Tuesday, December 08, 2020
Sun Fires at Earth, 1-2 Punch Coming, Superfamine | S0 News Dec.8.2020
Ya gotta remember that Planet Earth is in a Galaxy + A Great Big Universe. . .
There are certain things beyond our control
City of Mesa Consolidated Plan Meeting
It's a shame that less than 40 people in a city over 500,000 have taken the time
to see this ...but that's just about the normal guage of City Participation here.
A CEREMONY TODAY: Recognition/Acknowledgement of Councilmember Jeremy Whittaker for His Service To The City of Mesa
Let's take a time-out and notice Item 10 on the Final Agenda: A Farewell for Jeremy Whittaker who managed a successful campaign to get elected to the Mesa City Council representing District 2 for four years of his first term in-office over the hand-selected opponent from the city's generations-old Political Machine. He was eligible to fulfill and gain a second term in public office for what was a well-qualified foray challenging the status quo, only to get trounced by a less-qualified hand-chosen opponent who was endorsed by both the "non-partisan" mayor Hizzoner John Giles and the "non-partisan" city manager Chris Brady in that contentious campaign. Jeremy Whittaker no doubt will have some things to say at the ceremony that will take place today streamed into The Lower Chambers while all elected members have been working remote-from-home for months - maybe he'll get a plaque for his send-off?
But who can ever forget - and long remember - his dedication to speaking uncomfortable facts and analyzing in-depth many of the issues facing the future of Mesa head-on.
Highlights (and lowlights) during his four years on the Mesa City Council have been featured in many posts on this blog.
10 Recognition/acknowledgement of Councilmember Jeremy Whittaker for his service to the City of Mesa
ddd
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The Tell-All Case of COVID-19 Data Scientist Whistle-Blower Rebekah Jones
Let's put it out there (using some of the words from Mike Masnick reporting iMonday afternoon: "This in insane... This is horrifying on so many levels many levels...This is not supposed to happen. This should not happen. It is horrifying and I hope that Jones is able to retain powerful legal help to fight back against this clear violation of her civil liberties, and a clear authoritarian overreach by Governor DeSantis.. ."
OK that's serious stuff - What's it all about? REFUSING TO MANIPULATE DATA + THE CONSEQUENCES
Here are more details from the inserted source above:
Cumberland Advisors Market Commentary – Rebekah Jones
A Duel Over Data (Or, Three Cheers for Rebekah Jones)
“The Florida Department of Health’s website is extraordinary, and this is what every department of health should have…. When you inform the public and give them the information that they need, then they can make decisions along with the local government and governors…. It’s by Zip Code and it’s by county. They can see cases; they can see cumulative cases; they can see new cases; they can see hospitalizations; they can see mortality; they can see age groups of mortality; and they can see where every testing piece is. This is how we have to inform the American public, and this is where the American public will develop confidence in each of their counties and local governments.”
(https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4870297/user-clip-dr-birx-comments-jacksonville-beach-opening)
On that same day, a blog post at the website of ESRI, the company behind the ArcGIS program used for many state COVID-19 dashboards and the dashboard created by Johns Hopkins, featured a story about the Florida COVID-19 Dashboard and the GIS manager for the Florida Department of Health, who had configured the dashboard and managed it in consultation with three Dept. of Health teams. Her name, one many readers may know by now, is Rebekah Jones. Blog post authors Este Geraghty (MD, MS, MPH, GISP) and Ryan Lanclos praised her qualifications for creating the Florida dashboard:
"When Rebekah Jones was subsequently fired from her job on May 18, it was the Palm Beach Post that broke the story. According to Jones, she was fired for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data to justify the state’s reopening. (“Coronavirus: Florida scientist said she was fired for refusing to ‘manipulate’ COVID-19 data,” https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200519/coronavirus-florida-scientist-said-she-was-fired-for-refusing-to-lsquomanipulatersquo-covid-19-data)
That story was picked up in many places, and interviews followed.
Without going deeply into the weeds, we can offer several sources for interested readers to delve into. We will leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions about what happened in connection with COVID-19 data in Florida.
The Tampa Bay Times published an in-depth report on the incident and events leading up to it:
“Florida Health Department manager told to delete coronavirus data is ousted,” https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-health-department-officials-told-manager-to-delete-coronavirus-data-before-reassigning-her-emails-show/.
Jones offered her own account in a 7-minute NPR Interview that aired on June 29: “Florida Scientist Says She Was Fired for Not Manipulating COVID-19 Data,” https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884551391/florida-scientist-says-she-was-fired-for-not-manipulating-covid-19-data. I’ve excerpted two paragraphs from the transcript of that interview:
“I was asked by DOH leadership to manually change numbers. This was a week before the reopening plan officially kicked off into phase one. I was asked to do the analysis and present the findings about which counties met the criteria for reopening. The criteria followed more or less the White House panel’s recommendations, but our epidemiology team also contributed to that as well. As soon as I presented the results, they were essentially the opposite of what they had anticipated. The whole day while we’re having this kind of back and forth changing this, not showing that, the plan was being printed and stapled right in front of me. So it was very clear at that point that the science behind the supposedly science-driven plan didn’t matter because the plan was already made….The whole next week was a lot of manipulating things and a lot of back and forth with the epidemiologists, who were extremely uncomfortable with the way that this was being managed. And then eventually the night before the first phase of reopening, I was asked to actually delete and then hide data from the public. I said I wanted in writing that directive from my boss telling me to do that before I would do it. I said it was the wrong call, and it was a mistake to have this information that was available to the public and just take it away
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Second, we turn to Governor DeSantis’s response.
When questioned about Jones’s firing, Governor DeSantis had this to say when questioned by a Fox 13 News reporter on May 20 (“DeSantis on firing of Florida COVID-19 dashboard data scientist,” https://www.fox13news.com/video/686230):
“So, first of all, okay, so (1) she’s not, she’s not a data scientist. She’s somebody that’s got a degree in journalism, communication, and geography. She is not involved in collating any data. She does not have the expertise to do that. She is not an epidemiologist. She is not the chief architect of our web portal: that is another false statement. And what she was doing, she was putting data on the portal which the scientists didn’t believe was valid data. So she didn’t listen to the people who were her superiors. She had many people above her in the chain of command, and so then she was dismissed because of that and because of a bunch of different reasons about how she did.
“Come to find out, she’s also under active criminal charges in the State of Florida. She’s being charged with cyberstalking and cyber sexual harassment. So I’ve asked the Department of Health to explain to me how someone would be allowed to be charged with that and continue on because this was many months ago. I have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, so her supervisor dismissed her because of a lot of those reasons, and it was a totally valid way, but she should have been dismissed long before that.
Kotok note to readers: this assertion by DeSantis has been greeted by disbelief and lack of proof about veracity on his part. Jones has extensively answered his assertion. So far no criminal charge against Jones has been validated.
We will continue DeSantis’ quote: “Our data is available. Our data is transparent. . ."
Jones responded to the situation by creating her own coronavirus dashboard for Florida, funded by public support, putting to rest the question of whether she was capable of such things (“Fired scientist Rebekah Jones builds coronavirus dashboard to rival Florida’s,” https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200611/fired-scientist-rebekah-jones-builds-coronavirus-dashboard-to-rival-floridarsquos).
According to her data (which is updated daily and in some cases every 30 minutes, since she still has access to the Department of Health’s raw data), Florida has had considerably more cases than the state reports and more deaths. Jones carefully explains on the site how she arrives at her numbers. . .
Jones reports data with an eye to its accuracy and its usefulness. She is being recognized for her efforts, and not just by news outlets calling for interviews. She will be the keynote speaker at the online National Data Science Conference this year, sponsored by the American Statistical Assoc. and Journal of Data Science. For details, see https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1280194029494374403?s=20.
Governor DeSantis’s quest for reopening, however, has to be addressed. We left it to him and got a raging forest fire of COVID. Now the situation is in the hands of cities and counties and school boards. There is, frankly, no way to fully close down. Protracted lockdowns are deeply problematic. Everything stops. But rising case counts and hospitalizations teach us that there is no way to freely open up, either, no way to party and proceed as if it’s still the summer of 2019, at least not without sickening many people, perhaps for a long, long time, and killing quite a number of them. We need the attention to providing full and complete data that Rebekah Jones’s efforts represent, and we have to seek a better way to tackle the necessity of reopening. We need both better health outcomes and better economic outcomes. Leadership succeeds when it finds a path forward between extremes. Leadership fails if it doesn’t.
As we’ve learned from this pandemic what can work and what can’t, governors who now chart a path toward a disciplined, science-based, and data-driven reopening that controls viral spread will be credited both with safeguarding public health and with optimizing essential economic functions.
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THERE ARE MORE ISSUES THAN THOSE HIGHLIGHTED ABOVE:
Florida State Police Raid Home Of COVID Whistleblower, Point Guns At Her & Her Family, Seize All Her Computer Equipment
from the this-is-fucked-up dept
This is insane. Earlier this year, we wrote about Rebekah Jones, the data scientist working for Florida, who put together that state's COVID-19 database (that had received widespread praise), and who was fired by the state for her failure to fake the data to make it look like Florida was handling the pandemic better than it actually was. Governor Ron DeSantis had made it clear he wanted data showing good results in order to justify reopening the state...
Since then, Jones has been running Florida COVID Action, which is a dashboard of Florida COVID information, like the one she used to run for the state.
And apparently Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis couldn't allow that to stand. This afternoon Rebekah posted a short Twitter thread, with video, showing Florida state police raiding her home. As she notes, when they asked her who else was in the home, she told them that her husband and children were upstairs, and they pulled out their guns. . .
Why was her home raided? Why did they pull out guns? Why did they do it after she told them that it was her children upstairs? Why did they seize all of her electronics equipment? Why are they doing any of this?
Jones has been doing everything to better inform the public of what's happening in the middle of a pandemic, and this is the thanks she gets? Having her home raided by the police and having guns drawn on her children?
This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly.
This is what happens to people who speak truth to power.
I tell them my husband and my two children are upstairs... and THEN one of them draws his gun.
On my children.
This is Desantis' Florida.
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 7, 2020
___________________________________________________________________________
HOLD ON > It's more than that
Monday, December 07, 2020
Zero-Tolerance For Not Respecting The Mask Mandate?. . .Who's Responsbile For Compliance
Sure they are protocols-in-place here in Arizona and the City of Mesa to stop the spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic but it's getting worse not better. Some states - even Arkansas - are taking compliance to the next level
Yesterday The Arizona Department of Health Services reported a week's rise in new record-breaking cases. Health officials on Sunday reported 5,376 new cases + 25 additional deaths.
So far the City of Mesa has not taken stronger measures to follow the leads of the two female mayors - both Democrats - in the state's two larger cities Phoenix and Tucson.
Republican Governor Doug Dicey plans to emphasize enforcement at the county level for local enforcement but that appears inconsistent for the cities and towns. However, after a visit to Phoenix last week by Rudy Giuliani - and on the same day that it was announced he was infected with the COVID-19 Virus - The Arizona State House was shut down for a week.
The latest numbers push the state’s total to 364,276 cases since the pandemic began with 6,950 known deaths.
--
PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) -- The Arizona Senate and House of Representatives will be closed this coming week due tCOVID-19 concerns
Arizona legislature to close for a week due to COVID-19 concerns
Sunday, December 06, 2020
FACT-CHECK > Claims That ASU is #1 In Innovation
If you repeat something enough times, people believe it.
Please read on and scroll farther down to watch-and-listen to ASU Associate Vice-President Ji Mi Choi making a sales pitch for more money - more than $3,000,000 more - for another 'GUARANTEED MAXIMUM PRICE INCREASE' at the construction site for The Studios @Mesa City Center that's been called "The Front Door to Mesa's Innovation District" in all the hype that has been thrown out for more than five years...
Geez I thought we're in AN ECONOMIC CRISIS
Hizzoner John Giles all 'puffed-up' with Crow at 2018 Mayor's Inauguration
There is a sort of cult that has grown up around Crow, one based largely on his expansion of the school and the fact that U.S. News and World Report ranks ASU “No. 1 in innovation.”
However, the very same publication has ASU tied with Alabama’s Auburn University for a ranking of 115 out of 312 national universities. Out of 145 “best value schools,” ASU ranks 119. The University of Arizona comes in at 97.
Your MesaZona blogger really hopes that Mesa Mayor John Giles gets his act together before this year's performance in the State-Of-The-City Speech on February 6, 2018.
He's had the all the opportunities to learn on-the-job getting invited to Harvard and Washington, D.C under the auspices of Mike Bloomberg... It's easy to get elected, hard to perform
He's had the all the opportunities to learn on-the-job getting invited to Harvard and Washington, D.C under the auspices of Mike Bloomberg... It's easy to get elected, hard to perform
Report June 2017
Advancing a new wave of urban competitiveness:
The role of mayors in the rise of innovation districts
Just keeping the information closely-held from the public while only making registration available on the website for The Mesa Chamber of Commerce???? . . . and suggesting that people only "tune-in" rather than actively encouraging the public to participate in a discussion about what's important here in DTMesa?
It's no wonder that downtown Mesa has become "The Old Donut-Hole"
In 2005 a $100 Million Dollar-Investment in the Mesa Arts Center was supposed to transform DTMesa into an "Arts-and-Entertainment District"
. . . Did that happen?
In August 2015 Valley Metro Light Rail service was opened extending into the Central Business District here in historic DTMesa
. . . Did "The Salvation Train" that John Giles promised 2 years ago ever arrive??
. . . and now he brags after two years in elected office inside City Hall that
Mesa is preparing downtown to be the location of choice for entrepreneurs and innovators.
2 years ago Mesa joined Bloomberg Philanthropies WhatWorksCities . . .
How's that working here now?
What has the mayor delivered for results?
Now Giles says there are "experts" from The Brookings Institution scheduled to be here.
Ever notice how almost every "talking-head" in front of a camera has now mastered gesticulating madly with both hands when they appear on screens? Indian-American Researcher Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan leads the Knowledge Enterprise at Arizona State University, which advances research, innovation, strategic partnerships, entrepreneurship and international development at ASU... Now Knowledge is A Business
"Innovating the Future" is an interview from Friday on ASU's PBS Channel, part of their New America Series. The host for this program is Anne Marie Slaughter. Panch's focus uses his hands to make some points about Artificial Intelligence and what he calls situational awareness. These include what he calls "vibro-tactile motors" to alert soldiers or those with disabilities in stories that he tells during the episode. . .
---------------------------------------------------------------------------". . . At a time of rising social inequality, they offer the prospect of expanding employment and educational opportunities for disadvantaged populations given that many districts are close to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. And, at a time of inefficient land use, extensive sprawl and continued environmental degradation, they present the potential for denser residential and employment patterns, the leveraging of mass transit, and the repopulation of urban cores.https://www.brookings.edu/essay/rise-of-innovation-districts/
Keynote Speaker: Jennifer Vey, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Panelists:
Panelists:
Karrin Taylor Robson, Chair, GPEC Next Leadership Council
Ji Mi Choi, Associate Vice President, Arizona State University
Ji Mi Choi, Associate Vice President, Arizona State University
BLOGGER INSERT >> AN UPDATE
WAY TOO MUCH "GROUP-THINK" e.g..District 2 Council member Jeremy Whittaker is the only one who is persistent and dedicated to stating uncomfortable facts
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