The cranks have gotten smarter. How could I possibly wreck this poll from Lou Dobbs?
On the one hand, Dobbs has “cleverly” made it impossible to participate in the poll without approving of Trump.
On the other hand, it’s ridiculous, and they’ve totally given up on the idea of using a poll to gather honest information, and they’ve reduced it to meaningless noise from the claque, which is what I was trying to show with bombing polls anyway.
So I win, I guess?
We’re going to have to work on our categories, I see. This one is a mess about profiteering, lawyers who serve greed rather than justice, and an astonishingly selfish view of a pandemic as an opportunity to exploit everyone. Patent trolls are trying to block companies that make COVID-19 diagnostic tests.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to begin this story or how to fit all the insanity into the title. It’s a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you’ll ever see. They are representing “Labrador Diagnostics LLC” a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you’ll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos — the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle.
However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right?
So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, “Labrador Diagnostics,” which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.
This is shaking up my perspective — I thought conservatives were the apotheosis of evil and Satan incarnate, but these guys seem even worse. Irell & Manella are American lawyers based in Los Angeles, so the only hope for my equanimity is that they’re also Republicans.
And Lieberman is pretty ding-danged evil. This is, I presume, an excerpt from The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, which describes all the backroom maneuvering that went on to get Obama’s stimulus bill passed. It’s what our politicians do that tells us most about their character, not what they say to the press, and whoa, was Collins behind some awful policy decisions.
Wow. Wondering why we don't have enough masks or testing equipment and can't scale up quickly?
Susan Collins killed almost $1B in spending for pandemic flu preparedness. Personally. All by herself. https://t.co/XnAkp4l2p6
— John Neffinger (@Neffinger) March 12, 2020
So…she hates education, refusing to fund school construction, and she wanted to “kill outright” all preparations for a pandemic. When Joe Lieberman is begging you to be slightly less wicked, you know you’re a bad person, and Joe Lieberman is the earthly manifestation of centrism.
That brings back bad memories of how awful the Republicans were during the Obama administration, and now they’re even worse.
Scratch out the word “economy” and replace it with “pandemic response”, and it’s still true.
He has a remarkable ability to infest, corrupt, and destroy even the most reputable institutions. Will you ever believe a doctor’s report on the health of a president ever again? Do you still wishfully hope that Mr Smith Goes to Washington accurately portrays how an honest man can shape the Senate? Do you believe any more that “CDC” stands for “Center for Disease Control”?
Of course, he had help. It would be nice if the poison in the body politic had a single name and we could just boot the creep and get back to having trust, but I just can’t get out of my head the fact that 43% of the electorate think he’s doing a good job coping with a medical crisis.
They started testing for SARS-CoV-2 in Seattle, with one researcher, Helen Chu, leading the way. They started getting positive hits, and then the federal government stepped in, but not to anyone’s benefit.
The state laboratory, finally able to begin testing, confirmed the result the next morning. The teenager, who had recovered from his illness, was located and informed just after he entered his school building. He was sent home and the school was later closed as a precaution.
Later that day, the investigators and Seattle health officials gathered with representatives of the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. to discuss what happened. The message from the federal government was blunt. “What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu,” Dr. Lindquist remembered. “Stop testing.”
I found that shocking. Stop collecting information, stop responding to patient concerns, minimize the threat. This is not what I want the government to do.
On a phone call the day after the C.D.C. and F.D.A. had told Dr. Chu to stop, officials relented, but only partially, the researchers recalled. They would allow the study’s laboratories to test cases and report the results only in future samples. They would need to use a new consent form that explicitly mentioned that results of the coronavirus tests might be shared with the local health department.
They were not to test the thousands of samples that had already been collected.
While I sympathize with privacy concerns, this is a situation where public health ought to have priority. Being diagnosed with COVID-19 does not create a permanent stigma. It guides the appropriate response to the affected individual.
Especially since this is what’s happening:
In the days since the teenager’s test, the Seattle region has spun into crisis, with dozens of people testing positive and at least 22 dying — many of them infected in a nursing home that had unknowingly been suffering casualties since Feb. 19.
My mother lives in that area, she’s a few years older than I am (just a few), and she’s already had a few respiratory episodes that required temporary hospitalization. When I talked to her the other day, she’s self-quarantining and avoiding going out in public at all…but I feel like if there were a problem, she wouldn’t get the help she would need, but instead is going to be told to shut up.
It’s amazing. This is the universal comic, it applies to everything right now.
Except spiders and cephalopods, that is. They’re looking better and better.
I pretty much agree with everything this guy says, except for the clumsy Batman analogy, but I fear it might be too late. I don’t have much hope that today’s primaries will change the trajectory of the electorate towards the moderate centrist. Ick.
But sure, vote for whoever wins the nomination. You know, the Democrats had a low bar to hurdle this time around, it’s rather depressing that they picked the guy that barely clears it.
I don’t follow the stock market at all. Nope, not interested — I have no direct personal investment, although I am sure a lot of my retirement funds may be attached to stocks of some sort. What do I know? Ask me about spiders, cephalopods, or zebrafish and I’ll respond enthusiastically, but money? I don’t have much, so it’s not on my radar.
But I do know enough to guess that “cratering” is not a word you want to see in the financial news. Probably “plunge”, “big losses”, “panic”, and “apoplectic” are not good things to hear from the grown-ups, either.
“The stock market is looking at the oil price plunge as a canary in the coal mine of a disinflationary one-two punch, driven partly by cratering demand for transportation fuels and a wanton price war among the major oil producers” that will result in big losses for U.S. and Canadian producers.
Global markets were apoplectic. Japan’s Nikkei closed down more than 5 percent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index shed more than 4.2 percent. European markets were tumbling more than 7 percent across the board in midday trading.
Panic pushed the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury below 0.4 percent for the first time in history Monday as investors fled for safe havens. The trajectory could be an ominous sign of a weakening economy, because a low yield can indicate a lack of confidence in economic growth. Yields decline as bond prices rise. Gold, another safe haven, was up 0.4 percent in early trading.
On top of that, Maxine Waters tells some Wells Fargo board members to resign, and…they do! Either Waters is even scarier than I thought, or Wells Fargo is more rotten than I expected and its executives know it, or both. The rats are scurrying to leave the ship.
I don’t like this subject. Can we talk about spiders instead?
They’re still talking about “electability”. STFU, please. Sandersistas are saying Biden couldn’t beat Trump in the election; Bidenites keep arguing that Socialist Sanders can’t possibly win against Trump. Both are wrong.
I’ll pick on Biden for a moment, because I agree that he’s a terrible candidate, just the worst of the Democrats. He’s got baggage. He favors weak policies that don’t correct any of our systemic issues. He’s a patronizing old fool. But, and this is the important thing, Trump is worse on all counts. And if Trump was electable, then Biden is electable. I detest the thought of a Biden nomination and think he would be bad for the country, but he’s better than Trump, so I’ll vote for him and hope he doesn’t screw up so bad that there’s a Republican rebound in 2024.
If the weakest candidate we’ve got is better than the Republican candidate, build on that and beat the Republican in the fall. It’s that simple. What would be better is if Sanders sweeps the remaining primaries (it could happen!) and soars to the nomination. We could also get 150 million people to turn out for the general election and the majority write in “Elizabeth Warren” for president, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.
What isn’t so simple is figuring out why the Democratic party goes through a painful winnowing process that somehow ends up promoting the chaff rather than the wheat.
My wife is currently in Longmont, Colorado. She is scheduled to fly back home in 10 days, which is the problem. Look at the ratfuckery our administration is up to with coronavirus recommendations. They just don’t care what the CDC says, and I trust the CDC far more than I do Trump/Pence.
The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.
So now Mary is considering not flying, and instead renting a car to drive back — it’s 800+ miles and 12 hours of driving. Yikes. I have concerns about that, too.
I am not helped by the dithering of the incompetents in the White House. I am also not helped by the vague recommendations of the CDC; I don’t consider either of us to be elderly or physically fragile in our ability to respond to disease…although I mentioned that a high school acquaintance of ours just lost her husband to COVID-19, so maybe we are.
Indecision can have terrible consequences, and the Republicans have so thoroughly politicized what ought to be scientific decision-making that now I’m being indecisive.
