The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online Is Joseph Mercola

Please avoid close contact with people who are sick

And speaking of that quack, Joseph Mercola, the NYT reports:

The article that appeared online on Feb. 9 began with a seemingly innocuous question about the legal definition of vaccines. Then over its next 3,400 words, it declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease.

Instead, the article claimed, the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.”

Its assertions were easily disprovable. No matter. Over the next few hours, the article was translated from English into Spanish and Polish. It appeared on dozens of blogs and was picked up by anti-vaccination activists, who repeated the false claims online. The article also made its way to Facebook, where it reached 400,000 people, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool.

The entire effort traced back to one person: Joseph Mercola.

Dr. Mercola, 67, an osteopathic physician in Cape Coral, Fla., has long been a subject of criticism and government regulatory actions for his promotion of unproven or unapproved treatments. But most recently, he has become the chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, according to researchers.

The activity has earned Dr. Mercola, a natural health proponent with an Everyman demeanor, the dubious distinction of the top spot in the “Disinformation Dozen,” a list of 12 people responsible for sharing 65 percent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, said the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. Others on the list include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, and Erin Elizabeth, the founder of the website Health Nut News, who is also Dr. Mercola’s girlfriend.

“Mercola is the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement,” said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. “He’s a master of capitalizing on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, to grow his movement.”

Some high-profile media figures have promoted skepticism of the vaccines, notably Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News, though other Fox personalities have urged viewers to get the shots. Now, Dr. Mercola and others in the “Disinformation Dozen” are in the spotlight as vaccinations in the United States slow, just as the highly infectious Delta variant has fueled a resurgence in coronavirus cases. More than 97 percent of people hospitalized for Covid-19 are unvaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(click here to continue reading The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online – The New York Times.)

Free speech certainly has its costs, letting evil people like Mercola spread their anti-vax garbage is one such charge. 

Suddenly, (Some) Republicans Are All In on the Vaccine

Susan Glasser, The New Yorker, reports:

Since the end of the Trump Presidency, Republicans have been ratcheting up the doom-and-gloom quotient in their rhetoric. By this spring, they settled on a narrative of permanent crisis—to be blamed on President Biden, of course. There was the Biden Border Crisis. The Crime Crisis. The Inflation Crisis and its corollary, the High-Gas-Price Crisis. The Critical-Race-Theory Crisis. Even, this week, the Ben & Jerry’s-Is-Mean-to-Israel Crisis. America under Biden, to hear them tell it, has become a hellscape of disasters. In June, the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, issued a letter to his colleagues. “Our country is in crisis,” he declared. “Republicans stand against the impending malaise and stand for a greatness that we reached just a few years ago.” The one crisis that Republicans have tended not to mention is the actual one—that is, the pandemic. When Republican politicians have focussed on covid in recent months, it’s often been to give Donald Trump credit for the vaccines, while simultaneously accusing the Biden Administration of forcing those same vaccines on unwilling Americans.

So it was more than a bit surprising to see some Republicans this week kinda, sorta, maybe embrace a different message. The Louisiana congressman Steve Scalise, the House’s No. 2 Republican, posed for a photo of himself getting a vaccine shot, many months after he was eligible, and urged others to do the same. “Get the vaccine,” Scalise said, at a press conference on Thursday. “I have high confidence in it. I got it myself.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor who was never on board with his party’s vaccine denialists and anti-maskers, warned, during his own press conference: either get vaccinated or get ready for more lockdowns. “This is not complicated,” McConnell said. Fox News, which, along with Facebook, has been among the country’s premier platforms for vaccine disinformation in recent months, started promoting a new get-vaccinated public-service announcement. Its prime-time star, the Trump confidant Sean Hannity, stared straight into the camera on Monday night and said, “It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.”

(click here to continue reading Suddenly, (Some) Republicans Are All In on the Vaccine | The New Yorker.)

Covid Vaccines

I dunno, can you really trust a Republican to do the right thing for humanity? Even once? For instance, Sean Hannity has already denied he told anyone to get vaccinated because, paraphrased since I’m not interested in looking at his face this morning, “I never told anyone to get vaccinated because I’m not a health care professional”. 

The cynical answer to this conservative flip-flop is that1 some GOP political consultant did the math and wrote a warning memo to members of the party who are able to read. If thousands, or millions of conservatives die then some close “purple” Congressional districts will vote Democratic members into office, not to mention Fox News ratings will tumble if their viewers are on respirators or in funeral parlors and unable to control the remote. 

The real question is will this new pro-vaccine message penetrate the conservative base’s consciousness? Honestly, the base has to be pretty gullible and easy to lead if they believed in nonsense like Obama is from Kenya, and Jade Helm, and that Hillary Clinton & Bill Gates has a secret pedophile ring in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant, and whatever the gazillion other ridiculous conspiracies were. So maybe they will quickly forget months of these same talking heads arguing the exact opposite? Freedom! 

But influential falsehood spreaders like Tucker Carlson and Joseph Mercola haven’t switched yet, thus I’m not sure what Brittany Johnson2 of Little Rock, AR will do – will she continue sharing fake news about 5G cell towers and mRNA on Facebook? Or will she get a vaccine before she is hospitalized? Is she still going to mindlessly chant, “lock her up” at the next Trump rally? Or tell people that keys stick to her forehead?

Only time and hospital bed availability numbers will tell…

COVID19 Risk by county 2021 07 23
COVID19 Risk by county 2021-07-23.PNG via NYT

Footnotes:
  1. probably []
  2. a made up name []

So Uh Changes Afoot

For the faithful and/or lazy who still get periodic email from this humble blog, I guess we’ll have to find other means of distribution, as Feedburner1 is deprecating certain features, including the email-of-new-posts feature.

Hotel Visitor

Upcoming changes to FeedBurner in July 2021 – FeedBurner Help:

Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time.

What FeedBurner users can expect

For many users, no action is required. All existing feeds will continue to serve uninterrupted, and you can continue to create new accounts and burn new feeds. Core feed management functionality will continue to be supported, such as the ability to change the URL, source feed, title, and podcast metadata of your feed. Basic analytics on feed requests and the ability to create enclosure tags for MP3 files will also continue to be supported.

So what is changing? We are turning down most non-core feed management features that help you optimize and publicize your feed, e.g. email subscriptions, Browser Friendly, and Password Protector.

I’m not sure what I’ll do to replace this functionality. Or when. I suspect there are other tools I can use, but I don’t know what they are, yet.

To be honest, I’m pleasantly surprised that Google is keeping Feedburner at all!

Cougle Comission - Fulton Market

Footnotes:
  1. now owned by Google []

Vinyl Records Project

Atlantic Blues: Guitar

My cousin drove to Toronto to spend the summer with his mom, and stopped in to visit for a few days. He was kind enough to bring up 5 crates of LPs that I had never managed to cart back with me from Austin. I have always collected music since I was a teen, and didn’t start buying CDs until the mid 1990s. In Austin during my interminable college years, there was a glut of quality, used LPs available at the record shops (probably as students passed through, or replaced vinyl with CDs), I bought several a week for a long time. As far as obsessive behavior goes, not a bad one…

I’ve been methodically playing each record, adding them to my Delicious Library database, looking up information in Wikipedia, Allmusic, and Discogs, and in general immersing my ears and brain into this time capsule from 1993. I have an audio-technica AT-LP120 USB turntable; my plan is that once I go through the 600 or so LPs once, I’ll start digitizing the ones that are unusual, or I don’t have CD versions of, or that are simply unavailable currently. My tastes in music are basically the same as then, which is way to say I haven’t found any horrible, cringe records, yet. Lots of blues, music from various African regions, Brazilian, classic rock, European classical, Indie & Alternative rock, jazz, and so on.

I initially have been working on the box of “A-C”, and “H-J”, loosely alphabetized by a prior self, and altered by other people’s explorations no doubt.

Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland

Playing an LP is a different mindset: deciding what to listen to, opening the album up, choosing a side to play, queuing up, holding the cover sleeve, reading liner notes, admiring the art, yadda yadda. An analog modality.

A fun project!

Started a Vinyl Shelf in Delicious Library

Started a Vinyl Shelf in Delicious Library

Started a Vinyl Shelf in Delicious Library

Yazoo Record

The pre-internet Age Wasn’t So Long Ago

film Canister graveyard

Charles Blow:

In 1992, there was no MSNBC or Fox News, no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok. Also, there weren’t many, if any, mainstream news organizations online. The Times didn’t start online publication until 1996, and then it was not the truly transformative force it would become.

(click here to continue reading Opinion | As the Press Weakens, So Does Democracy – The New York Times.)

I’ve been ruminating about 1992 lately1 – it was different from the current era in so many ways. Every paper I wrote for school was either long hand or on a typewriter. Nobody I knew owned a computer, nor a cellphone. Film cameras were the only kind of camera people owned. We had never heard of text messages, or websites, the list goes on and on. Such a radical shift in such a short period of time. Mostly for the better, but not always.

Model 1

Computer Consultants

Footnotes:
  1. as I go through my vinyl record time machine project []

Texas’s Abortion Law Upends the Legal System

Dome of Texas Capitol Building - Ektachrome Holga

Texas is trying to destroy America in many ways currently, but their tactics regarding women’s health autonomy is especially troublesome.

Lawrence Tribe & Stephen Vladeck write:

Not only has Texas banned virtually all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, a point at which many women do not even know they’re pregnant; it has also provided for enforcement of that ban by private citizens. If you suspect that a Texan is seeking to obtain an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, not only will you be able to sue the provider to try to stop it, but if you succeed, you’ll also be entitled to compensation. (And what’s known as the litigation privilege would likely protect you from a defamation claim even if you’re wrong.) The law, known as S.B. 8, effectively enlists the citizenry to act as an anti-abortion Stasi.

All of that would be problematic enough, but enlisting private citizens to enforce the restriction makes it very difficult, procedurally, to challenge the bill’s constitutionality in court. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Austin last week tries to get around those roadblocks. We believe that it should succeed. But if it fails, not only would that leave the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country impervious to constitutional challenge; it would also encourage other states to follow Texas’ lead on abortion, as well as on every other contested question of social policy.

California could shift to private enforcement of its gun control regulations, never mind the Second Amendment implications of such restrictions. Vermont could shift to private enforcement of its environmental regulations, never mind the federal pre-emption implications. And the list goes on.

In the abstract, allowing citizens to help enforce the law is nothing new. Many states have so-called citizen suit or private attorney general provisions that allow people to help enforce a range of laws and rules governing consumer and environmental protection, government transparency and more. The federal government authorizes citizens to help bring certain fraud claims on behalf of the United States — and allows those citizens to share in any damages that the government receives. The critical point in both of those contexts is that citizens are supplementing government enforcement.

The Texas law, by contrast, leaves private enforcement as the only mechanism for enforcing the broad restrictions on abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. It specifically precludes the state’s attorney general or any other state official from initiating enforcement. Under this new law, private enforcement supplants government enforcement rather than supplements it. If this seems like a strange move, it is. And it appears to be a deeply cynical one, serving no purpose other than to make the abortion ban difficult to challenge in court.

(click here to continue reading Opinion | Texas’s Abortion Law Upends the Legal System – The New York Times.)

Super scary. The Christian Taliban are rampaging over our freedoms, and the liberal political & judicial class seems to be helpless to stop it.

I Got The Jabs!

2nd Jab Done!

Following up on an earlier lament, I was able to get my Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine last month, and I am past the “immortality” moment of full immunity.1

Yayyy!!

A photographer friend pointed me to vaccinespotter.org and I successfully booked an appointment at Mariano’s/Kroger in Lombard. 

I Got the Pfizer-Biontech COVID-19 Vaccine Today

I drove out to Lombard twice, the second time stopping to smell the flowers at Lilacia Park, literally and figuratively. Lilacs only bloom for a short span of time each year; inhaling their delicious springtime aroma is one of the bonuses of living on this planet.

Lilac In Bloom

Footnotes:

  1. 2 weeks past the second dose []

It Is NOT against HIPAA to ask about covid vaccinations

HIPAA is woefully misunderstood, and I’ve encountered much wrong information about it during this pandemic. 

Eventually

winter birds, Cook County Forest Preserve

The Washington Post explains

Is it against HIPAA to ask about covid vaccinations? – The Washington Post:

HIPAA, also known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and its subsequently added Privacy Rule include provisions to protect a person’s identifying health information from being shared without their knowledge or consent. The law, though, only applies to specific health-related entities, such as insurance providers, health-care clearinghouses, health-care providers and their business associates.
That means that even if your friend, favorite restaurant or grocery store were to publicly share private details about your health, they would not be in violation of HIPAA because they aren’t one of the “covered entities,” Gatter said.

There are other federal and state confidentiality laws that may require employers and schools to protect your privacy. And, experts emphasized, there is nothing in HIPAA that bars asking people about their health — including vaccination status — or requiring proof that the information is accurate.
“It’s not really a prohibition on asking, it’s a prohibition against sharing,” said Kayte Spector-Bagdady, an associate director at the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan. The law, she added, “doesn’t mean you never have to tell anyone about your health information.”

HIPAA has become one of the “most misunderstood statutes in existence,” said Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who is an expert on health law and bioethics. “People think it does a lot more than it’s actually doing.”

The misconceptions about the law likely stem from people widely using it in conversation as a “shorthand for privacy,” said Joshua Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University. If someone is asked a question about their health that they view as intrusive, he said, they might say, “I can’t tell you because of HIPAA,” when what they actually mean is that they consider the information private.

Many people also seem to have a problem spelling HIPAA properly, and as one Twitter aficionado opined, perhaps this is a sign of long-haul COVID-19?

A Desperate Plan

 A Desperate Plan

…click to embiggen

There is a short story waiting to be written about this moment in time. The dog walker’s expression is one of surprised guilt, but why? Is the smoker following him? His bodyguard? Or an innocent bystander?

Alleys are the beating heart of a city.

I took this photo on on March 2, 2018, and processed it in my digital darkroom on March 11, 2021.

ƒ/4.8
60.0 mm
1/125

Rock Docu Reviews – Lowell George – Feats First

Music Library

I realized last night that I have watched hundreds of music documentaries. I place them in three broad categories, not including actual concert movies, a related but different genre, nor including fictionalized BioPics about real or nearly-real musicians. 

1. The quality ones, which are fairly rare. These documentaries often have a well known director, have licensed the actual music from the musicians involved, and if they are still alive, even interview some of them. Like Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, for instance. Or Muscle Shoals, about the music studios in Muscle Shoals, AL, and which includes some great footage of Aretha Franklin belting out, I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You). If you haven’t watched the first 2 seasons of Mike Judge Presents: Tales From The Tour Bus, you should.

2. A second tier style that does include some of the musicians, but usually not the ones who played on the albums in question. There always seems to be a few rock journalists who once wrote for Rolling Stone Magazine, or similar, who are interviewed in front of their shelves of CDs/vinyl, and interviews with contemporaries or studio partners, usually interviewed with studio equipment in the background. Sometimes these docs have enough of a budget to license some of the music or snippets of live performance. Frequent usage of the so-called Ken Burns Effect.

3. Documentaries that focus on a single album, track by track, and inevitably have multiple interviews with a sound engineer at a mixing console who slides the mixing panel controls to isolate vocals or drums or bass or all of these. Eddie Kramer, of Jimi Hendrix fame, seems to be in half of these for some reason. Some of these don’t license music from the original artists, so they can only have snippets, or video from television broadcasts or in a few cases, muzak-inspired studio versions. Yikes. A few of these are interesting, many of the documentaries I’ve watched in this category are for hard-core fans only, everyone else would be bored to tears. Very frequent usage of the so-called Ken Burns Effect.

The better documentaries also don’t shy away from controversy, drugs and sex are not skipped over. To be honest, the juicy bits are often the most fun, which is why tell all books about Led Zeppelin or Keith Richards are fun to read, and popular.

Feats First falls into tier 2 – a solid B in my estimation. Lowell George and Little Feat made 2 great LPs, a couple more really good LPs, and maybe a few other good tracks.1

He died young, probably due to his drug habits. The Feats First doc didn’t even mention that Lowell George was a cocaine-heroin speedball aficionado. Seems like this should have been relevant to the discussion, but nope. Whatever, still an enjoyable look at a great talent. I learned a few new-to-me facts, such as that Lowell George was a Frank Zappa protégé and hung out with Zappa and the other Freaks in LA. Or that George used a Sears Craftman 11/16th socket because it was easy to replace by going to a hardware store, and that it created a fairly unique sound, especially when George tuned his guitar up a step, instead of tuning down like so many other slide guitarists. 

Footnotes:

  1. Dixie Chicken, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, Little Feat, Sailin’ Shoes, respectively… []

Scoring Vaccine Appointments Should Not Be Like Getting Tickets To A Popular Touring Act

No upcoming COVID-19 vaccine appointments available

No appointments available. Again.

I realize I am not the only resident of America still in need of a COVID-19 vaccine shot, but I wish it wasn’t so frustrating and tedious to get an actual appointment to do so. I mean, if I could book out the appointment 6 weeks from now, I’d be ok with that, at least I’d have a target date to look forward to.

Zocdoc.com, Walgreens.com and Albertsons.com all offer vaccine appointments within 25 miles, but they all require a lot of hoop-jumping for each check. Why can’t they keep track of me so I don’t have to click all the damn radio buttons each time?

Also, why is ZocDoc.com having such technical problems? Last night in the wee hours, I was able to book an appointment for Sunday afternoon at the city’s mass-vax FEMA-run site at United Center. This morning, I woke to the appointment being cancelled.

ZocDoc Failure “Your Appointment Could Not Be Scheduled"

Damn it!

COVID-19 Vaccinations

I have not yet been successful in getting an appointment to receive my Covid vax, not for lack of trying, but because there are not1 enough appointments available. I assume as more doses are made available due to President Biden’s team pushing, I’ll get one in a month or so.

The Moment Passed

Last weekend, the City contracted ZocDoc.com to handle the appointments available at a FEMA run site at United Center. It did not go smoothly. One would think ZocDoc would have scaled up their infrastructure in anticipation, but you would be wrong. 110,000 people were able to get appointments, but many were not, including me.

For me, I was able to select a time, date and could see the magic button that said, “Book appointment”, but there was a last part, required by ZocDoc.com, where they needed to verify my phone number by sending me a PIN. I was stuck on this last step for about 30 minutes, waiting for a PIN that never came. After a moment, ZocDoc.com would give an error code, and I would re-enter my cell number, and so on and so on. After 30 minutes, I accidentally typed the wrong area code, and went to the final step, but of course, I didn’t get the PIN, someone in Detroit did. I then thought to use my Google Voice number that has a different area code, and this worked, but it was too late. I lost my appointment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have confidence that I’ll be able to book an appointment, eventually, before the spring is over.

Footnotes:
  1. yet []

Shoutout to Join Together by the great Doug Adams

The great AppleScript iTunes master, Doug Adams, created an app a while ago that allows me to join together LP sides so they play in the sequence as originally released on vinyl.

For me, I use this to emulate listening to an LP in iTunes. Sometimes I only want to hear a particular side of an LP that I’m familiar with. I don’t want to shuffle it, I don’t want to hear the whole thing, perhaps I’m listening on my headphones while on my treadmill, or walking around avoiding carjackers or whatever.

In the pre-digital days, you put an album on your turntable, and only one side played. If you wanted to hear the other side, you had to get up and flip it. Or you could listen to something else. 

Producers or artists sequenced their albums accordingly. There were many heated discussions about which track came first on a side, which track closed the side, yadda yadda.

Of course, you can choose which tracks to listen to in whatever order you choose, even on a vinyl record, but it takes more effort.

The genius of Join Together is that once you create the music file, you can just queue that one file.

Here is my procedure, which works in iTunes1

1. Select the files which constitute a side of an LP. For instance, today, I used Glass Eye’s Hello Young Lovers2 – looked up the track order at Discogs.com, and copied the tracks that were on side A to Join Together.

Glass Eye - Hello Young Lovers

2. In Join Together, entered in the “Name” field, “Hello Young Lovers – Side 1”, and also added the phrase “JoinedTogether” to the Grouping field.

3. I personally make every digital file as large as possible so they sound better, so I chose 320kbps as the export.

4. After the merged AAC file is completed, it is added to my iTunes library. 

5. I use the Grouping field so that I can add all of these album sides to a Smart Playlist3, and also exclude it from certain Smart Playlists4

6. Then duplicate this procedure to create Side 2. Voilà!

Double LPs take longer, or triple LPs like Sandinista! give 6 files, or maybe even less

There are some LPs that I always skipped a certain song, this can be recreated in Join Together. For another favorite album of mine, Meat Puppets II, when I used to play it in my college years, I always skipped Side 1 track one, and started on the second song. Sometimes I would play the 1st track later at the end, but I felt strongly that the first song, Split Myself In Two – a punk thrash song – didn’t fit with the mood of the rest of songs. Later on, after some other songs played, it was ok to hear, but not as the first song. So when I created this LP in Join Together, I simply put Split Myself In Two at the end of Side 1. Perfect!

Same with some LPs that the CD version added new songs. They don’t always “fit”, so why play them? For instance, the LP of Sonic Youth’s Sister has less songs than the CD version. Skip ‘em! I felt they changed the mood, so why include them?  

Anyway, Join Together is well worth the $5 Doug Adams charges.

Footnotes:

  1. I haven’t upgraded to a Mac that requires the new version called Music, yet []
  2. which I had on vinyl when I lived in Austin and now own on CD []
  3. I have 10 sides that sync to my iDevices, based on not hearing them in the last few weeks []
  4. specifically, New Rips, i.e., songs that I’ve only listened to less than 5 times []

Late-1800s flour mill coming down in Fulton Market

A real shame, actually. Sterling Bay could have kept some of this structure at least.

Late-1800s flour mill coming down in Fulton Market – Chicago Tribune:

Sterling Bay is demolishing a former Archer Daniels Midland flour mill in the Fulton Market district, after preservationists unsuccessfully urged the Chicago developer to preserve the buildings.

Demolition of the more-than-century-old property at 1300 W. Carroll Ave. began Thursday. The work will last about three months as the developer eyes a mixed-use development of the site, Sterling Bay managing principal Keating Crown said.

The nonprofit Preservation Chicago has pushed Sterling Bay to keep at least portions of the structure, a patchwork of silos and brick buildings built over time. The mill opened in the late 1800s, and ADM closed it in 2019.

“It’s very disappointing that a first-rate developer in Chicago isn’t able to save an important Chicago building,” said Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago. “This is one of those buildings we felt was important to have saved because of its architectural pedigree, and because it’s one of the oldest mills and food production facilities in the Fulton-Randolph landmark district.”

So much of Chicago’s architectural history has been razed in the last ten years.

I Doubt That Is True

Fleeting Moments of Silence

Reliable, ADM In afternoon light

Ogden Avenue - 1923

Industrial Devolution

Storing Wheat - Agfa Scala 200

Majestic Corn Silo- Kodak Ultra Color 100UC

ADM butt-crack