Sunday, March 21, 2021
Saturday, March 20, 2021
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."
Friday, March 19, 2021
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.
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.
Friday, March 12, 2021
My Two Cents on the Newsom Recall Effort
Thank you, Gustavo Arellano! (Gustavo is the fellow who once helmed the Orange County Register's nationally-syndicated "Ask A Mexican" column, and is now with the Los Angeles Times). Full text below!:
Recalling California’s Wild and Crazy and Crowded 2003 Gubernatorial Recall
By GUSTAVO ARELLANO - COLUMNIST MARCH 12, 2021 5 AM PT
About eight years ago, Sacramento resident Marc Valdez threw a most unusual party. He invited a band of brothers and sisters of different political stripes. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens. Independents, American Independents, and even people from something called the Natural Law Party.
The only thing that bonded the guests was their role in California’s crazy election season of 2003, when voters booted out Gov. Gray Davis in a historic recall. You wouldn’t recognize the names of the people who showed up at this shindig. But you’d remember some of the others who crashed Davis’ party to pop his political balloon: Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, Arianna Huffington or some of the 132 other D-list celebrities and randos who ran to replace the unpopular governor.
The eventual winner, of course, was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cheryl Bly-Chester, who attended Valdez’s party, got the most votes among his guests. She finished 17th overall — a mere 4.19 million votes behind the “Terminator.”
But their brush with history nevertheless makes these most anonymous of recall alumni an important voice today as current Gov. Gavin Newsom faces his own reckoning. (Or would that be a recall-ning?) Anti-Newsom activists want to channel the populist winds of 2003 that Valdez, Bly-Chester and others kite-surfed and send Newsom off to his political Bermuda Triangle.
So you might think that these folks would understand and sympathize with the anger that voters have toward a governor accused of gross negligence during hard times. They’re a great California slice of political, geographic and ethnic diversity. But when I rang up five of them, not a single one supported the recall.
“I support Newsom 100%,” said Valdez, a Democrat. “The people who are most active against Newsom are the same people who invited over their relatives for Thanksgiving, so they’re trying to burn off their guilt by burning a witch or two.”
“If it wasn’t for COVID, it wouldn’t happen,” said Darin Price, who ran as one of two Natural Law Party candidates in the Davis recall. “He’s being as thoughtful as anyone could be. The bar should be fairly high for recall, but it’s not here.”
“I respect the more than 2 million people who have signed [the recall petition] for exercising their constitutional right,” said Badi Badiozamani, a San Diego author and declared independent. He declined to say whether he was one of them, saying he was “divorced from politics.”
“We think Newsom has a lot of holes,” said C.T. Weber, a Peace and Freedom Party member then and now. “But we’re against it for the racist right-wing reasons that its supporters are putting out there.”
“I don’t think that he’s doing a great job as governor, but I’m not signing it,” said Bly-Chester, an El Dorado County planning commissioner who said “the Republican Party left me” in 2016 and is now “decline to state.” “This [recall] election won’t mean anything.”
Yes, this is a small — scratch that — teeny, tiny sample from the legions that joined the 2003 race like it was the L.A. Marathon. But it’s an important one, and one to which I can relate.
I covered the recall as a cub reporter, and voted yes then. I think I picked billboard legend Angelyne as governor. Or was it the comedian Gallagher? Anyways, I found Davis ineffectual and weak and found no reason to support him or oppose his recall. Even his most ardent defenders mustered up all the enthusiasm of someone replacing their car brakes.
That change-in-the-air feeling isn’t blowing across the Golden State the way it did in 2003. Newsom’s critics despise him — a not-insignificant part of the California electorate. But Democratic leaders will vocally stand by their well-coiffed man. If we continue to reopen and get as close to normal as we ever can by the fall — which seems increasingly likely, thank God — only Republicans will still care about kicking him out.
Successful recalls are born from widespread, bipartisan frustration, not from a dying political party that has relied on cataclysms to win statewide elections in California for the past generation.
“Everything bad was personified in Gray Davis,” Badiozamani said. “He was not a charismatic person, whereas Newsom is. And Gray was seen as a bureaucrat, whereas Newsom is handsome and presentable, which can help.” “He’s not doing the worst,” said Bly-Chester, while adding that his “almost arbitrary” decisions mean “he’s not the governor for a large portion of the state.”
“In 2001 you had Gray Davis wasn’t taking action when action was clearly needed,” Valdez said. “Today, the story on Newsom is that he’s been too aggressive with the lockdown and quarantines. But a lot of people think it’s good to have the California governor having enough power to look some of these rich people in the face say, ‘No, you’ve got to close.’ No one supported Davis doing nothing.”
“It’s just the right wing,” Weber said. “Now, it’s pretty much a super-Democratic state.”
And yes, Newsom’s maskless dinner at the uber-elite French Laundry looked bad because it was bad. But we just survived four years of a president who makes Newsom look like Mister Rogers in the personal responsibility department.
Successful recalls need to get people like me. I’m no fan of Newsom’s ham-fisted governance during our pandemic year — but it’s far better than the hands-off approach most of his critics would have favored. And most of the people I know who can’t stand Newsom hate the Republican Party even more. It’s a zero-sum game with no nuances — the opposite of how 2003 felt.
That hyper-partisan reality is another reason that Bly-Chester, Badiozamani and Valdez don’t look forward to a potential, and at this point increasingly likely, recall vote. While the world treated them and their fellow rivals as a circus of fools when they joined the recall race in 2003, they saw it as a beautiful expression of American democracy, one that just doesn’t exist today.
“We [minor candidates] had to band together in order to make our voices heard,” Valdez said. He ran back then because he believed “nobody was in charge anymore” and wanted to do something about it. “We had, in many cases, nothing in common. Now, it’s just a different situation, different time.”
Bly-Chester remembered when dozens of candidates met before a Bay Area news conference to figure out how to get media members to take them seriously.
“We identified one person from every party,” she said. “We each had a line to say for an official statement and did it. All across party lines. It felt really good.”
Likelihood of that happening today? The sad truth: About as high as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare) holding hands and singing “We Are the World.”
High-Incidence and Low-Incidence Countries
Looks like the Covid-19 pandemic is beginning to resolve itself into high-incidence and low-incidence countries, with the United States slowly joining the latter:
A Bit of Hardball
Get the vote suppressors where they work:
The Hancock County Board of Commissioners voted 4-0 Wednesday to ask Rep. Barry Fleming (R-Harlem) to resign as county attorney after pressure from citizens opposed to his work on proposed voting law changes.
Fleming is currently the House Special Committee on Election Integrity Chairman and primary sponsor of HB 531, a 66-page voting omnibus that would make sweeping changes to voting in Georgia, including limiting access to drop boxes and curbing larger counties' ability to offer a full slate of weekend voting.
Hancock has one of the highest proportions of Black voters in the country and has been the center of several voting controversies in recent years, including an episode in 2015 when a fifth of the voters in Sparta — all Black — had their voter registrations challenged.
One of those was Johnny Thornton, a retired DEA agent who lives and works on a catfish farm.
...Thornton said opposition to Fleming's involvement as county attorney has been building for weeks, and he hopes other lawmakers take note of the national conversation about voting rights.
"We might not be taking a lot of money out of his pocket, but it's sure going to embarrass the hell out of him to say your a** has been fired," he said. "That type of leverage will make some of these other state representatives in some of these rural towns say, 'Wait a minute.'"
Police Response
I was surprised. First, a cop came to take my statement. He was a dog person. I liked his nickname for Jasper: Cujo.
Then a police CSI unit came to the house to get a picture of my back’s all-but-invisible bruise from the rock thrown by the local bike-riding teens. The police are doing what they can to establish a record of the teens’ activities.
The best of luck to the cops!
Clingy Dog
Best year ever for the dogs:
This has been their favorite year.
Posted by Marc Valdez on Thursday, March 11, 2021
The Pain Of Having To Walk Away
Harder to deal with Southern Baptists than ever:
Moore’s outsize influence and role in teaching the Bible have always made some evangelical power brokers uneasy, because of their belief only men should be allowed to preach.
But Moore was above reproach, supporting Southern Baptist teaching that limits the office of pastor to men alone and cheerleading for the missions and evangelistic work that the denomination holds dear.
“She has been a stalwart for the Word of God, never compromising,” former Lifeway Christian Resources President Thom Rainer said in 2015, during a celebration at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville that honored 20 years of partnership between the Southern Baptist publishing house and Moore.
“And when all is said and done, the impact of Beth Moore can only be measured in eternity’s grasp.”
Then along came Donald Trump.
Moore’s criticism of the 45th president’s abusive behavior toward women and her advocacy for sexual abuse victims turned her from a beloved icon to a pariah in the denomination she loved all her life.
“Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power,” Moore once wrote about Trump, riffing on a passage from the New Testament Book of Ephesians.
Because of her opposition to Trump and her outspokenness in confronting sexism and nationalism in the evangelical world, Moore has been labeled as “liberal” and “woke” and even as being a heretic for daring to give a message during a Sunday morning church service.
Finally, Moore had had enough. She told Religion News Service in an interview Friday (March 5) that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.”
Awfully Quiet Out There
Silent spring after all:
Listening is an art that we should practice because it does two things. It makes us shut up and it makes us open up. We stop listening just to the songs of “me, me, me”. When we set aside our own stories, it opens us up so we can listen to the stories of other beings. It’s a skill of empathy, isn’t it? Listening to other people’s stories and other creatures’ sounds is a way of understanding the world from their point of view. It’s a moral training.
When it comes to understanding what we hear, Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and cared so much about bird song, took pains to tell us that it doesn’t matter if we know the names of what we see. That comes later. But the first thing that has to happen is love.
So I’m not so concerned about knowing which bird is calling. I’m surrounded by people who could do that in a majestic way. My husband can identify birds by their call. My neighbor can. I think it’s a beautiful skill that I don’t have.
But I do have the ability to catch a song. To hear it, which isn’t nothing. It can catch my attention and I can seek it out and I can listen to it. Knowing its name — maybe that’s not so important as knowing its tune.
Tuesday, March 09, 2021
Teens Causing Trouble
Some young, male teens (most were African-American, but one or two may have been Hispanic, and all were maybe age 13 or 14) on three or four bikes rolled up behind my dog Jasper and myself as we were walking eastbound on the northern sidewalk of Yale St., just west of 21st St. about 5:35 p.m. on March 8th. I heard menacing words directed at my dog - something of the order "Fuck that dog." Someone threw a rock and hit my back. I’m not hurt - it was just a small rock - but there might be a minor bruise at the impact point. I was more surprised than anything. I stopped as the bike riders rolled past, giving my dog and I hard stares. They crossed 21st St. and continued rolling eastbound on X St. - Broadway Alley. This group of teens appears to be the same group of teens caught on video causing trouble elsewhere in Curtis Park over the last week, as reported on Nextdoor, Curtis Park.
Monday, March 08, 2021
Two Interviews
I had an interview with LA Times California columnist Gustavo Arellano (formerly the syndicated "Ask a Mexican" columnist with the Orange County Register) regarding my opinion about the upcoming gubernatorial recall campaign against Gavin Newsom. (I strongly support Newsom and have no intention of running again.) Looking forward to seeing that in the LA Times soon!
Also had an interview with the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, regarding my presentation on Salvador Dali's influence on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." Looks like I will make a Zoom presentation to them on May 27th.
Monday, March 01, 2021
Covid Status
New Covid cases appear to be nearing a bottom in the U.S. (but still at a pretty-high level - we need more vaccinations). Over the last two months, the UK and Spain seem to be the most-improved; Italy and Sweden are having worrisome upticks.
Saharan Spring
The 2020/21 rainy season fiasco continues, portending real troubles in the hot, hot summer to come, given that reservoirs are at about two-thirds capacity right now.
Currently, rainfall at Sacramento Executive Airport's weather station is about 41% of average, making it even worse than for the 2013/14 rainy-season disaster, and the third-worst on record (since 1947).
Interestingly, the current season not among the worst for the older Downtown Sacramento site. We had worse rainy seasons a hundred years ago. Today's closest parallel is to the 1927/28 rainy season.
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