Have a great Thanksgiving if you'rein America. And if not, I hope you have a great Thursday.
"ViacomCBS has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for more than $2 billion in a deal that will create the first megapublisher… Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States, is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Adding Simon & Schuster, the third largest publisher, would create a book behemoth, a combination that could trigger antitrust concerns."
"On Monday, China successfully sent the latest in its Chang'e missions on its way to the Moon. Chang'e 5 is the most ambitious to date and, if successful, will make China just the third country to return samples from the lunar surface (after the Soviet Union and the US). While the mission is quite complex with lots of potential for things to go wrong, it's also happening on a short schedule, so we'll have a good idea of how things are going within three weeks."
"Nasa has started assembling the first Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on a launch platform ahead of its maiden flight next year… The SLS is the giant rocket that will send US astronauts back to the Moon this decade - with the first crewed landing targeted for 2024."
"Theresa Arevalo was in high school when she first tried finishing drywall at her brother’s construction company. 'It’s a fine art,' she says of mudding—applying and smoothing drywall. 'Like frosting a cake, you have to give the illusion that the wall is flat.'… Fast-forward a few decades: Arevalo now works at Canvas, a company that’s built a robot using artificial intelligence that’s capable of drywalling with almost as much artistry as a skilled human worker."
"Once a COVID-19 vaccine is authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, allocations will be made based on the total number of adults in the state. 'We wanted to keep this simple,' Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, said at a media briefing Tuesday. 'We thought it would be the fairest approach, and the most consistent.'"
"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is aiming to reduce the quarantine requirements for someone potentially exposed to the virus from 14 days to somewhere between 7 to 10 days." At the hospital, our official guidance is that a patient is considered "recovered" when we reach 10 days after their positive test… no matter if they're still symptomatic or not.
"Federal government officials said the first 6.4 million doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine could be distributed to U.S. communities as early as December within 24 hours of approval from the Food and Drug Administration… But the U.S. recorded its highest daily death toll since May on Tuesday, and experts warned that good vaccine news doesn't mean Americans should let down their guard over the holidays."
"Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has blamed delay of a second stimulus check on Republicans, saying that they're demanding corporate COVID legal immunity to be included in the relief deal." Funny how you'd need legal protection from a "hoax" disease.
"With promising news from three COVID-19 vaccine trials showing 90% to 95% efficacy, employers are now weighing whether they should simply encourage their employees to get vaccinated or make it mandatory." This year at the hospital the flu vaccine was mandatory (in previous years you could opt out and wear a mask).
"When the Department of Health and Human Services released Pfizer's $1.95 billion coronavirus vaccine contract with Operation Warp Speed last Wednesday, the agreement revealed that the Trump administration didn't include government rights to intellectual property typically found in federal contracts." Your tax dollars not working for you.
"The texts from an Alabama census supervisor had an urgent tone. 'THIS JUST IN …,' one of them began. It then laid out how census takers should fake data to mark households as having only one resident even if they had no idea how many people actually lived there." If true, that's a crime with both jail time and financial penalty.
"The pace of first-time filings for jobless claims picked up last week, with the jobs market showing increasing vulnerability to the coronavirus spread… Claims totaled 778,000 for the week ended Nov. 21, ahead of the 733,000 expectation from economists surveyed by Dow Jones and up from 742,000 the previous week, the Labor Department reported Wednesday."
"President Donald Trump briefly emerged Tuesday to tout the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaking 30,000 for the first time ever, and then vanished after a minute without taking questions."
Meanwhile on Bullshit Mountain… "White House reporters were left befuddled by President Donald Trump's brief statement about the stock market Tuesday afternoon, with one remarking afterward it was 'weird as s--t.'"
"The 'economic emergency' caused by Covid-19 has only just begun, according to (UK) chancellor Rishi Sunak, as he warned the pandemic would deal lasting damage to growth and jobs… The UK economy is expected to shrink by 11.3% this year and not return to its pre-crisis size until the end of 2022."
"U.S. President-elect Joe Biden said on Tuesday he did not want to see a guarded border between Ireland and the United Kingdom, adding that he had previously discussed the matter with the British and Irish prime ministers and other European leaders."
"Periods are a biological predisposition of being born a female, and the average female will spend more than 2,500 days, or roughly 7 years, of her life menstruating, but many women and girls around the world cannot afford period products. On Tuesday, Scotland became the first country to legislatively combat this issue by making menstrual products free in public facilities nationwide."
"Tens of thousands of prison and jail inmates, including convicted serial killers and notorious inmates like Scott Peterson, have carried out what prosecutors described Tuesday as possibly the largest fraud scheme in California history… The alleged crimes, which center on pandemic unemployment benefits, could total as much as $1 billion, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said."
Why I believe in cancelling student loan debt… "The couple’s original $40,000 loan to cover the cost of sending their son and daughter to public universities in Indiana, where the family lived at the time, has snowballed in those 18 years, with interest rates as high as 8.5 percent. Their bill now stands at more than $100,000." It's not just the students' problem. This is a hidden tax on the low and middle classes. We need to rethink how we, as a society, pay for education. Know that there is plenty blame to go around (societal norms, state funding of education, federal funding of education, college presidents and boards…). But we're forcing families to bear the brunt of all of those bad decisions.
"The White House has discussed a possible pardon for Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, and others, three sources told CNN on Tuesday." This should never happen. After all, Flynn now says he's not guilty.
"As the ravages of the novel coronavirus forced millions of people out of work, shuttered businesses and shrank the value of retirement accounts, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged to a three-year low… But for Sen. David Perdue, a Georgia Republican, the crisis last March signaled something else: a stock buying opportunity… And for the second time in less than two months, Perdue’s timing was impeccable. He avoided a sharp loss and reaped a stunning gain by selling and then buying the same stock: Cardlytics, an Atlanta-based financial technology company on whose board of directors he once served." It's time for that bill prohibiting any elected federal office holder from owning stocks (or at least, trading stocks while in office).
"This should be something for Georgians to celebrate, whether their favored presidential candidate won or lost. For those wondering, mine lost — my family voted for him, donated to him and are now being thrown under the bus by him." Hi, welcome to Authoritarianism 101. In today's lesson, in strong man rules of governance, everyone is expendable and everyone will be expended with eventually. I have no pity for the Georgia Secretary of State. To quote Trump, you knew he was a snake when you agreed to carry him.
"More votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election than in any other U.S. election in history, and the turnout rate was the highest in more than a century."
"Modern, recent, robust evidence is *everywhere* that election theft is abundant… It’s called voter disenfranchisement, suppression, and disinformation. It’s not new-but it is getting more sophisticated." An important twitter thread. Saying the Trumpists didn't "steal the election" or "they were very bad at it" shouldn't be a dismissal. It should be a wake up call. It's akin to saying, "What was all the fuss about Y2K?" The bad stuff of Y2K didn't happen because people worked themselves to death to make sure we avoided it. Trumpists stealing the election… "It didn’t work because Black, Indigenous & marginalized people BUSTED OUR TAILS to beat back our own suppression. PERIOD."
"Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel confirmed Tuesday that her office is 'actively investigating' threats against members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers." Criticizing is not "threatening." I'm pretty sure the AG understands this difference.
"President Donald Trump is expected to join his attorney Rudy Giuliani in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, where Republican state lawmakers are holding a 'hearing' on allegations of fraud in this month's election, two sources familiar with the plans told CNN." Gee, why Gettysburg?
"Rudy Giuliani was brought in to lead an 'elite strike force' of lawyers to guide President Donald Trump's legal challenges to the 2020 election, but their efforts have been 'dysfunctional' and 'an embarrassment,' based on 'unsubstantiated evidence' and 'outlandish claims,' legal experts told NBC News."
"But the president’s campaign now finds itself on the other side of a legal case in a newly filed federal lawsuit alleging that it violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when it sought to 'disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters,' particularly African Americans in metropolitan areas of Michigan." I wish them success, but I doubt it will get very far.
"The Fox News Channel has reached a private settlement with the parents of the slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. The network had baselessly reported in May 2017 that Rich leaked thousands of Democratic party emails to Wikileaks during the height of the 2016 presidential campaign."
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