pjörk🐷 (@NicoleConlan) November 12, 2020

Before this, I never truly understood the deep existential angst that is Gritty before this, and it is completely appropriate that it is being said in French. (with subtitles)

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Objectively Pro Nazi

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Not the Republican Party this time, though they are to Nazis what hot fudge is to a sundae, but rather the overwhelming majority of the state security apparatus of the United States of America, at the federal, state, and local levels:

As protests over police brutality and racial justice broke out this summer, often resulting in harsh responses from law enforcement, police officers across the country have been accused of favoring a violent extremist group that took to the streets to oppose those demonstrators.

The latest example of a cozy relationship between law enforcement and the far-right Proud Boys happened in the nation’s capital last week when the Metropolitan Police responded to a stabbing involving members of the Proud Boys and an associate.

Provocateur Bevelyn Beatty and the chairman of the Proud Boys, who was with her, told police they were both stabbed by people associated with Black Lives Matter in a street fight early the morning after the presidential election. The Metropolitan Police Department repeated their claim to media outlets, leading to headlines around the country claiming Black Lives Matter had attacked the Proud Boys.

There’s no evidence Black Lives Matter had anything to do with the incident. Police officials have since walked back their initial statements, saying it’s unclear whether anyone involved was affiliated with political groups.

The department’s willingness to echo the accusations of the Proud Boys is another example of law enforcement’s deference to the group, said Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.

It’s been transparently clear for years that police support white supremacists, and white supremacist violence, while clamping down on left wing protests, particularly when law enforcement misconduct is at the root of those protests.

This must be destroyed root and branch.

Jason Furman Sucks Wet Farts from Dead Pigeons

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This you? https://t.co/feb7Ndm4kO pic.twitter.com/Y08lUEx5dw

— Capricciola🦉 (@Capricciola) November 16, 2020

Obama Administration #1 Wanker

One of the suggestions fro boosting the economy, and one that does not have to go through what will likely be a Republican Senate, is the mass forgiveness student loans.

It would have the effect of removing a burden from millions of recent, and not so recent, college graduates, improving their credit scores and making them more likely to make big ticket purchases, start families, etc.

Jason Furman, one of the strongest advocates of austerity in the Obama administration thinks that this is a bad idea, which, in an of itself, is probably the strongest endorsement for such a policy that you can find.

The post financial crisis economy was a recovery only for the Wall Street banks bailed out, the insurance companies bailed in by Obamacare, and other parasitic speculators who had the ear of Obama, Geithner, and their Evil Minions™.

For some reason ordinary people getting a break is beyond the pale for the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment):

Since the election, the Prospect has been getting a certain degree of attention for a series we did last fall called the Day One Agenda. In it we posited a number of things a Democratic president can do without having to pass new legislation, comprising a full and robust agenda of tangible progress. Considering that Joe Biden may face a hostile legislature as president, with control of the Senate in the hands of Mitch McConnell, the Day One Agenda has taken on new importance.

One of the more high-impact (and controversial) of these measures is the Education Department’s ability to cancel student debt under something called “compromise and settlement authority.” The federal government directly issues almost all student debt, and has the discretion to reduce balances completely, or anything short of that.

Since Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren have been calling for student debt relief by executive authority, it appears that the powers that be are getting nervous about something actually potentially happening, as they’re fashioning a list of reasons to shoot it down. Former Obama administration top economist Jason Furman is taking the lead on this. He started by insisting that student debt forgiveness would be taxable, which… no. There’s a long history here, but suffice to say that the government forgives student debt all the time without making it a taxable event, and the IRS has every discretion to follow its past rulings (and remember this will be Biden’s IRS) and say that student loans are a non-taxable scholarship.

Undaunted, Furman admitted “some ambiguity” with his claim (which I guess is the new way of saying “I was wrong”) but nevertheless stated that student loan forgiveness wouldn’t be worth it because it would only be a “small positive” multiplier from an economic standpoint. “Give someone $10 a year for 10 years and they won’t spend $100 more today,” he wrote.

Now, there are a million reasons to cancel student debt that aren’t economic in nature. Student debt acts like a medieval indenture and if we have the power to eliminate it we should. But on the economic point, what we’ve done with student debt during the pandemic (which maybe Furman doesn’t know about?) makes it more urgent that cancellation proceed on the first day in office. 

……… 

The Trump administration put that pause in effect back in March—there’s that executive branch power flashing again—meaning that 33 million Americans have not needed to make student loan payments since then. This has been an unsung part of the economic effect of coronavirus relief: taking hundreds dollars a month (the average payment is $393) off the books of 33 million people really improves their budget.

But this is coming to an end. Last week the Education Department started informing borrowers that the freeze on payments ends December 31. At one point President Trump said he would extend it, but that was before the election was RIGGED and all non-spiteful governing stopped. So 33 million Americans will have the sudden shock of an additional large bill, with many of them out of work and having exhausted their pandemic assistance and even unemployment benefits.

………

There are those who will preach about the unfairness of it all, that those who didn’t go to college or paid off their loans get nothing. This pitting of people against one another is bad even in the best of times. (There are also plenty of executive actions you can pair with this to make it broad-based; seizing drug patents to lower prescription prices, for example, or high-road contracting that would force all federal contractors to pay a $15/hour minimum wage.) In the worst of times like right now, it’s downright stupid. Forcing billions in payments back would hurt everybody. The family that has to pay again will eat out less, or put off that new piece of furniture they wanted. The entire economy will get socked.

It’s not seizing drug patents.  It’s called compulsory licensing.

Big pharma still gets its vig, it just does not get to print money.

Because Trump likely won’t budge, we’re going to have a chaotic three weeks (absent Congressional action) when student loan payments are back. Biden can make this significantly better in a very visible way. And he can do it by himself.

Do this.

There will be gnashing of teeth from the Republicans and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party (but I repeat myself), but who gives a crap.

F%$# them with Cheney’s dick.

H/t Atrios.

Elon Musk!!!!! Space Karen!!!!

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I will never not laugh at Space Karen https://t.co/InvR5sTRMy pic.twitter.com/92vQfIyzHi

— dan hett (@danhett) November 16, 2020

Total 0wn493

Call it confirmation bias, but I think that my assesment of Elon Musk, that he is a privileged self-important stupid person’s idea of a smart person has been validated:

SpaceX boss Elon Musk was forced to miss his firm’s historic rocket launch after testing positive for Covid-19.

Four astronauts were blasted into orbit aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday night, marking the company’s first fully-fledged crewed mission to the International Space Station.

Mr Musk, who is usually present during major launches, could not attend after receiving two positive coronavirus tests and exhibiting minor symptoms of the virus.

Nasa rules forbid anyone from entering their facilities following a positive test, no matter what their position or role.

………

Mr Musk had previously questioned the legitimacy of the results, claiming that he had tested both positive and negative for Covid-19 on Thursday.

“Something extremely bogus is going on,” he tweeted. “Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test.”

………

In March, Mr Musk declared that “the coronavirus pandemic is dumb.”

Since then, nearly more than 11 million people have been infected and nearly a quarter of a million people have died from the virus in the US alone.

One Twitter user dubbed him “Space Karen” for his perceived indifference towards the pandemic, causing the term to trend across the platform.

Dr Emma Bell responded to his tweet by noting that rapid antigen tests only detect Covid-19 “when you’re absolutely riddled with it”.

She tweeted: “What’s bogus is that Space Karen didn’t read up on the test before complaining to his millions of followers.”

Now, whenever I refer to Elon Musk in the future, he will be “Space Karen”.

Dr. Emma Bell should get a Pulitzer for that.

Yeah, This Is Appalling

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Talk about burying the lede.

 In a Washington Post story about Republicans pressuring the (Republican) Secretary of State to throw out legal ballots, we find this bit of horror from Lindsay Graham:

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

(emphasis mine)

The road that Graham was speeding down was, “Invalidate all the mail in ballots from counties with lots of black and brown people.”

This has been a core Republican value since (checks notes) before John Roberts worked at the Reagan White House.

The party of Abraham Lincoln is now the party of  Jefferson Davis, and one of their most important values is, “Stop n****** from voting.”

I do not know how you find common ground with that.

Again, I invoke Robert Graves’ paraphrase of Germanicus Caesar.

H/t Atrios. 

Linkage

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 Have a memorable review of an unmemorable movie:

Mr. Koch, Would You Please Dine on Excrement and Expire?

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So now, Charles Koch is apologizing for funding the Tea Baggers and creating a hyperpartisan political atmosphere.

F%$# you.  Just f%$# you, and your fortune, which was made building refineries Stalin.

I get it:  Now you want to buy Democrats.

F%$# you:

The billionaire Charles Koch, who has funneled millions into the GOP and conservative movements, reportedly expressed misgivings over how that money had fueled excessive partisanship.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Belkin published Friday, Koch spoke about his new mission of unification across partisan lines.

He also shared with The Journal parts of his new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” in which he said he regretted his partisanship and the divisions it fostered.

“Boy, did we screw up!” he wrote, according to The Journal. “What a mess!”

Koch and his brother David, who died last year, were major players in the rise and shaping of the tea party. The brothers founded the conservative organization Americans for Prosperity in 2004.

In her 2015 book “Dark Money,” the New Yorker writer Jane Mayer tracked how they used their fortunes to amass political influence and further a libertarian agenda.

If there is any justice in the world, Charles Koch will be mauled to death by bears in Grafton, New Hampshire.

About Bloody Time

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The Philadelphia City Council has finally apologized for bombing its own citizens and allowing a city block to burn to the ground. 

It would have been nice if some of the people behind those decisions had actually faced consequences for their actions:

The Philadelphia City Council this week formally apologized for the decision in 1985 to drop an improvised bomb on a rowhouse occupied by the MOVE separatist group, a desperate action that resulted in a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed 61 homes.

The resolution, approved on Thursday, marked the first time that the city had formally apologized for the action. The measure, which also calls for an annual day of remembrance on May 13, the anniversary of the bombing, was sponsored by Jamie Gauthier, a city councilwoman who grew up near the West Philadelphia neighborhood where the bombing happened.

Ms. Gauthier recalled watching the aftermath of the bombing on television as a child, and said that the neighborhood was only now starting to fully recover from the devastation.

“There have been divisions in our city between police and community for decades, and I think if we had done the true work of acknowledging what happened with MOVE and with other acts of police violence, and we had really worked on not only the acknowledgment but building better relationships and working towards reconciliation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the place we are now,” she said in an interview on Friday.

“It was always striking to me that we did this, that our city did this and that no one ever was held accountable,” she added. “I thought that was unconscionable.”

People should have gone to jail and lost their jobs, but a 11 people, including children, were murdered, and a whole block was wiped out, and no one cared because they were black.

Oh God No

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I don’t know who, except for Rahm Emanuel, would even consider giving the disgraced ex-mayor of Chicago a position in the Biden Cabinet, but it appears that he is under consideration:

When former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s name quickly surfaced as a possible transportation secretary in a Joe Biden administration, it came as little surprise to those in the political-media ecosystem.

If the longtime Beltway insider didn’t float his own name for a Cabinet spot, he has plenty of friends up to the task. Soon to turn 61 and out of power since abruptly pulling the plug on a bid for a third mayoral term 26 months ago, the TV pundit, investment banker and informal Biden adviser could be looking for a fourth act on the national stage in his third White House.

But it was a trial balloon those on the other side of the centrist-leftist Democratic divide quickly sought to pierce.

Leading the charge was progressive U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. After telling The New York Times that Emanuel would be “a pretty divisive pick” and signal “a hostile approach to the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party,” Ocasio-Cortez responded to a tweet on the subject by WTTW’s Heather Cherone with this: “We must govern with integrity and accountability. Laquan McDonald’s life mattered.”

………

His policy chops and experience in the White House, in Congress and working on transit projects as mayor make him a strong choice to join presumptive President-elect Joe Biden’s team. But Emanuel is lambasted by some Democrats for his reputation as a pro-Wall Street, anti-teachers union centrist, and especially for his handling of the 17-year-old Black teen’s shooting death by a white police officer who went to prison for it.

His second term was dogged by allegations he sought to keep the now-infamous police dashcam video of the incident from coming out until after he won reelection in 2015.

The city Law Department quickly reached a $5 million settlement in April 2015 with the McDonald family in their lawsuit about the shooting, shortly after Emanuel defeated Jesús “Chuy” García in a mayoral runoff election. The Emanuel administration fought against releasing the video until a Cook County judge ordered it in November 2015.

People will refer to his success as DCCC chair during the 2006 election, but many, if not most of the seats that were picked up resulted from Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy, and not his DCCC supported candidates who underperformed.

This man is a toxic and corrupt self-promoter.  Do not allow him anywhere near the halls of power.

The Tuskegee Vaccine

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Over at Stat, a medical news web site, they are calling for giving priority to giving any new vaccines to peoples of color. 

Taken at face value this seems like a good idea, but when one considers the fact that all of the vaccine candidates have been developed on an accelerated schedule, with Pfizer’s recently hyped entry using a technique never used in human beings before, one can’t help but wonder if the real push for this is to use the minority community as guinea pigs, because even if some of the will be effective and without significant side effects, it is likely that some of them will not be successes:

As the U.S. edges closer to approving a vaccine for Covid-19, a difficult decision is emerging as a central issue: Should people in hard-hit communities of color receive priority access to it, and if so, how should that be done?

Frontline health workers, elderly people, and those with chronic conditions that make them especially vulnerable to Covid-19 are likely to be at the head of the line, but there is also support among public health experts for making special efforts to deliver the vaccine early on to Black, Latino, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, and Native American people — who have experienced higher rates of serious illness and death from the coronavirus.

“Having a racial preference for a Covid-19 vaccine is not only ethically permissible, but I think it’s an ethical imperative,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “The reason is both because of historic structural racism that’s resulted in grossly unequal health outcomes for all kinds of diseases, and because Covid-19 has so disproportionately impacted the lives of people of color.”

………

There is also concern that some groups, especially Black people, might be hesitant to be among the first to get a vaccine, given the history of mistreatment of Black patients in medical research.

“The other challenge you have with saying, ‘We want African Americans to step up first,’  is that we don’t want people to feel that they’re being guinea pigs,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We need to be very careful. We don’t want to give people the perception that they’re being experimented upon.”

Gee, you think? 

The criteria for distribution should be fairly straight-forward:  Where you have large outbreaks, the vaccine goes first.

This Apple Screw Up Points to a Bigger Picture

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Apple rolled out a new operating system for its Macintosh computers, Big Sur, and it slowed down the operation of every Mac with an online connection, whether or not they were running, or even capable of running the upgrade:

Mac users today began experiencing unexpected issues that included apps taking minutes to launch, stuttering and non-responsiveness throughout macOS, and other problems. The issues seemed to begin close to the time when Apple began rolling out the new version of macOS, Big Sur—but it affected users of other versions of macOS, like Catalina and Mojave.

Other Apple services faced slowdowns, outages, and odd behavior, too, including Apple Pay, Messages, and even Apple TV devices.

It didn’t take long for some Mac users to note that trustd—a macOS process responsible for checking with Apple’s servers to confirm that an app is notarized—was attempting to contact a host named ocsp.apple.com but failing repeatedly. This resulted in systemwide slowdowns as apps attempted to launch, among other things.

The big picture here is not that Apple screwed up.  The big picture here, as Jeffrey Paul notes is that your computer no longer belongs to you.  It is under the direct control of a corporation who may or may not have your best interests at heart:

It’s here. It happened. Did you notice?

I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.

On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.

It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.

………

This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.

“Who cares?” I hear you asking.

Well, it’s not just Apple. This information doesn’t stay with them:

  1. These OCSP requests are transmitted unencrypted. Everyone who can see the network can see these, including your ISP and anyone who has tapped their cables.

  2. These requests go to a third-party CDN run by another company, Akamai.

  3. Since October of 2012, Apple is a partner in the US military intelligence community’s PRISM spying program, which grants the US federal police and military unfettered access to this data without a warrant, any time they ask for it. In the first half of 2019 they did this over 18,000 times, and another 17,500+ times in the second half of 2019.

This data amounts to a tremendous trove of data about your life and habits, and allows someone possessing all of it to identify your movement and activity patterns. For some people, this can even pose a physical danger to them.

Big brother is here, and he’s inside of the house.