Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2468 - The View from Mt. Stupid - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2111.20
Here we are again.
Another edition of the WEEKLY HODGE PODGE. I am trying a new thing. Fewer shares and more just curated content worked into my spiel.
We'll see if I stick with it. But in doing that, I might be able to make the HODGE truly weekly again.
Here's the best thing I saw this week.
[ Thai Commercial ] - "what do you desire most" HD
Jul 30, 2015
Here's the second best.
TEACHERLESS ONLINE CLASS ROOM DISCUSSION BORED
Seth Robins
This video illustrates what not to do in a hybrid or online class discussion. The point is to illustrate how instructor investment--in terms of relationship-building, interactive engagement, and the validation of student participation--will help increase the learning experience and engagement of students in asynchronous educational forums.
This video was made in collaboration with Brian Carter and his employees at BYU-Idaho's Online Curriculum Development Department--who shot the footage, acted in the film, and produced the video--and Seth Robins of BYU-Idaho's Campus Curriculum Development Department, who conceptualized the video and created the storyboard.
SO LET'S compare these two things, shall we?
The first video is all about gratitude and doing good things.
The second is about how online "education" is failing our students when the teacher is kind of checked out.
So, Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted and now in addition to going to college to be a nurse, he may get to be an intern with one of the more extreme lunatics that have somehow been elected to Congress, like Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, or even Madison Cawthorn, the latter who has actually told his followers to be "armed and dangerous." WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK??
No one, actually, should be telling their followers to be "armed and dangerous" but certainly not a sitting member of the U.S. Congress?????!!!!!
But then, the greatest threat to our national security is white supremacists and right-wing extremists, and the problem with investigating and prosecuting these domestic terrorists is that many who would investigate and arrest them are the very terrorists being investigated or they are the brothers and sisters of these lunatics.
Trump Was Named In 1,200 Threat Reports Prior To 2020 Election
Nov 20, 2021
The Ring of Fire
The Department of Homeland Security analyzes millions of threats every year, but in the lead-up to the 2020 election, they received roughly 1,200 threat reports that mentioned the name "Trump." In spite of this, the agency didn't believe that the people threatening to commit acts of violence were really that important, so many of these reports were just left to die on the vine, and we all know what happened next. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.
I hate to be so pejorative that I accuse those who have bought into Trump fanaticism have failed an IQ test, but, really, they have. It's difficult to argue with people who think that the 2020 election was the greatest fraud in the history of elections or worse, that democrats eat babies.
I used the think that it was plain to see the grift, like that Iraq had WMDs and so we needed to attack, even though it was obviously all about oil and military contracts.
But the current state of play seems even more obvious to be a test of how intelligent you are.
The big lie?
Qanon?
Fears about Critical Race Theory by people who do not know what it is?
Rewriting history with lies people believe?
It's gross.
Hello up there on Mt.Stupid!
Or I should say "Hello down there," as Mt. Stupid is definitely an opposite mountain, growing downwards.
I hate writing this kind of invective. Mostly, I am trying to work through my feelings as always.
What we need is to come together. We need to listen to each other and agree to disagree.
But how can I find respect for someone who really thinks Donald Trump is the rightful president or that Critical Race Theory is taught to third graders and is about white people hating themselves for being racist.
Just as I write about all this hate and grotesque shitshow that our country is becoming, "America! Fuck Yeah!", there are parents ready to burn books like Gender Queer just for being available in a high school library, not assigned reading in any course, in the mistaken belief that it is pornographic: it's not.
BUT students and former students descended on the school board meeting where the parents gathered to demand the removal of that and other books and spoke out against this idiocy and hate.
High School Students Stand Up To Backwards Parents Who Want To Ban Books
Nov 18, 2021
The Ring of Fire
Bitter parents at a school board meeting in Illinois this week got more than they bargained for when a group of high school students showed up to teach them a lesson. The students were there because the parents wanted certain books banned (dealing with LGBTQ themes) and they wanted the parents to understand that the books were not, as they had claimed, "teaching kids how to be gay." They also used the right wing's "free speech" arguments against them. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why this shows that there might be a little hope for this country after all.
"The people who are calling themselves black people saviors don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help."
That's New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter talking about his best-selling new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and The 1619 Project undermine the success of black people by sharpening racial divides and distracting from actual obstacles to real progress.
His shortlist for what would most help black America? "There should be no war on drugs; society should get behind teaching everybody to read the right way; and we should make solid vocational training as easy to obtain as a college education."
Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.
By 2100, 13 of the world’s 20 biggest urban areas will be in Africa. This is how Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future.
By Max Bearak, Dylan Moriarty and Júlia Ledur ●Read more »
Apple finds itself engaged in an epic legal battle with Epic Games over its near monopoly with its app store.
And that's not all. Tech seems to be a HOT story line, like in New Mexico where a Canadian company mines Bitcoin on land belonging to Navajo Nation, using SEVEN MEGAWATTS of power a month (think almost 20,000 homes worth of power). And over in New York, the new mayor, Eric Adams thinks that NYC schools should teach kids about Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, which is rather ambitious in a country in which lots of so-called conservatives don't even want anyone taught about the realities of racism and the history of the bigotry in the origins of the country.
And let's not leave today without our dose of Trump news, such as how he's facing LEGAL BATTLES on both sides of the Atlantic in both New York state and Scotland.
Remember when I wrote about Jon Gruden? Now, he's doing even more to prove that my assessment of him as a colossal asshole was always true: he's suing the NFL.
New Hampshire, one of the more weirdly fucked up states in the country, has some new ban on speech that contradicts itself and in the end makes no sense, probably so they can "interpret" it however they like to suit their own purposes. The clearest part indicates that it bans speech related to unconscious racism in the workplace because, you know, if it's unconscious then clearly it doesn't exist. And, you know, they will pay you to catch people breaking this vague law, basically saying anything you don't like in the class room or workplace. Because, you know, that's nothing like Nazi Germany or any other totalitarian regime.
"Moms for Liberty" with a speech bounty for teachers. Perfectly normal country. pic.twitter.com/YbKITM3KdZ
— nate bowling (local elections matter) (@nate_bowling) November 13, 2021
And if you don't have a law in your state or bounty hunter wackos turning people they don't like over to the state, you can just SUE libraries for having content you want to censor because you fear black people or gay people or most especially black and gay people.
And it should come as no surprise that smart investigative journalists, like David Corn at Mother Jones, have thoroughly investigated and PROVEN that Trump and his cronies cries of RUSSIAN HOAX are just as phony as nearly everything else they cry. Russia attacked and Trump was (and is?) in bed with Putin.
It was a clever ploy on the part of the Trump gang: Deny the unfounded—that Trump was caught on tape consorting with urinating prostitutes and that he conspired directly with Putin—to sidestep the damning reality that Trump and his aides betrayed the nation by both encouraging the Russian attack and trying to cover up Putin’s sinister intervention. The dossier has been a convenient foil, their false flag. Critiquing the memos and the reporting of them is fair game. Yet obsessing over the Steele dossier—without equal or greater attention to the larger story—is itself a profoundly dangerous assault upon truth.
Don Jr's lady friend Kimberly Guilfoyle wants due credit for basically organizing the whole January 6th protest. Okay, sure, happy to give her credit.
The House Select committee may give her the credit for which she is begging with some prison time for organizing an insurrection.
Phooey!
There's little justice in this country. Oklahoma governor commuted the execution of Julius Jones minutes before he was to be executed. Jones has been on death row since 1999 for a crime of which he claims he is innocent and framed by his co-defendant, who has since served his time and been released.
More from this article:
Disturbingly, even if he were proven innocent, "actual innocence" does not necessarily mean getting out of prison in the United States, or even not being executed. That's why there are people sitting behind bars right now for crimes other people have not only confessed to, but for which they have already served their time and been released.
Just yesterday, two men were officially exonerated by a New York state judge for the assassination of Malcolm X, after the New York DA found, fifty years later, that proof of their actual innocence had been withheld.
#THE_STATE_OF_THE_HATE_NATION
I coined this hash tag (above) because Trump let the hate out with his own hate and bigotry and sociopathology.
FOX NEWS went from being just a nauseating channel of political and other lies sold by sexual harassers and those they were sexually harassing to being a full-blown HATE MACHINE, stoking fear and hate about anything and everything that will make the bigoted more outspoken about their bigotry and convince those more moderate that their secret fears are really justified and making them into bigots as well.
Such is the mission of people like Laura Ingraham, who has to be one of the most vile TV personalities I have ever seen.
What now?
Hating Kamala Harris and stoking the fears of DIVERSITY over "merit," which is a disgusting argument that suggests people of color want things handed to them simply due to their skin color and not because they are ALSO qualified and have merit. It's a grotesque way to stoke higher and higher the flames of fear in white people that they do not deserve what they have, that they actually lack merit, that they have unearned privileges and opportunities, and that they will be replaced by people of color, especially for those we let into the country or fail to stop from crossing the border.
And, you know, if FOX is too mild, you can always watch NEWSMAX or ONE AMERICA NEWS to really get a dose of the vile hate machine in its most abhorrent baseness and hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy because most of these hate spewers consider themselves Christians, though we can add to the list of things about which they are ignorant what CHRIST ACTUALLY TAUGHT PEOPLE about love, charity, grace, and forgiveness.
Did y'all see what Tucker Carlson said about Vice President Kamala Harris the other night? How he was lobbing weird Canadian birther comments toward Vice President Kamala Harris, because she attended high school in Montreal, and insinuating that she only got where she is by dating Willie Brown and Montel Williams? (We had no idea that's how you got to the vice presidency. Would love to hear Mike Pence's stories!)
Yeah, so we guess others at Fox News were feeling left out and decided to prove to America that they also too could be fucking misogynistic racist garbage toward Vice President Harris.
Just gonna throw you all some quotes and videos here, starting with Laura Ingraham. No need for heavy analysis here, just public shame.
INGRAHAM: Now, one thing we do know, however, is that Biden's Vice President — I mean, she is completely incapable of stepping in to take over as Commander-in-Chief, should Biden be incapacitated. She has problems delivering simple remarks. Because, I'm sorry, she knows nothing except how to play the race card to get ahead. [...]
It's always a diversity thing. How about merit? How about that for a change? Well, it turns out that selecting a VP based solely on diversity criteria and not objective merit is not only stupid, it's really dangerous.
GERALDO RIVERA (HOST): I do believe the tragedy is that she is historic. She is the first female, Asian, and African-American and all of the rest of that. But, you know, she's blowing it. And I think leaving a bad taste for the next one. And I don't appreciate that.
"A bad taste for the next one?" Oh my God. And Geraldo doesn't appreciate that? Oh my God even more!
Jesse Watters responded:
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): Are you surprised that there's so much drama with the first female vice president?
Very quickly the Republicans are becoming the party of DEATH THREATS, people who have completely broken from reality, stoked by TV crazies just chasing the all-mighty dollar by sacrificing any semblance of truth. I wrote about some of the most heinous DEATH THREATS this week.
I also called out all politicians but especially REPUBLICANS to stop their in fighting bullshit and actually work to HELP PEOPLE like Stacy Abrams, who is not even serving in an elected office right now.
But we can have good things. We can study Bertrand Russell's ten commandments for living in a healthy democracy, or we can get a good understanding of Sun Tzu's THE ART OF WAR because we might need it. Important to remember that the central concept is "know they enemy."
I coined the motto EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY years ago to keep an open mind about complex subjects, like gender, that are difficult to define and require a flexible point of view. I also coined the motto because I saw how dangerous CERTAINTY can be. Had I know how very, very true this would become, beyond what I could imagine in 1999 or so when I coined the phrase, then I might have coined some more mottos for myself.
But here’s the thing. We’re all confident idiots.
Think for a moment about something you’re really good at. It might be fixing cars, breeding Basset hounds, baking bread, playing Call of Duty…..anything you know a lot about. Now consider what the average person knows about your area of expertise. It’s probably not much, and some of it is probably wrong. They probably don’t even realize how much there is to know.
Now consider you’re as ignorant as that person in essentially every other area. If you didn’t just eat a slice of humble pie, I would suggest thinking a bit harder, because you’re probably dumber than you think you are.
As Dunning pointed out, “The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.”
The Parable of the Graph
When my husband and I were first married, we spent a semester in Germany. In preparation, we bought books and CDs to learn to speak German. (This was before apps and smartphones.) Fortunately for us, we were in an area of the country where most people didn’t speak English. No problem. We knew how to speak German!
Or we thought we did. Most people were generous enough to humor us, but let’s just say there were incidents. On one occasion, while conducting a concert during a heat wave, my husband repeatedly told an audience that he was hot, and they were hot, too. Having forgotten to use the reflexive, he essentially told everyone how horny he was.
Having gained just enough knowledge to make us feel confident, we were on the Peak of Mt. Stupid. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Figure 2: The Dunning-Kruger effect took off like wildfire on the internet, as it clearly touched a nerve. Memes and jokes went viral, as did this graph, which, while it seemed intuitive, was actually not part of the original research. However, in an ironic twist, Dunning later tested the graph and confirmed the internet was onto something! Source: Intelligent Speculation
Actually, it’s crowded up there, full of people who watched a couple of YouTube videos and think they’ve discovered proof that NASA is hiding the fact that the Earth is flat, or the celebrity who spent a few hours on Google and concluded they know more about vaccines than scientists.
Getting off of Mt. Stupid isn’t automatic. Some stay up there for life. But hopefully, you learn enough to descend into the Valley of Despair. Confidence plummets because you realize there’s more to learn. It’s complicated. Oh, and there are people who know more than you!
If you persevere, you start to climb up the Slope of Enlightenment. You learn more, make connections, recognize nuance. You realize you may never actually really know for sure. You gain more mastery and your confidence increases.
And frustratingly, you see those at the top of Mt. Stupid and wonder how they can be so confident when they’re so clearly wrong.
How to Not Be a Confident Idiot
McArthur Wheeler was confident his plan was fool-proof, and convinced lemon juice would make him invisible. When the police showed him the surveillance videos, he thought they were fake. He just couldn’t believe he had been wrong. He kept repeating, “But I wore the juice!”
(Apparently Wheeler’s incompetence extended to photography, as when he turned the camera to take a selfie to test his plan, he had actually taken a photo of the ceiling!)
Wheeler’s confidence was because of his incompetence. He was too ignorant to recognize his mistakes, and made poor decisions because of it. In short, he had deceived himself.
So, if we don’t know what we don’t know, what’s the solution?
The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs because we are unable to objectively evaluate our knowledge and competence. Therefore, the solution boils down to metacognition, or being aware of our thought processes, so that we can more accurately and honestly evaluate our own knowledge and skills.
So, ask yourself how you know something. And maybe more importantly, how would you know if you were wrong. Honestly evaluate the evidence. Consider that you might not even know enough to be capable of evaluating the evidence.
Be curious about what you don’t know. Actively look for your blindspots. Ask for feedback from experts, and be open to incorporating their suggestions. If they tell you you’ve made a mistake or overlooked something, don’t get defensive. Listen and learn.
Get comfortable with uncertainty. Most issues are more complicated than we think, and understanding the complexity and nuance requires deep knowledge and expertise.
Oh, and monitor your confidence. Don’t wear the juice!
The Take-Home Message
Many of us go through the world confident in what we think we know. Unfortunately, our hubris stops us from actually achieving real knowledge. Being able to accurately assess what we know and how we are thinking is essential to true understanding. Often, our confidence is an illusion, based on an illusion of knowledge. We’re dumb and proud……completely unaware of how much we don’t know.
Making better decisions requires better thinking. We are experts at fooling ourselves, and we love to be right and know everything. But, if our goal is real knowledge, we need to recognize the limits of our knowledge.
What will the Sea Level Rise of tomorrow look like? The truth is there's still a big range of possibilities, and scientists are struggling to pin down the processes that come into play. But one thing is clear: to stay safe, we need to stop emitting as soon as possible.
Unless you’re an expert in the field you’re “researching,” you’re almost certainly not able to fully understand the nuance and complexity of the topic. Experts have advanced degrees, published research, and years of experience in their sub-field. They know the body of evidence and the methodologies the researchers use. And importantly, they are aware of what they don’t know.
Can experts be wrong? Sure. But they’re MUCH less likely to be wrong than a non-expert.
Thinking one can “do their research” on scientific topics, such as climate change or mRNA vaccines, is to fool oneself. It’s an exercise in the Dunning-Kruger effect: you’ll be overconfident but wrong.
Yes, information is widely available. But it doesn’t mean you have the background knowledge to understand it. So know your limits.
Wouldn't it be great to get phone calls from your dogs??
Posted by BeauHD from the give-a-dog-a-choice dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian:[R]esearchers have created a hi-tech option for canines left home alone: a ball that allows them to call their owners on the old dog and bone. The device -- nicknamed the DogPhone -- is a soft ball that, when moved, sends a signal to a laptop that launches a video call, and the sound of a ringing telephone. The owner can choose whether to take the call, and when to hang up, while they can also place a call to their pet -- although the dog has to move the ball to pick up.
The research, which is published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Computer-Human interaction and is being presented at the 2021 ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces Conference in Lodz, Poland, reveals how [Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, of the University of Glasgow, and first author of the research] and researchers from Aalto University in Finland settled on a soft ball to create the device. The DogPhone underwent a number of iterations to ensure it had the right level of sensitivity towards movement -- these were tested over 16 days by Hirskyj-Douglas and her nine-year-old black labrador, Zack.
A diary detailing the calls between owner and pet suggests the latter did not always seem to know what he was doing -- despite having been shown five times how the system worked. "Dog rang me but was not interested in our call instead was checking for things in his bed," Hirskyj-Douglas noted during the testing of one iteration. Another entry reveals the potential pitfalls of the DogPhone. "Dog walking around wagging and then laying down. I was in a meeting so had to hang up quickly," one record reveals. The team say that many of the calls made by Zack -- who was left alone for about eight hours during testing days -- appear to have been accidents although they caution that may simply be the human perspective. "For example, when the dog triggered the system with their butt, this could have been deliberate and the dog's unique way of triggering an interaction," they write.
In things that are really important, like outer space and the universe, black holes may gain mass from the expansion of the universe itself. Some black holes are as massive as fifty or even one hundred suns.
This is ... well. This is why we're probably leaving Montana. Because in the Great Re-Sorting, this nurse is coming here instead of getting vaccinated, wearing a mask at the nursing home, watching football, or having dinner with her parents, who are Biden-loving heretics. Fox News, you did this, and now they are eating your face too.
"Sometimes you have to take a stand," she said.
"You're damn right," Tiffani said. "I started tearing up this morning watching all these nurses walk out around the country on Fox News."
Roughton frowned and shook her head. "You've got to give that up," she said.
"What?"
"Fox News. I heard they did their own mandate. I switched over to Newsmax."
It was the latest piece of her life she'd surrendered on principle: Sunday afternoon football, after the players started to kneel during the national anthem; her Costco membership, after the store mandated masks; regular dinners with her parents, after she saw a Joe Biden sign in their front yard. During the last several months, she'd started talking to her husband about leaving liberal Washington and moving with their children and grandchildren to Montana or Idaho.
Meanwhile, who's the vaccination absolute MVP? At 98 percent of those eligible vaccinated, it's the lettuce fields of California's Central Valley. (Zocalo Public Square)
You guys aren't going to believe this, but Politico used the noun "Nancy Pelosi" and the verb "wins" in its California newsletter headline. (Politico) Tick-tock of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi saving the BIF. (Politico again)
Wages grew by 12 percent in low-income food, hotel, and leisure industries. Plus other indicia of a quickly flourishing Biden Economy. — The American Prospect
When your antitrust bill excludes Target and Walmart. Don't expect better from Tom Cotton, of course, but AHEM KLOBS. (Techcrunch)
Dr. Oz, a quack, is thinking about running for US Senate from Pennsylvania. Quackery, itemized. — From Missouri Medicine archived at National Institutes of Health
Max Cleland has died. Wonk pal Charles P. Pierce excoriates #resistance hero Rick Wilson, because that guy can suck all our dicks. — Esquire
McDonald's one weird trick for not being responsible for its managers raping teen employees! (Mother Jones)
Resource use, economics, and the Metaverse. Be a nerd with Noahpinion!
A Bronx post office that was one of four pilot locations to test postal banking has had literally zero takers. Why? David Dayen does journalism at it. (The American Prospect)
The Missoula Mauler, because it came up in conversation. Not a wrestler, a bad murdering man. (Wikipedia)
Oh how lovely. In remembrance of "Avatar," Gillian Lovejoy, an artist and perhaps a witch, but not the demon kind, no demons allowed!!! — Cintra Wilson substack
I have been on a Mary Tyler Moore kick (again) and was trying to figure out how old the actors were at the time, because Lou Grant was "44," which is hilarious — AND HE WAS ACTUALLY YOUNGER, HE WAS 41 — but Cloris Leachman was actually 44, and Betty White, who you couldn't tell if she was supposed to be 35 or 60, was about 52. Leachman died in January at 94, with COVID-19 as a factor. Wikipedia does not even MENTION Granny in Bad Santa, or as my Good Son calls her the second he sees her on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Hey, is that Sammiches?!" (Wik)
Apparently Reuters thinks it's pretty gross how garbage people are getting away with harassing and threatening elections officials around America, now that Donald Trump and his Big Lie have radicalized and emboldened rightwing insurgents to attack their own country because they're sore losers who don't believe in democracy.
So Reuters decided to expose some of the most prolific offenders in that regard, people who have made awful threats to innocent people by phone and online, and who have suffered zero consequences. Hell, looks like most of them haven't even really been investigated.
Reuters ended up speaking personally to nine of these people. Eight of those were so proud of themselves they allowed their names to be used on the record.
Reuters with some more numbers:
In the seven cases that legal scholars said could be prosecuted, law enforcement agencies were alerted by election officials to six of them. The people who made those threats told Reuters they never heard from police.
All nine harassers interviewed by Reuters said they believed they did nothing wrong. Just two expressed regret when told their messages had frightened officials or caused security scares. The seven others were unrepentant, with some saying the election workers deserved the menacing messages.
And here is how the story starts:
In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state's chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado's election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.
In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.
"This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger," the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. "Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered."
Golly they sound nice.
Reuters notes that all three people it's describing right there are big believers in Trump's big lie and other fake news, and that none of them has been charged with any crime. And those three are part of the nine Reuters spoke to, who all apparently just confessed everything they had done. Guess that's what happens when radicalized white people are under the impression, perhaps correctly, that nothing will happen to them.
In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters' request.
Reuters notes that in the course of its investigation this year, it's "documented nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states, including more than 100 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts." It notes that not long after it started reporting on this growing phenomenon, Attorney General Merrick Garland's Department of Justice "launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases." Unfortunately, Reuters adds, "law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions."
And so forth:
In many cases, they didn't investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America's patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.
So all that is great.
This is a long report, so you'll have to read it all. Below are some previews if you want them.
Ross Miller
You can learn about Ross Miller, the real estate investor in Georgia, who according to Reuters "warned an official in the Atlanta area that he'd be tarred and feathered, hung or face firing squads unless he addressed voter fraud." That guy got radicalized, at least in part, by watching a bullshit video from Rudy Giuliani featuring fantastical tall tales about suitcases full of fraudulent ballots. We know what you're thinking — man, you'd have to be so stupid to believe Rudy Giuliani. But this guy is pretty clearly not smart.
More choice quotes from poor Ross, bless his heart:
"I left the message because I'm a patriot, and I'm sick and tired of what's going on in this country," he said. "That's what happens when you commit treason: You get hung." [...]
"You've got to stand up," said Miller. "You're either a patriot for the freedom of this country or you're a communist against it."
OK.
Jamie Fialkin
Then there was Jamie Fialkin, now of Peoria, Arizona, previously an Orthodox Jewish standup comedian in Brooklyn. He seems weird.
Jamie Fialkin of Peoria, Arizona, talked of a grand conspiracy of those controlling the media, the banking system and social media companies. "When you have those three things, you can get away with anything – you can tell people, 'black is white, white is black,' and people go, 'OK,'" Fialkin said. [...]
He said he's convinced that former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and progressive philanthropist George Soros bought fake ballots from China, another debunked theory promoted by Trump's allies.
Hoo boy.
Apparently he's really angriest at Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, and called her June 3 to say she was going to hang "from a fucking tree." Also: "They're going to hang you for treason, you fucking bitch." And then he called again to say a "good slogan" for her upcoming gubernatorial campaign would be "Don't vote for me, for one reason. Back in December I got hung for treason."
Fialkin is a good example of just how delusional these people are. He told Reuters he's "like most Americans" and "just waiting to see when the civil war starts." He regrets nothing.
Jeff Yeager
Also very angry at Katie Hobbs, and also very delusional, was Jeff Yeager, a 56-year-old electrician from Los Angeles:
"When Katie the c‑‑‑ is executed for treason, what are you f‑‑‑‑‑‑ traitors going to be doing for work?" Yeager said in a June 17 voicemail left for Hobbs and her staff. Months later, on Sept. 8, he left another voicemail warning she'd be executed.
Like Fialkin, Yeager said he never actually wanted to personally hurt Hobbs, but he's delusional, so he's convinced "the public is going to hang this woman." Reuters notes that when they talked to Yeager, he had gotten a visit the day before from the FBI for threatening Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi.
Eric Pickett
Another one?
Eric Pickett, a 42-year-old night staffer at a youth treatment center in Utah, said his anger boiled over after watching an Aug. 10 "cyber symposium" held by pillow magnate Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has pushed false election conspiracy theories.
And you wonder why we cover that fucking pillow loser?
Pickett said he paid close attention as one of the symposium's speakers, Tina Peters, a Republican clerk in Colorado's Mesa County, criticized Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. Griswold has been leading an investigation into Peters over a voting-system security breach in Mesa, one of the state's most conservative counties. At the symposium, Peters, an election-fraud conspiracy theorist, claimed Griswold "raided" her office to produce false evidence and "bully" her.
None of that was true, according to state officials. Nonetheless, Pickett snapped. He got on Facebook and sent Griswold a message.
"You raided an office. You broke the law. STOP USING YOUR TACTICS. STOP NOW. Watch your back. I KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP, I SEE YOU SLEEPING. BE AFRAID, BE VERRY AFFRAID. I hope you die."
Pickett said in an interview that he "got wrapped up in the moment." He was surprised Griswold found the message threatening and expressed regret for causing alarm.
"I didn't know they would take it as a threat," he said. "I was thinking they would just take it as somebody just trolling them."
Good god.
If you like that guy, you'll LOVE all the rest of the folks in the Reuters report, especially VERMONT GUY.
To keep this piece from being 10,000 words long, and because the Reuters thing already is, we're not going to tell you about Vermont Guy. But listen, y'all Vermont Guy is FUUUUUUUCKED.
Now don't you wanna go read the Reuters thing?
The details of each of these situations are different, as are the particulars of why the threats really haven't been investigated.
But oh boy, we sure are down the rabbithole here, when local, state, and national law enforcement just can't figure out how to prosecute all these people threatening elections officials for their unwillingness to overthrow America in service of the one-term loser fascist.
Read the whole thing, as they say on the internet.
White parents in Virginia can sleep well knowing that they've elected a new governor who'll make sure their kids won't learn anything uncomfortable. You'd think they'd enjoy a victory lap or two and a cooling-off period, but they're still real mad at their local school boards.
Tuesday, parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, yelled at school board members some more, accusing them of all sorts of perfidious skullduggery. Dig this one lady who sounds like someone I tried to avoid whenever I rode the A train late at night.
ANGRY PERSON: Critical race theory is a Marxist philosophy and a cancer that spreads through the vehicles that you spend my taxpayer money on … You have activist teachers using it to indoctrinate their kids who are at the mercy of their authority. That is child abuse and you have no right to brainwash children into believing that their skin color supersedes the power of constructive life choices.
Yes, if enslaved Black people had made more constructive life choices, they might not have been born into slavery.
White parents are also still pissed that their kids have to wear masks to protect themselves from COVID-19. That's a precaution we can expect Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin to toss aside in the name of freedom. I keep mentioning the parents' race because I'm obviously a Marxist who hates children, but I also don't see any Black or Hispanic parents at these shouting matches. Maybe they prefer more quiet forms of entertainment.
Parents are attempting to recall members of the school board, which one parent claimed has "overseen the worst example of education leadership in the history of this country." This person presumably never heard of Betsy DeVos.
The angry lady also accused the school boards of promoting child molestation.
ANGRY PERSON: And we've uncovered your books in our libraries and they are laced with pedophilia and incest. You can't gaslight us into child-grooming psychobabble. You aren't fooling anyone anymore, especially now, that you're sitting there, doubling down on child rape. It's disgusting!
This would all be terrible if it were actually happening, but it's not. Republicans and rightwing media have convinced these people that they live in a moral sewer. We're just a few weeks away from 2022 and these parents are re-enacting the “very special" book banning episode of a 1980s sitcom. In the "Family Ties" episode “Read It And Weep," Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox) quotes Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in response to a school banning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books, and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.
Yes, Alex the Reagan Republican quotes a liberal Supreme Court justice. It was a simpler time.
In Spotsylvania County, Virginia, which Youngkin carried with almost 60 percent of the vote, the school board has ordered staff to remove any books from library shelves that contain "sexually explicit" material. They're expected to report on the number of naughty books at a special meeting next week. This is in response to a parent's freakout over the content of books accessible through Riverbend High School's digital library app.
The mother was originally distraught that so many available books acknowledged the existence of the LGTBQ community. Then she discovered a book that she considered even worse: Adam Rapp's 33 Snowfish(Wonkette cut link), which the American Library Association named a Best Book for Young Adults in 2004. The book addresses child pornography but it's not actually child pornography. From what I've read, it seems overtly anti-child pornography. It's recommended for readers 15 and older. They can handle it. But the school board disagrees.
One board member, 24-year-old Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail, claimed that 33 Snowfish's presence on school library shelves means public schools "would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ." That is quite the leap — perhaps a leap straight to Congress. Leaving no cliche unturned, Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg want the removed books BURNED.
"I think we should throw those books in a fire," Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to "see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff."
So, that's where we are now — literal book burning. As grotesque as historical book burnings were, they at least served a practical purpose. Your modern bigot bonfire isn't accomplishing much if the book still exists in the cloud.
Abuismail confronted Superintendent Scott Baker over the “objectionable" books and what he said should chill you: "Dr. Baker, you saw this coming from Northern Virginia — did it not occur to you to check what is on our libraries?"
Yes, a wave of ignorant censorship is coming, and I'm reminded of these words from German poet Heinrich Heine: "Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people."
The attack on American democracy that took place on January 6, 2021, is not just harrowing history of almost a year ago. It is an attack that remains ongoing.
Ever since the late afternoon of that day—when the White House posted a short video of Donald Trump expressing “love” for the “very special” people who stormed Congress and telling them belatedly to go home—the 45th president has deceived the public about the horrific siege that shook Capitol Hill and the nation. He has denied the many vicious attacks on police by describing his supporters’ interactions with them as a “lovefest,” ignored the more than $30 million in damage and security costs, and falsely claimed that the insurrectionists, many of whomwere armed, had “no guns whatsoever.” In a recently revealed interview with a book author recorded in March, Trump sided with the bloodthirsty mob that threatened to hang Mike Pence and admitted he had no concerns that day about the safety of his sitting vice president.
Now, the twice-impeached former president is pushing his most brazen narrative yet in support of the insurrection. Since mid-October, in a series of statements posted online and in remarks to right-wing media and at fundraising events, Trump has sought to fully transform the Capitol siege into a patriotic triumph of the Republican Party. He started rolling out his latest messaging as the House select committee investigating January 6 issued a wave of subpoenas whose targets Trump instructed not to comply, including now-indicted ally Steve Bannon. Trump’s effort goes beyond repeating his long-running lie about the 2020 election being “stolen” through “massive fraud.” Using a familiar tactic, he is now appropriating language about the insurrection and the so-called Big Lie that drove it as he aims to flip reality on its head.
“Why isn’t the January 6th Unselect Committee of partisan hacks studying the massive Presidential Election Fraud, which took place on November 3rd and was the reason that hundreds of thousands of people went to Washington to protest on January 6th?” he asked in a statement posted October 13 on the “Save America” campaign site hosted at donaldjtrump.com. “Look at the numbers now being reported on the fraud, which we now call the ‘Really Big Lie.’ You cannot study January 6th without studying the reason it happened, November 3rd.”
Trump continued the theme the following day with a statement declaring that the committee was “looking to hold people in criminal contempt for things relative to the Protest” and was “using prosecutors and prosecutions to destroy more than half of this Country.” Then, on October 21, he delivered a more polished version in two short sentences:
“The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!”
He has since repeated the claim multiple times. Though he remains banned from major social media platforms, his messaging still has vast reach, from his frequent interview appearances in right-wing media to the numerous sycophantsbacking him in Congress.
Trump has made freshly evident, in other words, that he is serving as the inspirational leader for a domestic terrorism movement. His role as such was first openly described by a handful of leading national security experts in the season of his reelection defeat and tumultuous final months in office. Back then, the discussion centered on Trump using tactics of stochastic terrorism, a method of inciting violence veiled in plausible deniability that those experts (and this journalist) recognized from Trump in the run-up to January 6. Two conservative Republicans who left the Trump administration as whistleblowers in 2020, both counterterrorism experts, sounded the alarm, with one referring to Trump’s “coded support” for far-right extremist groups. (Numerous members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who heeded Trump’s call for supporters to descend on DC would soon face conspiracy charges stemming from the assault on Congress.) A third longtime Republican, a former senior national security official in the George W. Bush administration, described Trump as “an arsonist of radicalization.”
A WHOLE LOTTA
PANDEMIC GOING ON
I have a lot of students trying to argue against the vaccine, and most of the arguments are really weak.
A common one is that if you get Covid and develop natural immunity with antibodies, this is better protection the vaccine.
Posted by BeauHD from the stop-making-excuses dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill:A new study from the [CDC] finds that vaccination provides better protection against hospitalization with COVID-19 than a previous infection with the virus. The analysis found people hospitalized with coronavirus-like symptoms were more than five times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 if they had had recent prior infection than if they were recently vaccinated. The study released Friday examined more than 7,000 people across nine states and 187 hospitals, comparing those who were unvaccinated and had previously had the coronavirus in the last three to six months and those who were vaccinated over the same time frame.
The CDC urged even those who were previously infected to get their shots. [...] Overall, [CDC Director Rochelle Walensky] said at a press briefing earlier this week that the hospitalization rate among unvaccinated people is 12 times higher than for vaccinated people. The vaccination rate for those 12 and older has now reached 78 percent with at least one shot, but Walensky noted that still leaves more than 60 million eligible Americans unvaccinated.
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT - JOHNS HOPKINS
Anyway, as usual, here's the weekly links to the data about cases (lower than reality) and deaths (lower than reality, also) due to COVID-19.
Worldometer manually analyzes, validates, and aggregates data from thousands of sources in real time and provides global COVID-19 live statisticsfor a wide audience of caring people around the world.
Over the past 15 years, our statistics have been requested by, and provided to Oxford University Press, Wiley, Pearson, CERN, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), The Atlantic, BBC, Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology, Science Museum of Virginia, Morgan Stanley, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Kaspersky, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Amazon Alexa, Google Translate, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), the U2 concert, and many others.
Good morning. The U.S. may soon offer booster shots to every adult. We’ll explain why.
Receiving a booster in Anchorage.Ash Adams for The New York Times
Boosters for all?
The federal government’s guidance on Covid booster shots has often been confusing, but it looks as if it’s about to become much simpler.
The F.D.A. appears to be on the verge of authorizing Moderna and Pfizer booster shots for all adults in the U.S. If it does, anyone over 18 can get a booster, as long as it’s been at least six months since their last shot. (The C.D.C. has said that adults who received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine should get a booster at least two months later.)
Dr. Anthony Fauci has become “a very, very relentless advocate” for boosters, The Times’s Sharon LaFraniere, who covers the federal government’s response to the pandemic, told us. “He keeps pointing out that the data is getting stronger.”
Today we’ll walk you through what’s compelling regulators to widen eligibility, who needs the shots most and how to get one.
Why now?
First, immunity is waning. While experts debate the pace at which the vaccines become less effective, there’s strong evidence that they do lose some of their ability to prevent Covid infections. (These charts show the decline.) While the vaccines’ protection against severe disease mostly holds, some studies suggest they become somewhat less effective at doing so, particularly for older people or others with underlying medical conditions.
Second, expanding booster access is simpler than asking Americans to consult a list of rules to determine whether they’re eligible. As our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli put it, “It’s easier to just tell people to get them.”
Third, broadening eligibility to all adults would bring the U.S. in line with the approach of other countries, including Israel and Canada. Several U.S. states have begun expanding booster access on their own, essentially declaring that they couldn’t wait for the federal government.
“Critics would say that the C.D.C. is starting to look more like a caboose than a locomotive,” Sharon says. If the agency recommends boosters for all adults, “they’re just authorizing what’s already happening.”
Who should get one?
The government has already recommended that older adults, people 50 and up with underlying medical conditions and those who are immunocompromised get an additional shot. And the C.D.C. has allowed boosters for many others.
“I’ve urged everyone I know who is higher risk to get a booster,” Zeynep Tufekci, the sociologist and Times Opinion columnist, writes.
Some experts believe that the urgency for younger, healthier Americans to get a booster is lower. But others have started to make the case for it. “All vaccinated adults would benefit from a booster,” Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University wrote yesterday in The Atlantic.
Why? Cases are rising again — as of Wednesday, the U.S. was averaging over 88,000 new cases a day, up 23 percent from two weeks ago — and another winter surge seems possible, particularly in parts of the country with lower vaccination rates. (Look up your county’s numbers.) That increases the urgency of getting more Americans as much protection as they can.
Chart shows 7-day daily average.Source: New York Times database
And although new infections are concentrated among the unvaccinated, Jha notes, breakthrough infections have become more common. For younger and healthier adults, getting a booster can lessen the chances of getting sick and of spreading the virus to someone more vulnerable.
And boosters appear to work. Evidence from Israel, which has offered extra shots to all adults, suggests that a third Pfizer dose increases protection against infection to a level similar to the vaccine’s initial efficacy.
How do I get one?
Once the government broadens eligibility, you’ll be able to go to your local pharmacy, a doctor’s office or anywhere else where vaccines are available.
Mixing and matching different types of vaccines seems to provide a stronger immune response, Apoorva says, especially if you get a Moderna one after two Pfizer shots or following the single-dose of J.&J.
Is it ethical?
Some public health experts have urged the U.S. and other countries not to make boosters widely available. They argue that doing so will limit the supply of shots for the rest of the world, especially for residents of less wealthy countries.
But as Sharon notes, the U.S. government has already stockpiled enough vaccine doses to give boosters to the adult population. And the Biden administration, under pressure to increase the supply to poor nations, is planning to expand manufacturing capacity with the goal of producing at least a billion more doses a year.
Millions of doses have already been distributed to pharmacies and clinics around the U.S. “They cannot be recaptured and sent abroad,” Jha writes. “Either we use those doses here or we throw them away.”
More on the virus:
The first known Covid patient was a vendor at a Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived miles from it, a scientist says.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2111.20 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2332 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
United States
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