Month: April 2023

I guess this is as good a theory as any:

Honestly this is the first explanation that makes sense to me. Australians really hate this shit. pic.twitter.com/RuKMz44GyI

— Mike Caulfield (@holden) April 26, 2023

Politico reports today that Ron DeSantis's hand-picked surgeon general decided to make a few personal edits to a study of COVID-19 vaccines:

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo personally altered a state-driven study about Covid-19 vaccines last year to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document...He later used the final document in October to bolster disputed claims that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were dangerous to young men.

Are you curious about what Ladapo did? In detail? I am! Here's the paragraph he added to the report:

Results from the stratified analysis for cardiac-related death following vaccination suggests mRNA vaccination may be driving the increased risk in males, especially among males aged 18-39. Risk for both all-cause and cardiac related deaths was substantially higher 28 days following COVID-19 infection.

What was this based on? Here's an excerpt from the report:

Aha! Maybe Ladapo has a point. For males aged 18-39, the relative risk of a cardiac death was 1.84 compared to the baseline of no vaccine. (Anything above one means a higher risk.) This is only barely above the level of statistical significance, and the sample size is only 20, but it's still an indication that something might be going on.

But wait. Here's a Ladapo edit at the top of the study:

Hmmm. The authors used a method called SCCS in the study, but in the section that's been moved down they say it can introduce bias. In the section that's been deleted, they say SCCS doesn't account for a multidose vaccine schedule—like the one for COVID—so they performed a sensitivity analysis to correct for it. So what does this sensitivity analysis say?

It says that the relative risk for males aged 18-39 is actually 0.89 for the first dose and 1.14 for the second dose. This is basically nothing. The authors confirm this in the section below in bold, which Ladapo deleted from the final report:

COVID-19 vaccination was associated with a slight increased risk for cardiac-related mortality 28 days following vaccination in the primary analysis, but this association was attenuated and no longer significant when applying the event-dependent exposures model utilized for multidose vaccines. Thus, there is little suggestion of any effect immediately following vaccination.

In other words:

• The vaccine had no effect on cardiac deaths.
• Ladapo knew it had no effect.
• He knew exactly which parts of the report to excise to make it look like there was an effect.
• He excised those parts.

The great thing about this is that it's so technical that nobody except an expert has any idea what he did. Even when it's explained, there's probably not one person in a hundred who understands what happened.

In layman's language, then, here's what happened: The authors of the report used a method to eliminate bias in their measurements of cardiac deaths. When the bias was removed, they found no effect from the vaccine. Ladapo deleted that part of the report.

Any questions?

According to the latest annual report from the BLS, the worst paid occupation in America is shampooer, followed closely by fast food cooks, cashiers, and dishwashers. But you'd rather know about the top paying occupations, wouldn't you, you money-grubbing fiends? Fine.

It turns out that almost all the top-paying occupations are doctors of some sort, so here are two charts. The top one is for everyone except doctors; the bottom one is for doctors only.

My prime night sky target last week was the Pinwheel Galaxy, but it's not the only thing I photographed. I got to my usual site early but didn't want to start up until the sky was fully dark, so I spent the first hour on something else.

This is Markarian's Chain, a group of galaxies in Virgo that form a fairly smooth curve.  The two bright galaxies on the right are M86 and M84. The rest are not as well known.

In addition to the chain itself, other galaxies are also visible in this picture. By my count you can see 13 in total. They are all labeled here.

As of 10:36 am PDT I am fully infused with my brand new, genetically modified killer T-cells. Now we wait.

The following post was written entirely by ChatGPT. I ran it multiple times with different prompts, and regenerated each prompt at least once. It kept finding more stuff! Then I put it all together and added a single sentence about the recent Dominion payout.

---

Rupert Murdoch and his media companies have paid out millions of dollars in legal settlements over the years. The exact amount is difficult to determine, as settlements are often confidential and not publicly disclosed.

However, some notable cases where Murdoch's companies have paid out large settlements include:

In 1987, News of the World, a British tabloid owned by Murdoch's News Corp, published a story alleging that politician Jeffrey Archer had paid a prostitute for sex. Archer denied the allegations and sued the newspaper for libel. In 1994, the newspaper settled with Archer, paying him a significant sum in damages. (Archer later paid back the money after he was convicted of committing perjury during the libel trial.)

In 1996, Murdoch settled a libel lawsuit brought by Elton John over an article in The Sun newspaper that suggested the singer had behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner towards a young man.

In 2011, News Corporation (one of Murdoch's companies) paid out around $580 million to settle phone-hacking claims in the UK. As of 2021, it is estimated that News Corp has paid out over £1 billion (approximately $1.4 billion USD) in settlements and legal fees related to the scandal.

In addition to the phone hacking scandal, News Corp has made several other legal payouts over the years. For example, in 2013, Murdoch's UK newspaper The Sun published a story alleging that Tom Cruise had "abandoned" his daughter, Suri, after his divorce from Katie Holmes. Cruise denied the allegations and sued the newspaper for libel. The lawsuit was settled, with the newspaper paying Cruise an undisclosed sum in damages.

In 2015, News Corp settled a lawsuit filed by real estate website Zillow, which accused News Corp-owned Move, Inc. of engaging in anti-competitive behavior. News Corp paid out $130 million in compensation to Zillow as part of the settlement.

In 2016, the company settled a lawsuit filed by former News of the World editor Colin Myler and ex-legal manager Tom Crone, who alleged that they were unfairly dismissed in relation to the phone hacking scandal.

The same year, News Corp settled a lawsuit filed by shareholders who accused the company of securities fraud related to the phone hacking scandal. The company paid out $139 million in compensation to the shareholders.

In 2017, the company settled a defamation lawsuit filed by a former British intelligence officer who was named in a report by News Corp-owned The Times newspaper. The company paid out a significant sum in compensation to the officer.

In 2017, the network paid $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought by former host Gretchen Carlson, who alleged that she had been sexually harassed by former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Other related claims brought the total to $45 million.

In addition, there have been other legal settlements involving Fox News, including a $20 million settlement in a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by former anchor Kelly Wright, and a $1 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by contributor Tamara Holder alleging sexual assault by a Fox News executive.

In 2020, Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by the parents of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered in 2016. The settlement amount was reportedly $250,000. In the same year the network paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by former host Ed Henry, who was accused of sexual misconduct.

In 2021, Fox was sued for defamation by the Dominion Voting Systems company, which accused Murdoch and his media outlets of spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 US presidential election. The lawsuit seeks $1.6 billion in damages. In 2023 the suit was settled for $787 million.

There have been many other legal cases involving Murdoch and his companies, and the total amount paid out in settlements is likely much higher than the examples listed above.

UPDATE: This was truly a ChatGPT story, complete with hallucinations! The original version included a paragraph about Jeffrey Wigand that was completely invented. I've removed it. It also failed to note that Jeffrey Archer had to pay back his libel award after he was convicted of perjury.

Oh come on:

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court.

....Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank. Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket.

I hardly need to add that Gorsuch hasn't recused himself from cases involving Greenberg Traurig. Why would he? Republican Supreme Court justices appear to consider themselves above the law, and in practice it turns out that they are.

I've heard a bunch of theories about why Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News:

• He was the biggest name in the Dominion lawsuit, so now he's taking the fall.
• Some of his text messages, which were made public during discovery, were critical of Fox. Rupert Murdoch didn't like that.
• Tucker had started to think he was bigger than Fox, and Rupert decided it was time to nip that in the bud.
• Tucker was opposed to US support of Ukraine, something the Deep State couldn't tolerate. So they engineered his departure.
• A former booking producer has sued both Tucker and his senior executive producer, who was also fired, of sexism and harassment. The case was likely to be embarrassing, so Fox decided to bite the bullet and cut him loose.
• He was a pain in the ass and everyone was tired of him.

It is a testament to Fox's reputation that no one thinks Tucker was fired because of his endless appeals to racism, bigotry, and demented conspiracy theories. And why would they? That's why Fox kept him around so long in the first place.

A day at the carwash. Or, more accurately, a day in the carwash.

In news that should surprise no one who's ever worked in an office, new research suggests that remote work is fine for experienced workers but bad for new workers. The reason is pretty obvious: Senior workers already know how to do their jobs and are slowed down by fielding annoying questions from junior workers. For them, being remote is great. Conversely, junior workers know squat and need to get guidance from senior workers to learn their jobs. They can't do that when senior workers are at home hiding in their basements.

This particular bit of research was done at a large software company, and one of the metrics the authors collected was the number of comments offered during code reviews. They found that after the start of the pandemic the number of comments received by younger engineers plummeted:

Among young engineers, the number of comments dropped by nearly half within six months of everyone going remote. The decline was especially pronounced among women:

The number of comments received by female engineers dropped nearly in half within two months of the start of remote work. This finding might or might not generalize to professions that are less male dominated.

The bottom line is that remote work might provide a short-term benefit by increasing the output of senior coders but a longer-term loss because junior coders don't get the training and mentoring they need. This causes more junior coders to quit in search of firms where there's less remote work.

This overall finding needs to be confirmed in other settings, but I have zero doubt that it will be. Remote work should be carefully deployed, not rolled out company-wide. Some jobs benefit from it while others suffer. Tread carefully.