Water: scary stuff

It doesn’t look like much at the beginning, but this dam failure in Michigan led to thousands of people being evacuated, destruction of bridges and homes downstream, and some houses were flooded to a depth of 9 feet. All it took was a little rain. OK, a lot of rain.

Here’s an analysis of the failure. There was something more going on.

This video is going to be a classic in the teaching of geotechnical failures, but it also clarifies the events that led to the Edenville Dam failure. It would have been simple to ascribe this to a simple overtopping event that occurred when the capacity of the spillway was exceeded. But in reality the events are are more worrying than that – the dam appears to have undergone a slope failure; a failure of its integrity. This should never occur, and to me it suggests that the problems at the Edenville Dam went further than known issues with the spillway.

So not just rain, but also negligence by whoever had responsibility for the dam. It turns out that this dam was privately owned, by absentee landlords with a criminal history who neglected it, refused to do necessary repairs and expansion, and had their federal license to run the dam revoked for their greedy refusal to do what was needed. I guess it is unsurprising that Lee Mueller is a Randian Trumpkin who lives in Las Vegas.

America’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t helped by the parasites and rentiers who’ve taken it over.

What? The History Channel is showing history?

I haven’t watched the History Channel in years, since I have little interest in UFOs, Hitler, or pawn shops, but I may have to see if the tuner on my television works tonight. In celebration of Memorial Day, they’re showing a documentary on US Grant, based on the Chernow biography (which is very good), that is getting good reviews.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the Confederacy getting a good whuppin’. Again.

He’s lying

Trump claims to be taking hydroxychloroquine.

President Trump told reporters Monday that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for about a week and a half and that the White House physician knows he is taking the anti-malaria drug despite the fact that he continues to test negative for the coronavirus.

Clinical trials, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger of the drug is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients, particularly those with heart problems. Trump dismissed those concerns, saying he has heard about the drug’s benefits from doctors and others he has spoken with.

You have to be closely monitored if you take this dangerous drug — there are all kinds of potential side effects. So we know he’s lying his ass off.

It’s also a lie that can get other people killed, if they believe him and try to emulate him.

On the other hand if he’s not lying, I hope he decides to quadruple his dose. Please.

Imagine that on your CV

Zach Vorhies: “ex Google employee turned QAnon fan and committed anti-vaxxer”. He has a video in which he takes credit for Judy Mikovits “going viral” with her idiotic claims, and lies about her history in science.

In the video, Vorhies claims that Mikovits’ research was “derailed by Anthony Fauci,” who, as he puts it, “saw to it that her career was destroyed.” That’s flatly untrue: after Mikovits’ research—which claimed that a mouse retrovirus called XMRV caused chronic fatigue syndrome—was called into question, the National Institutes of Health funded a $2.3 million study at Fauci’s request to definitively settle the question of whether XMRV caused chronic fatigue. As part of that study, Mikovits was given more funding and a chance to replicate her original research, which she couldn’t do. In a press conference announcing the findings of the study, Mikovits acknowledged, “It’s not there,” and thanked the NIH.

That’s a far cry from the narrative Mikovits, Vorhies, and others now promote. In the unlisted video, Vorhies says that Mikovits “discovered that the vaccine supply and the blood supply was contaminated with zoonotic retroviruses coming from mice,” and, in a series of graphics, suggests that “hundreds of millions of Americans may have received vaccines contaminated with XMRV.” The idea that vaccines are contaminated with XMRV or any other dangerous retrovirus has been repeatedly debunked; the pro-vaccine site Vaxopedia has a list of the many studies that have confirmed that. Nor did Mikovits’ work have anything whatsoever to do with vaccines, though her supporters have more recently claimed that it did.

I hang out with a lot of smart people (at least I did, before about 2 months ago), and that used to fill me with optimism about our future. I suspect that Vorhies is also an intelligent guy. But it turns out that being smart isn’t necessarily a good defense against bad ideas. Suddenly, Snow Crash seems incredibly prescient. Has someone been wandering around Silicon Valley tech companies handing out hypercards with a mind-wiping virus encoded on them?

I didn’t need the ad to know I have to vote for Biden next fall

I hate it. I think Biden is a barely competent tool who is going to be a cheerleader for corporate America, but we’re not going to have a choice — it’s him or the totally incompetent grifter who is just in it for himself. Thanks, Democratic party! You’re a bunch of assholes!

But I do think they’ve put out an effective ad.

Remember, you’re not voting for a good candidate, you’re voting against a malignant one.

In case you’d like to name names responsible for the COVID-19 disaster

Rolling Stone tracks all the errors leading to our current unprepared state, and names the names.

Robert Redfield:

The front-line agency built to respond to a pandemic, the CDC, was placed in unreliable hands. Dr. Robert Redfield is a right-wing darling with a checkered scientific past. His 2018 nomination was a triumph for the Christian right, a coup in particular for evangelical activists Shepherd and Anita Smith, who have been instrumental in driving a global AIDS strategy centered on abstinence.

Redfield’s tight-knit relationship with the Smiths goes back at least three decades, beginning when Shepherd Smith recruited him to join the board of his religious nonprofit, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP). The Smiths made their views plain in the 1990 book Christians in the Age of AIDS, which argued HIV infection resulted from “people’s sinfulness,” and described AIDS as a consequence for those who “violate God’s laws.” Redfield, a devout Catholic who was then a prominent HIV researcher in the Army, wrote the introduction, calling for the rejection of “false prophets who preach the quick-fix strategies of condoms and free needles.”

Alex Azar:

The CDC reports to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Alex Azar, a former executive for the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly who gained infamy, in his five-year tenure, by doubling the price of insulin.

Azar is a creature of the GOP establishment: He cut his teeth as a Supreme Court clerk to Antonin Scalia, worked with Brett Kavanaugh on the Clinton-Whitewater investigation under special counsel Ken Starr, and served as a deputy HHS administrator in the George W. Bush era, before becoming Eli Lilly’s top lobbyist. Azar, 52, is the type of corporate leader Republicans have long touted as capable of driving efficiencies in the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell praised Azar’s nomination in 2017, insisting, “Alex brings a wealth of private-sector knowledge that will prepare him well for this crucial role.”

Stephen Hahn:

Stephen Hahn had been on the job at the FDA for barely a month. A bald, 60-year-old of modest height, Hahn has an impeccable résumé — he served as chief medical executive at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center — but he had no experience running a government agency.

The need to engage the private sector for coronavirus testing was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen — by Trump’s first FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb. In a January 28th Wall Street Journal article, “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic,” Gottlieb warned that the “CDC will struggle to keep up with the volume of screening.” He said the government must begin “working with private industry to develop easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic tests.”

If Hahn read his predecessor’s call to action, he did not act on it. Hahn did not lack authority; the FDA has broad discretion to relax the rules that were locked into place with Azar’s declaration. But Azar had, unaccountably, not included Hahn on the Coronavirus Task Force. By default, private test developers were now required to obtain an “emergency-use authorization” from the FDA to deploy COVID-19 testing. “Companies couldn’t make their own lab-developed tests,” Adalja says, “so you had Quest and LabCorp and the big-university labs on the sidelines.”

Donald Trump:

Having plunged the nation headlong and unprepared into the deadliest disease outbreak in a century, President Trump is now proving to be one of the greatest obstacles to an effective national response.

Sebelius ultimately blames Trump for failing to end the infighting and fix the testing failure. “The White House has a unique way to get agencies’ attention, by making it clear that they want a solution, and everybody at the table with that solution within 24 hours,” she says. “If the president wants this to happen, it will happen.” But on his visit to the CDC in Atlanta, Trump had made an extraordinary admission: That he did not want to let passengers from a cruise ship, then suffering an outbreak off the California coast, to come on shore because the tally of patients would rise. “I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said.

There are many other players, like Mike Pence, but these four are singled out for having the greatest responsibility and potential ability to have addressed the problem early on, who then failed and continue to fail spectacularly. Given the US’s historical failure to be able to hold our leaders accountable for anything — we’re treating the war criminal George W. Bush like a statesman now — I suspect they’re all going to emerge from this debacle unscathed, with a hundred thousand dead (or more) at their feet, and they won’t be arrested and tried for malignant neglect of their duties.

I still hold Henry Kissinger guilty of being a monster, and yet he’s still advising governments on how to murder their citizens. He’s a walking, talking declaration to the world that there is no justice.

Jacob Wohl rides again!

Lung & oral cancers are nature’s way of cleaning out the barn.

Tell me if this strategy sounds familiar.

  1. Pick a target, any target, as long as the Trumpkins hate ’em.
  2. Pay a non-credible source to make up an unlikely story of sexual malfeasance.
  3. Hold a press conference in which the story palpably unravels.
  4. Profit!

That was the game plan in their phony accusations against Mueller and Warren, and their balloons collapsed so fast they sounded like a fast wet fart. Would you believe Wohl and Burkman have done it again? Only you may not have heard about it because the press doesn’t believe them anymore.

  1. They tried to discredit Anthony Fauci.
  2. They found a woman, Diana Andrade AKA Diana Rodriguez, willing to make up a story about Fauci.

    “He looked rich and powerful, and I love smart men with grey hair. He told me all about his fantastic career in medicine, so I went upstairs,” Rodriguez wrote of her fictional meeting with Fauci at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. After detailing some ineffective hotel bed wrestling and managing to flee with her honor intact, Rodriguez closed with the statement, “Now, when I see him on TV touted as some kind of hero, I want the nation to know the truth. This is my truth. This is my story.”

  3. They tried to recruit the media to report on the story. They mostly failed. Andrade later wrote to journalists confessing that she’d been paid.

    And that would have been that—until Saturday’s email, which included Andrade telling me, “The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” taken when they were romantically involved. Also, that Wohl and Burkman “had me do something like this…back in January.”

  4. I fail to see what they gain from this nonsense. Does anyone believe anything they have to say any more?

To put the frosting on the cake, though, Andrade called Wohl and Burkman to express her unhappiness with her role, and most wonderfully, recorded the entire call, so we get to see the two con artists rationalizing their lies. It’s something.

“Let me tell you something, Diana,” says Burkman. “This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.”

Andrade counters that he and Wohl are not taking COVID-19 seriously. “It’s not just any virus. I mean, it’s a huge deal….I think you guys think it’s something made up, and it’s not.”

“Mother Nature has to clean the barn every so often,” Burkman counters. “How real is it? Who knows? So what if 1 percent of the population goes? So what if you lose 400,000 people? Two hundred thousand were elderly, the other 200,000 are the bottom of society. You got to clean out the barn. If it’s real, it’s a positive thing, for God’s sake.”

“So, what? Survival of the fittest?” Andrade asks, a bit more pique in her voice. (The sense you are dealing with people who have an enthusiasm for eugenics can do that.) But Wohl’s not having it.

“Diana, look, can you just do this for me?” he says. “Can you just keep your mouth shut and just…just do it for me.”

Uh-oh. They said the quiet part of the Republican strategy out loud. It’s OK if the virus kills 400,000 people, because half of them are old and the other half are “the bottom of society”.

They don’t seem to have noticed that they themselves are the dregs.