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Zorro

Zorro's Journal
Zorro's Journal
March 24, 2022

How safe are Floridians from COVID? State overcounts vaccinations by 600,000 people

More than 100 Florida ZIP codes report more than 100% of their residents are vaccinated. DeSantis and health officials don't plan to investigate this.

Florida has overstated how many residents are vaccinated against COVID-19 by more than half a million people, a Palm Beach Post analysis shows.

Health officials and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who were alerted last year about impossibly high inoculation rates across the state, say they have no plan to fix or investigate this statistical flaw, driven by out-of-staters.

At the same time, Florida does not reveal to the public the number of nonresidents infected in the state.

That means Floridians don't know the true picture of how safe they are from the deadly disease.

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/coronavirus/2022/03/24/florida-overcounts-covid-19-vaccinations-because-snowbirds-tourists/6800073001/
March 24, 2022

Madison Cawthorn Committed the One Unforgivable Sin of Politics

The ingredients are there for an upset.

If the worst thing Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) did this month was call Ukraine’s President “a thug,” or get caught speeding multiple times with a revoked license, or accuse Speaker Nancy Pelosi of being an alcoholic, the 26-year-old MAGA-influencer would probably be just fine in his re-election bid.

But Cawthorn did something far worse, at least for his own political prospects, and it may cost him his seat: He left his constituents—and then was forced to return to them, hat in hand, after the courts predictably struck down the state’s new map, and eliminated the district he left to run in, on Feb. 23.

The about-face opened up a more damaging line of attack than anything Cawthorn has said or done. It showed, at least briefly, that he was less interested in representing the voters who first elected him than he was in just being in Congress.

The numerous candidates challenging Cawthorn in the GOP primary, slated for May, do not intend to let voters in North Carolina’s 11th District forget it.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/madison-cawthorn-committed-the-one-unforgivable-sin-of-politics

Hopefully this little Nazi will lose in this upcoming primary election.
March 24, 2022

Digging Into the Archeology of Language

Almost half of the global population now speaks a language that originated five to six thousand years ago on the steppe lands of the country we now call Ukraine.



From the outset of the Ukraine Crisis, Ukraine’s relationship with Europe and potential integration into Europe via the European Union has been a, perhaps the, cornerstone issue. I got to thinking about this over the weekend since almost every European language originated in the country we now call Ukraine. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t argue that what I’m describing has any particular relevance to the current crisis. But it’s a fascinating prism through which we can look at our connections to the distant past. The language which I am now writing and which you are now reading originated on the steppeland just north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In other words, in the region we now call Ukraine and some adjoining parts of Russia and perhaps Romania. This is true of English — a loose hodgepodge language — but not only English. All European languages except Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque start there. (Maltese, an official EU language, is derived from Arabic, a Semitic language. Turkish is an Altaic language so it depends what you count as “Europe.”) And not just Europe. This is also the origin point for the languages of Iran, much of Central Asia and northern India (including Hindi and Urdu). This is not to mention the Spanish, Portuguese and French that are spoken in the Western Hemisphere outside of Anglophone Canada and the United States.

This is the Indo-European language family which includes Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Italic (the Romance langauges), Greek, Iranic, Indic and few other subfamilies. How this story and these interconnections were put together and how we’re pretty confident where it started is one of the most fascinating stories of human reasoning and intellection I have ever heard.

The story begins almost 250 years ago when a young Welshman who was a specialist and prodigy in the study of foreign languages, William Jones, was sent to India to learn Sanskrit as part of the British East India Company’s effort to run an Indian court system on the basis of Hindu legal precedents. The Hindu pandits of course knew Sanskrit perfectly well. But the British worried that the Indians would bamboozle them with phony precedents because they weren’t able to read the texts themselves. When Jones set to learning Sanskrit he quickly realized that this ancient language (the ancestor of Hindi and Urdu) was similar enough to Persian (which he also knew) and the Germanic languages (which include English) that they must all derive from a common ancestor. This insight sparked the birth of the modern field of linguistics. Over the next century scholars scoured the globe for languages in an effort to figure out whether they were part of the Indo-European linguistic family tree and where they fit into it. This search led to the eventual classification of the rest of the world’s languages into their own language families as well.

Along the way, specialists in the field we now call linguistics discovered a series of patterns by which languages change over time. So for instance a “kuh” sound will often evolve into an “ess” sound. But “kuh” won’t ever evolve into “puh” or “buh.” These patterns are built into the physical structure of our mouths and the circuitry of our brains. The specific rules don’t need to concern us here. But with these rules in hand these linguists were able to take the various Indo-European languages either spoken today or of which there is a written record, reverse engineer their evolution back to their common ancestor and in so doing reconstruct the language now called “proto-Indo-European” which was never written down and was spoken some five to six thousand years ago.

Think about it. That’s pretty F’ing amazing.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/digging-into-the-archeology-of-language/sharetoken/HcBdZdj22kAr
March 22, 2022

Is Geometry a Language That Only Humans Know?

Neuroscientists are exploring whether shapes like squares and rectangles — and our ability to recognize them — are part of what makes our species special.

During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special.

Dr. Dehaene has spent decades probing the evolutionary roots of our mathematical instinct; this was the subject of his 1996 book, “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.” Lately, he has zeroed in on a related question: What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? Part of the answer, Dr. Dehaene believes, might be our seemingly innate intuitions about geometry.

Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican workshop addressed the subject “Symbols, Myths and Religious Sense in Humans Since the First” — that is, since the first humans emerged a couple of million years back. Dr. Dehaene began his slide show with a collage of photographs showing symbols engraved in rock — scythes, axes, animals, gods, suns, stars, spirals, zigzags, parallel lines, dots. Some of the photos he took during a trip to the Valley of Marvels in southern France. These engravings are thought to date back to the Bronze Age, from roughly 3,300 B.C. to 1,200 B.C.; others were 70,000 and 540,000 years old. He also showed a photo of a “biface” stone implement — spherical at one end, triangular at the other — and he noted that humans sculpted similar tools 1.8 million years ago.

For Dr. Dehaene, it is the inclination to imagine — a triangle, the laws of physics, the square root of negative 1 — that captures the essence of being human. “The argument I made in the Vatican is that the same ability is at the heart of our capacity to imagine religion,” he recalled recently.

He acknowledged, with a laugh, that it is no small leap from imagining a triangle to devising religion. (His own intellectual trajectory entailed a degree in mathematics and a master’s in computer science before becoming a neuroscientist). Nevertheless, he said, “This is what we have to explain: Suddenly there was an explosion of new ideas with the human species.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/science/geometry-math-brain-primates.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DODmwYiP8eAoWG8EqKaqdkYtYvxSXeQdZdMPolXvVzyKpHJU1oQhWlud2EhJEBaW0TmL6EY1kXjdjLTKxqtnjjdHW4I-Nyg-Gz7x6MPWbpRK3U13A-IA02po9vdFH-xXEIkqfBFOUlitR43ewzRcwvHUd2bymKv_DrCRt_KY_GOkmasl9qLrkfDTLDntec6KYCchFSCj_GTnB55GU94bBMKY9dffa_f1N7Jp2I0fhGAXdoLYypG5Q3W4PX8r5rurPLohaGo9Gkr_dan9rxNG80afbYvQi3EA&smid=url-share
March 22, 2022

Behind Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance, a revolt against the GOP unfolds

“The Republican Party is getting better,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson informed his viewers some time ago. “We know that because of two new Republican Senate candidates.”

In the next few months, those two candidates — J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona — will face GOP primary voters. This means that, in a sense, Carlson’s kingmaking will be on the ballot.

Carlson’s promotion of Vance and Masters is the subject of an ambitious new piece in the New York Times, which notes that both face stiff challenges from other Republicans. If they lose, Carlson’s mission — to make the GOP “better” — will have fizzled.

The Times piece designates this phenomenon as “the rise of the Tucker Carlson politician.” Vance and Masters hope to ride the electoral passions unleashed by Donald Trump, not through personal loyalty to Trump, but by giving voice to right-wing populist nationalism while seeking to “align instead with Carlson.”

https://wapo.st/36idt2g

March 22, 2022

TurboTax Threatens To Tell IRS Customer Cheated On Taxes Unless They Upgrade To Deluxe Version



PAHRUMP, NV—A local woman doing her taxes Thursday reportedly didn’t know what to do after an onscreen message from TurboTax threatened to tell the IRS that she cheated on her taxes unless she upgraded to the deluxe version of the tax preparation software.

“We’ve got all your information now, and we can easily change a few numbers here or there, maybe add a couple red flags—but of course all that can go away for an additional $99.99,” read the message, adding that if the woman chose not to upgrade, she risked IRS agents coming to her house and starting a years-long investigation that could land her in prison for tax fraud.

“With TurboTax Deluxe, you can rest easy knowing that we’ve gone through over 350 potential deductions and credits to maximize your refund, and we won’t tell the IRS that your claimed dependents are actually dead and you’ve been scamming the government. It’s not too late to save yourself from years and years of headaches and massive fines. It’s simple: Just click the button to upgrade, and we won’t use your Social Security number to open a bunch of accounts in the Maldives and then inform the IRS you’ve been shielding most of your income from taxation. The choice is yours. You have five minutes.”

At press time, the TurboTax customer had upgraded to TurboTax Deluxe and was reading another message suggesting that she upgrade to TurboTax Premier if she didn’t want to see all of her financial accounts emptied and to ultimately lose her home.

https://www.theonion.com/turbotax-threatens-to-tell-irs-customer-cheated-on-taxe-1848638340
March 22, 2022

Prosecutor in Phoenix quits amid criticism of performance

The top county prosecutor in metro Phoenix has announced she is resigning from the elected post amid criticism of her performance, including the dismissal of 180 misdemeanor cases because charges were not filed before the statute of limitation expired.

In a statement released Monday, Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel said her resignation is effective late Friday afternoon. Adel, a Republican and the first woman to be elected to the position, said winning the office was an honor.

She was appointed to serve as metro Phoenix’s top county prosecutor in October 2019 and later won the office in November 2020.

Adel underwent emergency surgery on election night for a brain bleed. She was back full-time by the following spring. In August, she went to rehab for alcohol abuse, an eating disorder and other issues. In September, she confirmed she was working remotely from an out-of-state treatment facility.

Last month, chiefs of five criminal divisions in her office called into question Adel's ability to do her job by rarely being in the office, showing signs of being inebriated during phone calls and not providing leadership. Adel responded by saying she wasn’t planning to resign and that she vehemently disagreed with their characterization of her.

https://news.yahoo.com/prosecutor-phoenix-quits-amid-criticism-204615523.html

March 22, 2022

Deadbeat Dads and Ex-Cons Rounded up to Fight by Desperate Putin, Says Ukraine

With nearly 10,000 dead soldiers in less than a month of war, the Russian military is resorting to drastic new methods, according to Ukrainian intelligence.

After weeks of devastating losses and plummeting morale, the Russian military has devised a new way to bolster its ranks of soldiers being sent to kill civilians in Ukraine: preying on men who’ve fallen behind on alimony or credit card payments.

That’s according to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, which reports that those in debt are offered the chance to have their obligations erased in exchange for signing a contract with the Russian military. Russian prosecutors are also said to be seeking out those who’ve run afoul of the law and offering similar proposals.

“The number of such people is increasing… considering the consequences of the sanctions on the Russian economy,” the Ukrainian intelligence agency noted.

Such proposals have reportedly been documented in Tatarstan, Pyatigorsk, Rostov-on-Don, and the North Caucasus.

News of the new recruiting method comes after data from the Russian Defense Ministry was leaked Tuesday showing that more than 9,800 troops have been killed since Vladimir Putin launched his “special operation” on Feb. 24.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/deadbeat-dads-and-ex-cons-rounded-up-to-fight-by-desperate-putin
March 21, 2022

Abrams files lawsuit to use fundraising law meant to aid Kemp

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams filed a federal lawsuit Monday seeking court approval to use a law that gives Republican Gov. Brian Kemp a massive fundraising advantage in his reelection bid this year.

The challenge asks the court to require state officials to let her use a leadership committee under a law approved last year by the Republican-controlled General Assembly.

The lawsuit says Abrams’ campaign has already created such a committee, One Georgia, and it has been raising money since shortly after she filed to run against Kemp earlier this month.

The law lets the governor, the opposing party’s gubernatorial nominee and party caucuses raise as much cash as they can throughout the campaign, including during legislative sessions. It gave incumbents an added edge, since their challengers can’t use the funds until they win their party’s nomination.

Read more: https://www.ajc.com/politics/abrams-files-lawsuit-to-use-fundraising-law-meant-to-aid-kemp/OPHWWM365VEQFOG354TDR7IJAQ/



Turn-about is fair play, right?
March 21, 2022

The One Trump Lawyer the Rest of Trump's Legal Team Loathes

Alina Habba has developed quite the reputation.

Facing high-stakes investigations that could cripple his business empire or even mean jail time for him and close associates, former President Donald Trump and his family’s armada of lawyers are facing a threat from within.

Her name is Alina Habba, and—almost out of nowhere—the relatively unknown New Jersey lawyer went from representing a college student ticked off at COVID-19 virtual learning to being one of the top attorneys defending the twice-impeached former president in some of the country’s most high-profile cases.

There’s just one problem for Habba: There’s hardly anyone in the Trump legal universe who can stand her.

Many of Habba’s fellow senior Trumpland attorneys—including but not limited to Alan Garten—have all privately vented that she has botched things or doesn’t know what she’s doing, according to Trumpworld legal sources intimately familiar with the topic. Some of them want her fired or sidelined.

Some of the Trump lawyers think her work is so bad—so self-interested, pointlessly aggressive, and sloppy—that they think Habba’s mere presence on the team increases the likelihood of Trump and his family facing court losses and legal peril.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/alina-habba-the-trump-lawyer-the-rest-of-trumps-legal-team-loathes

Hmmmm. Wonder what convinced Trump to hire her.

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