Bitchy

Last week, I read an article about how Germany has a surplus of over 1.4M doses of Astra Zeneca because people are missing their appointments to hold out for Pfizer. 

I read another article today about how governors are concerned about the optics of distributing Johnson & Johnson to low income neighborhoods where people are harder to track down for vaccination. 

Someone on Twitter this morning asked, “How immune are you after the first dose of Moderna?”. 

There’s still a lot of vaccine misconception out there, so I’m going to try and address some. 

First off, none of the vaccines will prevent you from getting COVID. None of them. No one is claiming that about their vaccine. What we’re talking about when we refer to the efficacy of a vaccine, is how effective are they at keeping you out of the hospital with just a mild or moderate case that you can recover from at home. That’s all we’re talking about. We’re not even at the stage of talking about whether you can spread the virus after you’ve been vaccinated. The assumption at this point is that you can, and that you should stay masked up until we know more. 

Angela Merkel was asked if she would get the Astra Zeneca vaccine (I don’t know why we’re pretending she’s not already vaccinated). She replied that she would not because she’s 66 and in Germany, Astra Zeneca is only approved for people under the age of 65. They put out a very sketchy (and scientifically unsound) study that claims it’s only 8% effective on those who are over 65.  While it may (we’re still not seeing definitive proof in the UK to support this) be less effective on people over the age of 65, we need to understand what “less effective” means? It means if you’re over 80, you only have a 19% chance of ending up on the hospital. In other words, it’s 81% effective. 

I don’t know why Merkel would say something so reckless and stupid, but her words have resonated and the people she represents aren’t getting Astra Zeneca vaccines. 

Everyone is focused on getting the vaccine with the ‘highest percentage’. There’s more to it than that. I got my first dose of Moderna last week. My top 2 choices were (and still are, although I’m already wed to Moderna) Astra Zeneca and Johnson and Johnson. Since this pandemic started, I’ve done a stupid amount of reading about it. I’ve read hundreds of scientific studies, some of which I understand, some of which I’m reasonably certain I misunderstood. I actually scheduled a call with the Chief Science Officer of my company to discuss what I thought I understood with him. I have a concern about the long term efficacy of m-RNA vaccines. They’ve been in development for several years now, but COVID is the first time anyone has tried them. The primary issue with them is the short term efficacy. They don’t seem to produce the same response from your own immune system that (for example) the polio or measles vaccines do. They just don’t seem to produce a meaningful t cell response from the natural immune system. That’s why we hadn’t seen one until COVID. We (by we, I mean all of us including the scientists who created these vaccines) don’t know how long either of the m-RNA COVID vaccines will provide protection for. We just have to wait and see. 

For that reason, I concluded that the two vaccines that were more like traditional vaccines were more likely to produce the kind of t cell response that your body needs to give you long term protection. Our Chief Science Officer agreed with my conclusions, so my thought process isn’t totally off base.

So why did I get a Moderna shot? Because it’s imperative for all of us to get vaccinated as soon as possible. The higher the vaccination rate is, the fewer hosts this virus will have Fewer hosts = fewer mutations. 

That was a little imprecise, and some of you may have spotted an inconsistency in what I’m saying so let me clarify. The vaccines mean that your body will produce an immediate immune response to COVID, which will keep the viral load down. The lower the viral load is, the less severe the symptoms you will have. Also, it appears that if you have a lower viral load, you’re not as efficient a transmitter as someone with a higher viral load and that what you’re infecting others with is a lower viral load case of COVID. Mutations are errors in replication. The lower the viral load, the less of the virus there is to replicate and therefore create errors in replication. 

You have to get vaccinated with whatever you can get, as soon as you can get it. That’s the bottom line. 

I don’t agree about the narrative regarding the optics of distributing J&J to poorer neighborhoods. NYC was going to send mobile vaccination trucks to lower income neighborhoods as soon as J&J started rolling in. This makes sense to me, as only one visit would be needed There would be no need to schedule second vaccination appointments at locations that the people who received the first injection might or might not be able to get to. The logistics of scheduling two interaction with people using trucks sounds like a nightmare, and doesn’t make much sense to me especially knowing that J&J will 100% keep you out of the hospital if you get COVID 50 or more days after your vaccination. Plus, J&J has much more favorable storage requirements that lend themselves to mobile vaccination. 

Instead of worrying about the “optics” of getting low income people vaccinated with the product that makes the most sense in this situation, we need to deal with the perception problems that lead people to believe that J&J (and Astra Zeneca for that matter) are “subpar” choices. They’re absolutely not, and if I had been given an option when I showed up for my vaccination appointment, I would 100% have chosen J&J. 

We need to get people in every corner of this planet vaccinated as soon as possible. The lack of understanding about the different vaccines shouldn’t slow those efforts down. Educating people should not be the Herculean task that it’s become in the digital age. 

So I got my first dose of vaccine last night. I have to say that this experience has run the gamut from abhorrent to elation. I thought I would share some thoughts.

First, let me say that I became eligible for the vaccine twelve days ago. I only spend eight days trying to land an appointment, so I’m aware that my experience is far better than it has been for many but it wasn’t good. The snow storms hit the country a few days before my eligibility date so I knew that vaccine shipments were definitely going to be delayed. That’s what I knew. What I felt was an urgency to get an appointment as soon as possible so for eight days, I had over a dozen tabs open in my browser dedicated to finding an appointment. I refreshed and answered qualifying questions fifty to sixty times a day in between work calls. It was frustrating, sometimes maddening, but it needed to be done. 

I banded together with a group of friends to work together to get us all appointments. I wake up very early in the morning because I have a couple of very self centered cats who hold their breakfast in much higher regard than my sleep. They wake me up just before 5 am every day. I have a rule about getting off the computer and phone by 8 pm every day. I had read that this helps with sleep, and I really needed help sleeping through the pandemic. It works, by the way. The sooner you unplug, the sooner your mind starts to wind down. So I took the 5 am shift for searching for appointments. Between us, we had 5 am to midnight covered. About 10 minutes after my last refresh, I got a text from one of my vaccine hunter partners letting me know that her husband’s boyfriend (it’s complicated) had just landed an appointment in Queens. I immediately refreshed on a site that aggregates most of the state run sites (it’s turbovax.com if you’re in NY and need help). For the first time in 8 days, there were appointments. Lots of appointments in eight or nine locations. I immediately got to work and used the muscle memory I had built up at that point to quickly fill out the form and secure the appointment for myself. My friend snagged an appointment for another friend who has three very serious comorbidities, and who couldn’t get an appointment up to that point. Once I had secured my appointment, I got to work scheduling one for a friend. Our appointments were for three days later so we were all elated. 

On the morning that we all got our appointments, I read a story in the Times about a woman who was trying to help her 87 year old mother get an appointment with no luck. Her mother isn’t computer or smart phone savvy, and the daughter isn’t lucky enough to have a work-from-home job. I had been reading stories like that one on almost a daily basis so I was acutely aware of my privilege every single time I refreshed a tab. But what was I going to do? Not use every tool in my toolbox to secure an appointment? That’s clearly not a rational option for anyone, I don’t care how aware you are of the magnitude of fuckery in this Hunger Games system we have set up in the richest country in the world. Getting COVID was not likely to turn out well for me so getting vaccinated was my top priority. 

I spoke with a friend of mine in Northern California on the day that I secured my appointment. He’s a 62 year old cancer survivor who is currently taking immunosuppressants for arthritis. He wasn’t able to get an appointment. He has a friend who heard that if you show up to a big vaccination center in Santa Rosa at 8 am, you can put your name on a waitlist to get any left over doses. His friend got vaccinated on the second day he went. My friend went the next morning and got his vaccine on the spot. We talked about the guilt that comes with getting vaccinated right now. We talked about how it feels to take a shot away from a poor elderly person in bad health. But again, not doing everything you can to secure a vaccine is not an option. This process should not include a combination of elation and guilt. 

After I got my appointment, I started thinking of ways that I can organize to help disadvantaged people get their vaccines. I spoke with a couple of older people on my block who haven’t been able to get vaccinated, and I got the information that I need to work on booking appointments for them but I want to do more. I’m still trying to figure out how to approach this. Getting tech savvy volunteers to perpetually refresh their browsers is not a hurdle. I can use social media for that. Getting to the people who need help is the tricky part. When I was waiting in line for my vaccine last night, I heard that NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) was going to start sending mobile vaccination units to low income housing units as soon as the J&J vaccine arrives. I might try and help out with that. I’m not sure, but I will figure something out because I need to deal with the guilt. 

Now on to the happy part (mostly) of my story. I arrived at 4:50 for my 5:10 vaccine appointment. When I got there, I discovered that the line went down the block, around the corner, and down 2 more blocks. I wasn’t surprised because I had just experienced the most healthcare that I’d ever consumed  so far. I had a horrifying night in the ER, another night in the hospital, and a subsequent surgery. Everything is fine now, and it was (in the grand scheme of things) a minor medical emergency but seeing our healthcare system up close and personal is eye opening, even if you’re intellectually aware of the issues. I digress. A few people in line were shocked at the length of the line. They envisioned walking and getting their shot at the time that their appointments were scheduled. I knew better so I was prepared for a long wait. Anyway, I made some friends over the course of the nearly two hours that we waited in line.  

We came to learn that a large shipment of the Moderna vaccine that had been delayed due to the storm had dropped unexpectedly, which is why all of those appointments had opened up in several locations that were not vaccine hubs. Because we weren’t at a big hub location, they didn’t really have the system down enough to get people in and out quickly. But we got our shots and in the end, that’s all that mattered. 

So we got our shots and moved to another waiting room where our second appointments were going to be scheduled. There was high fiving and elation in that room. A year’s worth of stress and fear had finally been released (at least a little bit). It was really an environment of unmitigated joy. For a few minutes I and all of my new friends let go of the guilt and allowed ourselves to be happy. 

Except for that last part, this isn’t how things should be. Obviously, we weren’t going to get 7.5 billion doses of vaccinations over night so the rollout was going to be slower than anyone would like but this system of fucking the already fucked that we have here in America is super fucked. Germany, France, and Italy were out of vaccines for several days (sometimes a whole week) at a time but they’re distributing much more equitably than we are. I actually just read a story about how Germany has a huge surplus of Astra Zeneca because people are missing their appointments and holding out for Pfizer. Those people would be morons. You get whatever vaccine you can get, as soon as you can get it. The fewer hosts this virus has, the fewer opportunities it has to mutate. Even with the supply shortages, poor people aren’t getting extra fucked in Germany and the middle class feel so comfortable with the German healthcare and distribution systems, that they’re getting picky. All of my friends in Europe say that people are being contacted for appointments. No one is playing the Hunger Games there. 

Personally, I’ve concluded that Astra Zeneca and J&J are the two best options to create the kind of t cell response that will produce long term immunity but I gladly got my Moderna shot last night because none of us can see the future and it’s important to get vaccinated as soon as possible.  

So my point here was to share my experience and to tell you that if you’re experiencing guilt and frustration, you’re not alone. Get your appointment as soon as you can. Follow up on tips, go to mega vaccine centers and see if you can snag any surplus shots. Do anything you can to get that needle in your arm. Get your shot! If you can, help someone who doesn’t have the resources you have to get theirs. This might make the Hunger Games a little more palatable for you. 

Here’s WaPo’s headline about the woman who was shot in DC yesterday.

Interesting. That’s the main thing that the Washington Post wants you to know about her. She’s an air force veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s nice. The next thing they tell you about her is that she was one of the rioters who broke a window in the Capital building, and that she was shot while she was jumping through that window. 

It isn’t until two thirds of the way through the article that we learn that she was a batshit crazy Q-anon conspiracy theorist. 

But she’s a veteran!

Does anyone in their right minds think that a black person (ANY black person) who gets shot by the cops get the same treatment from the media? I’m fairly certain that if she were black, the headline would have read: A woman who was shot was part of a pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol. 

I didn’t see any details about her military record. I wonder if anyone tried to look at it to see if she was ever disciplined the way they always look for a criminal record when a black person is shot?

Also, did you notice the picture they used? Doesn’t she look nice? They didn’t use any of her whacky zealot MAGA pictures on her social media. How nice for her. Black people always get the mugshot, handcuffed, or generally unflattering picture treatment. 

You know what else I noticed? That half the country isn’t in agreement that she deserved to get shot because; what was she doing breaking into the capital building? If she hadn’t been doing that, she would be alive today. I do see some dumb dumbs on social media saying that, but it’s not half the country the way it was with (for example) Michael Brown. 

Isn’t that interesting?

To be clear, I don’t think that she deserved to be shot by the police. I don’t believe that anyone should be shot by police unless they’re shooting first. That is the only circumstance in which I would be comfortable with a cop shooting a citizen. I’m not even okay with a cop shooting someone wielding a knife. That is not equal force to neutralize an immediate threat. My position on that will not change based on who the shooting victim is. 

Is my heart bleeding because this woman was shot? I’ve got to be honest, it’s not. I don’t feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over her death, but I do feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over the state of policing in America. My desire to fix the system won’t allow me to be happy about this shooting, or to even find it tolerable and I don’t care how batshit crazy she was. This isn’t about her. It’s about the next victim of a police shooting. 

But I digress. The point of this post is really to show you how the media helps to shape our collective unconscious biases. We all have them, regardless of how “woke” we think we are. I have them, and I check them every single day. Our biases are largely manufactured by exactly this kind of crap, and I plan on highlighting things like more often. 

Before I get to my point, I want to tell you something that long time followers of this blog and of my social media know: I am not a partisan. I am an unabashed progressive, but I am not under the illusion that the sad state of our country is entirely the fault of republicans. I have praised republicans on the rare occasion when they do good things (like when Jan Brewer took the Medicaid expansion for Arizona), and I point out when democrats do things to fuck us all over (like when Richard Neal shut down a bill that would end surprise billing in health care). 

So if you’re the kind of person who approached politics from a team mentality, I’m probably not going to be your cup of tea. 

If you’re the kind of person who would like to figure out how we got here in earnest, and are interested in having respectful discussions to that end, then read on. But if you’re a person who cannot under any circumstances be exposed to any opinions that you don’t agree with, save yourself some grief and just follow someone else who parrots your rigid ideology. 

I like being challenged. I devour information that I don’t agree with because it either changes my opinions, or helps me craft a more compelling argument to support the opinions I already have. 

Now on to the point of this piece. My congratulating Mitch McConnell. No, not for keeping control of the senate, but for becoming the next president (at least on all domestic matters). Biden is going to not lose (I chose those words for a reason that will become clear later) this election with a 290 electoral college total so he will be sworn in as president next January. But in the process, he murdered down ballot democrats. A lot of people can’t figure out how democrats not only didn’t manage to take control of the senate, but also lost several seats in the house. I think I have at least a piece of the explanation. 

I’m going to start by telling you something that I tell ammosexuals who insist that arming teachers is the solution to our school shooting problem: if your solution doesn’t start until after the shooting does, I question your commitment to solving the problem. 

If your answers about what happened in this election don’t include Biden and the democratic establishment, you’re not really applying yourself to solving the problem. 

I bit my tongue for the past 6 months because I didn’t want to do anything to damage Biden’s chances of not losing this election but good fucking god, I’m relieved to finally be able to get it all out. 

Problem number one is that Biden didn’t have a platform that he really wanted to talk about. He really just ran a “return to decency” and an “I’m more palatable than Trump” campaign. Once we got stuck with Biden, I actually thought this strategy was the best one he could employ because when Biden speaks, people vote for someone else. 

That’s what has happened in every election Biden has ever run in outside of Delaware. He got his ass handed to him by white working class voters in the first three primaries, and by Latinos in the third primary. He should have been finished when he came in 4th in New Hampshire. For a former VP to come in 4th in a primary is devastating, and it should have ended then. But the party was laser focused in stopping Bernie, who won the first 3 primaries. So everyone that Biden lost to dropped out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday (after already making their ad buys) and endorsed the guy they beat. I have never seen such a blatant, “No, you don’t decide elections. WE decide elections” message from the DNC before. I suspect we’re going to see it more and more as the electorate moves further and further away from them.  

But I digress. When people had choices, Biden was on the top of no one’s list because his message was not appealing. That’s why everyone else had to drop out to give him the illusion of viability. So speaking was not going to be a winning strategy for Biden. Communicating his ideas was not going to get him votes so in my opinion, Biden ran the best campaign Biden could run. The problem is that it didn’t leave down ballot democrats with any sort of message to transmit to voters. There was no platform for them to champion. 

To compound this problem, Biden furthered the narrative that Trump is an aberration in the republican party and that without Trump, republicans are just peachy. His social media accounts kept sharing Lincoln Project content, and he had 4 republicans speak at his convention for every progressive who spoke. He should have hit republicanism hard, but he did the opposite. That further hurt down ballot democrats. Not only didn’t they have a platform to champion, but they had a nominee who was basically telling the country that their opponents weren’t so bad. It was really the most ass backward strategy I’ve ever seen. 

And what did he get for all his republican outreach? A higher percentage of republicans voted for Trump in 2020 than did in 2016. 

So now we have a nightmare scenario where republicans still have control of the senate, which effectively makes Mitch McConnell the president (on all domestic matters, anyway). Biden gets to do nothing without Mitch’s blessing. Nothing. No stimulus, no COVID funding, no nipping at the edges to marginally improve health care access for a small group of people, no nothing. Any economic recovery package we might get will funnel at least 95% of the gains to the top 1% because that’s where Obama set the bar for democrats. 

In other words, Biden has no chance of success here but all of the liability is on him. Mitch gets to tank his presidency, get some nice cookies for his big donors on the name of bipartisanship, and then gets to pick up more seats in 2022 because the working class will be even worse off than they are at this very moment. 

As if that’s not enough, there was a report out last week that Biden was vetting John Kasich (among other republicans) for his cabinet. GOD FORBID that we might get a democratic cabinet when we vote for a (supposedly) democratic president. So Biden’s brilliant plan is to elevate one of Kamala’s 2024 republican challengers to a cabinet level position. 

That’s fantastic because it would definitely be bad form to stop shanking democrats when the election is over. 

Oh no mes petits lapins, you will not get to breathe a sigh of relief when Biden is sworn in. We’re going to have to be more vigilant than ever. 

I obviously have many thoughts about the election, but I’m going to hold off on most of it until the dust has settled and we have final numbers.

I’ve actually had a lot of pent up things that I’ve been holding back for months, but that can wait.
I will say this: Amy McGrath and Jon Ossoff were never going to win. I said that all along. In fact, I used Ossoff’s special election loss to make my point about McGrath. If you thought that either of them were going to win, you need to stop getting your news from the tv once and for all, and diversify your online journalism portfolio to include one major newspaper and at least half a dozen outlets with good track records.

Track records matter, and if you weigh Steve Schmitt’s opinions more heavily than Michael Moore’s, then you’re not being objective.

I am shocked about Susan Collins. I really thought she was done.

I’m surprised at the margin of victory for Lindsey Graham (although I did think he was likely to win).

There were forty million more votes cast in this election compared to 2016. Those are overwhelming numbers that are frankly too big to steal. Disappearing votes is one thing, but creating votes that never existed is something that I frankly find inconceivable. Like it or not, republicans were way more motivated than the mainstream media led you to believe.

I never thought there was going to be mass defection numbers from republicans to democrats, and I’ve been telling you that The Lincoln Project was a big con all along. The last 40 years have been about approaching politics from a team mentality, and that won’t change until millennials and Zoomers are 70% of the electorate. They’re not interested in a team. They’re interested in policies that will dig them out of the hole that was dug for them.

We still don’t know how the presidential race is going to go, and please don’t mistake this post as an admission of defeat. It is simply an observation about how this should have never been as close as it is, and an explanation of why this is happening.

That’s it for now. I will have a lot more to say when all of the races have been called.

I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix last night. If you haven’t watched it, DO IT NOW. It’s a MUST watch for everyone. It doesn’t matter what your world view is, what your political persuasion is, or where in the world you are. You MUST watch this documentary about what the internet is doing to your brain, and how it’s manipulating you.

After you watch that (assuming it got your attention), you should read Weapons Of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. She’s a quant who wrote a very informative book about how AI can go horribly wrong. She actually did an incredible talk for my company last month, and I can tell you that she knows her field, and she’s very thoughtful about her conclusions.

Anyway, The Social Dilemma didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know in great detail but after having watched it, I thought I would share a few things that the documentary didn’t go into. Actually, I had an interaction on my Facebook page about a month ago that got me thinking about writing this post. I said, on something that I posted that I never use Google for search. One commenter was genuinely perplexed and wanted to know what I use and why I don’t use Google.

Most people don’t take their internet privacy too seriously because they don’t care if advertisers use their data to sell them shit. Seems harmless, right? It’s totally not. In order to sell you shit, the name of the game has become to not only build a psychological profile about you, but to also use that profile to keep you online more. This is accomplished by feeding you what you crave. If you’re trying to stay informed about politics, this is actually destroying your perspective and your ability to access objectively true information. Watch the documentary to really learn how terrifying this is. I’m not going to repeat much of what’s in the documentary because this post is more about what you should do after you’ve learned what the documentary teaches you.

So I’m going to share my best practices with you. First of all, I quit social media as myself about 6 years ago. I only maintain a social media presence for my Bitchy self. My [NAME REDACTED] self hasn’t posted a single piece of information about herself in years. The only social media app I have on my phone is Twitter. I keep Twitter because it’s the fastest way to get information in real time. There was a pretty big fire in my neighborhood a couple of months ago. It was about 3 blocks away, and we could see the thick black smoke. No news outlet had that story until the next morning. With Twitter, I knew which building was on fire within minutes. Plus, the only thing Twitter knows about me is that I’m a progressive and a political junkie. The ads I get on Twitter are all over the place because they don’t have enough information to build a manipulative profile on me. My Twitter suggestions on who to follow come from all sides of the political spectrum. Why? Because I follow people I don’t agree with.

I’m going to take a tangent for a minute. If you’re not following people you don’t agree with, you are actively telling tech companies that you would like to be manipulated with confirmation bias. I posted a comment about my thoughts about Bob Woodward a few weeks ago. Fifty some odd dumb dumbs unfollowed me because they couldn’t bear the idea of being exposed to an opinion they don’t agree with. The super dumb ones announced their departures (thereby letting everyone else know how stupid they are) before leaving. My opinions are not so fragile that they can’t withstand exposure to differing opinions. If yours are, you’re (and I mean this literally) part of the problem that gave us Trump, Bolconaro, and Boris Johnson even if you’re diametrically opposed to them. Intolerance to differing opinions is how we got here, and more tolerance will be a step in the right direction for getting us out. I’m not saying you need to follow Trump supporters, although if you can find a few who are respectful I do encourage following them. If you’re a Hillary or Biden supporter, find some progressives to follow. You can’t just silo yourself to the tiny sliver of the (left or right) spectrum that you want to live in. I follow more people that I disagree with (by a factor of 10), than I do people I agree with. This is a healthy practice. Not only does it give you exposure to different ideas, but it helps you to fine tune your own arguments (or change them if you’re persuadable by empirical facts).

Do not follow grifters on social media. When you follow a grifter, your social media platform will serve you up more grifters to follow. How do you know if someone is a grifter? Fact check! I don’t share anything without fact checking. The more you fact check, the more efficient you become at it. I can fact check almost anything in under a minute now. I like to employ a three strikes rule – if someone posts three pieces of total bullshit, I stop following them. Trump’s election has created a cottage industry for left wing grifters. Here’s a small sampling of who to avoid:
The Grifter Brothers, who suddenly developed a keen interest in politics after the feds shut down their previous grift and RICOed half a million dollars from them. When they got suspended from Twitter for basically doing what the Russian bots were doing, one of their wives suddenly took an interest in politics and appeared on Twitter. Grifters gonna grift.
The Click Bait Report, who serves up establishment talking points, but wraps them up in click bait and sprinkles in some outrageous lies to make those tasty nuggets go down more smoothly.
Scott Dworkin, running the oldest grift in politics.
Amy Siskind, Karen-on-steroids. I have all the respect in the world for people who change their opinions, but not acknowledging your past stances is not a good sign that you’ve turned a new leaf. It’s a sign that you’ve found a new grift.
There are more, but those are the big ones.

Social media platforms know who their grifters are. If you follow a grifter, you’re telling them that you’re receptive to a certain kind of grift and you end up falling down a rabbit hole of half truths and flat out lies. Before I move on to some more tips, I want to tell you something about my fact checking practices: I fact check articles that make me happy more vigorously than I do with articles that I think are bullshit. Part of that is because the right wind circulates the same bullshit for years so I have a lot of the facts around their bullshit down cold. I spotted this steaming pile of bullshit on Twitter a couple of days ago. Even though I know Jon Cooper to be a frequent poster of bullshit, I still fact checked because if it was true, it would be YUMMMYYY. Guess what? Yeah, it was bullshit.

Getting back to how to fight the algorithm. I rarely use Google for search. I use DuckDuckGo instead. Here’s one reason. They’re actually good about protecting your privacy, while Google’s business model centers around selling your most intimate thoughts early and often. More importantly than that, DuckDuckGo doesn’t store your search history so it doesn’t use your past searches to serve you up the propaganda it has learned you’re looking for. If you and a conservative friend try and fact the same news story using precisely the same search terms in Google, your results won’t resemble each other in any way. Why? Because you’ve taught Google what your political leanings are and serving you up what you’re looking for makes them more money. We no longer live in a world where we share the same facts. DuckDuckGo will help you with that. Also, you have to teach yourself not to search with a bias. For example, “how has the climate changed over the past 60 years” is a good string. “Climate change hoax” or “the climate crisis” is not. You have to stop looking for what you want, and start looking for more objective results.

Another thing I do is dump my cookies every week. I have a calendar reminder set to remind me to dump my cookies every Saturday morning. This can be a pain in the ass, since you have to log into everything all over again but fear not! I have a solution that you should use whether you’re going to be a cookie dumper or not. Use a password manager. I have for years. I personally like Lastpass. A password manager will create unique passwords for you for every single sight you have a password for. I don’t know my passwords for anything and no two of my passwords even remotely resemble each other. I have LastPass installed in my browser, so it automatically fills in my passwords when I go to those sites. I also have the mobile app on my phone. I like this more than any password manager that comes with your OS because this generates unique passwords for me, instead of just storing my passwords. If I ever have to log into LastPass from a computer that isn’t mine (like if I’m traveling and my phone gets stolen for example), I change the master password as soon as I get home. There are a few password managers out there for you to look at. LastPass is just the one that I use.

Speaking of home, I use a VPN. I use a VPN on all of my mobile devices, and I use a VPN at home. This prevents my ISP from selling my web browsing data. When you’re traveling, or on an unprotected WiFi network, a VPN is essential for protecting your personal data. I use NordVPN, but there are several different products you can look at.

If you absolutely have to keep your Facebook account, use a browser to access your page. Delete the app from your phone. As I said, there are no Facebook apps on my phone. I know it’s a pain logging in every time, but trust me, it’s less painful in the long run.

The worst internet browser you can use is Chrome. I can’t believe I have to point this out, but Chrome is made by Google. Respecting your privacy is antithetical to their business model. I strongly recommend switching to Firefox or Safari. I’m currently running the beta version of Big Sur on my Mac, and the new version of Safari is actually pretty good at blocking trackers. Apple is trying to carve out a “we’re all about privacy” niche for themselves, and Safari is a good step. In addition to that, I use an ad blocker to make my internet perusal more pleasant.

I am loathe to recommend creating a total monopoly, but anyone who uses and Android phone knows nothing about how little privacy you have. Android is open source, so that means that anyone can customize it. Samsung has installed trackers in their version of Android. On top of that, your cell provider has also added trackers bloatware, etc. Android is a privacy and security nightmare. Up until 2015, Facebook was literally scraping every single scrap of information from Android phones, whether you were using the FB app or not. Every phone call that was made, and every text message that was send using any platform was captured by Facebook. This did not happen on the iPhone version because big daddy Apple was watching. Apple combs through every app that’s available in their store. Google has gotten better at this, but it’s still not good. That keyboard you downloaded could very well have been a key logger and no one cared to look because, YAY OPEN SOURCE!!! Open source is great for languages and frameworks, not so much for operating systems. I am not saying that Apple are “good guys”. They’re playing the data game like freaking champs but they are shutting out a lot of other players from exploiting you on your phone.

If this all sounds like a time suck that you just can’t manage, you haven’t watched the documentary. Please watch it. Yes, setting up a password manager to change all of your passwords will take a few hours to get up and running, and you will have to pay a couple of dollars a month but you won’t be vulnerable to identity theft and hackers. Yes, a VPN will also cost you a little bit of money but not using one could potentially wipe you out someday. DuckDuckGo is not as good a search engine as Google. They take a bit longer to catalog breaking news than Google does, and I occasionally have to use Google but that’s rare. The upsides to DuckDuckGo far outweigh the minor deficiencies.

The bigger picture here includes tech companies noticing a change in your behavior and responding with changes of their own. When tens of millions of people didn’t delete their Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts after the Cambridge Analytica incident, they sent a message that they didn’t care about their privacy. The Cambridge Analytica incident told us that our individual FB privacy settings are meaningless, and that your privacy is only as good as your most clueless friend because their shit settings open you up to more exploitation than you’ve consented to. When Google starts to see that people are quitting them in droves, they might, just might stop serving each of us up different “facts”. Ultimately, we need legislation to deal with this monster but changing our behavior can help.

There is no way to stop all of your data from being sold and used to create a psychological profile about you. That’s not realistic but you can take steps to minimize the damage and send a message to tech companies.

Last night surpassed even my most delightful socialist utopian dreams. I’m going to ask you to indulge me in just one paragraph of unbearable, puerile gloating before I get to my serious political analysis.

Suck it, Nancy! Suck it congressional black caucus, you miserable, sell-out fools. You endorsed a terrible candidate who showed (at best) complete apathy for the outrage over what happened to George Floyd, and what’s happening to black people all across the country. The world is leaving your sell-out corporate asses behind, and I can’t be more delighted.

Okay, I’m done.

There were a few really, really exciting upset victories here in NYS last night including Richie Torres, who won against Rubén Díaz Sr. Diaz is one of those republicans who calls himself a democrat, just to be viable in New York. Mondaire Jones crushed Adam Schleifer, a former federal prosecutor who spent $4M of his own money.

In addition to Jamaal Bowman, the other high profile race yesterday was in Kentucky. Chuck Schumer pumped $45M into Amy McGrath’s campaign. That’s just the cost of running the primary. $45 million dollars. By contrast, Charles Booker – the progressive grass roots funded candidate had less than $4M. Most of that was raised in the last 3 weeks leading up to the election. He essentially ran his campaign on less than a million dollars.

In America, 82% of all senate races are won by the candidate with the most money. That number goes up to 94% for house races.

The fact that Booker came as close as he did is a giant victory, even if McGrath wins. This was his first statewide race so he started with virtually no name recognition and none of that gigantic pile of corporate cash that was bestowed upon McGrath. If he doesn’t win this one, he’s very likely to win his next state-wide bid.

I never thought that McGrath was going to beat McConnell. That’s why I haven’t posted a single thing about her on my social media. I didn’t feel the need to pee on the establishment-faithful’s parade but I see her as another John Ossof nothing burger. The fact that Charles Booker did so well against her in the primary with no money and no name recognition tells me that if she wins the primary, she is 100% guaranteed to lose to McConnell.

Let me show you the basis for that belief.

Remember the 2017 special election in Georgia where Schumer spent over $40M running John Ossoff? Remember how the party faithful drank the kool-aid and thought that “we” had a real shot at winning that congressional seat? Remember that? After $40M and a lot of press coverage, Ossoff only managed to get 125,500 votes.

Now let’s look at the governor’s race in Georgia a little over a year later. Stacey Abrams spent $27.4M on her campaign. For that $27M, she received 1,923,685 votes.

That’s a pretty big fucking difference in voter turnout. That’s the difference between excitement and no excitement.

Amy McGrath and her milquetoast republican-light platform = no excitement. That’s just a fact. It’s the same uninspiring platform that John Ossoff ran on. All the money in the world isn’t going to make this turd shine enough to excite voters to come out. Republicans are going to turn out to vote for their highest profile senator, who stole them a Supreme Court seat. Trust that.

Democrats don’t show up to vote against people. They show up to vote for people. George W Bush never would have won a second term if democrats voted like republicans did. Hillary would be president right now if democrats voted like republicans do. I don’t know why democrats keep assuming that turnout will be high to vote against someone. I have not found one instance where that was true.

Democrats came out in droves to vote for Barack Hussein Obama. There’s never been a less “safe” nominee than a black guy whose middle name is Hussein, 7 years after 9/11. I have a friend who keeps advocating for establishment candidates because “now is not the time to gamble”. Again, this opinion runs contrary to the evidence. What some people see as a “gamble” is what others see as progress.

Democrats have done the same damned thing for the past 40 years: focused on electing “moderates” that republicans can accept. I’ve literally, never once in my life heard a republican advocate for electing a moderate that democrats could get behind. Never.

The result has been a massive rightward shift. The center is now the hard right. Not the far right, but the hard right. The far right includes racists and religious whackadoodles. The hard right is where all of the working class-fucking economic policies lie. We call it neoliberalism now, as if it’s somehow different than hard right wing policies. Every single president and congress in the past 40 years has redistributed wealth to the top. Every single one.

Obama actually pulled off the single biggest wealth redistribution this country has ever seen. I know that we’re not allowed to say anything bad about Obama, but these are the facts. If Obama had given the working class more than just the crumbs off the table, Trump never would have happened.

The worse democrats get, the more monstrous republicans get. Both sides keep lowering the bar in ways that were unimaginable 60 years ago. If democrats would just do one meaningful thing for working people every generation, we wouldn’t be seeing republicans devolve into neanderthals. All democrats have to do is one great thing every 15 years. That’s it.

I’ve said this many times before, and I will say it many more times: democrats only win presidential elections when they run preternaturally charismatic candidates. Republicans win by running literal human garbage.

This is not what winning looks like.

I used to believe that electing a shitty democrat is better than letting a republican win. I no longer believe that. Over the past 40 years, I’ve seen shitty democrats pave the way for increasingly monstrous republicans. I no longer see the value in voting for a Joe Manchin over a republican. It may feel like you’re slowing down the bleeding but in the long term, you’re really just opening up another gaping wound in another part of the body. Amy McGrath is another Joe Manchin. Believe me.

Incumbents win over 90% of elections. The fact that incumbents are suddenly losing their primaries is a great thing. We need better democrats in order to stop more monstrous republicans from getting elected. If democrats manage to pass Medicare for all, that wins them 30 years of elections. Voting for democrats that aren’t willing to do something that sweeping just makes a more horrid version of Trump possible. Remember when we thought that W was the worst president this country could possibly ever elect? They have gotten worse, and there’s no reason to believe that trend won’t continue.

It’s time to do this a very different way. This 4 decades long experiment in neoliberalism has failed spectacularly.

The next big race to watch is in Colorado where Andrew Romanoff is running against John Frackenlooper. On the one hand, we have a progressive democrat. On the other hand, we have this fucking douchebag:

He’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the fracking industry, and he’s got the full support of the DNC. Cory Gardner is going to lose the general. I’m 99% sure of that. So the question now is who do democrats want in that seat? A guy who wants to frack the shit out of the country until we have no safe drinking water left, or someone who wants every American to have health care?

This seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since the winner of this primary is almost certainly going to be the next senator from Colorado.

Please Colorado, elect a better democrat so that we don’t get a more vile version of Cory Gardner down the road.

Another election to keep an eye on in November is the West Virginia senate race. Paula Jean Swearengin has already won that primary. You might remember her from Knock Down The House. She was one of the 4 progressives who ran in 2018. That documentary was edited to be all about AOC since she was the only one of the 4 to win, but watch it again to see what Paula Jean is all about. If she manages to pull of a victory in November that smashes the Joe Manchin compromise argument to hell once and for all.

We are slowly but surely electing better democrats. I am hopeful for the future of our country, and I will keep advocating for good candidates to defeat useless incumbents until the entire democratic party has been taking over. The time for change is long overdue. This isn’t going to be fast, but it’s happening much more quickly than I would have imagined 5 years ago.

You’ve all probably seen this video by now:

This was shot in Central Park yesterday by Christian Cooper (no relation), the man Amy Cooper was threatening.

There are so many things that I find troubling about this woman, that I felt compelled to share. But first, let me share her “apology” with you:

“I sincerely and humbly apologize to everyone, especially to that man, his family. It was unacceptable and I humbly and fully apologize to everyone who’s seen that video, everyone that’s been offended…everyone who thinks of me in a lower light and I understand why they do. When I think about the police, I’m such a blessed person. I’ve come to realize especially today that I think of [the police] as a protection agency, and unfortunately, this has caused me to realize that there are so many people in this country that don’t have that luxury.”

Now, I’m all for a good redemption story and I’m prone to accepting apologies that offer some indication that lessons were learned. This is not that.

Let me step back to all of the things I found troubling about this video before the “apology”.

First and foremost, this woman lives in Manhattan. Back in the olden days when I took a train to work, I would hear 14 different languages being spoken on my way to work. We have a very diverse culture here. You have to work pretty hard to be a racist here. Also, here is where NYPD is. Here is where Eric Garner was murdered. Here is where the Central Park Five were railroaded for a murder they couldn’t be tied to by a shred of physical or eyewitness evidence.

Here is where I don’t even think about calling the cops in my neighborhood (Harlem) unless the situation is very dire. Why? Because I know the history of the NYPD.

More importantly, I’ve been watching video after video of black men being abused and murdered at the hands of police officers for years now. Those videos have broken my heart and informed me of the severity of the problem. I admit to being ignorant as to the scope of the problem before the endless videos started appearing. I knew there was a problem, but I had no idea how big and how systemically entrenched it is. The injustice of these videos is further bolstered by videos of white men (and women) behaving abhorrently to police officers over and over again and living through it.

This woman, Amy Cooper watched the same videos and read the same news stories but instead of being heartbroken or better informed, she identified a weapon that she could wield when she needed it. She repeatedly told Christian that she was going to tell the cops that an African American man was threatening her life. Twice, during her call to 911, she emphasized African American man. She did this deliberately, and armed with the knowledge that gained from watching all of those videos of unarmed black men being beaten or killed. That knowledge didn’t evoke understanding or sympathy for the plight of black men in America. No, she saw an opportunity to weaponize the injustice.

Those were my observations before her “apology”. That nonpology just makes everything worse as it was not only a straight up lie, it was literally the opposite of the truth. She ended up on CNN where she accidentally let it spill that her “entire life was being ruined right now”. Awwwww, poor Amy! All she was trying to do was to ruin someone else’s life. Does she really deserve this?

Guess what, Amy Cooper? I think you’re a bigger piece of shit today, than I thought you were yesterday. Her employer Franklin Templeton has placed her on administrative leave while they “investigate”. You guys watched the video above, right? Are you done investigating? Yeah, me too. I’m sorry but this woman needs to be fired and shunned from society. I have no interest in tolerating or forgiving people like this, especially after her disingenuous, rectally generated nonpology that wasn’t even well crafted to line up with what we know about her just by watching the video.

There was a story in the newspaper today about how Shake Shack is returning $10 million dollars they received under the Paycheck Protection Program. If you recall, this was part of the COVID stimulus package. $350 billion dollars was set aside to give low interest loans to “small businesses” in order to keep their employees on payroll for ten weeks. The loan would forgiven if those “small businesses” didn’t lay anyone off.

To be clear, “small business” wasn’t defined in any way that makes sense by design. Since our congress is bought and paid for by big corporations, these “oversights” are always going to be baked in any economic relief package that ever gets passed.

Make no mistake, the Paycheck Protection Program is one that was designed for big corporations to exploit on top of probably trillions of dollars in other relief that was specifically designed for them.

Shake Shack just admitted that they never needed the money. Just like Kelly Leoffler didn’t need the money she made from her insider trading. Neither did Martha Stewart when she did her insider trading. This is unmitigated, irrational greed and it will always happen if it’s allowed to.

As long as our congress is bought and paid for, it will always happen. I’ve said this a thousand times; it was not an accident that 95% of Obama’s recovery went to the top 1% any more than Shake Shack was “accidentally” eligible for cashing in on the Paycheck Protection Program.

The problem is that only half the country cares when these things happen at any given time. The half that didn’t care from 2009 – 2016 suddenly care now. We can’t keep doing this.

Corporate CEOs don’t bother actually building companies anymore. Their only goal is to make an extra nickel today. Meat processing plants all around the country are starting to shut down because they didn’t want to spend a relatively tiny amount of money to protect their workers and their customers from this virus because that was going to cost them a nickel yesterday, and they can’t have that. So now they’re shut down completely, which should cost them exponentially more than yesterday’s nickel, but it won’t because congress is going to bail them out. There is literally no incentive for companies not to grab the extra nickel every single day that they can.

No (for example) McDonald’s franchisee should have been eligible to dip into the Paycheck Protection funds, but I promise you that hundreds did. Most people think that McDonald’s is a fast food business. It’s really a real estate holding company. Virtually every McDonald’s location sits on land that is owned by the corporate entity so every franchisee pays rent to that entity. Corporate should be figuring a way to bail out their tenants, since losing all of them overnight would probably cost more than keeping them alive. They’re sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real estate. If anyone doesn’t need a bailout, it’s a chain. And any chain that truly needs a bailout shouldn’t get one, since their executive board didn’t bother with shit like keeping enough liquidity to weather a storm. If we let enough companies go under, guess what will happen? Yeah, we will get business practices that don’t revolve around “a nickel today”.

This behavior isn’t just being incentivized by corporate owned federal legislators. It’s happening on every level of government. I remember 25 years ago or so, a 10 or 15 story building went up in the downtown area of the city where I grew up. That building stayed empty for about 15 years because the owner wanted one single tenant to rent the whole thing. Guess who took those losses while that building sat empty because the owner didn’t want to rent to multiple tenants? The taxpayers in that community. That son of a bitch real estate owner wrote off the losses on that building every single fucking year it stayed empty. That happens all across the country. We privatize the profits and socialize the losses and then on top of that, we fork out the big bucks for bailouts. We could force real estate developers to keep lowering rent prices until they get tenants in order to receive those right downs, but we don’t because they own the politicians. So they can hold out for the right tenant at the right price, thereby making it more difficult for people to become business owners.

Very little of the corruption that’s happening with Trump is actually new. What’s new is that this administration isn’t going to the pains of making it impossible for us to see the extent of the corporate welfare. Again, 95% of Obama’s recovery going to the top 1% was just about as savage as it gets. His administration was smart enough to hide the lion’s share of bailouts in a myriad of complex fuckery like giving the banks that took your house money from the federal reserve (your money) for literally nothing and letting them charge you 24% interest on your credit cards. You created the liquidity that keeps the banks running, and you were told that they paid back the bailout money so everything was swell, even though you were still bailing them out and continue to do so at this very moment.

Unfortunately, Obama left America’s cupboards bare. We literally can’t afford to do this again. Half of Americans were left without $400 in the bank after the last economic crash. This one is going to push them over the edge. Forty years of whittling away at the working class’s ability to save any money has finally come to a head.

We have to stop the ‘a nickel today’ approach to business once and for all, and the only way to do it is to let some percentage of business fail so that we can do a reset.

Here’s what’s going to happen once this virus is neutralized: all of your favorite local restaurants will be forever gone. The owners of those buildings are going to keep them empty until they can get a chain to rent those spaces. That is going to be the opposite of what needs to happen to rebuild our economy. Those commercial rent costs need to be allowed to plummet to pave the way for hundreds of thousands of small businesses to start up. This is precisely the reason why I’ve always been anti-Starbucks. They drove out small businesses and turned those business owners into employees. It’s fucking terrible for our society.

We cannot continue this concentrated ownership of our country and expect to survive. Concentrated ownership necessitates more corporate welfare and bigger bailouts.

And we can’t keep being outraged only when the other party does it. This practice tells our politicians that we’re not outraged at all. Actually, Bill Maher straight up told us not to be outraged in this seven minute long “okay boomer”:

We cannot keep doing what we’ve been doing and expecting different results. Bill Maher’s lunacy would just keep the ‘a nickel today’ business practices going in perpetuity. We can all start by not voting for corporate funded candidates in any election when we have another choice.

We’re stuck in the presidential election now, so voting for Biden is the only thing that makes sense to minimize the damage. But make no mistake; this presidential election is about minimizing damage. It’s not about improving anything in any sort of meaningful way since Biden is promising to keep the Obama years going. We had our chance for real change in the primary. Sadly, we didn’t get it so we all have to vote for Biden now.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fight to make him better. And no, doing so doesn’t undermine his candidacy. If Trump were smart, he could do the opposite of what Obama did right now and take this election in a landslide. He could advocate for a 1 year universal basic income of $2,000 for every individual (so 4k for a family), automatically enroll anyone who gets laid off in Medicare and it would all be over for Biden.

Fortunately, he’s not smart so we need to make Biden a more populist candidate who understands that this economy needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up. If he doesn’t start speaking directly to the plight that working people find themselves in right now, he leaves room for Trump to do it.

More importantly than the presidential election, almost all of you have the chance to vote for local and state level candidates who aren’t funded by the corporations who always rob you.

It’s really time to understand the power that we actually have as voters, and to do way more homework (and legwork) than we’re used to doing at election time. This ‘a nickel a day’ corporate culture we have is one we’ve created by telling us that Bill Maher’s nonsense is reasonable.

STOP IT! We can change things if we understand that this is within our collective power.

So Trump finally invoked the Defense Production Act, forcing GM to make ventilators on Friday after trying to nickel and dime “negotiations” with them. Once again, this is the opposite of what our country needs right now. He should have doubled their cost estimates and paid them enough to turn a healthy profit.

Instead of giving companies that have been doing stock buy backs over the past 13 years trillions of dollars in bailout money, we should be invoking the Defense Production Act with every manufacturing company in the country and we should be offering them generous contracts with large profit margins.

Clothing companies should get federal dollars to make masks and gowns. Paper companies should get federal dollars to make latex gloves. Distilleries should get big fat contracts to make isopropyl alcohol and hand sanitizer. Event equipment companies should get contracts to build temporary hospitals and testing sites all across the country. Any factory that can be retrofitted within 2 weeks to produce critically needed supplies should all get big, fat fucking federal contracts to retrofit and ramp up production. Those contracts should be generous enough to ensure that safety precautions are in place for the workers, and that they can get tested every few days in order to prevent outbreaks.

This strategy would create a situation where everyone wins. Hospitals would get the supplies they need to save lives. Workers would be able to get good paying temporary jobs to sustain their households through this crisis instead of useless small checks every few months. The companies would be able to build up cash reserves with those generous profit margins, which would create the kind of long term stability that a stimulus check wouldn’t. The economy would get a boost because that money would be flowing.

But since this is America, and our politicians only care about the companies that generously donate to their campaigns, we can’t have nice things and we can’t do anything in a way that actually makes sense.

We’re going to spend the money anyway. I’d like to see us for once, not spend it in the stupidest way possible. Is that too much to ask?