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Hinderaker & I Have Done That Dance Before — Let’s Switch The Beat.

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I’ll ignore yet another set of Hinderaker falsehoods, about American crime and race data, tonight. But John always lies like this (and I disassemble his little whyte wagon for him, always). It is so repetitive as to be… boring. No one believes him — at least no sentient human.

So instead — with tomorrow being Earth Day… let’s switch the beat:

Riot Is Now Certain To Be In The Red, Tomorrow — 24 House Democrats Want Answers…

As Earth Day arrives — for the 52nd time — in the USA…

The House Committee Chairman responsible for the intersection of energy, and environmental policy has just written the EPA — to have the agency look closely at whether miners, like Riot and Marathon, and Core… are fully compliant with existing federal law.

I’d be willing to bet a full mug of frosty root beer, with a big scoop of real vanilla ice cream… that Riot’s Whinstone facilities in rural Texas have some compliance problems, relative to just the existing EPA rules.

“But wait! — there’s more!” There is now an entirely new call for tight regulation of all proof of work crypto-… the kind that Riot is completely wedded to. Riot’s hardware, perhaps now almost a billion dollars invested — cannot mine anything other than Bitcoin. It is hard coded in to each rig — no proof of stake mining can be configured on these Bitmain boxes:

…Of particular concern is the inherently energy-inefficient “Proof-of-Work” (PoW) mining technology to validate transactions. PoW-based cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Zcash. A single Bitcoin transaction could power the average U.S. household for a month. According to estimates by researchers, Bitcoin produces annually carbon emissions comparable to Greece. Less energy intensive cryptocurrency mining technologies, such as “Proof-of-Stake” (PoS), are available and have 99.99 percent lower energy demands than PoW to validate transactions….

People living near crypto mining facilities are already suffering the effects of air, water, and noise pollution from these facilities. We acknowledge and appreciate your continued work to investigate and reduce the risks posed by industries such as cryptocurrency PoW mining to vulnerable and underserved communities. We look forward to your response….

In short, if/when proof of work is outlawed, Riot’s entire business model becomes… unlawful. [Can’t say we didn’t warn you, back when Mr. Biden’s executive order was signed — see image at left.]

Yep, Riot will fall tomorrow (it is already down over $0.30 in the after hours market), and so… I may need to put on a new round of puts, having just closed out my last round, down from $24 to $12.50 tonight.

Hilarious.

Funny. Hinderaker Didn’t Mention Any Rasmussen Polling On The Lies Trump’s Still Telling About 2020.

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This late afternoon, John yammers on (STILL!) about how unfair it is that most people agree that Trump was NOT the legitimate winner way back in 2016.

Still. Butt sore. Some nearly six years later.

It is a well known, and accepted fact… that Rasmussen over-samples GOP households, but reports them as independent. All the more reason the figures supporting HRC’s 2016 claims are impressive, in my view. But whatever. The total, with Democrats, is more than half of all people surveyed.

What is most striking (to me, and most sentient political observers, simply seeking the truth — without an agenda) is that Rasmussen doesn’t poll — or more likely, will not release the RESULTS of the polling it is doing, on whether ANYONE believes Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020.

Spoiler Alert: essentially all reputable polling strongly suggests a solid majority of Americans see Trump as a pure liar — and a charlatan on this, and many other claims he makes.

Funny that Hinderaker never complains about that sort of persistent disinformation from many corners of the GOP.

Or… perhaps… not so.

Out.

Pfizer Outspent Merck In Q1 2022 On Lobbyists — By Almost Exactly $1 Million. Both Firms Keenly Focused On Vaccine Reimbursement…

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Continuing our series on how mega-cap pharma concerns spend for favorable legislation, we offer this latest quarterly installment. And as has been true for five solid years, Pfizer has outspent Merck, even accounting for size differentials.

But this past year — more than any in recent memory, both firms converged on vaccine reimbursement policy for obvious reasons. And for COVID-therapeutics reimbursement, more broadly.

Tomorrow, I’ll list out the areas Pfizer was lobbying on — but as you will see, their reports do not offer the granular level, by bill, of what they were jaw-boning about, around the Capitol. Here’s the detailed Merck spend, by bill advanced:

…H.R. 3, Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 19 Lower Costs, More Cures Act of 2021; H.R. 1550, PREVENT HPV Cancers Act of 2021; H.R. 2061, Advancing Emergency Preparedness Through One Health Act of 2021; H.R. 2873, Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Through Promoting Competition Act of 2021; H.R. 3173, Improving Seniors Timely Access to Care Act of 2021; H.R. 3932/S. 2079, Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up surging Resistance (PASTEUR) Act of 2021; H.R. 4127, Developing an Innovative Strategy for Antimicrobial Resistant Microorganisms (DISARM) Act of 2021; H.R. 5260, Reduced Costs and Continued Cures Act; H.R. 5376, Build Back Better Act; H.R. 5801, Help Ensure Lower Patient (HELP) Copays Act; H.R. 6584, Diverse and Equitable Participation in Clinical Trials (DEPICT) Act; H.R. 6963, Accelerated Approval Integrity Act of 2022; S. 1435, Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act of 2021; S. 2774, Pride in Patent Ownership Act; S. 2891, Restoring the America Invents Act….

S. 2543 (116th Congress) Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act of 2019; S. 1895 (116th Congress) Lower Health Care Costs Act

Issues relating to 340B program integrity; 340B of the Public Health Services Act; 340B policy; 340B issues; 340B drug pricing program; Drug pricing; Drug Pricing reforms — international reference prices and government price setting; Anti-microbial Resistance; Vaccines; COVID-19 vaccines; COVID-19 therapeutics coverage issues; COVID-19 FDA Emergency Use Authorization issues; COVID-19 Pandemic response; Cost and value of medicines; Drug importation; Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) immunization; Vaccines catch up; Vaccine provisions; Vaccine Issues, including return to care access, and pandemic-related policy; Package inserts, labeling issues, and E-Labeling authorization legislation; Prescription Drug User Fee Authorization (PDUFA VII); Prescription Drug User Fees Act (P.L. 102-571); Executive Order 13937, Access to Affordable Life-Saving Medications; FY-2023 Budget and Appropriations Legislation; Intellectual property protection; WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement; Animal Health; One Health Issues; Rural Broadband Issues; General pharmaceutical issues; Farm Bill 2023; Animal Drug User Fee Act 2023….

That’s quite a truckload. I am certain among the other lobbyist firms, there are more issues being discussed in the halls of Congress, on behalf of Merck — but that gives you a representative sample/sense for it. Onward, into the sunshine for a bike ride by the lake… smile.

नमस्ते

Y A W N. Pill Still… Drives This Deal. Or… “No Deal.”

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[With sideways, and boring Bitcoin action today, and a flat-to-down Riot price on the NASDAQ (@ ~$13.50), we turn to the Twitter Deal Buzz Beat:] Elon Musk made his financing commitments known this morning. But he is still out of the money… by about 10X, Condor confidently sez.

Since he admits he will need to buy the Rights, as well (that’s “the pill”, in common parlance)… he needs closer to $400 billion, not just $46 billion. Unless, that is, this becomes a friendly deal — one the board agrees with. He’ll need to go closer to $90 to get their assent, in any event (that’s my take on it). Yikes. Here’s the full filing — but it changes almost nothing (the below is the bulk of what’s new):

…[Musk is only] exploring whether to commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Common Stock (together with the associated rights issued pursuant to the Rights Agreement (the “Rights” and, together with the Common Stock, the “Shares”)) that are issued and outstanding (and not held by the Reporting Person)

The Proposal was (and remains) non-binding and, once negotiated and agreed upon, would be conditioned upon, among other things, the: (i) receipt of any required governmental approvals; (ii) confirmatory legal, regulatory, accounting and tax due diligence; and (iii) negotiation and execution of definitive agreements providing for the Proposed Transaction. At the time of delivery, the Proposal was also subject to the completion of financing and business due diligence, but it is no longer subject to financing as a result of the Reporting Person’s receipt of the financing commitments described below and is no longer subject to business due diligence….

The Reporting Person has not commenced, or determined to commence, any tender offer for Shares of Twitter. The Reporting Person may, directly or indirectly, take such additional steps as he may deem appropriate to further the Proposal or the Potential Offer….

Onward, into the sunshine… grinning, anew. Be excellent to one another….

नमस्ते

A Look At How Illogical The Mizelle Opinion Really Is; Must Be Appealed.

~ condor ~ 1 Comment

I will simply point to page 42, here. There is much more — but this is at the heart of all the rest.

She agrees that the evidence supports that masks save lives. She never discusses the balancing of a couple hours of inconvenience of wearing one, against dead people.

She simply steps over it, illogically asserting avoiding killing people is not sufficient “good cause”. That is frankly insane. For fifty years people have worn seat belts — under force of law… lobbied by the insurance industry.

But no one flinches, because everyone knows it likely will save one’s life, in a bad crash.

She would tell us all that matters is her personal autonomy — that, and that she doesn’t like that the government moved quickly to mitigate an indisputable pandemic. Over 900,000 dead in the US alone. But because Tangerine dawdled for two years… she thinks that’s how it ought to be. Fifty years of black letter law (and Supreme Court precedents) contradict her. And she makes no attempt to grapple with cases that have come out the other way on this very question. She ignores them.

The mark of lower third law student, that.

Out.

We Must Face — And Unflinchingly-Confront, Our Shared History… If We Are Ever Going To Move Beyond It, Into MLK’s “Dream”.

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Most of all — I encourage you to read the whole article for yourself.

At issue (among some whyte board members, at least) of the historical society that curates the land and buildings once held by our Fourth President — and the well-documented birthplace of our Constitution… a place quite literally built on the backs of the people he enslaved there — is whether after two centuries, the Black lives… will have mattered. At all.

Quite sensibly, the descendants of those enslaved people simply seek a real voice — in how the site is curated, with some board seats. Fair enough; and a simple thing to accommodate.

But last month the majority whyte / controlled board suddenly-altered its by-laws — to effectively lock out the voices of the people whose ancestors literally both built and maintained it, lived and died there — without compensation, for almost a century.

Here is the story, from NPR:

…Montpelier employees, as well as some board members, describe an environment rife with racism. White board members, they say, do not want to see power shared with descendants of the Black people who literally built the estate.

One board member, multiple people allege, described a Black man as having intimidated him with a “Frederick Douglass stare.”

The fear of a takeover, Chew says with incredulity, was rooted in what the board saw as “angry Black folks.”

Two calls to board chairman Gene Hickok and a call and a text to Montpelier President and CEO Roy Young went unanswered by the time of publication….

Good lord, people. How can any rational person whyte, or of color… NOT come to the conclusion that all the people who built the place (through their descendants’ voices) should finally be… heard? They were quite literally muzzled for over two centuries now.

Let — at long last — the dead finally now, speak. Speak their truths — all through the voices of their descendants.

Damn.

नमस्ते

“Cool Story, Bro — Hinderaker.” Now Do… BLEXIT. You Know, Your Puppeteer, Ms. Candace Owens…

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Hinderaker again likely libels BLM tonight.

The truth, whatever it really is — will out, pretty soon. And either he will get sued, or the umbrella BLM organization will be… disbanded (if all of his claims are founded).

In the worst case scenario, that is all that should happen. After all, Trump’s charity — which ran outright frauds for decades in New York, into the tens of millions of dollars, was simply disbanded. No one has been prosecuted. But he is barred from ever opening a charity again in New York, at least.

I write in part because Hinderaker wants criminal prosecutions at BLM, and civil liability for corporate leaders who may have donated without adequate due diligence (of course that would only be if John could prove the leaders used corporate, rather than personal, funds).

And now… I’ve now completely buried my punch line: Candace Owens’ Blexit organization had over $1.2 million in travel expenses, paid $2 million in advertising on Facebook, had a staff of over 40 people (each of whom look to have received FAR-less than any minimum wage), and yet paid herself $275,000 salary plus a $50,000 bonus — for the year — on the 2019-2020 returns we’ve seen.

I would bet that PowerLine was a donor, to her and to Blexit. Will he seek civil liability against… himself(?!); a criminal referral or two against her, personally? My understanding is that some $50,000 promised to DC police units for protective gear, during the George Floyd uprisings… never arrived at police HQ, despite publicity photos, with her.

So — what say you, Johnny boy?

How Many Clinical Studies Yield A Pill With… 100% Efficacy? That’s This ~40 Year “Longitudinal” Outcome.

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At the risk of striking a repetitive note here (but the posters at SA seem unable to… read the English language!), I would highlight this finance opinion/article, widely being reprinted in papers all over, now.

There is one minor inaccuracy (but we will get to that in a moment). The punch-line is that in perhaps over 600 adopted pill cases (over the 40 plus years they’ve existed), only a handful were ever invalidated by the courts, and none — not one — ever had to go all the way to triggering the flip-in/flip-over, to thwart a hostile bidder.

Not… one. The pills (unless stricken by a court) have always allowed the management time to work out a friendly deal — and in about half of all cases, the target remains independent, even after four years. [The low-ball, green-mail, back-end loaders’ threats are… blunted.]

Now you know.

The small inaccuracy is that this professor is unaware that the latest pills provide for a delayed, longer-acting “poison” (called a “Flip-Over”), if/when the unwelcome bidder runs a tender offer. When the unwelcome bidder shows up with all the shares he’s bought, the pill contains a feature that grants huge cash dividends on those shares that were NOT tendered, so NOT payable to the people from whom Elon bought, BUT OUT OF THE BIDDER’S (Elon’s) coffers, not the target’s. In the Twitter case, it would pay the people who’d not tendered $420 per share in cash, from Musk’s own pocket. That is beyond his reach by a great distance, if he needs 50% of the shares… he’d owe about $950 billion. His net worth is around $320 billion. No way, meet no how.

This in all practical cases, causes essentially all such hostile tender offers to… fail. From time to time, hostile bidders then try so-called “two-step” tenders — saying they will only pay the delivering shareholders in full… AFTER they get control [and invalidate the pill]. They offer about a ten per cent down feature.

But modern pills, again, grant the non-tendering holders a right to vast dividends, FROM the bidders’ coffers, at the moment before a control vote is to occur. That is, instead of what Musk offers, the non-tendering shareholders will get $420 a share from Musk. Q.: Who would ever tender to Musk then?

Yes, I am saying this scotches any “real world” probability of a two tier tender working — and Delaware courts have repeatedly upheld this provision as fully enforceable at law.

So — the professor is wrong insofar as s/he suggests a Musk tender could/would be a solution. It won’t be a realistic one, because Twitter adopted a very modern pill.

Cheers — and be excellent to one another.

We Are — Starting Today — Treating It As “Earth Week”…

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Well… I’ll freely admit it: I hadn’t foreseen the notion that a single unqualified 34-year old federal employee-for-life would upend the nation’s air safety rules, in the face of an ongoing health emergency.

I had planned for today to be all about the coming of another (the 52nd, if memory serves!) Earth Day, this Friday… so we will now march toward that, but leave our masthead as is for a bit yet. Here’s just one of many — an archived story, from June of last year:

…[In] the journal Geology an international team describes how the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been stable for the past ~10,000 years.

The vast Larsen Ice Shelf, twice the size of Wales, attracted global media attention, after a 5,800-square-kilometer iceberg weighing more than a trillion tons calved in 2017. Last month (April) it broke up completely, following a three year journey drifting from the Antarctic Peninsula to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.

Over the past 25 years, several of the region’s ice shelves have collapsed, including the rapid disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002. The sequential breakup of ice shelves along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula is linked to warmer atmospheric temperatures which have gradually moved southward over the past 50 years. At the same time, warm ocean currents have also increased, weakening the region’s ice shelves from below….

“We now have a much clearer picture of the pattern and extent of ice shelf break-ups, both past and present. It starts in the north and progresses southward as the atmosphere and ocean warms. Should collapse of Larsen C happen, it would confirm that the magnitudes of ice loss along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula and underlying climate change are unprecedented during the past 10,000 years” says Smith….

I note this one, in large part to point out that Hinderaker, and his fellow Luddites apparently forgot that the unassailable geological record documents that the ice was receding 8,000 to 6,000 years ago, as we ended another ICE AGE. Yes, it fluctuates, in roughly ten to twenty thousand year cycles — but that was before. In the “before times”. The epoch when collectively, maybe under one million humans in total, all had were tiny campfires burning.

Every single modern household now adds more heat to the environmental sphere in a year, than an entire village did, in a century, in antiquity, when one factors in air travel, and all the related consumption we engender.

We humans have greatly accelerated the melt, by burning hydro-carbons on a scale that is about 1015th more rapid than our ancestors in the end of the last ice age. So, the ice melt threatens to hit a runaway / non-reversible threshold, if we don’t act. [The entire eastern seaboard as far inland as Patterson, New Jersey could be under six to twenty feet of salt water, in a century’s time.]

We must do better, for our children — and theirs. Truly, there really is no time left… to vacillate.

नमस्ते

Meanwhile — In The “Logical, Black Letter Law-Compliant” Land Of Granting Wide Deference To Federal Governmental Public Health Decision-Making… Supremes Edition.

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We here doff our hat, and in the process note that the irrepressible Amy Howe, at the excellent SCOTUSblog, has overnight offered a sublime piece on what is the actual state of the law — at least as according to the nation’s HIGHEST court (i.e., not made up, out of whole cloth, by a plainly-unqualified 34 year old — who’s never tried a case, and reportedly finished near the bottom of her class in law school!).

She recounts here a decision allowing for the removal from active duty of a fighter pilot — for refusal to vaccinate after getting COVID, and recovering:

…The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a plea from a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve to block the Air Force from disciplining him because he is not vaccinated against COVID-19. Three justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — indicated that they would have granted the request and allowed him to continue to serve while his appeal continues.

The case, Dunn v. Austin, was brought by Lt. Col. Jonathan Dunn, an Air Force pilot who has served combat tours in Afghanistan and left active duty for the Air Force Reserve eight years ago. Dunn tested positive for COVID-19 last summer and requested a religious exemption from the Department of Defense’s requirement that all active-duty and reserve members of the armed forces be vaccinated against COVID-19. After his request was denied, Dunn was relieved of his command of a squadron; he then went to federal court in California, arguing that the denial of his request for a religious exemption violated both federal law and the Constitution when the Pentagon had granted “thousands” of exemptions for secular reasons.

The federal district court rejected Dunn’s request for a temporary order that would have barred the Air Force from taking action against him because of his failure to be vaccinated, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit also declined to step in….

Confidential note to that Florida judge: the highest court is saying… you got it wrong. And your illogical, unscientific decision, whether appealed and reversed, or not… will kill people, now — and needlessly so. Out.

नमस्ते