THIS IS FAR MORE WIDESPREAD THAN ANYONE THINKS:  Philadelphia Judge of Elections Pleads Guilty to Committing Election Fraud To Help Democrats…

OH, LOOK, ANOTHER CELEB RUNNING HIS MOUTH:  Mark Cuban’s mindless critique of President Trump.

SEEMS TO BE TO ALLOW GOVERNORS TO DAYDREAM ABOUT THEMSELVES IN HUGO BOSS UNIFORMS. IF THERE IS ANOTHER, I CAN’T FIGURE IT OUT:  Shutdowns: What’s the Point?

I’M FROM COLORADO. WE DON’T OBEY STUPID ORDERS:  Winnie the Flu and Mandatory Vaccines.

THEY COULD BE REPLACED TO ADVANTAGE BY A WILD EYED BUNCH OF FANTASY NOVELISTS. AND THAT’S SAYING A LOT:  Kill All the Economics Departments.

LOOK, IT’S MY SHOCKED FACE AGAIN:  Rice’s Last Minute ‘By the Book’ Email Written Upon Advice of Obama’s White House Counsel.

TRUE. BUT THEY MIGHT NOT KNOW IT:  China Should Not Provoke the United States.

BEHOLD! MY SHOCKED FACE:  Public Education On The Edge Of Collapse.

IF ONLY THIS WERE LITERAL, AND THEY VANISHED OVER THE HORIZON IN A CARTOON-LIKE CLOUD OF SMOKE, WHISTLING:  Biden VP Sweepstakes Pick Up Steam.

Or, if I need to be clear: these are all very bad people.

TOOK THEM LONG ENOUGH:  Churches Push Back Against Coronavirus Edicts.

PLEASE, I BEG YOU, TELL ME THIS IS PARODY:  China’s President Xi Jinping ‘turns down Mark Zuckerberg’s request to name his unborn child’ at White House dinner.

NEWSWEEK: Andrew Cuomo Needs to Own Nursing Home COVID Deaths. Well, he’s not going to do that because old people vote.

AT AMAZON, Clore Automotive Jump-N-Carry JNC550A 1100 Peak Amp Jump Starter with Air Compressor.

THEY COULD HAVE BEEN HEROES INSTEAD OF WHAT THEY ARE, WHICH IS A BUM. Kyle Smith: Journalists Are Not Heroes. “Are there many professions in which experienced, highly paid people are given the chop and replaced by 24-year-olds? Such has been the state of the journalism industry for at least 25 years. If people with no experience are able to do it, the takeaway for me is that journalism is . . . not that hard to do. People who have no particularly useful knowledge or world-improving skills often manage to do remarkably well.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Law professor falsely accused of rape, wins defamation case. The woman who lied is named Morgan Wright. “In his blistering ruling on Tuesday, Hennepin County Judge Daniel Moreno wrote that Parisi’s former lover, Morgan Wright, had pursued an ‘untruthful narrative crusade,’ and her ‘accusations were false, and made with malice.'”

“WE ARE GOING TO PUT OUT THE FIRES:” Trump says he won’t close the country if second wave of coronavirus hits.

THE PRESS HAS SYMPATHY FOR SOME PEOPLE WHO ARE OUT OF WORK: The Fragile Existence of Sex Workers During the Pandemic. Sympathy for prostitutes, though, is probably just a species of professional courtesy.

OPEN THREAD: I’m way deep into Nothing Special.

WORTHWHILE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN INITIATIVE: Hungary, Austria stand against rest of EU blasting Israel. “Hungary and Austria, the sole EU states that opposed sharp criticism of Israel by High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell this week, warned against having a double standard against Israel on Wednesday. The EU sets its foreign policy by consensus, but Borrell has repeatedly disregarded a minority of member states’ opposition in his statements threatening or condemning Israel over the possibility that it may annex settlements in the coming months.”

Flashback, related: Intifada: A European “Proxy War” Against America, Says EU Parliament Member. “It is an open secret within the European Parliament that EU aid to the Palestinian Authority has not been spent correctly. . . . The European Parliament does not intend to verify whether European taxpayers’ money could have been used to finance anti-Semitic murderous attacks. Unfortunately, this fits well with European policy in this area.”

HIS APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE: Is Brain Stelter Afraid of a Big Bad Ratio on Twitter?

Stelter is sharing his morning newsletter. This is a weekday staple for the CNN commentator. So this morning, below his tweet, there is a notification that reads:

A conversation between @brianstelter and people they follow or mentioned in this Tweet.

It seems Stelter learned this might be a bad idea fairly quickly. Twitter meme lord Carpe Donktum must be an account that Stelter follows since all but one of the over 20 replies came from him. Donktum decided to share feedback on Stelter’s use of the feature from users that could not reply. The screencaps he shared with Stelter could be characterized as less than flattering.

Perhaps realizing the feature’s futility, Stelter has not applied this setting to any other tweets on his timeline after the one above.

Leading to this ratio:

Found via Iowahawk who tweets, “Watching him get blowtorched by TCM fans is better than an all-weekend Film Noir marathon.” Does Stelter not know that the channel whose viewers he’s insulting as aging crypto-racists is also owned by WarnerMedia, and was created by Ted Turner, a decade after creating CNN?

FIGHT THE POWER: Betsy McCaughey: Civil dissent is the American answer to outrageous lockdown rules. “The longer lockdowns drag on, the dumber rules get. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday that beaches will be closed and anyone who dares swim will ‘be taken right out of the water.’ Huh? Scientific evidence shows that being outside is extremely low risk, almost no risk, and swimming is undoubtedly the lowest. Don’t count on the NYPD to drag out swimmers. Across the nation, cops have displayed common sense and sympathy for their neighbors.”

MYSTERIES: Why do some COVID-19 patients infect many others, whereas most don’t spread the virus at all?

Most of the discussion around the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has concentrated on the average number of new infections caused by each patient. Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three. But in real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all. In fact, the latter is the norm, Lloyd-Smith says: “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero. Most people do not transmit.”

That’s why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people. In a seminal 2005 Nature paper, Lloyd-Smith and co-authors estimated that SARS—in which superspreading played a major role—had a k of 0.16. The estimated k for MERS, which emerged in 2012, is about 0.25. In the flu pandemic of 1918, in contrast, the value was about one, indicating that clusters played less of a role.

Estimates of k for SARS-CoV-2 vary. In January, Julien Riou and Christian Althaus at the University of Bern simulated the epidemic in China for different combinations of R and k and compared the outcomes with what had actually taken place. They concluded that k for COVID-19 is somewhat higher than for SARS and MERS. That seems about right, says Gabriel Leung, a modeler at the University of Hong Kong. “I don’t think this is quite like SARS or MERS, where we observed very large superspreading clusters,” Leung says. “But we are certainly seeing a lot of concentrated clusters where a small proportion of people are responsible for a large proportion of infections.” But in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1. “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski says.

That could explain some puzzling aspects of this pandemic, including why the virus did not take off around the world sooner after it emerged in China, and why some very early cases elsewhere—such as one in France in late December 2019, reported on 3 May—apparently failed to ignite a wider outbreak. If k is really 0.1, then most chains of infection die out by themselves and SARS-CoV-2 needs to be introduced undetected into a new country at least four times to have an even chance of establishing itself, Kucharski says. If the Chinese epidemic was a big fire that sent sparks flying around the world, most of the sparks simply fizzled out.

Hmm. This suggests that a lot of what we’re doing to control the spread is misdirected.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Hull [UK] school ‘sorry’ after pupils researched porn homework on web.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Stupidity in the New York Times. “I disagree with Farhad Manjoo about many things, but it is rare for me to read his column and think it stupid. His column in the New York Times today is irredeemably stupid. It argues that government should simply ‘abolish’ billionaires because — here’s the level of thinking at play — ‘billionaires are bad’… Any time your best thinking tells you that the best solution to a social problem is the elimination of a class of people, it’s time to have another cup of coffee and think a little harder.”

Flashback: “Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has become the largest shareholder of New York Times Co (NYT.N) after exercising warrants to double his stake in the publisher to 16.8 percent.”

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE BABYLON BEE:

● Shot: Government Announces Lockdown Of All Fast-Food Restaurants To Prevent Heart Disease.

—Headline, the Babylon Bee, Monday.

● Chaser: The End of Meat is Here: If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals.

—Headline, New York Times opinion column, today.

Ron Swanson, call your office!