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May 1 UPDATE: Amazon / NLRB Wrangling Update, Related To AMZN / JFK-8 Lawless Union Busting Tactics…

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Here is our monthly check in, to highlight the NLRB staff counsel’s very cogent brief in defending a post decision ruling, out of Phoenix, against Bezos’ serial labor relations violator, called Amazon.

Here, the staff counsel argues that seizing union literature, and destroying it cannot be re-cast as permissible “tidying up” of the lunchrooms, because the VIDEOTAPE shows security guards stealing only the union pamphlets and posters, and leaving garbage on the tables… untouched. Charming, thus:

…Spence then returned to the breakroom and saw [Security Guard] Hill holding copies of the Notice that Spence had distributed. See Tr. 543:7-12. Spence approached Hill and asked Hill why he removed the papers from the tables. See Tr. 1064:12. Spence told Hill that the papers concerned a union. See Tr. 1064:12-14. Spence further said that Hill didn’t “work for Amazon,” and that it’s not Hill’s “job to break the law.” Tr. 543:13-17. Approximately 20 Amazon associates were present in the breakroom at the time….

[Security Guard] Koplevich took photographs of ALU activity taking place at a public bus stop adjacent to JFK8. See Tr. 1067:10-18, 1081:19-21. Troy immediately asked Bertone to have Metro One remove Koplevich from JFK8 because she was acting outside of her authority, as Metro One guards are only allowed to take photographs or make videos during an active investigation….

There is much more at this link. But truly, the union will keep its win — on that you may rely. Onward.

नमस्ते

Hinderaker Believes Tangerine Can Ignore NY Criminal Court Orders.

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Astonishing.

Hinderaker thinks Trump would just “have to stay out of New York for a while” — but could get back to the campaign trail.

It is (objectively) hard to believe John ever passed the bar, now. Here’s that Hinderaker junk:

…I think that he would be legally and constitutionally justified in refusing to cooperate. He could ignore Merchan’s partisan orders and decline to have anything to do with the proceeding. He could get back on the campaign trail, where he belongs. On [sic s/b “In”] this scenario, Trump presumably would be convicted in absentia, which would mean that he couldn’t enter New York State for a while. But he is going to be convicted anyway, in all probability…

A very public felon — by then, holding rallies… can be arrested by federal or state authorities, for fleeing. So Trump could not cross into any blue state; or any battleground state — since any cop in any of these states could arrest him as he left the stage, and hold him for extradition to New York.

Jail is not an easy place to campaign from.

And perhaps all Hinderaker really thinks… is he’d do better to get a few weeks of campaigning in, before he’s convicted, and ordered not to leave the state, at a minimum — while his appeals run their course. [But fleeing means it’s a near certainty he’d be jailed in New York during the appeals. Wow.]

To be clear, the truth is Trump will be convicted on a mountain of documentary evidence (not politics). And John knows it.

It may be that John WANTS him in jail, and before Milwaukee, so that an alternate may be shoved forward.

That — at least — makes what John wrote… make sense. It’s a dumb argument, but Trump is dumb enough to believe he could successfully… flee. And… I love it!

Amazing! And… disgusting, all in one.

Out.

Tangent: The Supremes Tell Musk… “Tell Your Story Walkin’, Bub…”

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Welp. This has turned out just as we said it would. When you lead a public company, and take the public’s funding — you are subject to certain very sensible duties — like not lying — about your stock.

Mr. Musk got off very easily after 2018-era tweets that misled the public, and his shareholders, about Tesla stock. In his settled action with the SEC Enforcement staffers, he agreed to do certain things, to avoid a worse outcome. Specifically, he agreed to a $20 million fine for making misleading tweets, related to his ’34 Act registered stock — and agreed to have his GC pre-approve all tweets that mentioned his stock.

Then, several years later, he tried to argue that his own agreement violated his free expression rights. Hilarious.

What a churlish cad.

He AGREED, in writing (while being advised by some of the best lawyers in the US) — all to avoid a loss at trial (and an order removing him as an officer, director or any other role of power at Tesla); with hundreds of millions of dollars in fines possible (he had lied about a potential multi-billion Dollar buyout offer) — and even a chance of jail time (sorta’ like Martin Shkreli).

After losing on appeal in the Second Circuit, the Supremes… laughed at his petition for cert., thus:

…Musk’s settlement resolved the SEC lawsuit accusing him of defrauding investors. Under the agreement, Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million fines and he gave up his role as the company’s chairman. Musk also agreed to let a Tesla lawyer pre-approve some posts he made on the social media platform then called Twitter before Musk bought the company and renamed it X.

Musk later sought to terminate the pre-approval mandate, with his lawyers in a court filing calling it a “government-imposed muzzle” that amounted to an illegal prior restraint on his speech….

Now you know. This chucklehead… geez.

[More recently, he’s been spouting whyte replacement paranoia themes / crazy conspiracy theories — on his cash burning platform I call X-itter. Not exactly the kind of expression that we all should be rushing to protect, overall — as it often strays very close to intentional hate crimes, against protected classes.]

Onward.

नमस्ते

Of “Vampire Facials”… That End Up Being… Debilitating, Life Long Medical Problems.

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It has been a minute since I put up an “unlicensed, unapproved” medicines post.

But this one. . . is so egregious, it rivals Jim Bakker’s colloidial-silver solution being sold on cable-TV as “a cure” — for COVID-19 — back in 2020. Despicable.

In this current case, at least three women have tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, apparently after being micro-needled, in a “vampire facial” from an unlicensed supposed med-spa, in New Mexico. Understandably, the owner is facing jail time. Here’s a bit, from NPR:

…Many popular cosmetic treatments are delivered with needles, such as Botox to iron out wrinkles and fillers to plump lips. A “vampire facial,” or platelet-rich plasma microneedling procedure, involves drawing a client’s own blood, separating its components, then using tiny needles to inject plasma into the face to rejuvenate the skin….

The New Mexico Department of Health began investigating the spa in the summer of 2018 after it was notified that a woman in her 40s had tested positive for HIV even though she had no known risk factors. The woman reported exposure to needles through the procedure at the clinic that spring.

The spa closed in fall 2018 after the investigation was launched, and its owner was prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license….

The idea that a “lip plumper” (or similar) treatment could / would lead to AIDS…? Damn. Just… Damn. Be careful out there. Always — always, demand to see every license, on paper before sitting down. Out.

नमस्ते

Anon. Points Us To The Layoff News At BMS — As Its Keytruda® (Pembrolizumab) Competitor, Called Opdivo®, Saw Declining Sales Last Year, And In Q1 2024…

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From about mid-2014 to late-2017, the immuno oncology “horse race” was on, between Merck’s bio-engineered PD-1 inhibitor (branded as Keytruda) and BMS’s… theirs being called Opdivo. We covered it with at least 100 posts in that time frame. [Search the upper left dialog box if you’d like some background, from our perspective — here. And, Merck has hit the $22 billion a year mark a year ahead of Wall Street’s estimates — here in 2024, not 2025.]

But as the markets matured in immuno-oncology, in the main, Rahway’s has shown stronger statistically better (longer term) survival data than BMS’s agent has. [In the US, it is difficult to get full reimbursement for a “second best” agent, with a winner already available, in many solid organ tumors.] And so — as of last Thursday, Bristol Myers Squibb began retrenching, thus:

…Bristol Myers Squibb on Thursday said that around 2200 staff will be impacted by cost-cutting measures designed to save about $1.5 billion by the end of 2025, with two-thirds of the savings coming from R&D. The initiative will reduce management layers in an effort to speed decision making, along with pipeline rationalisation and site consolidation….

However, revenue from Opdivo fell 6% to $2.1 billion.

Chief commercialisation officer Adam Lenkowsky explained that the PD-1 inhibitor was hit by changes in buying patterns in the US, but the company is “confident we will see accelerating growth this year….”

I would not bet on many more high growth quarters for BMS’s Opdivo — Keytruda has become the gold standard choice here (especially inside the US). So we extend our best meditations, to the families of the 2,200 BMS people being let go. Onward — now you know.

नमस्ते

It Seems Dark Energy — Universe-Wide — Is… “Thawing?” That Is, It Seems To Be… Waning.

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As ever, first — the caveats: the data is strong, but the universe is very vary large. Very large. So over billions of light years, small differences in measured assumptions. . . can become magnified. That is, it could be a measurement error. [But two independent sources are now converging on this, as being real, and not an artifact.]

Moreover, this is approaching five sigma, nearly a gold standard for significance. More to come, of course — but the notion is that maybe the universe is a closed system — an endless series of big bangs and big collapses. [In a poetic/metaphorical sense, confirming endless “reincarnations” of all that we will ever see.] That we are not flying apart, never to fall back in, to a center.

Here’s the latest, via Wired.com:

…If dark energy is weakening, it can’t be a cosmological constant. Instead, it may be the same sort of field that many cosmologists think sparked a moment of exponential expansion during the universe’s birth. This kind of “scalar field” could fill space with an amount of energy that looks constant at first—like the cosmological constant—but eventually starts to slip over time.

“The idea that dark energy is varying is very natural,” said Paul Steinhardt, a cosmologist at Princeton University. Otherwise, he continued, “it would be the only form of energy we know which is absolutely constant in space and time.”

But that variability would bring about a profound paradigm shift: We would not be living in a vacuum, which is defined as the lowest-energy state of the universe. Instead, we would inhabit an energized state that’s slowly sliding toward a true vacuum. “We’re used to thinking that we’re living in the vacuum,” Steinhardt said, “but no one promised you that.”

Joshua Frieman, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and a member of the DESI collaboration who didn’t work on the data analysis, said he would be glad to see Lambda CDM fall. As a theorist, he proposed theories of thawing dark energy in the 1990s, and he more recently co-founded the Dark Energy Survey — a project that searched for deviations from the standard model from 2013 to 2019 and created one of the three supernova catalogs DESI used. But he also remembers being burnt by disappearing cosmological anomalies in the past. “My reaction to this is to be intrigued,” but “until the errors get smaller, I’m not going to write my [Nobel] acceptance speech,” Frieman joked….

The beauty of all this is that Einstein (were he alive) would celebrate wildly, if the next-gen data refutes his “constant” definitively. He always said that we learn the most when our best presumptions turn out to be… in error. Onward, grinning into a busy week ahead.

नमस्ते

The Sole Reason Mirengoff Feels Today’s Columbia Protests Are “Inconsequential”?! They Aren’t Being Drafted…

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Well now… I’ve seen it all.

I can’t be sure whether Paul believes what he says about today, or whether he’s just looking to justify his own life’s arc, looking back — toward 1969 at Dartmouth.

But he would tell us today’s protests on campuses don’t matter — or at least are not of the gravitas that prevailed against the War in Vietnam, by 1969-’70.

For Paul, it all comes down to… he and John and Scott might have been… drafted.

These students mostly don’t have the right to protest, today — as at least in his mind — they cannot be forced to go fight.

One small point Paul may have here: it was true, that the rising sentiment against the War in Vietnam… by 1969 — enjoyed very broad public support (excepting only in very small towns in the West and the deep South). And so, in this present case, I sense that supporting the right of Palestine to even exist… is still a minority view in the US. [In that regard, Bibi is doing a masterful job of painting all who disagree with his aim as “antisemitic”.]

But even on that point, I think most Americans support the idea that Palestinians have a right to some land — near or on… the Mediterranean. Where, and how much, is the rub — just as where, and how much… is the rub about… yep, Israel.

But I see nothing in Amendment One that says only popular views will be allowed to set up tents on campus lawns. Geez.

So it goes. Onward — and my important footnote, now mentioned repeatedly: Paul seems blissfully unaware of the immense privileges that were conferred on him, related to Vietnam protests — ones not enjoyed by peaceful civil rights protesters just five years earlier. [Same, as to John and Scott.]

He finished with honors, and went to Stanford Law. Many of the other young college kids, mostly of color in the South were beaten bloody, or worse… and blacklisted from any and all meaningful jobs (outside of civil rights activism groups, which thankfully eventually won the day — and led to Mayor Andrew Young, in Atlanta — and Rep. John Lewis in Congress, as two examples)… all for saying the they had the same rights as their whyte counterparts.

Peacefully.

Damn, Paul.

The River Buoy / Razor Wire Barriers Will Be Removed, But USDC Judge Ezra Ruled That The Treaty Is Not “Self-Executing”.

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This is a small update — as Judge Ezra has also ruled that all of the federal government Rivers and Harbors Act claims, and the immigration laws which vest singular authority at the federal level for border matters… remain intact.

And Texas has already lost on those. [Texas has appealed those losses, and it is all on appeal, and fully-briefed in the Fifth Circuit, with arguments due in June.]

All he held here, in 41 pages, published overnight, it that the Supremacy Clause by itself, cannot make the Treaty of Hidalgo from the 1840s self-executing, as against an individual state in the union.

So — a minor matter, as I say. Onward, grinning.

As In June of 2021, Hubble’s Third Gyroscope Is Rendering Inconsistent Readings — Hubble May Go To A One Gyro- Slew Configuration…

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This ‘scope has been in service since 1990 — and last had six gyros installed in 2009, by the then space shuttle “capture / repair” missions. So it has had a wonderful ride… but is, indeed, a very old spacecraft.

With the next-gen space scope (JWST) operating flawlessly, and providing far sharper imagery… it may be, that in due course, this one is allowed to safely deorbit. But for now, science will continue (once the fix is applied, ground-side) — even if need be, on one gyroscope. Here’s the latest:

…The telescope automatically entered safe mode when one of its three gyroscopes gave faulty readings. The gyros measure the telescope’s turn rates and are part of the system that determines which direction the telescope is pointed. While in safe mode, science operations are suspended, and the telescope waits for new directions from the ground.

This particular gyro caused Hubble to enter safe mode in November after returning similar faulty readings. The team is currently working to identify potential solutions. If necessary, the spacecraft can be re-configured to operate with only one gyro, with the other remaining gyro placed in reserve . The spacecraft had six new gyros installed during the fifth and final space shuttle servicing mission in 2009. To date, three of those gyros remain operational, including the gyro currently experiencing fluctuations. Hubble uses three gyros to maximize efficiency, but could continue to make science observations with only one gyro if required….

Now you know… onward, grinning, with a legacy graphic — and baby girls due here this evening.

नमस्ते

More Like… “Johnnie-List” 2.0…

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So Hinderaker tonight opines that journalists who frown on Presidents who’ve committed felonies… are engaging in dangerous “group-think”.

Somehow, he and his fellow GOP/MAGAts seem to think it’s the fault of liberals that Trump decided to commit brazen felonies — and because he is almost singularly inept… got caught red-handed.

That’s John, Paul and Scottie’s groupthink.

Or… Johnnie-List 2.0 if you prefer. Out.