Clown show: The Arizona audit

Running list from the Secretary of State. 

PR/spin from the AZ senate here. 

Made-up numbers in the final report.

Ok, those are the links. Here's the short version and I'll post this very belatedly. The GOP idiots in AZ went with the Trump lies that the election was stolen, and tried to find the evidence of it in their state. Since they don't actually know the safeguards in elections, or they're lying bitches, the GOP state senators voted to confiscate all the ballots from Maricopa Country and recheck them. And since they didn't have a plan about how to forge evidence, they had to report that the numbers from the original count were good--well within the margin of error for counting ballots. 

Lesson 1: It's hard to prove rubbish is true. Or maybe impossible. 

Lesson 2: If you're not willing to totally lie, cheat, and forge evidence, you're going to disappoint the audience that doesn't care about truth and reality. 

Unfortuantely, the GOP in AZ don't seem much smarter for this experience. 

Image: seattletimes.com

History: When the GOP pissed off black voters

Black voters were very loyal to the party of Lincoln, which after all fought to end slavery and insisted on rights for the newly freed Americans. I haven't studied this extensively to know when it started changing, but I do know that black Americans were grateful to FDR, and maybe even more so to Eleanor. Many New Deal programs gave black folks a share, and that wasn't common or expected at that time. FDR was getting around 70% of black votes for president, which is quite impressive. 

In 1948, Truman integrated the military, and got 77% of the black vote and that carried over to 1952. Eisenhower must have been relatively popular with black folks because he raised his take from 24% in 1952 to 39% in 1956. 

But this didn't carry over to Nixon, and here's why. Nixon decided to court the white southern vote instead. Maybe this happened because in 1948, white southern Democrats rebelled and formed their own party, the Dixiecrats. This showed the cracks in their loyalty, and probably Nixon took notice, no doubt along with others. So Nixon hoped to court white southern votes, and he did it at the cost of the hopes for equality of black Americans. Martin Luther King felt betrayed. There's little doubt that others did too. Nixon was calculating, and let southern white folks know that they could run their schools their way. 

Also, Kennedy stepped up to support Martin Luther King when he was jailed in Georgia in October '60, and get him released. Be sure to read these last two links because the stories are more emotional than I can convey. 

Kennedy got 68% of the black vote in 1960. In 1964, that surged to 94% for Johnson, and it hasn't dropped back into the 60s yet. For the complex reasons why, ask black folks and read a lot. But I don't think it's an accident. There are reasons for electoral shifts, and it's wise to pay attention to them. 

Image: mashable.com

Covid updates and articles

Publishing another post that's been sitting around. Good links here. 

The year in covid - 2021. Lots of people got vaccinated. There were a few scares with the vaccines, particularly rare blood clots from the Johnson&Johnson (very rare), and heart inflammation (myocarditis), mostly in younger men (somewhat rare). Summer brought a wave of the delta variant. Vaxxed people had some breakthrough cases, but few hospitalizations or deaths. Stupid red states like Texas had a ton of hospitalizations and deaths. And the anti-vaxxers remained dubious even with all the real-life info. The omicron wave started in November and surged fast, wiping out a lot of Christmas and New Year's plans. It was very contagious, but having a recent booster turned out still be quite protective. My family all got booster by December, so we had no covid cases here. 

Now the links:

An article about how masks protect. 

But the best explanation has come from private communication with an acquaintance with a PhD in molecular biology and decades of experience in pharmaceuticals and drug testing. He writes how masks are very helpful even though viruses are so small, 

A respiratory droplet contains water proteins, glycoproteins, salt, and if someone is infectious, SARS-VoV-2 virus.

When they very rapidly evaporate, what gets left behind is a hydrated particle of proteins, glycoproteins, salt, and virus.

It's not naked virus. It is much larger than the cold virus, although still small enough to remain airborne.

And yes, those droplet nuclei can pass fairly easily through a mask. I pointed that out of my original extended reply to you. That's why masks do a poor job of protecting the person wearing them.

But the point is that masks do quite a good job of trapping large respiratory droplets at the source, before they have a chance to evaporate into airborne droplet nuclei.

That's the point. Respiratory droplets get caught at the source before they have a chance to evaporate into droplet nuclei, which remain suspended in the air, and are quite effective at infecting other people.

The heartache of being a covid doctor. How huge the omicron wave was.  What it was like in Kansas City. 

Excellent resource. The report from the independent panel reviewing the Pfizer vaccine test data. Loads of info, like how many subjects were hospitalized. 

So the big ivermectin guru, Dr. Pierre Kory, got covid even though he was following his preventative protocol. Why he didn't change his advice--bias, of course.

Image: pewtrusts.org

Canada's Freedom Convoy

 Catching up on this old story. 

So a lot of truckers in Canada got together to protest mandatory covid vaccination in late January. They convoyed across Canada and descended on Ottawa to protest at parliament. Like a lot of anti-vaxxers, they were long on shouting conspiracy theories and very short on data and realism. They ruined the quality of life in the neighborhoods where they lined the streets with their trucks idling and polluting, blowing their horns at high volume, and generally being annoying to the point that murder was conceivable. 

Of course they were cheered on by US anti-vaxxers. Their fundraising may have been largely from Americans. But at some point, the government shut down their fundraising and seized the money, if I remember correctly. 

This was perhaps the biggest showdown between anti-vaxxers and a national government, so the whole world watched. I hoped it would fail so that US truckers weren't encouraged to pull the same shit here. Eventually, the mild-mannered Canadians got fed up with the US-style raucous rednecks, and clamped down hard. Some police sabotaged extra vehicles, Police surrounded them and managed to get them to disperse. Oh, yeah, Trudeau (the baby prime minister son of a former prime minister) invoked some emergency powers to have the legal tools to arrest scofflaws and throw them in jail. After a bit of grandstanding, he won a vote backing the powers. 

So it went from a cause celebre to a fizzle. Americans tried to copy it, but it never ascended very far and then fizzled. The Canadian protest didn't launch an Arab Spring or anything close to it. But we didn't know if it might. Remember this as only a year after the Jan. 6 coup attempt in Washington DC, so rebellion was still in the air. It could have ignited, but luckily it didn't. No one needs a rebellion based on stupidity and ridiculous internet claims. Also, Russia invaded Ukraine a few weeks later, so Canadian idiots were no longer the biggest news story in the world. Real issues took over. 

Sources: Aggrieved entitlement. White nationalism among the protest leaders. The emergency declaration. The police tighten the circle around the protesters. The biggest outrage was a woman being trampled to death by a mounted officer, but that was a huge exaggeration of the incident. Not even a serious injury. I recognize this blowing issues out of total proportion. 

Image: nbcnews.com

More great assorted links

I'm a fan of history especially history that helps explain the world I live in today. One piece I got to see personally was the science-led ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). I did independent study on the issue while in college in the late 70s, and it's fascinating to look back. Back then, science was more respected and not just a ping pong ball in adversarial politics. 

A great, passionate talk about race relations in the US. Insight after insight. Watch and learn so much that you need to learn. 

Unusual mail-in ballot numbers in Wisconsin. Probably some fraud, but not huge amounts. And during covid, nursing homes were making sure residents got to vote. But that makes sense because residents weren't getting visits. 

Explanation of US oil production and the effects of covid. Demand cratered, pumping didn't slow, the market was over saturated, prices cratered, producers went bankrupt, production dropped sharply. 

The view from Twitter employees on the Musk takeover. Nervous. (Funny, this one fell apart, but here's a historical record.)

Fact-checking the 'blockbuster' expose movie about voter fraud. The premise is very weak--the Dems supposedly had 2000 ballot harvesters, based on cell phone tower ping data. 

The military has a problem with white supremacists. But according to some conservatives, the military is actually trying to censor conservatives. Here are some cases. 

Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense, describes how Trump was unfit to be president. Maybe compare that with Rick Scott's reasons for calling Biden unfit. 

How were voting rights for black people secured? It was a long process, where the federal government ignored the problem for years despite having the mandate right in the 14th amendment to enforce those rights. 

A pilot project sent mental health teams to respond to minor police calls in Denver. It was successful, so maybe we'll see more diverse response teams become more common rather than relying so much on police. 

An software engineer at Google has been suspended for sharing private information. It concerns his opinion that an artificial intelligence (AI) application has achieved sentience. That puts the engineer into an ethical dilemma.

Image: abcnews.go.com

Links from months ago

Charlie Munger, a billionaire investor who is also associated with Warren Buffett, is 97 years old and throwing money into a social experiment in student housing. His idea: students don't need windows to the outside in their dorm rooms. The results aren't good, but he's on his second project in this dream. The first was a dorm for 600 grad students at U Michigan. The second is for 4500 students at UC Santa Barbara. 

A NYT article about how the Biden administration can fight misinformation.. 

The president of Belarus is weaponizing migrants--flying them into Belarus, then dumping them across the borders at the neighbors he doesn't like. 

Ethnic studies will be required for graduation in California high schools. Sounds like a good idea! Not so different from having mandatory health education.

The fast, unorganized withdrawal from Afghanistan happened in part because the Taliban weren't going to extend the ceasefire into September. 

A different kind of misinformation. An anti-BLM claim that Irish slaves were treated worse than African slaves. The story is tracked down, debunked, and shown as the propaganda it is. 

Image: youtube/kobeissi

The future of the GOP

(I've been neglectful of my blog. Catching up with some posts I wrote. This one is from early November 2021.)

I asked what Qanon is going to do. I have to ask the same about the GOP. Not that most of the GOP is as crazy as Qanon folks, but they are in a bind. Trump said the election was stolen from him, but the evidence is so paltry that the claims are frankly embarrassing. So what will the GOP do? In Virginia, the winning governor candidate went along with the charade during the primary, and has now pivoted away from it. 

There's also the problem of the Jan. 6 riots/attempted coup/insurrection/tourist visit to the Capitol. Will Congress be able to set up a commission to investigate and report on it? Uh, it's certainly past time when the commission should have been formed. However, Republicans want to block it without being caught blocking it. Lots of them are in this bind, but probably none more than Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House. He was on the phone with Trump on Jan. 6, so his testimony is extremely important, and perhaps extremely embarrassing. Yes, what a bind. 

Politico: Headaches of Trump running again. The Politico article is over 6 months old, but so much of it still applies. Trump did squander a lot of political capital, and other senior GOP leaders don't know what to do about him. They are flailing in their response because Trump is frankly more popular than the established leadership. There is no old dean or statesman who has the stature to talk sense to the party base. So the situation is frozen until primaries show which view is stronger. 

Image: businessinsider.com