Coyote Blog

From Glenn Greenwald, whose email blast is well worth the money:

Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pachai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users)....

But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.

We have gotten scores of variations on this message in the last 2 weeks from our public contact form -- someone is beating our Captcha, probably just by hiring people in low-wage countries to manually do them.  I have not tried it, but I would sooner have unprotected sex with 20 random people than click on the link (I X'ed out part of the link to avoid anyone screwing up and doing so).  That link is not a web site but a file programmed to download that probably isn't designed to improve your computer's operation.

Hi,

This is Melaenis and I am a qualified photographer.

I was baffled, frankly speaking, when I recognised my images at your website. If you use a copyrighted image without an owner's license, you should be aware that you could be sued by the creator.

It's illegal to use stolen images and it's so сheap!

Take a look at this document with the links to my images you used at camprrm.com and my earlier publications to get the evidence of my ownership.

Download it right now and check this out for yourself:

https://sites.google.com/view/id98430927432698768/home/drive/storage/file/download?FileID=8343XXXXX3081562342  [it is a clickable link in the email]

If you don't delete the images mentioned in the document above within the next couple of days, I'll file a to your hosting provider stating that my copyrights have been severely infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property.

And if it doesn't work, trust me I am going to report and sue you! And I will not bother myself to let you know of it in advance.

It is actually sort of a brilliant come-on, given that most small website owners are sloppy about what images they grab for their site and probably have some latent sense of guilt on this score.

People imagine hackers doing  clever electronic things to break into systems, and some times that is the case.  But more often than not -- and this is true all the way back to the early phone phreaks -- they crack systems by social engineering, convincing some rube on the inside to give up a password or click on a bad link.

Half our politicians don't want to declare the pandemic over because they are wallowing in all their new power and having too much fun as petty dictators.  The other half are scared, living in fear that every death after they declare an end will be used as the basis for a Bush-esque "mission accomplished" critique.  Well, people will likely contract and perish from COVID forever.  Heck, people died last year in this country of the whooping cough.  My 25-year-old nephew died of regular old flu.

But if we define the pandemic as a time when a single disease drives excess mortality outside of normal bounds, then this pandemic is over, at least in AZ.   As of this morning, 27% of people in AZ had at least one dose of the Pfizer or similar vaccine, over half of those being in the vulnerable over-65 group.  We don't know how many have gotten the virus, but (non-random) anti-body tests were running over 50% positive last month.  If we assume a third of folks have antibodies from the virus itself, and that there is a 50% overlap between these folks and those vaccinated, this gets us to nearly 45% immunity, rising by several percentage points each week.  Immunity levels in the over-65 population may be over 80%.

As a result, cases have fallen sharply but due to the sensitivity of testing, I am not a fan of that metric.  We will probably always have people testing positive.  The question is whether people are getting seriously ill.  And here are the numbers for that, I use ICU bed occupancy as a proxy for serious illness (because case numbers are exaggerated and death numbers have a crazy lag to them):

I am not cherry-picking -- this is the most useful metric, I think, but all the others show the same thing.

My suspicion has always been that "COVID patients" means "Patients who test positive for COVID," so the number may be a bit exaggerated for true hospitalizations caused by COVID.  Also it is a lagging indicator -- 10 days to incubate and a week to end up in the hospital and perhaps a week stay in the hospital means these are likely folks exposed in early March.   But the result is clear.  Given the sensitivity of testing, these numbers will likely never go to zero.  What we see is a normal hospital load form a seasonal virus, in fact one currently far smaller than what we might get in a normal flu season.  In other words, we are back to normal.  AZ, by the way, last week opened vaccines to everyone over 18.

Postscript:  If you compare the ethnic data on COVID deaths vs. vaccines, it does appear Hispanic and native American groups are under-represented in the vaccine population vs. the population of COVID deaths, though the ethnic information on vaccine administration has a lot of gaps.  This is partly predictable for Hispanic groups as they skew much younger than whites in AZ so the prioritization to over-65 people first is going to skew the racial mix.

That fact may get reported on.  The fact that will not get reported on is the gender skew.  In AZ men were 58% of deaths but are only 43% of those who have been vaccinated.  I guess if I wanted to spend my life being aggrieved about my tribe I could be upset about this, but in fact it is entirely predictable from the vaccine priorities.  Vaccines first went to teachers, health care workers, and old people -- all three of which skew heavily female.

Postscript #2: One interesting thing that I have not seen reported -- I don't know any men, including myself, who had any substantial reactions from the vaccine.  My wife and daughter, however, were really knocked out for a day.  This is partly random, but also partly the inevitable result of having a singles-size dose for everyone.  The ladies in my family have much smaller body mass than I but got the same dose, which may explain why it hit them harder.

My company is taking over a new campground in Washington State.  In that small town, and anywhere near it, there is only one bank, a Keybank branch.  So I need to open a business checking account there so we have somewhere to put our weekly cash revenue deposits.

Unfortunately, many banks have crazy paranoid lawyers.  Years ago the US Government implemented "know your customer" rules making sure banks are dealing with a real person and not some fake entity meant to launder drug profits to Columbia, or something.  A lot of banks, including Keybank, have interpreted the rule as meaning that a business owner has to physically walk into a branch before they will open an account.  That is fine for the pet grooming business next door, but if one runs a multi-state business, it is a royal pain in the ass.

Note that I have completed all the paperwork for the account on the phone.  They have copies of my drivers license and all my corporate paperwork.  I am looking at my unsigned signature card.  But Keybank insists I go into a branch to complete the transaction.  Literally I have to just tag a branch for 5 minutes to make the lawyers happy.  Because making me travel across the country to walk into a bank branch makes the country safe from terrorism.

Keybank has no branches in AZ.  So I was going to have to take an entire day to fly to Utah or Colorado or Washington in order to create the account, which is obviously expensive and time-consuming.  I am actually on vacation soon in Florida, and I see Keybank has a bank in south Florida, so my current plan is to drive 3 hours on my vacation, tag the branch, and then drive back.  Good times.

By the way, if you want a business bank that a) is not insanely arrogant and b) actually wants your business, consider Enterprise Bank in the St Louis area.  I have shifted a lot of my corporate and treasury stuff there and have not regretted it.

Phone company: To make your suggested change, we need your PIN first

Me: I don't know that I have a PIN, though since we opened the account 18 years ago I may have forgotten.

PC:  We only started using them about 5 years ago

Me:  I don't remember being asked to set a PIN 5 years ago

PC: No, you probably would not have.  On old accounts they were simply assigned by computer

Me: So I can't possibly know what it is.

PC:.... I need your PIN before I can process the change your have requested