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September 19th, 2021:

Weekend link dump for September 19

Sep 19th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
11 comments

“It is possible to be both a victim and a villain.”

“Last year, three cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship. They named it the Satoshi, and dreamed of starting a floating libertarian utopia. It didn’t work out.”

“Over the past year, as the conspiracy theorists have come together under one big apocalyptic tent—the “stop the steal” election truthers, the anti-vaxers, the anti-maskers—we have seen organized campaigns of harassment, threats of violence, attempts to harm members of school administrations, and physical altercations at school board meetings when masks are mandated.”

“Most viruses in an infected person are genetically identical to the strain that started the infection. It is much more likely that one of these copies – not a rare mutation – gets passed on to someone else. Research has shown that almost no mutated viruses are transmitted from their original host to another person. And even if a new mutant causes an infection, the mutant viruses are usually outnumbered by non-mutant viruses in the new host and aren’t usually transmitted to the next person.”

“Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” through most of the 1970s, and there is little in the history of evangelicalism to suggest that abortion would become a point of interest. Even James Dobson, who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged after the Roe decision that the Bible was silent on the matter and that it was plausible for an evangelical to hold that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being”.”

“Not once does the story mention obstruction, which also carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. If you don’t mention obstruction — and your sources don’t explain that obstruction will get you to precisely where you’d get with a sedition charge, but with a lot more flexibility to distinguish between defendants and a far lower bar of proof (unless and until judges decide it has been misapplied) — then your sources are not describing what is going on with the investigation.”

“More than a million children have already lost a primary caregiver due to COVID, according to one recent study.”

“President Joe Biden gave a gift to every major company in America by forcing them to mandate vaccines or stringently test their employees for Covid. Their reaction to the new rule: glee.”

“Researchers are finding that when pulverized rock is applied to agricultural fields, the soil pulls far more carbon from the air and crop yields increase. More studies are underway, but some scientists say this method shows significant benefits for farmers and the climate.”

Four words: Lab-grown woolly mammoths. You’re welcome.

RIP, Norm MacDonald, comedian, writer, actor best known for several seasons on Saturday Night Live.

“He’s ended America’s longest war, got vaccines distributed at no cost nationwide and halved the child poverty rate. So why all the stories about ‘Biden‘s Cruel Summer’?”

“Maybe Washington State needs to implement vaccine passports for crossing its state borders.”

The story of Bruce, the large fiberglass shark that went on an epic journey during Hurricane Nicholas.

You oughtta know that Alanis Morisette does not care for the forthcoming HBO documentary about her life.

RIP, Dotty Griffith, pioneering Texas food journalist.

“Remember that many unvaccinated Americans aren’t hardcore resisters, just people who need a push. The president gave them one.”

“I must say I take a personal glee at the outcome of the Republican attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom, not just because it’s another setback for the party that advocates stupidity, the end of democracy, and the death of its members (don’t wear masks, don’t take vaccines, COVID is a hoax)— no, I’m thrilled because I personally know the candidate who lost — Larry Elder.”

“This dataset is all that’s needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the Internet that has eluded researchers, activists, and, well, just about everybody.”

“I am happy to announce that we are offering Official letters for those Pastafarians who would like to be exempt from working in proximity to the unvaxxed. The unvaccinated may emit harmful virus particles which are forbidden to devout Pastafarians, therefore we expect all reasonable measures to be taken to help us avoid these virus particles. Please respect our religious liberty.”

“Netflix was hit with a lawsuit on Thursday over the mention of chess champion Nona Gaprindashvili in the final episode of the Emmy-winning limited series The Queens Gambit.”

“Vaccine requirements work: Raiders report more than 6,000 fans got the shot on game day”.

Here’s your first proposed Senate map

Sep 19th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
8 comments

Behold. This dropped on Saturday afternoon while normal people were running errands or watching college football, so commentary and coverage is limited at this time. Here’s one view:

Other data is here. I don’t see past election results, but it’s clear at a glance that SD10 would become Republican. As for the rest, and for other maps, we’ll have to see. Even with more sophisticated technology, the first map is never the final map, so expect to see some variations soon. Thanks to Reform Austin for the heads up.

UPDATE: Here’s coverage from the Trib. Sen. Powell, who is clearly targeted by this map, is not happy about it.

State Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson, immediately called foul on the initial draft of the map, which was authored by Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, who chairs the Senate Redistricting Committee.

“The proposed State Senate map is a direct assault on the voting rights of minority citizens in Senate District 10 and, if adopted, it would be an act of intentional discrimination,” she said in a statement. “The 2020 census revealed the population of Senate District 10 is nearly ideal. There is no need to make any changes to district lines. Moreover, since 2010, the minority population percentage within the district increased dramatically while the Anglo percentage has dropped. The changes now proposed are intended to silence and destroy the established and growing voting strength of minority voters in Tarrant County.”

[…]

Since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Texas has not made it through a single decade without a federal court admonishing it for violating federal protections for voters of color.

“The release of the proposed map is only the beginning of the fight. I’m proud to be the candidate of choice of minority citizens in Senate District 10 and will do everything within my power to stop this direct, discriminatory, and illegal attack on their voting rights,” Powell said.

She has a point, and then-Sen. Wendy Davis was able to negotiate a settlement last decade that took the Senate map out of the litigation. I just don’t expect her to get much reception from the courts.

A kinder, gentler voter purge

Sep 19th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

How nice.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Two years after Texas officials fumbled an effort to double-check the voting rolls on a hunt for non-citizens — and instead threatened the voting rights of nearly 60,000 eligible Texans — similar efforts to purge non-citizen voters are now the law of the land, thanks to provisions tucked into the massive elections bill enacted earlier this month.

The Secretary of State will once again be allowed to regularly compare driver’s license records to voter registration lists in a quest to find people who are not eligible.

But while Republicans are determined to make another run at the controversial purge that alarmed civil rights groups two years ago, they insist they’ve made key changes to prevent a repeat of the same mistakes.

“They blew it last time,” acknowledged Republican State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston.

So much so, then-Secretary of State David Whitley resigned his position in the aftermath and triggered a public apology from his office. Civil rights groups also sued his office and blocked the state from continuing the purge at the time.

Starting by December of this year, the Secretary of State will review Department of Public Safety records every month looking for potential non-citizens. But this time lawmakers have put in a provision that intentionally bars the Secretary of State from going too far back in time as it scours drivers’ license records, something that led to some of the problems in 2019.

In some instances, the state flagged legal voters who had become naturalized citizens since the time they first applied for a driver’s license a decade or more earlier. Non-citizens, including those with visas or green cards to stay in the U.S., are able to get Texas driver’s licenses. The state’s 2019 analysis flagged those drivers, but it never accounted for the fact that about 50,000 Texans become naturalized citizens each year.

The result was many legitimate voters receiving letters warning they were at risk of being knocked off the voter rolls and facing potential legal action because of faulty data.

By hastening to send out the written warnings, civil rights groups said the state caused a lot of fear and confusion, particularly for naturalized citizens.

“Definitely this is substantially better than what they were doing before,” said Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

But Gonzalez said he’s still worried about the reliability of Department of Public Safety drivers’ license databases and the inherent pitfalls of trying to compare millions of records against millions of other records. He said there is just too much room for error.

“There are still concerns that they will be falsely flagging people,” he said.

There’s too much to even sum up, so just go here for all things David Whitley. The provision the Democrats fought for should limit the damage, and for that we can be thankful. But there’s still no reason to trust anything the state is likely to want to do to “clean up” the voter rolls. They have not earned any benefit of the doubt. I will be delighted to be pleasantly surprised by this, but we very much need to keep a close eye on the process, because again, the state cannot be trusted.

COVID rate slows a bit, but ICUs still full

Sep 19th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The good news.

So far, the delta variant has fueled a month of Houston-area COVID hospitalizations over 3,000, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

But Texas Medical Center records show positive case rates may be slowly declining. According to TMC’s daily report, 1,939 people tested positive Tuesday in the Greater Houston area, a decline that may be related to COVID testing site closures as a precaution before Hurricane Nicholas.

Also Tuesday, the medical center admitted 310 new COVID-19 patients compared to the average 328 per day last week. Hospitals in the TMC remain at 90 percent capacity.

Dr. Wesley Long, a microbiologist and medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist, has been tracking and analyzing the virus and its variants through the hospital’s COVID-19 genome sequencing operation.

While Long sees the increase slowing, he hesitates to say Houston is passed the peak of the surge.

“It’s like cresting the top of the wave, you don’t know what the backside of the wave is going to look like,” Long said. “In the beginning of this fourth wave, there were some people hopeful it would go up quickly and come down quickly. That’s not the case.”

The fourth wave’s peak has been broader than previous waves, which spiked and declined within about 25-30 days, Long explained. The big question with the delta wave is whether it will plateau at a high rate of hospitalizations or have a slow decline.

“It’s hard to know how other things like holidays and school will affect the case count,” he said. “It’s really important to keep masking, social distancing and staying home if you’re sick because it’s important to bring the fourth wave under control.”

Another way to look at it:

The not so good news.

COVID-19 hospitalizations have been declining across Texas and the Houston region, but the virus is still keeping a high number of people in ICUs, prolonging the strain on patients waiting for critical care beds.

Last week, the number of available adult ICU beds in Texas sunk below 300 for the first time in the pandemic, with 270 beds available on Sept. 8 and 279 available on Sept. 9, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. There were 326 beds available this Wednesday, including 65 in the nine-county region surrounding Houston, the data show.

Texas Medical Center ICUs for weeks have been hovering around 90 percent full with “Phase 2” surge plans — which add 373 ICU beds to the 1,330 available in Phase 1 — activated.

[…]

ICU data is a lagging indicator of the virus’s impact, [Dr. Syed Raza, vice president of medical operations at CHI St. Luke’s Health-The Woodlands Hospital] said, because the sickest patients need care for a longer period of time. He said it is the “natural course of the pandemic” for ICUs to remain high after hospitalizations decline.

Dr. James McDeavitt, executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, said the hospital strain appears to be easing overall. The number of COVID patients in ICU beds likely peaked at the end of August, when they took up 49 percent of all critical care beds, he said. As of Wednesday, that number dropped to 45 percent.

He said he is cautiously optimistic that “we’ll continue to see this trend move in right direction.” He compared the current ICU situation to flooding during hurricane.

“We are no longer stuffing towels under the door” to stop the water, he said. “But the water is still over our threshold.”

I mean, it could be worse. It’s still not good, and it’s going to continue to not be good for awhile, but it could be worse. Keep up with the precautions, they’re our best hope in the short term as more people get vaccinated.

A gold-plated dud

Sep 19th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Just a dumb story all around.

When state lawmakers decided in 2015 that Texas needed to be the only state to have its own precious metals depository, supporters said there were plenty of reasons the project would be a gold mine.

The University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Co., which handles the schools’ endowment, owned hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of gold as an investment, stored for a fee in a New York City vault. A state-owned depository “will repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York to Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott said.

Citizens, too, were clamoring for an independent-minded location they could trust with their valuables. “When I first presented this, to be honest with you, we got hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world, really, who wanted to be able to put their gold in something that has the Texas banner above it,” said Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, the bill’s author. “This doesn’t work in Wisconsin, it doesn’t work in Idaho.”

Best of all, because the state would find a private partner to build and own the physical depository, it would cost taxpayers nothing. The enterprise would even reap a big profit for Texas. “We estimate that we could raise tens of millions of dollars in fees,” Capriglione testified.

More than three years after the depository opened, none of those things has happened. Yet earlier this year state lawmakers quietly voted to let the state borrow millions of dollars to bail out a project created to fix a problem that didn’t exist, and which they had vowed would cost nothing.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, one of only two senators to oppose the bill. “I don’t think the State of Texas should be in the commercial real estate business, or the gold bullion business.”

The UT/A&M investment company liquidated its gold more than a year ago without moving any bullion back to Texas. A spokeswoman said the agency currently owns no precious metals and so has no need for storage. No other state entity has metal at the Texas depository.

In the time since state leaders created the Texas facility, two large private competing depositories have also opened, in Shiner and Dallas. Officials said Texas Bullion Depository is currently less than 10 percent full. Taxpayers, meanwhile, have yet to see a penny from the enterprise.

Worse, the state’s partner, Lone Star Tangible Assets, recently revealed it is looking to sell the new facility, placing the state at risk of losing control of the entire enterprise. In response, two months ago legislators gave Comptroller Glenn Hegar permission to borrow up to $20 million to buy it.

How a project touted as a golden opportunity for taxpayers devolved into a bait-and-switch that could instead cost millions is a classic tale of government mission creep. It also raises new questions about the odd-couple partnership between the State of Texas and the high-volume precious metals sales industry, a sector that has inspired numerous warnings and enforcement actions from federal and state regulators, including the Texas attorney general.

“When I saw this, I thought, ‘This is going to be embarrassing for the State of Texas,’” said Paul Montgomery, a precious metals dealer and appraiser who has worked with regulators to bring cases against coin dealers who scam investors.

I don’t think you can claim that people were “clamoring” for this without citing some evidence of said clamor. There are enough gold bugs in the state that I can believe some people wanted this, but in the big picture that would be little more than a murmur. Be that as it may, here we are. I remember this as it was happening, and I definitely remember thinking it was deeply dumb, but I figured it was the mostly harmless kind of dumb. I never bothered to blog about it because once you link to the story and say “this is dumb”, there’s really nowhere else to go.

This will cost us a few million bucks, but in the grand scheme of things that’s a rounding error in the budget. Compared to Greg Abbott’s border wall extravaganza, this is peanuts. Everyone should mock Rep. Capriglione for the rest of his life because of this, but beyond that it’s not worth the effort. Honestly, in some ways this is almost charming, like the kind of old-school dumbassery that powered a million Molly Ivins bon mots. We’d be in a much better place if this were the biggest outrage of the 87th legislative session.