In which we discuss our utter disillusionment with the institutions meant to be guiding civilization through these perilous times, but fun! Check out below for links relevant to this conversation.
William & Mary are telling the college kids not to pack too heavily this semester.
Abe drove a couple hours to Lookout Mountain only to run into weather problems. Here’s what he missed:
A Norwegian cruise line decided the time was right to resume service. Results: predictably corona-heavy seas.
Flu vaccine efficacy rates, according to the CDC.
Dr. Robert Gallo, researcher best known for being among the first people to discover HIV and its relation to AIDS, showed up on the Useful Idiots podcast to discuss his concerns about the sort of vaccine that the US and pharmaceutical companies are prioritizing. In short, he’s not optimistic, and suggests that at least some resources should be diverted to less pipe-dreamy treatments. He first raised these concerns publicly in a letter to The New York Times.
“Antibodies Didn’t Last Long After Infection in Study, Especially for Asymptomatic” (news article, June 19) highlights that unknowing or recovered Covid-19 carriers at best develop weak antibodies that may be effective for some few months, leaving carriers vulnerable to the possibility of repeat infection.
This appears to rule out “herd immunity” as an avenue for vanquishing the virus. It appears that true immunity will come only from a vaccine that works to prevent infection safely for a defined and specific period of time and can be produced and delivered to billions of people quickly. Once such a vaccine is proved effective, we will learn for how long only with the passage of time.
How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air” — Vanity Fair
“By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.
“But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
(…)
“Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.”
Congress had an opportunity to question the heads of four of the most powerful and intrusive corporations in the history of humanity, and they mostly fucking blew it.
Here’s the series of articles by Kashmir Hill for Gizmodo in which she tried, in 2019, to cut the various tech overlords out of her life entirely for a week at a time:
Goodbye Big Five
Week 1 — Amazon
Week 2 — Facebook
Week 3 — Google
Week 4 — Microsoft
Week 5 — Apple
Week 6 — All Five of Them
Greg Steube has some very important questions for Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet.
Not to be outdone by any of the other idiot Republicans at the hearing, Chair and ranking member Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin demanded to know why Donald Trump, Jr. had recently been suspended from Twitter. He demanded this information from the CEO of Facebook, of course.
Here’s an article that should put to rest the bitching about anti-conservative bias on Facebook.
Bob misspoke when he said that these companies will eventually be trillion-dollar enterprises. Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet are all already trillion-dollar enterprises, and Facebook isn’t far behind.
Here’s the article that claims Jeff Bezos is on track to be the world’s first trillionaire by 2030.
Here’s a small window from the Electronic Frontier Foundation into how the big tech companies are hoovering up as much personal data as they possibly can, and the sort of thing that would have been worth asking about.
Mark Meadows showed up on Face the Nation and explained why the president thinks it’s a good idea to possibly delay the presidential election in November.
James Clyburn went on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning and called Trump Mussolini, among other things, and suggested that he doesn’t think Trump will leave next January, regardless of the election outcome.
Somebody else out there thinks Trump might quit the race before November, too.
If the plan is to delegitimize the election ahead of time and plant the seed of refusing to give up the White House, you might start by convincing half of America that if Joe Biden wins, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE. To wit:
Failing that, the Trump campaign is also trying to convince everyone that Joe Biden, one of the least radical Senators in the history of the institution, is a secret commie patsy.
Here’s that brief Marketplace report that put Bob on tilt last week. Check out the full blargh! about it here.
I think that’s it! Talk to you next week.