Tag: Business For Sale

Trump supporters believe election whistle blowers because they agree with them

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It’s amazing who right-wing pundits and politicians decide to take at their word. As Donald Trump continues to lose more and more lawsuits intended to overturn his election loss, his supporters in the media and beyond have put an increased emphasis on personal accounts from alleged whistleblowers. “Many [sworn affidavits] have been thrown out and many debunked, but many still have not. These Americans, these whistleblowers, deserve to be taken seriously and at least heard without threat of reprisal, but that’s not happening,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said recently . Fine, let’s take a look at some of these whistleblowers. There was the woman at Rudy Giuliani’s circus-like hearing in Michigan on Wednesday, December 2, who argued for stringent voter ID laws because “all Chinese people look alike.” There’s the star witness at that same hearing, Dominion Voting Systems contractor Melissa Carone , an irate rambler who came across as an SNL character rejected for being too broad, and who has already become the subject of parody . a drunk woman is trump team’s star witness in michigan pic.twitter.com/qGxEI3hp2G — marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) December 3, 2020 Then there’s the trio of whistleblowers who appeared on Sean Hannity’s extremely popular Fox News show on Tuesday, December 1, to share their stories of an alleged conspiracy to commit mass voter fraud. First up are USPS subcontractors Ethan Pease and Jesse Morgan. Pease claims that USPS workers were ordered to illegally backdate ballots so that they’d meet the November 3 deadline, while Morgan claims he picked up several pallets worth of ballots in New York and was ordered to bring them across state lines. The stories are only marginally more believable than Roger Stone’s recent claim of North Korean boats dropping off ballots in Maine Harbor . Whether they are true or not is for the judges to decide, but Hannity found them credible enough to put on air for an audience of millions, and the usual suspects tended to agree . Even just on the surface, though, these witnesses don’t seem terribly credible. All we know about them is that they appeared on Hannity fresh from a mostly maskless, indoor press conference , and that despite the host’s repeated insistence that these two are both “non-partisan,” Pease states that his reason for speaking up is that this is the “most important election of our lifetime.” (Hannity does not pursue this inquiry any further.) The third guest on the show manages to be even less credible. Kristina Karamo, an election observer from Michigan, claims that she was ordered to mark multiple ballots for Biden that may hav been mistakenly filled out for both Biden and Trump or Biden and a third-party candidate. She then zooms out to rant about all the general supposed election fraud evidence that the lamestream media is ignoring Read More …

Inside the controversial rise of a top Twitter COVID-19 influencer

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E ric Feigl-Ding picked up his phone on the first ring. “Busy,” he said, when asked how things were going. He had just finished up an “epic, long” social media thread, he added—one of hundreds he’s posted about society’s ongoing battle with the coronavirus. “There’s so many different debates in the world of masking and herd immunity and reinfection,” he explained, among other dimensions of the pandemic. “We at FAS, we’ve been kind of monitoring all the debates and how we’re seeing signals in which the data goes one way, the debate goes the other,” he said, referring to his work with the Federation of American Scientists , a nonprofit policy think tank. He rattled off a rapid-fire sampler of hot-button COVID-19 topics: the growing anti-vaxxer movement, SARS-CoV-2 reinfection and antibodies, the body of research suggesting masks could decrease viral load, along with a quick mention of the debate among experts about what airborne  means. This whirlwind tour through viral COVID-19 themes felt like the conversational equivalent of Feigl-Ding’s Twitter account, which has grown by orders of magnitude since the dawn of the pandemic. The Harvard-trained scientist and 2018 Congressional aspirant posts dozens of times daily, often in the form of long, numbered threads. He’s fond of emojis, caps lock, and bombastic phrases. The first words of his very first viral tweet were “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” Made in January, weeks before the massive shutdowns that brought U.S. society to a halt, that exclamation preceded his observation that the “R0” (pronounced “R-naught”) of the novel coronavirus—a mathematical measure of a disease’s reproduction rate—was 3.8. That figure had been proposed in a scientific paper, posted online ahead of peer review, that Feigl-Ding called “thermonuclear pandemic level bad.” Further in that same Twitter thread, he claimed that the novel coronavirus could spread nearly eight times faster than SARS. The thread was widely criticized by infectious-disease experts and science journalists as needlessly fear-mongering and misleading, and the researchers behind the preprint had already tweeted that they’d lowered their estimate to an R0 of 2.5, meaning that Feigl-Ding’s SARS figure was incorrect. (Because R0 is an average measure of a virus’s transmissibility, estimates vary widely based on factors like local policy and population density ; as a result, researchers have suggested that other variables may be of more use.) He soon deleted the tweet—but his influence has only grown. At the beginning of the pandemic, before he began sounding the alarm on COVID-19’s seriousness, Feigl-Ding had around 2,000 followers. That number has since swelled to more than a quarter million, as Twitter users and the mainstream media turn to Feigl-Ding as an expert source, often pointing to his pedigree as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist Read More …

Comcast’s 1.2 TB data cap seems like a ton of data—until you factor in remote work

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The most frequent reaction to last week’s news that Comcast will subject all its residential broadband customers to a 1.2 terabyte monthly data cap has been “How could they?!” Broadband experts consistently say there’s no technical reason to enforce usage limits on wired connections such as cable internet. A less frequent reaction: “How could you?” As in, how could any one person possibly burn through that much data in a month? The threshold that Comcast will start enforcing next year on subscribers in the northeast does, indeed, allow for a lot of online life before getting socked by surcharges of $10 for each extra 50 GB, up to $100 a month. For example, streaming 200 hours of high-definition Netflix (at 3 GB an hour ) would still leave half that 1.2 TB allocation free. Read More …

Black Friday is the perfect time to unsubscribe from pesky marketing emails

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For some of us, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a good time to buy a new TV or a Bluetooth speaker. But for marketers, it’s the best time of the year to spam your inbox. Because none of them want to be left out of the consumer feeding frenzy, marketers devote untold hours to designing and strategizing their Black Friday emails. And as e-commerce plays a bigger role in our shopping habits, the volume of emails they send keeps increasing . The ongoing coronavirus pandemic means there will be an even bigger mess in your inbox, as marketers trip over themselves to make sure they’re part of the online shopping rush. But while this might seem like an annoyance, it can also be a gift in disguise. Read More …

Crisis hotlines are bracing for the COVID-19 holiday season

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Americans have suffered a cascade of instability, illness, death, job loss, and school closures this year. The added stressors could make for a rough holiday season. Crisis hotlines and text apps that counsel people under acute duress are optimistic that this season may be less chaotic than usual, as families have settled into being homebound. But just in case there are issues, crisis lines are staffing up. Contrary to popular belief, the holidays are relatively quiet for crisis lines. Calls dwindle and organizations that respond to crisis lines offer volunteers a much-needed break. However, because this year has been unusually difficult, crisis lines will keep staffing up to prepare for a possible rise in calls and texts. Because of the rising number of COVID-19 cases, some people are opting to spend the holidays alone instead of spending it with friends and family. People are already feeling more anxious and depressed than normal. Isolation could make that worse. “Volume is up even pre-holiday. It’s up from last year. It’s consistent with what we get in the spring, which is our highest volume during the year. So, we’re going into this with a different baseline,” says Beverly Marquez, CEO of Rocky Mountain Crisis Partners, an organization that supports crisis lines in Colorado. While official reports of child abuse have dropped substantially this year, calls to crisis hotlines have increased . Meanwhile, in September, the New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective that called intimate partner violence a “pandemic within the pandemic.” The report noted that in some regions reports of domestic abuse dropped 50% below the usual—not because incidents were dropping, but because people confined at home have not been able to safely reach out for help. Read More …