Bad Crow Review: WTF?
Twitter, the return of child labor, and cascading Covid effects
Links are at the end.
One of our readers (at least one) is doing interesting photography-related things. Please check out Peter B. Leighton’s work.1 For whatever it’s worth, yr. editors are happy to promote interesting things our subscribers do.
Twitter: Following the launch of Twitter’s new (and now dead) $8 “verified account” feature, someone impersonating Eli Lilly’s account announced that insulin is now free. The stocks of the three large insulin manufacturers immediately nose-dived, shaving tens of billions off the market value of the companies.2
The fake tweet wasn’t just damaging to Eli Lilly’s stock price; both Novo Nordisk and Sanofi also took a hit resulting from the tweet.
Novo Nordisk’s shares fell 3.2 per cent, and Sanofi’s fell by 4 per cent, according to the outlet.
Insulin prices have been a frequent subject of debate even at the Congressional level, as without it some diabetics would die. In Eli Lilly’s third quarter alone, the company reported $878m in sales.
A Lockheed Martin impersonator tanked that company’s stock as well, after tweeting that sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. were halted pending investigations of human rights violations in those countries.3
One of Musk’s first tweets after he bought the company was “Comedy is back.” How right he was.
Labor Department Finds 31 Children Cleaning Meatpacking Plants
You may have thought that child labor was outlawed a century ago with a few regulatory exceptions, and you would be right in theory but not in practice.4
Federal regulators say a Wisconsin cleaning contractor illegally hired minors to clean slaughterhouses. Among them were allegedly six teens who worked overnight shifts at two plants in southwestern Minnesota.
In a court filing this week, the U.S. Labor Department alleges that Packers Sanitation Services Inc., based in Kieler, Wis., employed at least 31 children, including some as young as 13, to clean equipment at three Midwestern meatpacking facilities.
The majority of the alleged violations were found at a JBS plant in Grand Island, Neb., but because PSSI operates in about 400 locations nationwide, “there is reason to believe Defendant’s practice of employing child labor is occurring throughout the country,” regulators wrote. The government alleges that a child, first employed at the Grand Island plant at age 13, suffered a burn injury from caustic cleaning chemicals. Another child, 14, reportedly suffered similar injuries and fell asleep in class after working overnight.
This is the result of all sorts of social ills: housing insecurity, food insecurity, low wages, fear of employers and state authorities—policy decisions, one and all. And of course greed on the top. So far as yr. editors can tell the penalties for this are civil, fines and the like, but perhaps the injuries can provoke criminal charges.
Elsewhere: Covid. Researchers at Washington University’s medical school have found that succeeding Covid infections dramatically increase the risk of death, organ damage, mental health issues, and long Covid.5
The risk of death, hospitalization and serious health issues from COVID-19 jumps significantly with reinfection compared with a first bout with the virus, regardless of vaccination status, a study published on Thursday suggests.
"Reinfection with COVID-19 increases the risk of both acute outcomes and long COVID," said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "This was evident in unvaccinated, vaccinated and boosted people."
…
Reinfected patients had a more than doubled risk of death and a more than tripled risk of hospitalization compared with those who were infected with COVID just once. They also had elevated risks for problems with lungs, heart, blood, kidneys, diabetes, mental health, bones and muscles, and neurological disorders, according to a report published in Nature Medicine.
Researchers outside the study said that the population involved — veterans at VA hospitals and clinics — is more vulnerable than the public at large, but they don’t quarrel with the findings.
One outside epidemiologist said that the data show a diminishing increase in risk after the second infection, meaning that the risk of death and complications is still greater in subsequent infections than with previous ones, but not as much as between the first and second infections.
Given the current laissez-faire approach to Covid prevention, we can count on people continuing to die from the disease at an unfortunate rate, and on an increase in people suffering significant short- and long-term damage from it. This is overtly tragic in human terms; it is also a now-silent drag on the economy, and bad policy decisions are implicated.
And we’re one mutation away from another Delta-like outbreak.
Ah well. The pandemic is over, you know.
Current Affairs publisher Nathan Robinson has a long and hopeful piece on tapping into the anti-reactionary majority of voters.6
Some of the lessons from this election are pretty obvious: Voters appear to like freedom, and do not appreciate Republicans’ effort to take away fundamental constitutional rights like the right to an abortion. Even in Kentucky, “We want to police your uterus” was not a winning message. Denying that Joe Biden is really the president does not turn out to be a very popular position nationwide, and the right might well learn that it needs to keep quiet about its more toxic policy plans. My major worry is that Democrats will conclude from the fact that they didn’t lose as many Congressional races as they expected to that Joe Biden is doing just fine and they should continue with “business as usual.” They may have a rude awakening in 2024 when Ron DeSantis tries to do to the country what he has done to Florida.
Most importantly, what we should remember is that nothing is inevitable and that we should be cautious about narratives and polls. The idea that one party has to lose in certain places at certain times is wrong. Whether one wins or loses depends on whether one is running good candidates with an appealing message. Democrats should not get complacent, but they should also stop making excuses for their failures, because we can see that there is no reason why the right cannot be defeated and robust progressive politics cannot triumph.
Yr. editors have no great faith that senior Democrats will take any position that discomfits them in any way, but one can hope.
She Drew The Gun, “Save Myself;” Bc Camplight, “Deportation Blues;” Chuck Brown and Eva Cassidy, “The Other Side,” courtesy Jack D.; and Low, “Ones and Sixes,” courtesy Tenacious K.
And that, Comrades, is all we got.
I know it’s not the least bit funny, but the Twitter activity makes me laugh. Makes me think of a little kitten knocking the pieces of a stodgy chess set gleefully to the marble floor and watching them roll away.