Afternoon Tea 4.12.2021 - Show Your Work

Getting away gets harder when the fog of war lifts...

April 12, 2021

Your regularly scheduled Cuomo-Update, Sinovac isn’t that great, windmills over pipelines, Mike Rowe’s oily hands, how to tell if your data was in FB’s latest breach, and a lovely story about Johns Hopkins professors sticking it to the man. It’s Monday, April 12th 2021, and this is the Tea.

Cuomo admin tracked nursing home deaths months before incomplete DOH report (NY Post) & Some Cuomo staff dispute work on book was 'voluntary' (Times Union) & State Budget Scraps Health Care Cuts To At-Need Hospitals Hit Hard By COVID (Gothamist) Cuts to Hospitals Cuomo pushed didn’t make it into the budget! Also two less surprising stories related to parochial abuse of power during pandemic.

Higher Ed, COVID-19, and the Austerity Shock Doctrine (Lawyers, Guns & Money) Wonderful summary of a massive grift that my alma mater, Johns Hopkins, tried to put over on their academic staff. To the point where a Hopkins professor of finance did their own forensic audit of JHU’s books. I’ll just quote the article, to show how insane this was:

The professor charged the faculty a grand total of $5,000 for this service, which is approximately .000001% of what it would have cost McKinsey or similar to do it…Anyway I don’t want to give anybody a heart attack, but the audit uncovered the fact that the financial “crisis” was largely made up, and in any case to the extent it was real it could be dealt with very easily by deploying a small portion of JH’s two billion dollars [!] in cash reserves, which the university claims it couldn’t do because those reserves are only supposed to be used for emergency situations (I’m not kidding).

The conclusion of this edifying tale is that for its $5,000 investment the faculty got $100,000,000 in retirement contributions returned to it, after the administration was forced to admit that its deployment of a classic MBB shock doctrine wasn’t based on actual facts in the world, but rather on the neoliberal corporate creed that cutting employee compensation in order to make sure that management paydays get constantly bigger should be the first resort to every crisis, real or imagined.

Effectiveness of Chinese vaccines ‘not high’ and needs improvement, top health official says (Washington Post) I’m stunned this messaging was actually allowed to be released into the public. And I’m kind of scared for the life of the head of Chinese Center for Disease Control & Prevention. As the internet says, Yikes.

About $700 million in health costs, specifically from hospitalization or premature deaths due to asthma and respiratory or heart disease, would be avoided from NYSERDA’s first two projects. The net benefits from reduced carbon emissions due to offshore wind through 2030 amount to $4 billion under an analysis of how to achieve the state’s 2019 climate act, which requires New York’s energy pool to be 70% renewable by 2030. That rises to $9.6 billion over the lifetime of the projects under the 2035 goals.

Iran says electrical problem in atomic facility is act of ‘nuclear terrorism’ (France24) Looks like Israel hacked the snot out of an underground atomic facility. Until something like the 2018 nuclear deal (which we left first) comes around and the two sides don’t come back to the table, I also can’t blame Israel for what it sees as a necessary defensive action for its security.

The media landscape shifted under Silicon Valley's feet, so now they're trying to silence criticism they don't like (Business Insider - Opinion) Clubhouse and Substack both allow venture capitalists to produce alternate “news” streams that actually produce a mix of news, commentary, and “content.” Similar to previous newspapers and evening news packages, but which is which, can be far harder to work out.

Mike Rowe’s New Discovery+ Show Is Big Oil-Funded Propaganda (Earther) Mike Rowe just blew all of the faith and hope I had in him walking a Middle Path. If you’re actively carrying water for Big Oil, I really don’t have time for you anymore. TV sponsored content like this is going to get really popular in the next decade, so get used to these “cancel culture” defenses.

How to check if you’re part of the Facebook data breach (The Verge) & Despite A Ban, Facebook Continued To Label People As Interested In Militias For Advertisers (BuzzFeed.News) & Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens (The Guardian) Trio of FB related stories, first on how to confirm if your info was in the data breach that surfaced 533 million users worth of data. The Facebook world leader loop hole article documents how state intelligence organizations & autocrats use digital astroturf campaigns, and the BuzzFeed article details how you can get micro-targeted into “interested in militias” which, lol FB lol.

Parts of Cincinnati Now Smell Like Semen, Which Means the Bradford Pear Trees Have Bloomed (CityBeat) I’d like to submit this for “Headline of the Year.” Can we get this editorial team a raise? Tethering Brazzers, Pears, and invasive tree species, and rotting seafood is masterful. I stand in awe.

Song of the Tea: I’m not going to give away what this track is re-imagining, but it’s mind-blowing when you figure it out. It feels like being at Cafe del Mar and running into the girl you had that one amazing summer in high school with. But you’d been doing yoga and getting plant protein into your diet, so you might be able to keep up with her this time around.

Shine through the gray.

Yours,