Author: MC

Master of Truth. A writer who has captured the imagination of many.

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Give credit where credit is due. ESPN analyst hints at notion Nikola Jokic has won MVPs, is favorite to win again because he’s white

Better than the rest.

Give credit where credit is due. ESPN analyst hints at notion Nikola Jokic has won MVPs, is favorite to win again because he’s white. Jokic is averaging a triple-double (24.6 points, 11.7 rebounds, 10.0 assists) for the first-place Denver Nuggets.

Nikola Jokic is the odds-on favorite to win his third-straight NBA MVP Award. The Serbia native is well on his way to becoming the fourth player in NBA history to win three straight MVPs, joining Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Larry Bird.Jokic is averaging a triple-double (24.6 points, 11.7 rebounds, 10.0 assists) for the first-place Denver Nuggets.

But former NBA champion Kendrick Perkins, now an ESPN analyst, says there’s racial hypocrisy in the award’s voting.

Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic gestures after being called for a foul in the second half of a game against the Charlotte Hornets Dec. 18, 2022, in Denver.

Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic gestures after being called for a foul in the second half of a game against the Charlotte Hornets Dec. 18, 2022, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

On Wednesday’s edition of “First Take,” Perkins acknowledged only three players since 1990 have won an MVP despite being outside the top 10 in points per game: Jokic in his first MVP campaign in 2020-21, Dirk Nowitzki (2006-07) and Steve Nash (2004-05, 2005-06).

“What do those guys have in common? I’ll let it sit there and marinate. You think about it,” he said, testing co-host Stephen A. Smith.

 

 

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Back Door Power Grab Links from other news sources. Reprints from others. Social Venues-Twitter

Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists.

Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists. twitter Photo

Thanks to Matt and Racket News for this.

 

Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project

Matt Taibbi

 

A new #TwitterFiles thread will be dropping in a few hours, at noon EST. It follows up the Hamilton 68 story of a month ago with examples of state-funded digital blacklisting campaigns run amok. It’s self-explanatory, but some advance context might help:

In 2015-2016, during the brief, forgotten period when Islamic terrorism was fading as a national obsession and Trumpian “domestic extremism” had not yet become one, Barack Obama made a series of decisions that may yet prove devastating to his legacy.

The short version is he signed Executive Order 13271, establishing a “Global Engagement Center” (“GEC”) to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.” This act got almost no press and even within government, almost no one noticed.

In the bigger picture, however, a lame duck president kick-started the process of shifting the national security establishment’s focus from counterterrorism to “disinformation.” Whether by malfunction or design, this abrupt course change of Washington’s contracting supertanker would have dramatic consequences. In fact, the tale of how America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against “threats” in our own population, might someday be remembered as the story of our time, with collective panic over “disinfo” defining this generation in much the same way the Red Scare defined the culture of the fifties.

This is a complicated story and it would be a mistake to jump to simplistic conclusions, like that the Global Engagement Center (humorously nicknamed “GECK” or “YUCK” by detractors in other agencies) is an evil Orwellian mind-control scheme. It isn’t. But for a few crucial bad decisions, it could have fulfilled a useful or at least logical mission, much as the United States Information Agency (USIA) once did. However, instead of stressing research and public reports, as the USIA did when responding to Soviet accusations that Americans had caused the AIDS crisis, GEC funded a secret list of contractors and employed a more surreptitious approach to “counter-disinformation,” sending companies like Twitter voluminous reports on foreign “ecosystems” — in practice, blacklists.

GEC was not conceived as a partisan mechanism to defang conservative media, despite the recent true and damning series of reports by the Washington Examiner, outlining how a GEC-funded NGO in England used algorithmic scoring to de-rank outlets like The Daily Wire and help papers like the New York Times earn more ad revenue. The blacklisting tales you’ll be reading about later today on Twitter also primarily target American conservatives, though GEC and GEC-funded contractors also target left-friendly movements like the gilets jaunes (yellow vests), socialist media outlets like Canada’s Global Research, even the Free Palestine movement.

The scary angle on GEC is not so much the agency as the sprawling infrastructure of “disinformation labs” that have grown around it.

Underneath America’s love affair with “anti-disinformation” in the Trump years — which expressed itself in the seemingly instant construction of a sprawling complex of disinformation studies “labs” at institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Clemson, UT, Pitt, William and Mary, the University of Washington, and other locations — lay a devastating secret. Most of these “experts” know nothing. Many have skill, if you can call mesmerizing dumb reporters a skill, but in the area of identifying true bad actors, few know more than the average person on the street.

This is described repeatedly in the #TwitterFiles. In one sequence Twitter was contacted by Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times, who was writing a hagiographic profiles of “disinformation” warrior Renee DiResta, who’d achieved some renown as a campaigner against vaccine misinformation. Frenkel wrote Twitter to ask why they hadn’t hired “independent researchers” like DiResta, Jonathan Albright, and Jonathon Morgan — coincidentally, all hired witnesses of the Senate Intelligence Committee — to help Twitter “better understand” its own business.

At the sight of Frenkel’s provocative note, some Twitter execs lost it.

“The word ‘researcher’ has taken on a very broad meaning,” snapped Nick Pickles. “Renee is literally doing this as a hobby… Of those three only [Albright] is the most credible, but… the bulk of his work is Medium blogs.”

“Like CVE before it, misinformation is becoming a cottage industry,” agreed comms official Ian Plunkett, referencing “countering violent extremism,” a.k.a. counterterrorism.

Today’s thread among other things will detail crude digital blacklisting schemes dreamed up by this new cottage industry. Each features the same design “flaw,” in which giant lists of supposed foreign disinformationists somehow also come to include ordinary Americans, often with the same political leanings.

In one ridiculous case, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), a GEC-funded entity, sent Twitter a huge list of people they suspected of “engaging in inauthentic behavior… and Hindu nationalism more broadly.” You’ll see the list to judge. As was the case with the “Hamilton 68” story, in which a spook-laden think tank purported to track accounts linked to “Russian influence activities” while really following the likes of @TrumpDyke and @TimeForTrumppp, this DFRLab list of “Hindu nationalists” is weirdly packed with real septuagenarian Trump supporters.

One, a woman named Marysel Urbanik who immigrated from Castro’s Cuba in her youth, struggled to understand why a Washington think tank had sent Twitter a letter ID’ing her as either “inauthentic” or a Hindu nationalist.

“They say I’m what?”

“A Hindu nationalist,” I said. “Well, suspected.”

“But I’m Cuban, not Indian,” she pleaded, confused. “Hindu? I wouldn’t even know what words to say.”

Such listmakers are either employing extremely expansive definitions of hate speech, extremely inexact methods of identifying spam, or they’re doing both in addition to a third thing: keeping up a busywork campaign for underemployed ex-anti-terror warriors, who don’t mind racking up lists of “foreign” disinformationists that just happen to also rope in domestic undesirables.

In his book Information Wars, the original nominal head of GEC and former Time editor Rick Stengel explained an epiphany he had that allowed him to tie the fight against “foreign” disinformation to matters domestic. It happened when Stengel watched a YouTube video of Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin:

He castigated Hillary Clinton’s campaign as a bunch of ‘“storm troopers.” He lambasted what he called the American “obsession with the fake Russian threat.” He said it was an excuse for losers… The production values were poor, the audience was small, but the video revealed an extraordinary mirroring of language and ideas between Dugin and other Russian voices and candidate Trump… The notion that there was some kind of shared rhetorical playbook just seemed too fanciful to believe. While the messages did not exactly repeat each other, they certainly rhymed.

At the same time as Dugin was uploading his video, according to public U.S. intelligence, the GRU—the Russian military intelligence service—began going through the email accounts of DNC officials…

Stengel didn’t need to prove an actual link between Dugin, Russia, and Trump. It was enough to imply it, by placing stories about the GRU near Trump’s name, while asserting Trump and Dugin’s ideas “rhymed.”

This is probably what’s going on in the DFRLab list: one assumes many BJP supporters have views that “rhyme” with what one might call the American version of nationalism, #MAGA. Similarly, a GEC report sent to Twitter about “Russian Pillars of Disinformation” stressed that even actors who “generate their own momentum” online should be considered part of a propaganda “ecosystem.” Independence, the GEC report stressed, should not “confuse those trying to discern the truth.”

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Education Links from other news sources. Reprints from others.

Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?

Cheaters. Illustrations by María Jesús Contreras for The Free Press
Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?

Thanks to the Free Press for this article.

Students say they are getting ‘screwed over’ for sticking to the rules. Professors say students are acting like ‘tyrants.’ Then came ChatGPT . .

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes.

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me.

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten.

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them.

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.”

Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.

“It’s the Wild West when it comes to using emerging technologies and new forms of access to knowledge,” Gregory Keating, who has a joint appointment at USC’s Department of Philosophy and Gould School of Law, told me. “Faculties and administrations are scrambling to keep up.”

Amy Kind, a philosophy professor at Claremont McKenna, said that, at the prestigious liberal arts college just east of Los Angeles, “Cheating is a big concern among the faculty.”

Nor do students have much incentive to turn back the clock: they’re getting better grades for less work than ever.

Exhibit A: Greye Dunn, a recent Boston University graduate who majored in international relations and minored in Spanish. Dunn said he never cheated per se, but he benefited handsomely from the new, lower standards. His pre-Covid GPA was just north of 3.0; during Covid, he averaged a 3.5. And he knows plenty of students who flouted the rules.

“Many students want the credential, and they just want the easiest way to get that,” Gabriel Rossman, a sociology professor at UCLA, told me.

A sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious business school, who declined to give me her name, said: “They’re here for the Wharton brand, a 4.0 GPA, and to party.”

“The students see school as a stepping stone,” Beyda told me. He meant they went on to graduate school or to jobs at consulting firms like McKinsey or Bain or in finance at Goldman Sachs, and then a spouse, a house, children, private school, vacations in Provence—all the nice things in life.

“Anything that you miss, you can just learn on YouTube,” he said.

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Leftist Virtue(!) Links from other news sources. Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

Trump’s rollback of regulations can’t be blamed for Ohio train wreck. So says the WP.

Not Trumps fault. Brooke LaValley-Pool/Getty Images

“I had nothing to do with it.”

— Former president Donald Trump, asked about criticism of his pulling back rail regulations, in East Palestine, Ohio, Feb. 22

Trump’s comment during his tour of East Palestine was widely interpreted to mean that he had nothing to do with regulatory rollbacks during his presidency — an odd remark since he frequently celebrated how many regs he had eliminated. (He often exaggerated the impact of his record, but that’s another story.)

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, said Trump was speaking more generally about regulatory changes being falsely blamed for the derailment of 38 train cars, including 11 carrying hazardous materials, in East Palestine on Feb. 3. Biden administration officials have strongly suggested that the Trump administration buckled under pressure from rail industry lobbyists, laying the groundwork for an accident.

We decided to examine every possible regulatory change made under Trump that could be related to the accident and assess whether it could have made an impact. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, said the Norfolk Southern crew received an alert about an overheated wheel bearing and was trying to slow the train before it came off the tracks.

From our analysis, none of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.

Electronically controlled pneumatic brakes

On long trains, these “ECP” brakes, which use electronic signals along the length of a train, are considered superior to an older braking system that uses compressed air to individually stop each car. The Trump administration in 2017 repealed an Obama-era rule that would have required ECP brakes on “high hazard” trains that carry flammable hazardous materials. A Government Accountability Office report had cast doubt on the Transportation Department’s estimates of the benefits from the requirement.

The GAO study was a requirement included, at the behest of industry, in a 2015 law signed by Obama, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, after dozens of trains hauling oil and ethanol crashed. The accidents included one in 2013 in Quebec that killed 47 people and destroyed the town of Lac-Mégantic. The Trump DOT determined that revised estimates found the costs outweighed the benefits. The Associated Press later discovered that the DOT estimate had miscalculated the potential benefits — what officials claimed at the time was an “unintentional error.” Even with a correction, the department still said the costs outweighed the benefits.

The Biden administration has not acted to reinstate the rule, which would have gone into effect starting in 2021 if Trump had not shelved it.

Relevance to derailment: Minimal. The train was not equipped with ECP brakes; instead its locomotive used dynamic braking — electric traction motors acting as generators, which slow the train and dissipate mechanical energy as heat. When the crew received the alert about the overheated wheel bearing and engaged the dynamic brake, an automatic emergency brake application kicked in to stop the train, the NTSB said. That’s a full application of a train’s main air brakes that takes place when the train senses that air-brake hoses between rail cars have been disconnected — indicating the train had already derailed.

NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said on Twitter that the repealed rule was not relevant to the accident. “The ECP braking rule would’ve applied ONLY to HIGH HAZARD FLAMMABLE TRAINS. The train that derailed in East Palestine was a MIXED FREIGHT TRAIN containing only 3 placarded Class 3 flammable liquids cars,” she wrote. “This means even if the rule had gone into effect, this train wouldn’t have had ECP brakes.”

But Cynthia Quarterman, who helped write the rule as administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration during the Obama administration, told The Fact Checker that if the rule had not been delayed and then shelved, she believes ECP brakes might have been widely adopted by industry and could have ended up on this train.

Brake safety inspections

The Trump administration in 2020 issued a rule that extended how much time a freight rail train could be parked with its air brake system depressurized before requiring a new brake inspection. The rule permitted U.S. trains to be off air for as long as 24 hours, similar to the rule in place in Canada since 2008; before the rule change, the limit was four hours. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimated the change would result in 110,000 fewer brake inspections, saving the industry $500 million over 10 years.

Relevance to derailment: Unclear. There is no determination yet that the braking system played a role in the accident.

Two-person crew requirement

After the Lac-Mégantic crash, which had only one crew member on the train, the Obama administration in 2016 proposed a rule to require two-person crews on all trains. The Trump administration withdrew the proposal in 2019, saying “no direct conclusions could be drawn about train crew staffing’s safety impact” on Lac-Mégantic or other accidents. The Biden administration has said it will seek to revive the rule.

Relevance to derailment: None. The 149-car train that derailed had two crew members plus a trainee on board.

Minimum rail safety requirements

The Trump administration in 2020 revised minimum safety requirements for railroad track, which among other measures allowed for quicker inspections.

Relevance to derailment: None. The NTSB inspected the tracks, and the preliminary report makes no mention of any problem.

Recurring safety audits

The FRA regulates the safety of railroad tracks, and railroad companies are responsible for maintaining and inspecting tracks. Under the Obama administration, the FRA in 2015 began audits known as the Crude Oil Route Track Examination (CORTEx) program, which sent dozens of additional inspectors to specific regions to conduct track inspections along crude oil routes. The last audit was in 2018, and the program was not renewed for the rest of the Trump administration.

In 2021, the Biden administration launched a different audit program that focused on railroad companies, beginning with Union Pacific Railroad.

Relevance to derailment: None. In 2022, FRA conducted an audit of Norfolk Southern, the company involved in the Ohio incident, and made a number of recommendations for improvement. “FRA observed inconsistencies in NS’s operational testing and inspection program, ranging from access to and accuracy of records, to the methods and processes used to prioritize the testing of rules that prevent accidents,” the audit said. “The failure to properly administer and implement the program of operational testing can diminish the capacity to correct accident/incident and injury trends.”

Deregulation of ethylene oxide

The Trump administration, bowing to industry pressure, ignored federal scientists and adopted weaker standards for regulating emissions of ethylene oxide, a hazardous air pollutant that could pose a risk of lymphoid and breast cancer. The Biden administration has said it would reconsider the rule.

Ethylene oxide is used to manufacture ethylene glycol, a toxic chemical used in hydraulic brake fluids, antifreeze, inks and paints. Ethylene glycol, generally a clear, syrupy liquid, was found near the derailment site.

Relevance to derailment: None. The rule concerned emissions by chemical plants, not the synthetic chemical released in the accident.

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Crime How sick is this? Links from other news sources. Politics Reprints from others. Uncategorized

But, but we were told it was led by Donald Trump. Government watchdog report finds FBI, Capitol Police identified but didn’t share “credible threats” before Jan. 6

Government watchdog report. He knew. DOJ Photo.

This is a CBS News report. But why did this come out now? The Report says the Capitol Police knew, so Schumer, the DC Mayor, and Pelosi Knew ahead of time. I’m guessing that if the FBI knew and did tell Trump, that’s why he wanted to send in the National Guard.

Government watchdog report finds FBI, Capitol Police identified but didn’t share “credible threats” before Jan. 6.

Federal agencies responsible for protecting the U.S. Capitol did not “fully process” or share critical information — including about militia groups arming themselves ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — a failure that stymied the response that day, according to a new 122-page report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. 

The FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police had seen “threats that were true or credible” days ahead of the assault on the Capitol building, the report said. But much as with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a failure by multiple agencies to share information and connect dots left those securing the Capitol unprepared for the onslaught.

“Some agencies did not fully process information or share it, preventing critical information from reaching key federal entities responsible for securing the National Capital Region against threats,” the report said.

The GAO report also revealed specific tips that were obtained by some federal agencies ahead of the attack. For example, the Capitol Police obtained information “regarding a tip that a member of the Proud Boys had recently obtained ballistic helmets, armored gloves, vests, and purchased weapons, including a sniper rifle and suppressors for the weapons.” 

The tip, which the Secret Service also obtained from its Denver Field Office, revealed the individual flew with others to Washington D.C. “on January 5, 2021” to incite violence. According to the report, the Secret Service interviewed the individual and his son when they arrived in Washington, D.C., and investigated whether they were traveling with “loaded weapons.” Capitol Police also attempted to locate the individual using “cell phone pings.” 

According to the report, investigators from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reviewed a tip a day before the Jan. 6 attacks about an individual who had “staked out parking lots of federal buildings to determine how to bring firearms into D.C. at January 6th events.”

The report also indicates there was a threat against the D.C. water system between Dec. 16, 2020 – Jan. 4, 2021. Information about the threat was obtained by the Architect of the Capitol and was shared with the Capitol Police. 

In addition to the Capitol Police and the FBI, five other federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, United States Secret Service, Park Police, Senate Sergeant at Arms and Postal Inspection Service “developed a total of 27 threat products specific to the planned events of January 6 prior to the attack on the Capitol,” according to the obtained report. The GAO found that “14 products included an assessment of the likelihood that violence could occur.”

A tip shared by intelligence officials from New York State with their counterparts in Washington D.C., included a social media post where the user “described intent to conduct an attack in Washington D.C. on January 6 — targeting Democratic members of Congress.”

The report singled out the FBI, concluding the agency “did not consistently follow policies for processing tips.” 

“FBI officials we spoke with said that from December 29, 2020 through January 6, 2021, they tracked domestic terrorism subjects that were traveling to Washington, D.C. and developed reports related to January 6 events,” said the report. “As of January 6, 2021, FBI officials noted that the Washington Field Office was tracking 18 domestic terrorism subjects as potential travelers to the D.C. area.”

In response to the GAO’s findings, the Justice Department said that the FBI would be working “diligently to address the recommendations in the GAO’s report,” and at the same time, the department would “incorporate GAO’s conclusion that, despite collecting and sharing significant pieces of threat reporting, the FBI did not process all relevant information related to potential violence on January 6.”

“The FBI continues to be introspective regarding its roles in sharing intelligence regarding the event of January 6,” Justice Department official Larissa Knapp said in a letter to the GAO.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger told the GAO his department is “currently drafting policy that will provide guidance for sharing threat-related information agency-wide” and said this policy is “currently under executive review.” 

The U.S. Park Police concurred with GAO’s findings, and an Interior Department official stated that the agency is working to update policy by March 2023, regarding the “collection, analysis, and distribution of intelligence information.” 

 

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Just my own thoughts Work Place

A tax I can sink my teeth into. Everyone pays their fair share. Taxing those making less than $50,000.

A tax I can sink my teeth into. Everyone pays their fair share. You get 90% of the social Benefits. Pay 10% of the tax. giphy.

A tax I can sink my teeth into. Everyone pays their fair share. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports where they say that folks making less than 50 K pay no federal taxes. Well I’m also sure that you have heard how those same folks get 90% of the social benefits the federal government has to offer. So why shouldn’t those on the bottom pay also?

Back when the second Bush was president he proposed something similar. Then it would have raised a little over 400 billion. I’m sure that in todays Economy and so many more folks working, it would raise a minimum of a trillion.

And yes folks like me who are on Medicare should also pay that 10% tax. Only deduction that would be allowed would be Charitable contributions.

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Daily Hits. Links from other news sources. Reprints from others. Uncategorized

News you can use. The week ahead.

Todays news. WSJ Photo

News you can use. More from Morning Brew.

CALENDAR
The week ahead

Students walking on campus in the fall.Jon Lovette/Getty Images

Student loan forgiveness on the docket: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments over President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which is being challenged by six GOP-led states. A ruling, due later this year, could have far-reaching consequences for a president’s power to make rules unilaterally.

Retailers in the spotlight: This week’s slate of earnings is all about retail. Target, Dollar Tree, Macy’s, Kroger, and others will give us an update on American consumer health in this period of ripping inflation.

New month alert: March arrives on Wednesday and with it St. Patrick’s Day, March Madness, Ted Lasso Season 3, and an extra hour of daylight in the evenings.

Everything else…

  • Congress gets back to work today following a break.
  • Tesla is holding its Investor Day on Wednesday.
  • Read Across America Day is also on Wednesday. That’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday (not a coincidence).

GRAB BAG

Key performance indicators

Screenshot from New GirlNew Girl/20th Television

Stat: For millennials, “adulting” has meant racking up debt at a historic pace. Americans in their 30s have accumulated 27% more debt from late 2019 to late 2022, per the New York Fed. That’s a bigger increase than any other age cohort and the highest rate of debt accumulation for Americans in their thirties since the 2008 financial crisis, the WSJ notes.

Quote: “Either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue…”

In his annual letter to shareholders, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett blasted critics of stock buybacks as Econ 101 dropouts. Some lawmakers, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have vilified the practice as a misuse of corporate funds that only benefits the elite. Buffett responded that buybacks benefit all shareholders by lifting the intrinsic value of the stock they own. Berkshire spent $7.9 billion on stock buybacks last year.

Read: Forget what you’ve heard—this is how large language models like ChatGPT actually work. (Stephen Wolfram)

NEWS

What else is brewing

  • Tens of thousands of protesters in Mexico City denounced President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s electoral reforms, saying they would erode democracy in Mexico.
  • Jake Paul lost his first match as a pro boxer, in a split decision to Tommy Fury.
  • Nokia is refreshing its logo for the first time in almost six decades.
  • Fans of the Turkish soccer team Beşiktaş threw toys on the field as a donation to children affected by the earthquakes.
  • Warner Bros. Discovery sued Paramount Global for allegedly breaching a $500 million South Park licensing deal the two signed in 2019.

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Corruption COVID Links from other news sources. Medicine Reprints from others. Science

US Department of Energy believes lab leak is most likely theory for Corvid’s origins.

I'm not a medical expert, and neither is the fauch.
US Department of Energy believes lab leak is most likely theory for Covid’s origins

We want to thank the Morning Brew.

HEALTH
New report reignites lab leak debate

P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on April 17, 2020Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Nearly three years after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down much of the world, we still don’t know how it started.

But the Department of Energy is ready to submit its best guess. In a new report based on fresh intelligence, the agency has concluded that Covid-19 most likely spread to humans as a result of a mistake at a Chinese laboratory (aka the “lab leak” theory), the WSJ reports.

Important note: In making this determination, the Energy Dept. is about as self-assured as any Michael Cera character—it reportedly has “low confidence” that this theory is correct.

Also, why would the Energy Dept. have information about a pandemic’s origins? Little-known fact: The Energy Dept. oversees a network of 17 national laboratories, and some of those labs do advanced bioresearch. The agency frequently leverages this lab network to gather information, rather than relying on typical intelligence operations, according to the NYT.

But there’s still no consensus

In endorsing the lab leak theory, the Energy Dept. joins the FBI, which has concluded with “moderate confidence” that Covid originated accidentally from a Chinese lab: the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The two agencies reportedly arrived at this conclusion via different methods.

However, four other US agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded that Covid originated through natural transmission from an infected animal. But they, too, have low confidence their conclusions are correct.

One piece of evidence that’s missing from the natural transmission theory? The animal that hypothetically did the infecting hasn’t been identified. Given all this uncertainty, two other US agencies haven’t reached a conclusion on Covid’s beginnings yet.

So, if you’re doing the math at home: Four US agencies believe it was natural transmission, two say lab leak, and two are undecided.

Zoom out: Scientists say it’s important to make every effort to learn how Covid-19, a pandemic that’s caused nearly 7 million deaths globally, began, so we can better prevent the next one.

But with the Chinese government (Joe and Hunter’s best buds) thwarting investigations by global authorities, there may only be so much information the US can gather. And it might never be able to confidently answer the question: How did Covid begin? Edited.

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COVID Links from other news sources. Reprints from others.

Lead author of new Cochrane review speaks out.

Lead author of new Cochrane review speaks out.

Lead author of new Cochrane review speaks out.

I’ve decided to post the entire interview from Dr. Demasi’s substack Also our lurker loons seem to be confused about what’s a fact and what’s Progressive gobly gook. Before I forget, the Study Doctor Jefferson’s group of doctors and scientists did was peer reviewed. Recently one of the lurker posted what it called a fact. A assistant worker at a hospital as a rebuttal to the report. One low level person. Well again this loon went after the report.

It’s source was Michael Hiltzik. What doctor or scientist is Mr. Hiltzik? He’s not one. I’ve been in contact with him since 2004. He’s a business writer for the LA Times. Yes a business writer. And a very good one at that. Not a medical writer. So if you wish to read his articles, you’ll find him in the business section not medical.

 

 

Tom Jefferson, senior associate tutor at the University of Oxford, is the lead author of a recent Cochrane review that has ‘gone viral’ on social media and re-ignited one of the most divisive debates during the pandemic – face masks.

The updated review titled “Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of acute respiratory viruses” found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to influenza-like or covid-19-like illness transmission.

This comes off the back of three years of governments mandating the use of face masks in the community, schools and hospital settings. Just last month, the WHO upgraded its guidelines advising “anyone in a crowded, enclosed, or poorly ventilated space” to wear a mask.

Jefferson and his colleagues also looked at the evidence for social distancing, hand washing, and sanitising/sterilising surfaces — in total, 78 randomised trials with over 610,000 participants.

Jefferson doesn’t grant many interviews with journalists — he doesn’t trust the media. But since we worked together at Cochrane a few years ago, he decided to let his guard down with me.

During our conversation, Jefferson didn’t hold back. He condemned the pandemic’s “overnight experts”, he criticised the multitude of scientifically baseless health policies, and even opened up about his disappointment in Cochrane’s handling of the review.

The Interview

DEMASI: This Cochrane review has caused quite a stir on social media and inflamed the great mask debate. What are your thoughts?

JEFFERSON: Well, it’s an update from our November 2020 review and the evidence really didn’t change from 2020 to 2023. There’s still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic.

DEMASI: And yet, most governments around the world implemented mask mandates during the pandemic…

JEFFERSON: Yes, well, governments completely failed to do the right thing and demand better evidence. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were some voices who said masks did not work and then suddenly the narrative changed.

DEMASI: That is true, Fauci went on 60 minutes and said that masks are not necessary and then weeks later he changed his tune.

JEFFERSON: Same with New Zealand’s Chief Medical Officer.  One minute he is saying masks don’t work, and the next minute, he flipped.

DEMASI: Why do you think that happened?

JEFFERSON: Governments had bad advisors from the very beginning…  They were convinced by non-randomised studies, flawed observational studies.  A lot of it had to do with appearing as if they were “doing something.”

In early 2020, when the pandemic was ramping up, we had just updated our Cochrane review ready to publish…but Cochrane held it up for 7 months before it was finally published in November 2020.

Those 7 months were crucial. During that time, it was when policy about masks was being formed.  Our review was important, and it should have been out there.

DEMASI: What was the delay?

JEFFERSON: For some unknown reason, Cochrane decided it needed an “extra” peer-review.  And then they forced us to insert unnecessary text phrases in the review like “this review doesn’t contain any covid-19 trials,” when it was obvious to anyone reading the study that the cut-off date was January 2020.

DEMASI: Do you think Cochrane intentionally delayed that 2020 review?  

JEFFERSON: During those 7 months, other researchers at Cochrane produced some unacceptable pieces of work, using unacceptable studies, that gave the “right answer”.

DEMASI: What do you mean by “the right answer”?  Are you suggesting that Cochrane was pro-mask, and that your review contradicted the narrative. Is that your intuition?

JEFFERSON: Yes, I think that is what was going on. After the 7-month delay, Cochrane then published an editorial to accompany our review.  The main message of that editorial was that you can’t sit on your hands, you’ve got to do something, you can’t wait for good evidence…. it’s a complete subversion of the ‘precautionary principle’ which states that you should do nothing unless you have reasonable evidence that benefits outweigh the harms.

DEMASI: Why would Cochrane do that?

JEFFERSON: I think the purpose of the editorial was to undermine our work.

DEMASI: Do you think Cochrane was playing a political game?

JEFFERSON: That I cannot say, but it was 7 months that just happened to coincide with the time when all the craziness began, when academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks. We call them “strident campaigners”.  They are activists, not scientists.

DEMASI: That’s interesting.

JEFFERSON: Well, no. It’s depressing.

DEMASI: So, the 2023 updated review now includes a couple of new covid-19 studies….the Danish mask study….and the Bangladesh study.  In fact, there was a lot of discussion about the Bangladesh mask study which claimed to show some benefit….

JEFFERSON: That was not a very good study because it was not a study about whether masks worked, it was a study about increasing compliance for wearing a mask.

DEMASI: Right, I remember there was a reanalysis of the Bangladesh study showing it had significant bias….you’ve worked in this area for decades, you’re an expert…

JEFFERSON [interjects]… please do not call me an expert. I’m a guy who has worked in the field for some time. That has to be the message. I don’t work with models, I don’t make predictions. I don’t hassle people or chase them on social media. I don’t call them names… I’m a scientist. I work with data.

David Sackett, the founder of Evidence Based Medicine, once wrote a very famous article for The BMJ saying that ‘experts’ are part of the problem. You just have to look at the so-called ‘experts’ that have been advising government.

DEMASI: There were so many silly mask policies. They expected 2yr olds to wear masks, and you had to wear a mask to walk into a restaurant, but you could take it off as soon as you sat down.

JEFFERSON: Yes, also the 2- meter rule. Based on what? Nothing.

DEMASI: Did you wear a mask?

JEFFERSON: I follow the law. If the law says I need to wear one, then I wear one because I have to.  I do not break the law. I obey the law of the country.

DEMASI: Yeah, same. What would you say to people who still want to wear a mask?

JEFFERSON: I think it’s fair to say that if you want to wear a mask then you should have a choice, okay. But in the absence of evidence, you shouldn’t be forcing anybody to do so.

DEMASI: But people say, I’m not wearing a mask for me, I’m wearing it for you.

JEFFERSON: I have never understood that difference. Have you?

DEMASI: They say it’s not to protect themselves, but to protect others, an act of altruism.

JEFFERSON: Ah yes. Wonderful. They get the Albert Schweitzer prize for Humanitarianism. Here’s what I think. Your overnight experts know nothing.

DEMASI (laughs)

JEFFERSON: There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop. My job, our job as a review team, was to look at the evidence, we have done that. Not just for masks. We looked at hand washing, sterilisation, goggles etcetera…

DEMASI: What’s the best evidence for avoiding infection?

JEFFERSON: I think your best shot is sanitation/sterilisation with antiseptic products. We’ve known for about 40 to 50 years that the inside of toilets, handles, seats for example, you recover a very high concentration of replication competent virus, it doesn’t matter what viruses they are. This argues for a contact / fomite mode of transmission.

Also, hand washing shows some benefit, especially in small children. The problem with that is, unless you make the population completely psychotic, they will not comply.

DEMASI: May I just ask a finer point on masks… it’s not that masks don’t work, it’s just that there is no evidence they do work…is that right?

JEFFERSON: There’s no evidence that they do work, that’s right. It’s possible they could work in some settings….we’d know if we’d done trials. All you needed was for Tedros [from WHO] to declare it’s a pandemic and they could have randomised half of the United Kingdom, or half of Italy, to masks and the other half to no masks. But they didn’t. Instead, they ran around like headless chickens.

DEMASI: I’ve worked as a political advisor, so I know that Governments don’t like to appear “uncertain,” they like to act as if they are in control of the situation….

JEFFERSON: Well, there’s always uncertainty. Masking became a “visible” political gesture, which is a point we make over and over again now.  Washing hands and sanitation and vaccination are not overtly visible, but wearing a mask is.

DEMASI: Your review also showed that n95 masks for healthcare workers did not make much difference. 

JEFFERSON: That’s right, it makes no difference – none of it.

DEMASI: Intuitively it makes sense to people though…. you put a barrier between you and the other person, and it helps reduce your risk?

JEFFERSON: Ahhhh the Swiss cheese argument…..

DEMASI: Well, the ‘Swiss cheese’ model was one of the most influential explanations for why people should layer their protection. Another barrier, another layer of protection? You don’t like the Swiss cheese model?

JEFFERSON: I like Swiss cheese to eat — the model not so much …It’s predicated on us knowing exactly how these respiratory viruses transmit, and that, I can tell you, we don’t know.  There isn’t a single mode of transmission, it is probably mixed.

The idea that the covid virus is transmitted via aerosols has been repeated over and over as if its “truth” but the evidence is as thin as air. It’s complex and all journalists want 40 years of experience condensed into two sentences. You can quote the Swiss cheese model, but there’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.

DEMASI: Why? How can that be?

JEFFERSON: It’s probably related to the way that people behave, it could be the way viruses are transmitted or their port of entry, people don’t wear masks correctly….no-one really knows for sure.  I keep saying it repeatedly, it needs to be looked at by doing a huge, randomised study – masks haven’t been given a proper trial. They should have been done, but they were not done. Instead, we have overnight experts perpetuating a ‘fear-demic.’

DEMASI: I’ve heard people say it would be unethical to do a study and randomise half of a group to masks and the other half to no masks….do you agree?

JEFFERSON: No, because we don’t know what effect masks will have.  If we don’t know what impact they have, how can it be unethical? Strident fanatics have managed to poison this whole discussion and try and make it into a black and white thing…and rely on terribly flawed studies.

DEMASI: Thanks for the chat with me today.

JEFFERSON: You’re welcome, Maryanne.

Note: This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. Jefferson is co-author of Trust The Evidence

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Life Links from other news sources. Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

A look at the weeks happenings.

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Provided by the free press.
A look at the weeks happenings.
TGIF: Dignity for Oompa Loompas


Former President Donald Trump hands out Make America Great Again hats to McDonalds employees in East Palestine, Ohio. (Jabin Botsford via Getty Images)
TGIF: Dignity for Oompa Loompas
Robots replace academics. Another Dolezal. The censors come for Roald Dahl. Buttigieg blows it in Ohio. Plus: David Mamet on cowboys.

By Nellie Bowles

February 24, 2023

 

→ Home sales fall for 12 straight months: It’s the longest streak since 1999. Mortgage rates are still too high. See I only care about politics that directly impact me financially, and this does because it means when I look at my house on Zillow I see the number going down. Not allowed! Meanwhile, office landlords are beginning to default as those 10-year leases end.

→ Georgia grand jury foreperson gone wild: The head juror for the special grand jury looking into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results has gone rogue. She is Emily Kohrs, 30, a private citizen, a grand jury foreperson tasked with protecting elections, and as of this week a chatty new media darling.

To MSNBC: “I kind of wanted to subpoena the former president because I got to swear everybody in. And so I thought it’d be really cool to get 60 seconds with President Trump, of me looking at him and being like, ​‘Do you solemnly swear?’ And me getting to swear him in​.”

To CNN: “There may be some names on that list that you wouldn’t expect. But the big name that everyone keeps asking me about—I don’t think you will be shocked.”

Emily’s having fun! (And of course she’s into witchcraft.) Honestly, the grand jury foreperson’s main bias seems to be toward drama and chaos, and in that we salute her.

 

As an aside, you know why Trump hasn’t been caught for anything big? The man never writes anything down. Not an email, not a text. The resistance, run by chaos Wiccans like Emily, will simply never catch him.

→ Roald Dahl meets 2023: The long-dead British children’s books author—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and, who could forget, The Witches—has not escaped our moment, and now his books are getting a modern makeover to remove offensive bits. I forget, were those books racist? Sexist? Not exactly, no, but lots of people might be offended, for example, by the fact that Dahl describes witches as bald. And so now there is a new line in the book right after his description of a witch’s hairless head: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” (I’m dead serious.)

Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was described as “fat.” That’s gone (now he’s just “enormous”). And did anyone ask the Oompa-Loompas whether they self-identified as “small men?” Now they are “small people,” which of course gives these characters, who are called Oompa. Loompas. All their dignity back. In one story, a character Dahl described as “ugly and beastly” is now just “beastly,” a concession, I guess, to sensitive ugly people. But what about the beastly?!

Now the next lines from James and the Giant Peach are so offensive, I want you to be very careful who sees your screen. These were traditionally sung by the Centipede: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that.” And: “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”

Those are gone now, replaced with new and worse rhymes coughed up by the very nice censors at Inclusive Minds.

Now, Dahl was also famously an antisemite, which he occasionally cloaked as simple anti-Zionism. Actually, that didn’t need a modern progressive update at all. Now excuse me while I go track down my original copy of The Twits before a sensitivity reader with red pens shows up at my door.

→ Ancestry is complex: One-time Black Panther Angela Davis went onto the PBS show Finding Your Roots, where Henry Louis Gates Jr. does a deep dive into your ancestry. But then something strange happened: It turns out her ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. Now the gotcha here from the right is something like “Oh she’s a descendant of the Mayflower! Not so victimized, eh?” But actually it’s sort of a vindication of the 1619-mindset, in that the history of America and slavery is entwined from the start. It’s worth watching the clip just to see Davis’s face and the gravity of being tied genetically back to that ship. “No, my ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower. No, no no. That’s a little bit too much to deal with right now.”

→ Selling unused Covid gear on the cheap: New York City is auctioning off $200 million in Covid supplies for just $500,000. This comes from local news blog The City, who got the scoop. Among some of the details from the story: A junk dealer from Long Island picked up $12 million in ventilators for just $24,600. “It took the dealer 28 truckloads to cart the stuff away, auction records state.” It’s a great story that also includes emails showing city officials fretting that people might find out how much they overspent. It’s like Storage Wars but so, so sad.

Congratulations to the junk dealer who got 500,000 pounds of ventilators.

→ Jimmy Carter, 98, in hospice: The former president is now in hospice in his Plains, Georgia, home. I recommend this 2018 feature about his sweet and simple life in retirement with Rosalynn, where every Sunday he taught a lesson at the Maranatha Baptist Church. TGIF salutes Jimmy Carter, a model of decency.

Speaking of gentle souls with good intentions, humble dreams, and devoted marriages, let’s see what Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are up to this week. . .

→ Trump gets to East Palestine before the White House: Trump visited the site of the toxic train derailment, spoke to residents, and brought pallets of water (Trump-branded, of course). He stopped at McDonalds, telling workers quite believably: “I know this menu better than you do.”

Meanwhile, local officials in East Palestine are getting on camera to show themselves drinking tap water. Like, see, it’s totally safe! The fish are dead and your dog is dying, but we’re cool! Don’t be so uptight about “vinyl chloride” and “phosgene,” which are just fancy words for totally not-toxic water.

One thing that makes Trump successful is he says that things are shitty when they’re shitty, and I’m sorry, but the water in East Palestine is shitty right now.

Racing there after Trump was Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the man who is proving single-handedly that Rhodes Scholars are overhyped. Buttigieg whiffed when he arrived: he ran away from reporters, leaving his press secretary begging those reporters to turn off their cameras before she would talk to them. When he did finally speak, he said he “lost his train of thought.” Oh god:

 

Is there something I’m missing here? Why did the train derailment get coded as so conservative that no one could talk about it? Why do the cameras have to be off? Why isn’t Michael Moore there? To me, this whole thing is a gimme for Democrats: use it to argue for more and smarter government infrastructure spending. But for some reason, acknowledging the crash and its environmental impact is verboten. If you can answer this political mystery, please do in the comments.

→ I really don’t like this item: Mark Middleton, a one-time advisor to Bill Clinton, who seemed to be involved with handling his Jeffrey Epstein relationship, is dead by apparent suicide. Details came out this week: Middleton was found hanged with an electrical cord—and with a gunshot wound to his chest. When it comes to Epstein-related shadiness and the extended cover-up of that scandal, at this point, I’m willing to believe just about anything. On the other hand, people who have done bad things do generally want to avoid facing their own souls. So I’d say I’m Epstein-related-murder-conspiracy-open but not sold. But let’s give it a week.

→ James O’Keefe is out: Project Veritas, the right-wing undercover investigations outlet, has ousted its leader and star, James O’Keefe. He spoke to staff before leaving and you can watch that strange, rambling speech here. The board accused him of spending “an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries.” Items and amounts that the Veritas board lists: “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor” and “over $150,000 in Black Cars in the last 18 months.”

Now, to be clear, James O’Keefe’s job is setting up shady stings of his enemies. One of my friends who got stung was on his third date with a woman who turned out to be an undercover Veritas operative. It was on that date that she recorded him. To me, there’s no one better to run an operation like that than a dude who spends $14,000 to meet someone about a boat. Over $150,000 on limos is basically the minimum spend for a guy like this.

→ Ozy Media founder arrested: It’s not only right-wing media that’s losing a star this week. On Thursday we learned that Carlos Watson, founder of progressive media company Ozy, had been arrested on charges of fraud. The United States of America v. Carlos Watson and Ozy Media, Inc. is pretty fun reading. Among other things, Watson allegedly had a subordinate— Samir Rao, Ozy’s COO—pretend to be a YouTube executive on a call with Goldman Sachs, to say how great Ozy Media was doing on YouTube.

This whole thing was first broken open by scoop hound Ben Smith, now of Semafor. An idea: maybe Carlos Watson and James O’Keefe can start something new together?

And now, a word from resident cartoonist David Mamet . . .

→ University DEI admins come up with their perfect replacement: Vanderbilt University’s office of diversity issued a statement consoling students about a recent mass shooting at Michigan State. But apparently they are so very busy that they used AI to write it.

Let me back up: last week, 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae—who had previously pleaded down a felony charge that would have prevented him from possessing a gun—slaughtered three students, seemingly at random, on Michigan State’s campus.

In response, Vanderbilt’s equity workers released a touching statement about how everyone needs to be kind and inclusive to, I guess, prevent mass shootings by nearby career criminals: “Another important aspect of creating an inclusive environment is to promote a culture of respect and understanding.” And: “[L]et us come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus.” And: “Finally, we must recognize that creating a safe and inclusive environment is an ongoing process that requires ongoing effort and commitment.” It’s the same nonsensical but warm sentiment said over and over—inclusive (7 times), community (5 times), safe (3)—and it kinda worked!

Except at the bottom of the statement was this sentence: Paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023.

People were upset. The university apologized. And yes, you could ask what exactly these bureaucrats are doing all day. But their laziness might also be their genius: replace all university bureaucrats with ChatGPT. Like the discovery of penicillin, sometimes accidents make genius.

→ NPR cutting 10 percent of its staff: The public radio station—that is, in part, taxpayer funded—is losing money and needs to cut staff. I can’t point to an institution that has more fully failed its mission than NPR, which went from fulfilling a genuine public service with news and great stories (I’m thinking of early This American Life) to just another hyper-partisan maker of mush. Tote bags and mush.

→ NYT union versus NYT workers: The New York Times’ labor union is a funny thing because reporters pay into it every two weeks and, in turn, the union’s main project is getting some of those reporters fired. It’s a bit like musical chairs: If you’re too slow putting the fist in your Twitter profile picture, you’re it. See, the union is pretty bad at achieving boring stuff like raises, but it shines at gathering groups of reporters to get a deskmate ousted. Who needs money when you can draw blood?

The latest: the union stepped in to help ax a couple Times writers who reported on trans issues with anything close to an objective lens. Here’s what union head Susan DeCarava wrote to Times staff in a note about how to organize: “[E]mployees are protected in collectively raising concerns that conditions of their employment constitute a hostile working environment.” Oh yes, reporting on trans issues makes a hostile work environment. Perfect. We got the language, now let’s march on Katie, that very bad Times reporter! Let’s picket the awful Emily! The people united will get Katie fired!

Except finally, finally, the union this week is seeing some organized pushback, and a group of Times people wrote their own letter asking the union to just please stop. “We ask that our union work to advance, not erode, our journalistic independence.”

If media union bosses can’t wake up and get Katies and Emilys fired, what exactly are they supposed to do all day?

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