I was today years old when I learned that the name of our candidate for KS-SEN, Barbara Bollier M.D. is pronounced the same as that of actor Charles Boyer, and does not rhyme with that of former KS-GOV Jon Colyer. Colyer was defeated by nutcase Kris Kobach in the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary. Kobach then accomplished the near-impossible feat of losing a statewide Kansas election to a Democrat, yet he has decided to try again.
If Kobach wins the Republican primary to oppose Dr Bollier, our chances are good. Unfortunately, he has serious primary opposition, who have not shied away from mentioning his 2018 result.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put himself on the national map thirteen years ago for picking up a story print media assured him was a nothing-burger: W Bush’s purge of US Attorneys who were either prosecuting corrupt Republicans or who had declined who join the permanent Republican campaign into chimerical Democratic voter fraud. (For this, he became the first Internet journalist to win a George Polk Award.)
He looks to be onto another big one: diversion of medical equipment from both the national stockpile and orders placed by states and hospitals, to politically-connected middlemen, who are then selling them to these same desperate institutions at whatever price the market will bear. In some cases, equipment that was purchased by taxpayers is being resold to be bought by taxpayers a second time. Shipments are even being intercepted by Customs at entry and not seen again. Kickbacks in the form of political contributions to Trump and the GOP are inevitably part of the scheme.
Like the Biden pay-for-play, this crime has the advantage (to the liberals) of being remarkably easy to understand. I have no doubt Congress will be interested.
Dear Supporter, Today the Alameda County Board of Supervisors will vote on the Sheriff’s proposal to allocate an additional $85 million toward staff at Santa Rita Jail. Rather than spend money to help our frontline public health workers, laid off co-workers, or unhoused neighbors, Alameda County is choosing to spend public dollars on incarceration. This is even more glaring given the safety concerns the coronavirus poses to those locked up inside.
Hundreds of you have contacted the county supervisors and dozens of organizations and unions have called on the supervisors to do prioritize people over punishment. We need to keep the pressure on! Here are some links and instructions to virtually mobilize with us: Livestream today’s county meeting at 10:45am and make your voice heard by participating in public comment. You can join by zoom or by phone, find more teleconferencing instructions here. The sheriff’s $85 million budget proposal we’re commenting on is Item #8.You can find the full board agenda here.If you don’t have time to tune in, you can provide written comment by emailing the county clerk at CBS@acgov.org. Include your name, your commet and remember note agenda item #8 in your email. Feel free to email me if you need support navigating this process.
Sample public comment: My name is ___ and I live in ______. Please vote NO on the proposed annual allocation of $85 million for 370 new positions at Santa Rita Jail. Spending taxpayer dollars on incarceration instead of healthcare in the middle of a global pandemic unconscionable.This proposal is completely unsubstantiated as it is not based on any known documentation, official analysis, report, or court order. Do the right thing! Take measures to further reduce the jail population and dedicate the proposed $85 million to meeting the immediate needs of our frontline public health workers and unhoused neighbors. Vote NO on Item 8. Our county residents and public health workers will thank you. Help us stop this critical waste of resources and encourage your friends and neighbors to do so too. Let’s send the message that they can’t sneak this by while we are stuck at home!
In Struggle, Tash Nguyen & The Audit Ahern Coalition Restore Oakland Program Coordinator
Meeting ID: 866 828 148 Password: [Our house number; but the direct link should work without it]
One tap mobile +16699006833,,866828148# US (San Jose) +13462487799,,866828148# US (Houston)
Dial by your location +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 253 215 8782 US +1 301 715 8592 US +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 929 205 6099 US (New York) Meeting ID: 866 828 148 Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aOi8o4ed9
Discussion of the direction of the group in the absence of physical meetings. Many participants endorsed the social value of the meetings, and some mentioned getting information that they had not synthesized from their own reading. Of course, we also serve as a central point for distributing postcards and text/card projects. Action item: Everyone should have their own wine and, optionally, cheese, chips, or pretzels, since we can no longer serve communally.
The undersigned gave an explanation of some of the more interesting data presentations of coronavirus data. For example, the chart below shows how early intervention in Kentucky did better than later intervention in Tennessee. (This does not extend at this time to deaths, which are not in the chart: KY 8, TN 7.) This was accompanied by a refresher on semi-log charts, and why they are being used to graph cumulative cases and deaths. I recommend the charts at the Financial Times and a site called Worldometer. The differential slopes suggest that certain states that have been slow with social distancing, like Louisiana and Florida, are in trouble. Louisiana is even catching up to New York.
There was enough interest that an extra meeting will be added for next Sunday at 5:00 pm (Zoom, obviously), where I will go back over this material with updated data. And this time, we will record it! A Zoom link and a review of exponents and logarithms will be posted later.
Naomi discussed texting technologies, and we are distributing a document from EBAA on the programs themselves and which organizations use which. Almost everyone uses Slack for communication between volunteers.
Winning the Internet today is an interview of Hoover Institute and NYU Law Professor Richard Epstein by Isaac Chotiner (occasional player at the Piedmont Bridge Club) for The New Yorker, already available online [possible paywall].
Epstein is a giant of libertarian legal studies. The interview shows he is also a pompous ass who doesn’t realize his putative skills in cross-examination do not make him a qualified epidemiologist. Chotiner is in bold below.
Excerpt of New Yorker article
This is the most powerful avowal of Dunning-Kruger Effect we may ever see from the right wing.
Background
On March 13, Epstein web-published an article (which apparently inspired the Trump Mob’s thoughts of an Easter Economic Resurrection) that, using a sophisticated cherry-picked model based on multiple false assumptions of virus behavior, predicted 500 total USA COVID-19 deaths. On March 19, faced with the superiority of the 11th-grade exponential growth model to his libertarian fantasy, he changed some fudge factors and replaced 500 with 2500. Just in time, too; we crossed 500 on the 23rd. Less than 24 hours later, the 2500 death prediction was replaced by 5000.
If you go to the the Epstein article’s comments, you can see I offered Epstein (and several of his anonymous acolytes there) a $1000 bet we would have 10,000 deaths (double his latest wild guess reasoned estimate) by end of April. I am surprised that none have shown the least interest in this style of Applied Capitalism.
[For a sense of how crazy Epstein is, Trump himself declared today he will be a great president if he can keep deaths down to 100,000, which is Dr. Fauci’s lowest estimate given current measures for social isolation.]
Even though I don’t think it would happen to us, I have set up a waiting room, to deal with the influx of Russian bots that invade liberal Zoom sessions and take them over. I can admit you from the waiting room.
Happy New Year! (England celebrated the New Year on March 25 from some time in the 12th Century until adopting the Gregorian Calendar reform in 1750.)
Happy Birthday: My sister and my brother’s daughter.
Also on this day: (3019, Third Age) Gollum bites the One Ring off Frodo’s hand and then drops into the fires of Mount Doom, ending the reign of Sauron in Mordor. Sauron is later resurrected in the guise of a real estate developer from Queens, New York.
I had been meaning to write about the latest in Israel: the terrible mistake Benny Gantz was about to make, joining Bibi Netanyahu in a rotation “Unity” government with Bibi as Prime Minister first. (Bibi literally has to remain as Prime Minister to remain in the Knesset at all: PM is the one exemption from existing law requiring members under indictment to take leave.) But at the last minute, Gantz came to his senses, realizing his Blue and White party would crumble, lose all leverage, and his turn to be PM would never come to pass. The current situation remains fluid. Gantz’s big problem is that 4 MKs nominally in his coalition refuse to sit in his government if it relies on support from the Joint Arab List. (To show how crazy this is, Avigdor Lieberman, one of the most overtly-bigoted politicians in Israel who has called for denaturalizing Israeli Arabs and incorporating largely Arab parts of Israel into the rump Palestinian Bantustan, waived his longstanding insistence on this principle out of his even greater hatred for Bibi and his ultra-Orthodox supporters.)
So, instead, what I was going to say about Gantz, without Gantz.
Our next meeting will be next Sunday March 27, 4:30 via Zoom. Andy will post and send out Zoom link.
1. Don’t forget to circulate our donation link to support Dr. Tipirneni and Nurse Underwood. We are half way to our $1,000 goal. Last week to influence the Wisconsin election so get your Tony the Democrat postcards and votefwd.org letters in the mail.
2. Items from Berkeley Invisible Elections Team Meeting via Videoconference | Sunday, March 22nd, video opens at 6:30pm, meeting at 7pm. Click here to join. Indivisible Berkeley Action Hour via Videoconference | Monday, March 23rd from 12pm to 1pm | Jump into this videoconference, then tackle all any Actions in this newsletter (or others) you haven’t taken yet, together. Report out on results. Phonebank – Together via Videoconference | Wednesday, March 25th from 2pm to 4:30pm | Call to re-register voters who have been purged from the rolls in southern states through Reclaim Our Vote. Indivisible Berkeley Happy Hour via Videoconference | Thursday, March 26th from 5:30pm to 7:30pm | This is just a social time. Pour yourself a favorite glass of wine, mix a cocktail, or blend a green smoothie, and join this video gathering. Indivisible Berkeley Office Hours – How To Get Involved via Videoconference | Friday, March 27th from 5:30pm to 6:30pm | Pissed? Trying to figure out how to plug in on what you care about right now? Hop into this office hour session to talk things through. ACTIONS Call Each of Your Representatives and Be on Record Supporting the Priorities Outlined By the American Nurses Association, the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association.The joint letter with the full details, sent today — March 19th, 2020 — is here. If you don’t have the district offices saved in your phones, here’s the Capital Switchboard: (202) 224-3121. National Indivisible: Demand Your Senators Ensure Safe, Secure Elections During the COVID-19 Outbreak. A few actions here: 1) Call your senators to demand they fight to include the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act in the next coronavirus relief package. We must act now to build alternatives to in-person voting across the country so that nothing will put the November presidential election at risk. Read the details here. Racism & Criminal Justice Reform Team: [from Restore Oakland] Urge Alameda County Sheriff and District Attorney to address the pandemic and adjust procedures at Santa Rita Jail. As the coronavirus sweeps the globe, Restore Oakland and our public health and community allies are calling for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) and Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to reduce the risk of this pandemic for those incarcerated at Santa Rita Jail, their families, and our community. We are only as safe and healthy as the most vulnerable and under-resourced among us. Support the following 4 demands by calling the Sheriff and DA today using the following call script. [Sheriff Gregory Ahern – (510) 272-6866 and District Attorney Nancy O’Malley – (510) 272-6222.] Call Script: “My name is ____, I am concerned about the safety and well being of everyone inside Santa Rita Jail. COVID-19 is rapidly spreading. Your agency has a legal & moral obligation to take bold action before it’s too late. I urge you to reduce the jail population by immediately releasing seniors and those who are immunocompromised, as well as anyone who is scheduled for release in 2020 or 2021. I urge you to halt all charges and jail bookings. I urge you to meet the immediate medical needs of people currently in custody at Santa Rita Jail. Thank you.” Petition to Tech Companies to Stop Powering ICE during Coronavirus(from Mijente). Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, RELX, and other tech companies are continuing to provide software and data to ICE during this time. These companies make millions selling software and information to ICE — and they’ve done nothing to stop this support during the coronavirus pandemic. We’re calling on every tech company that works with ICE to immediately halt its support for the agency at this time. The hundreds of contractors on which ICE relies can still put a halt to its operations. More here. Tell ICE: Release All Immigrants at Risk of Coronavirus (from RAICES). Tell ICE to release all immigrants in detention, because detention is no place for a family, and no place for a family to be during a pandemic. More here.Science & Environment Team: Urge Chase Bank to Drastically Reduce Fossil Fuel Financing. Sign your name to this letter to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and co-Presidents Daniel Pinto and Gordon Smith, urging them to align the Bank’s financing plans for fossil fuels with the targets set by the IPPC for limiting global warming increase to 1.5°C. Click here for full letter text and more info!Visit Teams Page to learn more & subscribe to individual team lists
Indivisible Elmwood 