My dear friend, President Xi -
Don't fuck with me.
Best Regards,
Joe
Mar 11, 2023
Today's Daddy State Bozo
A sitting US Senator is suggesting we make deadly incursions inside another country's sovereign borders, issuing death threats against the citizens of a foreign nation - a nation which is an important ally and trading partner.
Note: he makes a very Daddy State move, ie: "Let's change US law in order to make the crime of murdering Mexican citizens acceptable". And he does it after the operative phrase, "... start killing people in Mexico ..." which serves two purposes.
- It gives him cover - he can rant and rave for the benefit of the MAGA gang, and still be relatively assured that nothing he tells them he wants to do will ever be done
- It plants the seed - if the rabble raise a big enough stink, he can claim leadership on the issue.
Hint: he has the magic (R) next to his name.
Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game
with more than 200 players.
They're all cheating,
and they all know they're all cheating.
The calculus is never simple.
Today's Tweet
The self-own on this one is just too delectable.
The video is from a Tik Tok comic named Walter Masterson, who put this up spoofing the conspiracy fantasy of "Jan6 was an antifa false flag attack".
Now do you believe me? https://t.co/DD5cRJnnV0
— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) March 10, 2023
Mar 10, 2023
Overheard
House cats. They insist on believing they're fiercely independent, while being totally reliant on a system they don't respect and can't understand.
COVID-19 Update
The debate over masks’ effectiveness in fighting the spread of the coronavirus intensified recently when a respected scientific nonprofit said its review of studies assessing measures to impede the spread of viral illnesses found it was “uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.”
Now the organization, Cochrane, says the way it summarized the review was unclear and imprecise, and that the way some people interpreted it was wrong.
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor in chief of The Cochrane Library, said in a statement.
“The review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses,” Soares-Weiser said, adding, “given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.”
She said that “this wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize,” and that Cochrane would revise the summary.
Soares-Weiser also said, though, that one of the lead authors of the review even more seriously misinterpreted its finding on masks by saying in an interview that it proved “there is just no evidence that they make any difference.” In fact, Soares-Weiser said, “that statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found.”
Cochrane reviews are often referred to as gold standard evidence in medicine because they aggregate results from many randomized trials to reach an overall conclusion — a great method for evaluating drugs, for example, which often are subjected to rigorous but small trials. Combining their results can lead to more confident conclusions.
Masks and mask mandates have been a hot controversy during the pandemic. The flawed summary — and further misinterpretation of it — set off a debate between those who said the study showed there was no basis for relying on masks or mask mandates and those who said it did nothing to diminish the need for them.
Michael D. Brown, a doctor and academic who serves on the Cochrane editorial board and made the final decision on the review, told me the review couldn’t arrive at a firm conclusion because there weren’t enough high-quality randomized trials with high rates of mask adherence.
While the review assessed 78 studies, only 10 of those focused on what happens when people wear masks versus when they don’t, and a further five looked at how effective different types of masks were at blocking transmission, usually for health care workers. The remainder involved other measures aimed at lowering transmission, like hand washing or disinfection, while a few studies also considered masks in combination with other measures. Of those 10 studies that looked at masking, the two done since the start of the Covid pandemic both found that masks helped.
(emphasis is mine)
The calculations the review used to reach a conclusion were dominated by prepandemic studies that were not very informative about how well masks blocked the transmission of respiratory viruses.
For example, in one study of hajj pilgrims in Mecca, only 24.7 percent of those assigned to wear masks reported using one daily, but not all the time (while 14.3 percent in the no-mask group wore one anyway). The pilgrims then slept together, generally in tents with 50 or 100 people. Not surprisingly, given there was little difference between the two groups, researchers found no difference from mask wearing and declared their results “inconclusive.”
In another prepandemic study, college students were asked to wear masks for at least six hours a day while in their dormitories, but they were not obligated to wear them elsewhere. Researchers found no difference in infection rates between those who wore masks and those who did not. The authors noted this might be because “the amount of time masks were worn was not sufficient” — obviously, college students also go to classes and socialize where they may not wear masks.
Yet despite their inconclusiveness, the data from just these two studies accounted for roughly half of the calculations for evaluating the impact of mask wearing on transmission. The other six prepandemic studies similarly suffered from low masking adherence, limited time wearing them and, often, small sample sizes.
The only prepandemic study reviewed by Cochrane reporting high rates of mask adherence started during the worrying H1N1 season in 2009 in Germany, and found mask wearing reduced spread if started quickly after diagnosis and if a mask was worn consistently (though its sample size, too, was small).
So what we learn from the Cochrane review is that, especially before the pandemic, distributing masks didn’t lead people to wear them, which is why their effect on transmission couldn’t be confidently evaluated.
Soares-Weiser told me the review should be seen as a call for more data, and said she worried that misinterpretations of it could undermine preparedness for future outbreaks.
So let’s look more broadly at what we know about masks.
Crucially, the question of whether a mask reduces a wearer’s risk of infection is not the same as whether wearing masks slows the spread of respiratory viruses in a community.
To use randomized trials to study whether masks reduce a virus’s spread by keeping infected people from transmitting a pathogen, we need randomized comparisons of large groups, like having people in one city assigned to wear masks and not to in another. As ethically and logistically difficult as that might seem, there was one study during the pandemic in which masks were distributed, but not mandated, in some Bangladeshi villages and not others before masks were widely used in the country. Mask use increased from 10 percent to 40 percent over a two-month period in the villages where free masks were distributed. Researchers found an 11 percent reduction in Covid cases in the villages given surgical masks, with a 35 percent reduction for people over age 60.
Another pandemic study randomly distributed masks to people in Denmark over a month. About half the participants wore the masks as recommended. Of those assigned to wear masks, 1.8 percent became infected, compared to 2.1 percent in the no-mask group — a 14 percent reduction. But researchers could not reach a firm conclusion about whether masks were protective because there were few infections in either group and fewer than half the people assigned masks wore them.
Why aren’t there more randomized studies on masks? We could have started some in early 2020, distributing masks in some towns when they weren’t widely available. It’s a shame we didn’t. But it would have been hard and unethical to deny masks to some people once they were available to all.
Scientists routinely use other kinds of data besides randomized reviews, including lab studies, natural experiments, real-life data and observational studies. All these should be taken into account to evaluate masks.
Lab studies, many of which were done during the pandemic, show that masks, particularly N95 respirators, can block viral particles. Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist who has long studied airborne viral transmission, told me even cloth masks that fit well and use appropriate materials can help.
Real-life data can be complicated by variables that aren’t controlled for, but it’s worth examining even if studying it isn’t conclusive.
Japan, which emphasized wearing masks and mitigating airborne transmission, had a remarkably low death rate in 2020 even though it did not have any shutdowns and rarely tested and traced widely outside of clusters.
David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University, calculated that before vaccines were available, U.S. states without mask mandates had 30 percent higher Covid death rates than those with mandates.
Perhaps the best evidence comes from natural experiments, which study how things change after an event or intervention.
Researchers at Mass General Brigham, one of Harvard’s teaching hospital groups, found that in early 2020, before mask mandates were introduced, the infection rate among health care workers doubled every 3.6 days and rose to 21.3 percent. After universal masking was required, the rate stopped increasing, and then quickly declined to 11.4 percent.
In Germany, 401 regions introduced mask mandates at various times over three months in the spring of 2020. By carefully comparing otherwise similar places before and after mask mandates, researchers concluded that “face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 47 percent,” with the effect more pronounced in large cities and among older people.
Brown, who led the review’s approval process, told me that mask mandates may not be tenable now, but he has a starkly different feeling about their effects in the first year of a pandemic.
“Mask mandates, social distancing, the other shutdowns we had in terms of even restaurants and things like that — if places like New York City didn’t do that, the number of deaths would have been much higher,” he told me. “I’m very confident of that statement.”
So the evidence is relatively straightforward: Consistently wearing a mask, preferably a high-quality, well-fitting one, provides protection against the coronavirus.
It’s also true that the highly contagious Omicron variant is much harder to avoid, especially because even people masking consistently can catch it from others in their social circle. Fortunately, Omicron arrived after vaccines and treatments were available.
Then why all the fuss?
Masks have become a symbol of frustration over shortcomings in the pandemic response. Some see a lack of mask mandates or a failure to wear masks as an abandonment of the clinically vulnerable. The pandemic’s burden has indeed fallen disproportionately on them.
Others have come to think mandates represent illogical rules. To be sure, we did have many illogical rules: mandating masks outdoors and even at beaches, or wearing them to enter a restaurant but not at the table, or requiring children as young as 2 to mask in day care but not during nap time (presumably, the virus also took a nap). Some mask proponents and public health authorities have also used weak studies to make overblown or imprecise claims about masks’ effectiveness.
So how should we evaluate an interview in which the lead author of the Cochrane review, Tom Jefferson, said of masks that the review determined “there is just no evidence that they make any difference”? As for whether N95s are better than surgical masks, Jefferson said, “makes no difference — none of it.”
It’s no surprise that Jefferson says he has no faith in masks’ ability to stop the spread of Covid.
In that interview, he said there is no basis to say the coronavirus is spread by airborne transmission — despite the fact that major public health agencies have long said otherwise. He has long doubted well-accepted claims about the virus. In an article he co-wrote in April 2020, Jefferson questioned whether the Covid outbreak was a pandemic at all, rather than just a long respiratory illness season. At that point, New York City schools had been closed for a month and Covid had killed thousands of New Yorkers. When New York was preparing “M*A*S*H”-like mobile hospitals in Central Park, he said there was no point in mitigations to slow the spread.
In an editorial accompanying a 2020 version of the review — the review is in its sixth update since 2006 — Soares-Wiser noted a lack of “robust, high-quality evidence for any behavioral measure or policy” and said that “when protecting the public from harm is the objective, public health officials must act in a precautionary manner to take action even when evidence is uncertain (or not of the highest quality).”
Jefferson, however, said in the interview that “the purpose of the editorial was to undermine our work.” Soares-Wiser strongly denied this, and asserted that her warning in that editorial would apply to this update as well.
Jefferson has not responded to emailed requests for comment.
As Marr notes, a respiratory virus outbreak with even higher death rates would cut these arguments tragically short. We need to be better prepared in many ways for the next pandemic, and one way is to continue to collect data on mask wearing, despite the challenges.
That, along with an honest assessment of what was done right and what might have been done better, could go a long way in resolving people’s questions and doubts.
Masks are a tool, not a talisman or a magic wand. They have a role to play when used appropriately and consistently at the right times. They should not be dismissed or demonized.
Today's Grand Idea
Governor DeSantis is putting in place a mechanism to track menstrual cycles.
Help him out, ladies.
Please send all your used "sanitary products" to:
Gov Ron DeSantis
700 N Adams St
Tallahassee FL 32303
Today's Tweet
It's automatically a good day when I can watch Matt Taibbi take it in the shorts on national TV.
The evidence that foreign actors interfered in the 2016 election is overwhelming, yet today's GOP witnesses neither accepted that fact nor believe we should prevent it in the future.
— Rep. Dan Goldman (@RepDanGoldman) March 9, 2023
It's shocking anyone would think defending democracy isn't a legitimate law enforcement mission. pic.twitter.com/9xWwdHzZbk
Today's Crooked Politician
But it seems like it's always a Republican, because something like 95% of the time, it's a Republican.
So yeah - for all practical purposes, it's always a fucking Republican.
Former Ohio House speaker convicted in $60 million bribery scheme
Former state House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges were convicted Thursday in a $60 million bribery scheme that federal prosecutors have called the largest corruption case in state history.
A jury in Cincinnati found the two guilty of conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise involving bribery and money laundering, after about 9.5 half hours of deliberations over two days.
U.S. Attorney Kenneth Parker said the government's prosecution team showed that "Householder sold the Statehouse, and thus he ultimately betrayed the people of the great state of Ohio he was elected to serve." He called Borges "a willing co-conspirator."
"Through its verdict today, the jury reaffirmed that the illegal acts committed by both men will not be tolerated and that they should be held accountable," Parker said.
Attorneys for Householder and Borges did not immediately respond to messages left by The Associated Press on Thursday.
Prosecutors alleged that Householder orchestrated a scheme secretly funded by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to secure his power in the Legislature, elect his allies — and then to pass and defend a $1 billion nuclear power plant bailout benefiting the electric utility. They alleged that Borges, then a lobbyist, sought to bribe an operative for inside information on the referendum to overturn the bailout.
Householder, 63, had been one of Ohio's most powerful politicians — and twice elected speaker — until the Republican-controlled House ousted him after his indictment from his leadership post, and then in a bipartisan vote, and with Householder vigorously objecting, from the chamber. It was the first such expulsion in 150 years.
He took the stand in his own defense, contradicting FBI testimony and denying that he attended swanky Washington dinners where prosecutors allege he and executives of FirstEnergy hatched the elaborate scheme in 2017.
Borges, 50, did not testify at trial but has insisted that he's innocent. Both men face up to 20 years in prison.
The verdict comes two-and-a-half years after Householder, Borges and three others were arrested. Over the past seven weeks, jurors at the trial were presented with firsthand accounts of the alleged scheme, as well as reams of financial documents, emails, texts and wiretap audio.
"... alleged ..." ? - it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt, to the satisfaction of 12 regular everyday people who returned a unanimous verdict. It's not fucking "alleged" anymore.
The prosecution called two of the people arrested — Juan Cespedes and Jeff Longstreth, who pleaded guilty — to testify about political contributions that they said are not ordinary, but bribes intended to secure passage of the bailout bill, known as House Bill 6.
Householder's attorneys described his activities as nothing more than hardball politics.
Jurors also heard taped phone calls in which Householder and another co-defendant, the late Statehouse superlobbyist Neil Clark, plotted a nasty attack ad — and, in expletive-laced fashion, contemplated revenge against lawmakers who had crossed Householder.
Householder testified that he never retaliated against those who voted counter to his wishes or who donated to his rivals.
Under a deal to avoid prosecution, FirstEnergy admitted using a network of dark money groups to fund the scheme and even bribing the state's top utility regulator, Sam Randazzo.
Randazzo resigned as chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio after an FBI search of his home, but he has not been charged and denies wrongdoing.
A Thought
Republicans voting against raising the debt ceiling is the perfectly Trumpian thing to do.
- Commit to the funding
- Let people start planning - or start actual projects
- Renege on the promises and don't follow thru when it's time to settle up
- Pretend it's "the ethical thing to do"
It's a way the GOP can fuck with our heads.
ie: "We fucked up the government so you could see how the government's all fucked up. You need to keep us in power so we can go ahead and tear it all down and start from scratch, because - well, because it's all fucked up, dontcha see?"
GOP backdoor fuckery.
They need to get rid of that stupid rule so politicians can't use it to torpedo everything a year after the fucking budget was passed.
If you put a budget in place, then you've already made the commitment to pay for it when the time comes. It should take extraordinary action to change that budget after the fact.
Which brings it back to:
Trump did not remake the GOP in his own image. He's the perfect reflection of what that party has been morphing into for decades.
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