onfocus

Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties.

By the way if you want more context and detail about the January 6 Insurrection investigation, tune into Marcy Wheeler on the emptywheel weblog. There's more happening than you hear in the news. Also @emptywheel on Twitter.

"By this point, those lies have been circulating for what feels like forever. But at tonight’s rally, as Trump’s fans called for the arrests of poll workers and the reinstatement of the rightful president, I got the sense that this might be just the beginning."

This can only happen in a society with elite criminal impunity. We should all demand real consequences for crimes no matter how much money the perpetrator has. Our culture of billionaire worship is garbage.

“These compounds can be taken orally and have a long history of safe use in humans,” van Breemen said. “They have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2. CBDA and CBGA are produced by the hemp plant as precursors to CBD and CBG, which are familiar to many consumers. However, they are different from the acids and are not contained in hemp products.”

Hemp products produced in a slightly different way might help fight covid. I learned to fight covid watching you!

"We could have sent hazard pay to teachers and others working on the front lines. We could be offering paid leave to parents who need time off with kids home. We could have made upgrading ventilation in schools a requirement for reopening. We could be sending pallets of tests and piles of KN95s to schools across the country. But we've done none of that, instead we've followed the indelible pattern of the American pandemic response: indifference and inaction."

Vaccines were the only plan. Grateful for those but there was so much more we could have done.

"Schools are open because jobs are open because the economy must be fed. And people defend it. Like they’re people who know they’re in the Matrix and they defend it."

Yes, this is what it feels like right now to watch the daily covid numbers spike and see no requests to change behavior from the institutions in charge of public health.

"The most surprising thing I encountered when joining was how manual most processes are. It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains. It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases."

Interesting look inside Amazon’s organization and development processes.

"Already, this surge is pushing their hospitals to the edge. And this is just the beginning. Hospitalizations always lag behind cases by about two weeks, so we’re only starting to see the effects of daily case counts that have tripled in the past 14 days (and are almost certainly underestimates)."

Another important update from Ed Yong. It's worth changing our behavior again to limit covid spread so we can keep our health care system working.

"Yet shortly after the vote, Facebook dissolved the task force and rolled back other intensive enforcement measures. The results of that decision were clear in the data ProPublica and The Post examined: During the nine increasingly tense weeks that led up to Jan. 6, the groups were inundated with posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election while the pace of removals noticeably slowed."

A year later and Facebook has never faced consequences for its role in recruiting and facilitating an attack on our country.

"As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for."

Nice profile of Matt Mullenweg and WordPress—which is still a force on the Web.

"There is no one who could meaningfully tell him no, both because he owns 58 percent of the company’s voting shares and is also the chairman of its board, but also because Facebook is organized such that he effectively has the final say on every decision the company makes; no other company this size invests so much formal or informal power in one person. It’s a terrible thing to say about someone, but Mark Zuckerberg really is Facebook. It shows."

Excellent Zuckerant.

"Last week, Pfizer released updated results that showed the treatment cut the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% if given to high-risk adults within a few days of their first symptoms. If given within the first five days of symptoms, the efficacy was similar: 88%."

A pill is a lot easier for people to swallow (so to speak) so I hope this ramps up quickly as an option.