The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 4: Five things noted in passing

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 4: Five things noted in passing

Next up, an occasional feature called Five Things Noted in Passing, five things on which I'm only going to spend a minute or two each but I wanted to make sure got mentioned.

First, I have a prediction for you.

There is some speculation circulating around that Tweetie-pie will either pardon himself before he's kicked out of office or that he will resign before the Inauguration and let then-President Mike NotWorthAFarthing do the job.

I don't know if either of those will happen but I do say that there is no need for him to do either. Because I predict that a Joe Blahden administration, a Blahden DOJ, will not prosecute Tweetie-pie for any of his crimes, for any of his corruption.

Instead, Blahden will grandly say, just as the Amazing Mr. O said, coming into office faced with clear evidence of Bush the Lesser's war crimes, some version of "We must look forward, not backward, we must unite as one nation moving into a better future." And Tweetie-pie will walk.

Either way, Tweetie-pie may still not be off the hook, because Presidential pardons only apply to federal crimes, so any state-level prosecution, such as New York's case about taxes, would be unaffected.

But prosecuted by the Blahden administration? Not a chance.

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Next, filed under the heading "All Your Data is Belonging to US," Facebook is demanding that a team of New York University researchers stop their work analyzing the micro-targeting of political ads on the platform.

The researchers have a team of 6500 volunteers across the US using a browser plug-in allowing the researchers to see what political ads are being shown to what viewers, enabling them to study how Facebook has been used for disinformation and manipulation.

But on October 16, Facebook demanded that the team disable the  plug-in and destroy all data gathered, threatening "additional enforcement action" if this is not done by November 30. The claim is that the tool violates the site's rule against automated bulk collection of data - the very thing Facebook itself does all the time in order to have the very demographic data it can use to - for its own considerable profit - enable advertisers to micro-target users.

It should be noted that the threatening demand, first reported a week after it was sent, has gotten heavy pushback from journalists, academics, and First Amendment lawyers.

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Another fallout of the COVID pandemic is that the United Nations is facing a financial crisis. As of November 2, nearly one-third of the 193 member states have not paid up their yearly assessments, leading to a shortfall of $5.1 billion, which in the context of the UN budget is enough to threaten to undermine the world-wide operations of the organization.

The UN has never actually lived up to its promise but it's still a valuable organization, particularly in its international agencies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, the Relief and Works Agency, and the World Health Organization. (You did know that the WHO is part of the UN, yes?)

By the way, over half the shortfall is due to the failure of one nation to pay what it owes. Guess who.

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Speaking of the WHO brings me to some news I have been wanting to share since I heard it, so forgive me for referring to an announcement made back on August 25. That was the day that the WHO declared that polio has been eradicated from the entire continent of Africa.

Polio, for those of you too young to remember it, is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus that attacks the central nervous system, leading to paralysis. As recently at the 1980s, polio - also known as infantile paralysis - was a dread disease, endemic in 125 nations and claiming 350,000 children a year.

Now, it is endemic in just two, Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have seen a combined total of 102 cases so far in 2020. That is a reduction of over 99.9% from the 1980s.

This the result of a campaign sparked in 1988 by Rotary International, which gained powerful partners in the form of UNICEF, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), and the WHO, among others. The campaign was to bring polio vaccines, which had been available in the industrialized world for decades, to those still in need.

The goal of making polio join smallpox in the dustbin of history is obviously not achieved, but it is in sight.

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Finally, under the heading "this just in," it appears that the Affordable Care Act will for the third time survive a challenge at the Supreme Court.

At oral arguments on November 10 on the right wing's latest attempt to have the law struck down, two of the right-wing judges - John "The Smirk" Roberts and Brett "The Rapist" Kavanaugh - appeared ready to agree that the law's mandate to have insurance, the penalty for which was eliminated by Congress in 2017, should be thrown out but at the same time seemed prepared to have the rest of the law stand.

For his part, Roberts wondered aloud why, if Congress wanted the ACA to be dependent on the mandate, it didn't revoke the law when it eliminated the penalties while Kavahaugh said that precedent pointed in the direction of striking down the mandate but leaving the rest of the law intact.

Add the three judges considered liberal and you have a 5-4 majority.

Not a sure thing and clearly the whole issue of health care is something we'll be talking about a lot more, but for right now there is cause to be optimistic that we will at least not lose what has been gained.

A decision is expected by late spring.