We Can Make It Legal!

It will be interesting to see what happens with all this. D'Andrea is right that the outrageous charges being pushed onto Texas electricity users are all very legal under their current system. The only way the charges can be mitigated is for Texas Republicans to break the law. Will the courts allow that? Will customers pay? Or rebel?:

Abbott, whose office had defended D'Andrea on Friday, did not provide a reason for why he had requested D'Andrea's resignation. But the news came hours after Texas Monthly published a story Tuesday saying D'Andrea had told out-of-state investors on a call he would work to throw "the weight of the commission" behind stopping calls for repricing.

..."We want to make sure that we are going to show the vision to our fellow Texans that we are charting a new and fresh course for the Public Utility Commission, and the action that I made is one of many steps that will be taken to achieve those goals," Abbott said.

...And, asked at Thursday's news conference whether he had spoken with House members sympathetic to his position on repricing, Patrick said, "Yes, I'll leave it at that."

Corrido de Reies Lopez Tijerina

Memory Lane time, back to my childhood, when my father was peripherally involved with Alianza Federal de Mercedes. I remember Saturday afternoons, standing outside the little building on Thirs Street in Albuquerque, listening to Reies Lopez Tijerina raise hell. I didn't speak Spanish, but his fervor came through. In many ways, Tijerina was the best public speaker I've ever heard.

Saw a Bright Meteor

Friday evening, 8:39 p.m. PDT. Reported it too.

End of the Cassini Probe

I hadn't seen this video before - the end of the Cassini probe to Saturn, in 2017. Things get serious about the 53 minute mark:

Deepfake Videos

Well, at least no murder threats, per the Texas Cheerleader Mom case back around 1989, but still it looks like the victims got bounced from the program too:

A Pennsylvania mother allegedly sent deepfake photos and video of her teenage daughter's cheerleading rivals depicting them naked, drinking and smoking to their coaches in a bid to get them kicked off the team, the Hilltown Township Police Department said.

Raffaela Spone, 50, allegedly sent the manipulated photos and video to at least three of her daughter's teammates and their coaches on the cheerleading team, the Victory Vipers, in Chalfont, Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub's office said, according to the The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Spone also anonymously sent messages to the victims urging them to kill themselves, according to the paper’s report of the district attorney’s charges.

...Police determined the videos were deepfakes -- digitally altered images that appear to be authentic. The images were created by mapping the girls' social media photos onto other images, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Simple Errors Kill When It Comes To Covid-19

Get the public health people some resources:

The paper in question actually appeared on the MedRxiv preprint server just before Christmas (which is my excuse for missing it until now), and carries the title: “Does Contact Tracing Work? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from an Excel Error in England.”

... But this particular paper tells a very special story—one of a nation forced to wing it in the face of a massive threat, due to poor planning on the part of public officials, the sudden understanding that even a half-hearted effort could save thousands of lives, and how a choice that seemed absolutely meaningless caused more deaths than some of the worst battles of World War II.

The story goes like this: As COVID-19 was spilling out across the planet, the U.K., like the U.S., was doing essentially nothing. On top of this, decades of alternating dominance by neo-liberals in both major parties had starved the National Health Service of beds, doctors, and supplies, much less anything so frivolous as planning for future emergencies. 

...The technical error in this case was that the Excel sheet was being saved in the older .xls format instead of the newer .xlsx format. For your family budget, this would not make a difference. However, the .xls format is limited to 65,536 rows. So, every day from September 25, 2020 to October 2, 2020, the people managing this sheet added thousands of names. And every day those names were simply lost, as the sheet was at the limit.

When this was realized on October 2, the format was changed, but looking back on the 15,841 contacts that had not been made provided one opportunity—it allowed researchers to see the results of outcomes from this group that had not been contacted, compared to the people both before and after who were contacted. As a result, they were able to estimate that the week-long failure of case tracing cost about 1,500 lives.

...It’s almost hard to notice that, in the end, what this paper shows is that case tracing works. The researchers were able to effectively repudiate official statements from the U.K. government and their supposed team of expert advisors who insisted that case tracing would have “little impact” by showing that in just this case, the number of deaths connected to these missed calls was significantly higher than in the cases of those contacts.

Chemtrails Over the Country Club - Lana Del Rey