American entrepreneurialism: The slander industry

Investigative reporter trolls self

This is just too good to not mention. The New York Times writes:

My colleague Kashmir Hill and I [New York Times reporter Aaron Krolik] were trying to learn who is responsible for — and profiting from — the growing ecosystem of websites whose primary purpose is destroying reputations.

So I wrote a nasty post. About myself.

Then we watched as a constellation of sites duplicated my creation.

Egad!! IT'S ALIIIIVE!!!!!

To get slander removed, many people hire a “reputation management” company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000.

We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.

Part 1:The stain

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she “is a liar and a cheater” — the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase “cheater” to a search of their names.

The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. Posts from Cheaterboard.com appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles — or, in my case, articles in The New York Times.

The NYT interviewed one brave smear site owner, whose credentials include a criminal with a couple of stints in jail, e.g., for making death threats on one occasion and trying to pepper spray police in the face with Sriracha Dorito dust in another. He calmly explained why he does not feel bad about slandering people online. “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet.” Apparently, he sees himself as a life coach just trying to help the children of America.

The article is long and heavy with details, but mind-blowing. The astonishing high level of sleaze in this fine American industry arguably rivals that of the ex-president's personal life, business operations and his administration. Once again, the moral values of unregulated markets shine through for all to see. 

COVID in India

Cremating COVID victims in East Delhi 

The New York Times writes about the unfolding pandemic catastrophe in India. There are some similarities with the US, e.g., politicians downplay the death toll, but also some differences, e.g., a new double mutant strain of the virus. The NYT writes:

Fatalities have been overlooked or downplayed, understating the human toll of the country’s outbreak, which accounts for nearly half of all new cases in a global surge.

India’s coronavirus second wave is rapidly sliding into a devastating crisis, with hospitals unbearably full, oxygen supplies running low, desperate people dying in line waiting to see doctors — and mounting evidence that the actual death toll is far higher than officially reported.

Each day, the government reports more than 300,000 new infections, a world record, .... But experts say those numbers, however staggering, represent just a fraction of the real reach of the virus’s spread, which has thrown this country into emergency mode.

The sudden surge in recent weeks, with an insidious newer variant possibly playing a role, is casting increasing doubt on India’s official Covid-19 death toll of nearly 200,000, with more than 2,000 people dying every day.

Interviews from cremation grounds across the country, where the fires never stop, portray an extensive pattern of deaths far exceeding the official figures. Nervous politicians and hospital administrators may be undercounting or overlooking large numbers of dead, analysts say. And grieving families may be hiding Covid connections as well, out of shame, adding to the confusion in this enormous nation of 1.4 billion.

“It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.”

At one of the large cremation grounds in Ahmedabad, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, bright orange fires light up the night sky, burning 24 hours a day, like an industrial plant that never shuts down. Suresh Bhai, a worker there, said he had never seen such a never-ending assembly line of death.

But he has not been writing down the cause of death as Covid-19 on the thin paper slips that he hands over to the mournful families, even though the number of dead is surging along with the virus.

“Sickness, sickness, sickness,” Mr. Suresh said. “That’s what we write.”

When asked why, he said it was what he had been instructed to do by his bosses, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Doctors worry that the runaway surge is being at least partly driven by the emergence of a virus variant known as the “double mutant,” B.1.617, because it contains genetic mutations found in two other difficult-to-control versions of the coronavirus. One of the mutations is present in the highly contagious variant that ripped through California earlier this year. The other mutation is similar to one found in the South African variant and believed to make the virus more resistant to vaccines.

Still, scientists caution it is too early to know for sure how pernicious the new variant emerging in India really is.

Over 13 days in mid-April, Bhopal officials reported 41 deaths related to Covid-19. But a survey by The New York Times of the city’s main Covid-19 cremation and burial grounds, where bodies were being handled under strict protocols, revealed a total of more than 1,000 deaths during the same period.

“Many deaths are not getting recorded and they are increasing every day,” said Dr. G.C. Gautam, a cardiologist based in Bhopal. He said that officials were doing this because “they don’t want to create panic.”

This virus appears to evolve rapidly. If it turns out that a new mutant that arises anywhere can evade vaccines and is equally or more lethal, the world just might be forced to do another pandemic response all over gain. If a bad combination of mutations arises, that new variant could start a whole new pandemic. An October 2020 estimate of the pandemic cost in the US alone is $16 trillion. All of that would seem to be a very good argument for a more intense global effort to get all people vaccinated as soon as possible. 

A COVID tale of two countries and two leaders

One of the unemployed and homeless in São Paulo cooking dinner

The ex-president undeniably lied to the American people about the seriousness of the pandemic. he even denied there would be an epidemic in the US. He downplayed a need for lockdowns. He constantly mocked mask wearing and attacked experts who argued that masks were necessary. He blamed states, especially democratic states, for a poor response. At one point even said that he had no responsibility in dealing with the pandemic. The ex-president had no plan to distribute vaccine, apparently not caring and/or maybe even wanting to sabotage the US response effort.

That massive leadership incompetence and failure led many state governors and tens of millions of Americans to follow the president's lead and ignore, downplay or deny there was a significant problem. One US expert recently estimated that the US should have been able to limit US deaths to about 100,000 had the ex-president and his administration been competent, focused and serious.

The New York Times writes about the awful and still deteriorating situation in Brazil. There are striking similarities between Brazil and the US. 

RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger — fome — in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.

From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.

That trade-off led to one of the world’s highest death tolls, but also foundered in its goal — to keep the country afloat.

And about 117 million people, or roughly 55 percent of the country’s population, faced food insecurity, with uncertain access to enough nutrition, in 2020 — a leap from the 85 million who did so two years previous, the study showed.

Last year, as governors and mayors around Brazil signed decrees shutting down nonessential businesses and restricting mobility, Mr. Bolsonaro called those measures “extreme” and warned that they would result in malnutrition.

The president also dismissed the threat of the virus, sowed doubts about vaccines, which his government has been slow to procure, and often encouraged crowds of supporters at political events.

As a second wave of cases this year led to the collapse of the health care system in several cities, local officials again imposed a raft of strict measures — and found themselves at war with Mr. Bolsonaro.

Early this month, as the daily death toll from the virus sometimes surpassed 4,000, Mr. Bolsonaro acknowledged the severity of the humanitarian crisis facing his country. But he took no responsibility and instead faulted local officials.

In an open letter addressed to Brazilian authorities in late March, more than 1,500 economists and businesspeople asked the government to impose stricter measures, including lockdown.

“It is not reasonable to expect economic activity to recover from an uncontrolled epidemic,” the experts wrote.

Laura Carvalho, an economist, published a study showing that restrictions can have a negative short-term impact on a country’s financial health, but that, in the long run, it would have been a better strategy.  

Creomar de Souza, a political analyst and the founder of the consultancy Dharma Politics in Brasília, said the president underestimated the threat the pandemic posed to the country and failed to put together a comprehensive plan to address it.

“They thought it wouldn’t be something serious and figured that the health system would be able to handle it,” he said.

The similarities are obvious. One can argue that failed presidential leadership in the US needlessly caused hundreds of thousands of lives and, say, about $10 trillion (or more) in needless economic loss. It could even have caused needless deaths and economic loss in countries like Brazil that looked to and emulated the US president as an authority on how to deal with the pandemic. That US authority turned out to be grossly incompetent at best, and active sabotage at worst.

Should the US government donate some food, money or vaccine to try to help Brazil, or does the US owe nothing because the US has no moral or any other kind of authority? After all, Brazil is a sovereign state and it decides its own policies and fate. What about other nations that need help, especially ones that at least tried in good faith to deal with the pandemic?

How To Think About Packing the Supreme Court

Just a short comment this time, offering two simple observations. In the aftermath of the McConnell scandal in which Republicans violated their Constitutional obligation to "advise and consent" and the failure of Ruth Bader Ginsberg to retire during the Obama administration, the SCOTUS is now more brazenly partisan than it has been in many decades - perhaps ever. Given the lifetime appointments of the three new and young Drumpf Justices, a "debate" about whether or not to "pack the court" - ie, to alter the size of the court to appoint politically favorable judges - is now underway. But is the debate at all meaningful?

Theh first issue raised was of course the reciprocity problem: if the Democrats packed the court now, what's to stop Republicans from doing it in future?

Now the function of any honest debate is to shed light on the issues surrounding a topic and to find a reasonable solution. On this basis it's clear that the "topic" of the reciprocity problem is not the function of the court, but the political consequences of action. It is therefore a dishonest "debate". The actual topic at hand is the function of the Supreme Court and how best to implement it. The Constitution says this about that:

Article III Section 1. The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.

Section 2.

The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

Of note is the fact that lifetime appointments are not specified, nor is the number of Justices. What is clear however is that the range of responsibilities given the SCOTUS is wide indeed.

The Supreme Court was founded in the Constiution but established and ordained by Congress which, in the Judiciary Act of 1789, declared the Court to consist of a single Chief Justice and five additional justices. These six Justices were charged with among other things appellate jurisdiction over all cases involving US citizens. There were some four million citizens in 1789, which is roughly the size of metro Los Angeles today. Six justices representing 4,000,000 citizens comes to a ratio of 1 Justice to about 670,000 citizens. In 1894 the Court was expanded to its present nine Justices, and the population had grown to some 63,000,000 by 1890. That created a proportion of 7,000,000 citizens to each justice, affording each American just 1/10th the representation on the SCOTUS that it had enjoyed in 1789. Today of course there are still nine Justices, but with roughly 330,000,000 citizens, bringing the ratio to one Justice for every 37,000,000 or so citizens, bringing today's representation to less than 1/50th of what it was during George Washington's last presidency.

Today, fully one third of the Surpreme Court was appointed by the least popular president in American history. The Court has never enjoyed so much power as it does today, and never has it been less accountable to or representative of the American people. Administrations could pack the Court for literally decades and not likely reach the ratio of 1789.

Let the packing begin, I say.