I see that Douglass Mackey has been convicted of election interference and is possibly headed to jail and I have some things to say. 1/ I did not pay much attention to this story until a few days ago. Because stories have used his real name, I didn’t realize who he was on Twitter. All I saw was the framing that he was being prosecuted for what was commonly described as a “meme,” which sounded ridiculous. 2/

If there is one thing that I would hope this pandemic would have illustrated as a position that literally everyone could get behind, it is that we should not be monkeying around with viruses to make them more dangerous in order to make vaccines in case someday they exist. 1/ I don't mean that such research should be barred from government funding, I mean that it should be illegal. You don't have to believe that this is how COVID-19 started at all in order to grasp this obvious point. 2/

Let's review what we know about Jessie Smollett -- errr, Rachel Richardson, her godmother Lesa Pamplin, and the things we already know were lies in the story Smollett — dangit, sorry, Richardson, and Pamplin told. 1/ 1. The one person in this story we can say for certain has definitively repeatedly used racial slurs (against white people) is Pamplin, who (surprisingly!) protected her twitter account, but not until after people started pulling the receipts 2/tbdailynews.com/video-shows-th…

False. In fact, the entire reason we are here is because of journalistic dishonesty. The widespread malpractice in coverage of this bill is the real reason for this animus. 1/

https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1511361722245959686

First off, any journalist who refers to this bill as "Don't Say Gay," or who notes that others refer to it that way, without also noting that this description is objectively false, is too lazy or too dishonest to listen to. 2/

Saw so many people savaging this tweet yesterday that I thought, in the spirit of Christmas, that I would offer some reasons to encourage people to at least stop saying mean things about the person who posted it. 1/

https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1473689957956993030

She isn't evil, or crazy. She just suffers from the condition of being a hammer. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Some people are just incapable of seeing past their field of expertise and realizing that people have other considerations for how to live their lives 2/

Fauci is a bureaucrat. Nothing more, nothing less. He isn't Jesus Christ. Any other bureaucrat who is in charge of millions/billions in grant $, we would encourage aggressive questioning over whether they made mistakes and/or are covering their own asses or their friends'. 1/ When it's Fauci, though, aggressive questioning of his funding decisions is treated like an attack on science and truth itself. Just absolutely ridiculous. I realize that for a lot of people Fauci was an important voice last year but let's not lose perspective. 2/

I would like to not care about Taylor Lorenz and her toadies. They won’t let me.

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1369982771016310787

More

https://twitter.com/ewerickson/status/1369982891879501829

Top 4 states by population (CA, TX, FL, NY) offer an interesting contrast in how their governments have responded to the pandemic. From an outcomes perspective, there's not a lot to recommend the extra measures imposed on residents of CA and NY. 1/ By deaths per 100K residents: heritage.org/data-visualiza…
1. New York (222.9)
2. Texas (125.8)
3. Florida (123.3)
4. California (103) 2/

The minimum wage for robots will always be 0 dollars an hour Your job exists until either 1) your wages, inclusive of benefits, exceed the value you produce, or 2) the technology exists to produce and maintain a robot that could perform it for cheaper than your wages

My Octopus Teacher is possibly the worst project ever recorded on video. Everyone involved in making it, funding it, and green lighting it should be fired into the sun. Most especially this applies to the human protagonist, who somehow expects to be praised for abandoning his entire life, including kids, because he saw a fucking octopus.

Boy, am I seeing a lot of overheated and misguided commentary about the Liz Cheney vote. Here's what the vote does and does not mean. 1/ The vote was not at all a referendum on Trump or Trumpism within the House GOP. Trump already won those votes overwhelmingly when only 10 House members voted to impeach him. 2/

Actual facts:

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1357062153413529601

More actual facts dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar…

I gotta say: when the Jacob Blake story broke, I did not believe there might be a possible circumstance where a person being shot in the back seven times would be justified. After a full recounting of the facts in the case, it seems Blake worked really hard at it. 1/ By his own admission, he was armed with a knife. He struggled with a police officer while holding that same knife, and refused orders to drop the knife even while being held at gunpoint. 2/

Two things are both true at once. The first is that anyone who used violence or threat of violence in an attempt to overturn the election results yesterday engaged in a form of domestic terrorism and should have the book thrown at them. 1/ The second is that BLM protesters this summer stormed government buildings, forcibly occupied them, burned and damaged them, assaulted police officers, and literally took command of entire areas of major American cities. 2/

Ho boy do I have words to say about these remarks from Birx Let me start by saying that no one should be harassing or threatening public officials' families. To the extent that people may have broken the law in doing so, I hope law enforcement gets involved and holds the people responsible accountable. 2/

Watching Cuomo's reaction to the Supreme Court ruling and it just amazes me how blind he is to his own biases. I'm not really a religious person and haven't attended a worship service of any kind in years. 1/ But it is patently obvious to me, because I'm not an idiot, that exercises of religious freedom are being discriminated against in New York (and many other places) relative to secular activities. 2/

Just stop, dude. You had your chance to evenly enforce these rules and the whole country watched you not do it. No one is going to abide by this. You blew it.

https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1326596760710602753

Measures like this only work in the setting of overwhelming public compliance. America (thankfully) does not have enough law enforcement to force public compliance with an edict like this, so its efficacy depends on public faith in its elected officials.

I have been spending virtually all day reading through this stack of affidavits the Trump campaign provided regarding voter irregularities in Michigan. Some of the stuff should be investigated, but a lot of the stuff is... this. "I can confirm that I was made to stay six feet away from the table but sometimes I didn't."

Thanks for your input.

As I continue to run things down, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about voter fraud, and why I think it is fairly frequent on a small scale basis and largely impossible to pull off on a large scale basis. 1/ I would view it as more likely that the counting software caused serious problems than I would that there are massive numbers of fraudulent votes. The reason is pretty simple: creating a vote creates a paper trail and each instance significantly ups the risk of being caught 2/

After five days spent chasing down every even semi-plausible theory that was given to me by anyone, I view it to be almost certain at this point that what happened on Tuesday (and in the weeks preceding) is that Joe Biden secured enough legal votes to win the Electoral College 1/ I think it's important, for the health of the country and the integrity of the election process, that any credible accusation pertaining to the integrity of the voting process should be pursued to the fullest practical extent. 2/

I'm trying to limit what I respond to here because, believe it or not, I'm a little busy, but I have a feeling that this video should be addressed. 1/ I knew immediately when I saw this that I was almost certainly looking at someone transferring legal votes from ballots that were damaged or defective (printed wrong or somehow mangled by the machine) to ballots that could be machine fed. 2/