The silver (and gold) lining of COVID-19

by philg

COVID-19 isn’t necessarily bad. From the NYT:

Lenox Hill, one of the city’s oldest and best-known hospitals, repeatedly billed patients more than $3,000 for the routine nasal swab test, about 30 times the test’s typical cost.

“It was shocking to see a number like that, when I’ve gotten tested before for about $135,” said Ana Roa, who was billed $3,358 for a test at Lenox Hill last month.

Ms. Roa’s coronavirus test bill is among 16 that The New York Times reviewed from the site. They show that Lenox Hill arrives at its unusually high prices by charging a large fee for the test itself — about six times the typical charge — and by billing the encounter as a “moderately complex” emergency room visit.

In one case, a family accrued $39,314 in charges for 12 tests this winter, all taken to fulfill requirements for returning to work or school. In another, an asymptomatic patient walked in because she saw the banner outside and wanted a test after traveling. Her insurance was charged $2,963.

Patient bills show that at least one additional hospital owned by Lenox Hill’s parent group, Northwell Health, has charged emergency room fees to patients at a mass testing site.

Overall, a system in which a river of cash flows from Washington, D.C. favors those already big enough to hire the smartest people to navigate the system. “Some of America’s wealthiest hospital systems ended up even richer, thanks to federal bailouts” (Washington Post):

As the crisis crushed smaller providers, some of the nation’s richest health systems thrived, reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in surpluses after accepting huge grants for pandemic relief

Last May, Baylor Scott & White Health, the largest nonprofit hospital system in Texas, laid off 1,200 employees and furloughed others as it braced for the then-novel coronavirus to spread. The cancellation of lucrative elective procedures as the hospital pivoted to treat a new and less profitable infectious disease presaged financial distress, if not ruin. The federal government rushed $454 million in relief funds to help shore up its operations.

But Baylor not only weathered the crisis, it thrived. By the end of 2020, Baylor had accumulated an $815 million surplus, $20 million more than it had in 2019, creating a 7.5 percent operating margin that would be higher than most hospitals’ profits in the flushest of eras, a KHN examination of financial statements shows.

Like Baylor, some of the nation’s richest hospitals and health systems recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in surpluses after accepting a substantial share of the federal health-care bailout grants, their records show. Those included the Mayo Clinic, Pittsburgh’s UPMC and NYU Langone Health. But poorer hospitals — many serving rural and minority populations — got a tinier slice of the pie and limped through the year with deficits, downgrades of their bond ratings and bleak fiscal futures.

Wealthy hospitals also benefited because HHS used a broad definition of lost revenue. If a hospital earned less than in the year before, or simply less revenue than it had budgeted for, it could chalk up that difference to the pandemic and apply the relief funds to it.

When government gets bigger, only the big can thrive? If so, that’s a good argument for buying the S&P 500. If Congress adopts all of Presidents Biden and Harris’s proposals, government is on track to consume more than 50 percent of GDP. A big publicly traded company is going to be able to tap into the new veins of taxpayer gold much more effectively than a small business. Even if the U.S. economy stagnates, the big companies can thrive as they get a larger share of the fixed or shrinking pie.

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Maskachusetts: #Science says your backyard BBQ is illegal, but cram 150 people into a tent is okay if someone pays

by philg

An event planner whom we know says that she’s been super busy late. “People had planned backyard weddings, but they’re illegal so they’re going to pay to hold them here.” Her venue is a McMansion-sized house and a big tent with sides that come down during inclement weather. “I can have up to 150 people in the tent. It doesn’t make sense to me since a lot of these people have yards that are huge, but it is good for business.”

From the Maskachusetts State of Emergency page, which links to an appendix to Order #63:

Related:

  • Marie Antoinette of Covid: “Why is it a maximum of 10 people,” our hostess wondered, “regardless of the size of the house? Shouldn’t it be adjusted for square footage?”
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Coronascientists are the modern Aristotles?

by philg

Since the 17th century (see Francis Bacon), people who call themselves “scientists” have been using the scientific method:

  1. Make an observation.
  2. Ask a question.
  3. Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation.
  4. Make a prediction based on the hypothesis.
  5. Test the prediction.
  6. Iterate: use the results to make new hypotheses or predictions.

As previously documented here in this weblog, the “scientists” on whose advice politicians have ordered lockdowns, masks, etc. have consistently failed at Step 4 (making predictions). This failure, though, has been mostly invisible to the public due to the lack of media interest in going back a few weeks or months and comparing prediction to reality. In the rare cases when a false prediction, e.g., that the Czech Republic would have a low death rate due to masks and shutdown (in fact, the country ended up at #1 in the Covid death rate Olympics), is revisited it will be a “scientist” explaining how someone did something during the intervening period and that this action (or inaction) explains the current situation.

Is it Science when you can’t make accurate predictions, but you can tell a convincing tale? Yes! We just have to go back to 350 B.C. and Aristotelian physics. A lifted rock falls toward the earth because it is seeking its natural level. Air bubbles rise because the air seeks its natural place around the earth.

For concreteness (and remember that concrete seeks its natural level underneath highways!), let’s look at the official newspaper of those who #FollowScience. In “‘Life Has to Go On’: How Sweden Has Faced the Virus Without a Lockdown” (New York Times, April 28, 2020), the obvious comparison countries to Sweden were Ireland, Britain, and France. Once additional data are received, and it turns out Britain and France have higher COVID-19-tagged death rates than Sweden while Finland, Norway, and Denmark are outliers, the same scientifically minded folks will assert that Finland, Norway, and Denmark are the only sensible countries to which to compare Sweden and that it would be absurd to use France or Britain as a comparison. We did the same thing domestically. In March 2020, the experts predicted that locked-down Massachusetts would end up with a far lower death rate than Florida (and we should have, since only 14 percent of our population is over 65, compared to 20 percent in Florida). Now that data are available and Florida has suffered only 62 percent of the MA death rate, it is plain to scientists that comparing MA to FL would be nonsensical.

(The article has a funny-in-retrospect section:

From the first signs of the pandemic, the Swedish Public Health Authority decided that a lockdown would be pointless. “Once you get into a lockdown, it’s difficult to get out of it,” the country’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said. “How do you reopen? When?”

California teachers’ union answer: never! To the Swedes who say “Life Has to Go On,” the majority of Americans say, resoundingly, “No, it does not!”)

A more recent example… “Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing” (December 3, 2020, Atlantic, owned by someone who got rich by marrying Steve Jobs and now advocates for unlimited migration into parts of the U.S. other than her own Palo Alto neighborhood):

The story of the coronavirus in the state is one of government inaction in the name of freedom and personal responsibility.

“In a lot of ways, Iowa is serving as the control group of what not to do,” Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, told me. Although cases dropped in late November—a possible result of a warm spell in Iowa—Perencevich and other public-health experts predict that the state’s lax political leadership will result in a “super peak” over the holidays, and thousands of preventable deaths in the weeks to come. “We know the storm’s coming,” Perencevich said. “You can see it on the horizon.”

Experts expect to see a spike in COVID-19 cases in the state roughly one week from now [December 10], two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday. That spike will likely precede a surge in hospitalizations and, eventually, a wave of new deaths—maybe as many as 80 a day, Perencevich, the infectious-disease doctor, estimates. Add Christmas and New Year’s to the mix, and Iowans can expect to see nothing less than a tsunami, Perencevich says.

What actually did happen? From the NYT:

Cases peaked on November 13. Given that “cases” are subject to much human whim, e.g., whether people are fed into PCR machines or not, let’s look at deaths:

What happened to the predicted “tsunami” of death after Christmas and New Year’s gatherings? Deaths peaked on December 15. a month after the “case” peak and, thus far, have failed to reach that level again.

Readers: What do you think? If Aristotle can be a great “scientist” despite an inability to predict projectile trajectories or planetary orbits, is it also reasonable to call the coronascientists great despite their inability to predict the likely impact of coronavirus?

Related:

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How many people will die from having sat around the house for a year?

by philg

What is the most sensible scientifically informed response to a virus that attacks the obese and unfit? Sit at home next to the fridge for a year. Could this kill us? “Inactivity Drives 1 in 14 Deaths Globally, New Data Suggest” (Medscape, March 31):

The high cost of a sedentary lifestyle just became a bit more evident ― a new global study shows that inactivity drives up to 8% of noncommunicable diseases and mortality.

Physical inactivity, defined as engaging in less than 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity per week, is estimated to have caused 7.2% (95% CI, 5.4 – 9.0) of all-cause deaths and 7.6% (95% CI, 6.1 – 9.3) of cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths, according to investigators led by Peter T. Katzmarzyk, PhD, associate executive director for population and public health sciences, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Note that the study was done using 2016 data. See “Physical inactivity and non-communicable disease burden in low-income, middle-income and high-income countries” (BMJ)

What about the expectations that Americans would die from the disruption in non-Covid health care ordered by governors? “The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19” (NEJM, June 2020) had anecdotes, but no numbers. “Surge in Advanced Cancers Follows COVID-19 Into 2021” (MedPage Today, March 31, 2021) offers some survey data:

Two-thirds of radiation oncologists said new patients more often have advanced-stage disease at their initial clinic visit as compared with prior years. Consistent with data from multiple other sources, three-fourths of respondents said patients have skipped routine cancer screening, and two-thirds said COVID has interrupted treatment for existing patients.

“What we have learned one year into the COVID-19 pandemic is that radiation oncologists continue to see the harmful effects of the pandemic on our patients,” said Thomas J. Eichler, MD, chair of ASTRO’s board of directors, during a webinar to discuss the survey findings. “The data are clear that people with cancer are facing additional burdens in these difficult times.”

(bonus points to this doc for including the phrase “in these times”)

The same publication reminds us that feeling safe is not just about Covid-19. The director of abortion services at a clinic in Bangor, Maine writes “It’s Time for You to Be More Inclusive — Yes, You.”:

Small steps to support transgender patients go a long way in their healthcare

I recently saw a new patient seeking help addressing substance abuse issues. It was our first time meeting, so when I entered the exam room, I introduced myself with my name and my pronouns, as I always do. Before I even offered any advice or asked a question, the patient’s face lit up with a smile. She explained that she was a transgender woman, and hearing me introduce myself with my pronouns was a huge relief, because it showed her that I would treat her with respect.

She quickly opened up to me, describing how she was grappling with a host of challenges and stresses that were made even worse because other people in her life — including other doctors — didn’t understand, didn’t respect, or outright rejected her identity.

Something as simple as including your pronouns when you introduce yourself can indicate that you are an ally and contribute to a sense of safety and inclusion.

I say that I provide abortions, prenatal care, birth control or other resources to pregnant people, not just pregnant women, because all people deserve the right to make their own decisions about if, when, or how they want to have children, without facing judgement.

Separately, if there is a person on this planet who can get through a winter in Bangor, Maine without drinking heavily, consuming drugs, and considering a gender change, I would love to meet him/her/zir/them.

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We now know the price of freedom: $0

by philg

Continuing the Passover-Freedom theme… what is the actual price tag that Americans put on freedom? “The Curious Case of Florida’s Pandemic Response” (Atlantic) suggests that the value is $0.

To the extent that winning a pandemic is possible, Florida seemed to be winning the pandemic.

(the author does not consider the possibility that Floridians did not enter the COVID Olympics)

Governor Ron DeSantis bragged that Florida drew a straight flush of pandemic outcomes: “open schools, comparatively low unemployment, and per capita COVID mortality below the national average.”

But the closer I looked, the more holes I found in the simple pro-Florida narrative.

Yes, Florida is seeing falling COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. But so is just about everywhere else. And its overall pandemic performance is just about typical.

As far as I can tell, though, it didn’t. At 4.8 percent, its unemployment rate is 18th in the country, and not meaningfully different from that of the median states, South Carolina and Virginia, at 5.3 percent. Real-time data tracking state spending and employment show that Florida is doing, again, no better than average. Compared with January 2020, its consumer spending is down 1 percent, which is right in line with the national average. Its small-business revenue is down about 30 percent—again, almost exactly the national average. These statistics may be missing something. But the national narrative of an exceptionally white-hot Florida economy doesn’t match the statistical record of its performance.

What this nation desperately needs is low-skill immigration so that we have lots more people to house:

Since 2012, Miami home prices have increased by 94 percent, nearly the exact same as those in Los Angeles in that time. Prices are soaring as inventory melts away; Florida’s active listings fell by 50 percent last year, and it’s not doing enough to keep up with demand.

A rare moment of checking to see whether coronascience has any predictive value:

In 2020, smart media figures and scientists predicted that COVID-19 would especially ravage Florida, given its open economy and elderly population. They were wrong. Why? Did Florida just get lucky? Is this mostly about the salutary benefits of the outdoors, or the coronavirus’s sensitivity to heat and humidity? Do strict lockdowns simply fail the cost-benefit analysis? The answer to all three questions may be yes.

What’s most interesting to me is that the author implicitly values the freedoms to walk out of one’s door, walk outside without a mask, meet friends at a restaurant, host a party at one’s house, etc. at $0. If two people, one confined to his/her/zir/their home by a governor’s executive order and one free to send children to school, go to work, play a sport, socialize, have the same amount of money they are equally well off. So it makes sense to look at the statistics gathered by economists and pronounce a state (or a society) a success or failure based on those statistics. (We also see this applied to Sweden; people will look at a list of countries ranked by COVID-19-tagged deaths per capita and note Sweden’s position without pointing out that it avoided the lockdowns, masquerades, etc.)

From Wellington, Florida… (Why does the realtor rank “Pool” above “Hangar”?!?!)

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Both non-white residents of Vermont can now get a COVID vaccine

by philg

From the Vermont Department of Public Health:

If you or anyone in your household identifies as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC), including anyone with Abenaki or other First Nations heritage, all household members who are 16 years or older can sign up to get a vaccine.

A little more detail on this government program …

Related:

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Why can’t battery-electric vehicles win the USPS contract?

by philg

Only 10 percent of the USPS’s new delivery vehicles will be election (Green Car Reports):

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy confirmed to lawmakers Wednesday that electric versions of the trucks will make up only 10% of the next-generation fleet and claimed that a fully electric contract would have cost up to $4 billion more for the whole contract.

They won’t even be delivered until 2023. Given the generally short routes, slow speeds, and guaranteed overnight idle time for recharging, how is it possible that electric can’t be more cost-effective than gasoline-powered?

See also “Oshkosh’s NGDV Mail Van Looks Incredibly Dorky for a Reason” (Automobile):

If electric isn’t the smart choice for USPS local delivery, how could it ever be the smart choice for a family that wants to take some evening/nighttime trips, some intercity trips, etc.?

Loosely related:

  • a comment on a Tesla article: Every time I ask a Tesla owner to list the tech that makes some kind of difference they can’t come up with anything meaningful. What is it? Dog mode? Cheetah mode? Flush-mount door handles? A big tablet stuck to the dash looking like a high school shop project?

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How was the immigration of Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa supposed to benefit an average Coloradan?

by philg

According to Wikipedia, Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa immigrated to the U.S. in 2002, complained that non-Muslims were unreasonably subject to “Islamophobia”, and killed 10 of his fellow Americans in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket in 2021.

Why did it make sense to admit Mr. Al-Issa as an immigrant in 2002? Housing in Colorado already cost more than Coloradans could afford: “Denver originally adopted an Inclusionary Housing Ordinance (IHO) in 2002, requiring for-sale developers building more than 30 units to set aside 10% as affordable to moderate-income households” (denvergov.org). Mr. Al-Issa would require 13 years of K-12 school, nominally costing taxpayers roughly $130,000, but the headline “per-pupil spending” numbers don’t include capital costs, e.g., for school construction. Arvada, Colorado, where Mr. Al-Issa lived, was considered to have “overcrowded” schools and therefore taxpayers also had to work extra hours to pay for new school buildings. Taxpayers without children would have had to pay for various tax credits and other government subsidies that are provided to non-welfare parents in the U.S. So let’s say that the expected cost would have been at least $250,000 by the time Mr. Al-Issa reached age 18.

At this point, would we have expected Mr. Al-Issa to earn more than a median income? Presumably that is the best assumption about someone for whom minimal information is available. We can expect the average person to be average. But already in 2002 the average (median earner) person in Colorado couldn’t afford the basics of life (housing, health insurance, etc.) without a government-run program of assistance, such as the above-mentioned affordable housing scheme.

For a working class taxpayer, wouldn’t Mr. Al-Issa’s presence in the U.S. have led to higher rents (more competition for scarce housing), worse traffic (if Mr. Al-Issa had gotten a job and commuted to work), and higher taxes (to pay for the subsidies that a median earner would require).

Maybe Mr. Al-Issa’s immigration could benefit the Colorado elites, as pointed out by Harvard professor George Borjas. A Colorado owner of apartment buildings or real estate could benefit from a larger population generating demand for housing. An upper-income Coloradan could benefit from the availability of labor at lower prices due to Mr. Al-Issa offering his services, e.g., as an Uber driver. A Colorado government worker, e.g., teacher, police officer, prison official, firefighter, or bureaucrat, could benefit from a larger population and resulting increased hiring by the government, thus generating opportunities for promotion.

But how did the elites sell so many non-elites on this kind of immigration? (55 percent of Coloradans voted for Joe Biden and therefore additional low-skill immigration)

(Separately, what will taxpayers spend to prosecute and imprison Mr. Al-Issa? Colorado has no death penalty. Mr. Al-Issa could easily live to 100, so that’s 79 years of incarceration, state-funded prison health care, etc.)

Readers: If Mr. Al-Issa hadn’t committed 10 murders, but instead had turned out to be a median wage earner, how would that have made the other median wage earners in Colorado better off?

(At first glance the above seems like a stupid question. The best expectation for a native-born baby is that he/she/ze/they will become a median earner. We don’t say that we’re worse off when a baby is born within our own family, right? The difference is that parents experience a lot of joy from having their own children in the house (except for, at worst, 95 percent of the time!). We value our children even if they never earn a dime, which would offset to some extent the loss to other taxpayers from having to support our children in means-tested housing, on means-tested health insurance, and shopping for food via EBT/SNAP.)

From a 2018 trip to Colorado, where stores began selling marijuana in 2014…

Related:

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Short Snowflake?

by philg

Snowflake (SNOW) is valued at $62 billion and had 2020 revenue of $265 million with losses of $348 million (i.e., they lost more than 100 percent of revenue!). The company was at one time worth more than IBM (now at $120 billion).

How can a startup data warehousing company be worth a substantial fraction of Oracle’s $200 billion market cap? Oracle’s 2020 revenue (admittedly flat compared to 2019) was $39 billion with $10 billion in profit. Data warehousing is a small fraction of Oracle’s business; the company competes with SAP in the ERP market and sells its core RDBMS for transaction processing. Data warehousing is sometimes useful, but if a company’s Oracle systems were shut down the company wouldn’t be able to take orders, manufacture widgets, pay employees, pay vendors, etc. The actual operation of a business (which is what Oracle supports) has to be worth way more than sifting through data to learn that customers buy more alcohol after they’ve been locked down by state governors (what you can learn in a data warehouse).

Snowflake says that they’re doing something exciting layered on top of Amazon Web Services, but what if a lot of their customers are motivated by the fact that Snowflake is selling services to them at a loss? If Snowflake buys storage and computer from Amazon, then marks it down by 30 percent, plainly it is better to buy from Snowflake until and unless the party with investors’ money ends.

This guy liked Snowflake in 2018, but notes that it competes with a native Amazon offering: Redshift. The Gartner folks picked traditional data warehousing leader Teradata as superior to Snowflake in four out of four use cases. This mid-2020 comparison shows that AWS Redshift has substantially more customers, but Snowflake is growing rapidly:

The author does not come out strongly in favor of Brand A, G, or S:

Ultimately, in the world of cloud-based data warehouses, Redshift, BigQuery and Snowflake are similar in that they provide the scale and cost savings of a cloud solution. The main difference you will likely want to consider is the way that the services are billed, especially in terms of how this billing style will work out with your style of workflow. If you have very large data, but a spiky workload (i.e. you’re running lots of queries occasionally, with high idle time), BigQuery will probably be cheaper and easier for you. If you have a steadier, more continuous usage pattern when it comes to queries and the data you’re working with, it may be more cost-effective to go with Snowflake, since you’ll be able to cram more queries into the hours you’re paying for. Or if you have system engineers to tune the infrastructure according to your needs Redshift might just give you the flexibility to do so.

If “the main difference … is the way that the services are billed,” how can Snowflake be worth $60+ billion? Amazon and/or Google could simply change the way that they bill their services.

Readers: What am I missing? I hate to think that markets are wrong, but I can’t figure out how SNOW is worth $60 billion. In our current bubble, the average P/E ratio for the S&P 500 is 40 (15 is normal and Oracle is only at 17 right now). So SNOW would need $1.5 billion in annual profit to justify its current market cap. If the company settles in at Oracle’s fabulous 25 percent profitability, that would correspond to $6 billion in required revenue. Teradata (TDC), after 42 years in this business, has annual revenues of $1.83 billion, with profits of only $129 million. TDC’s market cap is $4.2 billion. If SNOW has not come up with new and better algorithms for analyzing data, how can they be worth more than the database warehousing businesses of IBM, Oracle, Teradata, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google combined?

Happy April Fools’ Day again and remember that nobody is more foolish than an investor in a bull market! (Also remember that nearly all of my investment instincts, including refraining from buying Bitcoin, have proved to be wrong!)

Related:

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Is the Passover story the original false victimhood narrative?

by philg

It’s still Passover and I hope that readers of the Jewish persuasion are enjoying their matzot! Nothing like a week of Matzah to make you appreciate Wonder Bread.

It’s also April Fools’ Day, in which we celebrate the credulous.

What if we combine these celebrations? Wikipedia:

The consensus of modern scholars is that the Bible does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites. There is no indication that the Israelites ever lived in Ancient Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula shows almost no sign of any occupation for the entire 2nd millennium BCE (even Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are said to have spent 38 years, was uninhabited prior to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy). In contrast to the absence of evidence for the Egyptian captivity and wilderness wanderings, there are ample signs of Israel’s evolution within Canaan from native Canaanite roots. …

The biblical narrative contains some details which are authentically Egyptian, but such details are scant, and the story frequently does not reflect Egypt of the Late Bronze Age or even Egypt at all (it is unlikely, for example, that a mother would place a baby in the reeds of the Nile, where it would be in danger from crocodiles). Such elements of the narrative as can be fitted into the 2nd millennium could equally belong to the 1st, consistent with a 1st millennium BCE writer trying to set an old story in Egypt. (The name of Moses, for example, belongs to 1st millennium Egyptian, and would have been Mase in the 2nd).

A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness.

We Jews say that we were enslaved and forced to labor for the Egyptians, whose pay records of voluntary laborers (farmers in the off season) are well-preserved and for whom “slavery” meant subjecting non-Egyptians to a 20 percent income tax. We Jews say that we weren’t permitted to leave Egypt, but there is no record of Ancient Egypt having any controls or restrictions on emigration (as the richest and most advanced civilization in the region, why would substantial numbers of people have wanted to leave it?).

When proffering a tale of victimhood, details add credibility. Example from a Haggadah:

This Pharaoh made the Israelites slaves. He forced them to do hard labor, building cities with bricks made from clay and straw. The people knew neither peace nor rest, only misery and pain. The cruelest decree of all was Pharaoh’s order that every baby boy born to an Israelite woman be drowned in the River Nile.

In contemporary western nations, where the most valuable coin is victimhood, should Jews be credited with having developed the first false victimhood narrative?

And what about a contemporary victimhood narrative that is fit for April Fools’ Day? On a collective basis, maybe immigrants to the U.S. could get the prize. From “Immigrants May Be Fed False Stories to Bolster Asylum Pleas” (New York Times, 2011):

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s accuser said in her 2004 asylum bid that she was gang-raped, and that soldiers destroyed her home, beating her and her husband, who she said died in jail. She recently admitted to prosecutors that she had been lying. Her lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, said she was desperate to leave Guinea, and had been encouraged to exaggerate her claims. She told Manhattan prosecutors that a man had given her a recording of the asylum story to memorize.

Whether here legally or illegally, immigrants can apply for asylum within one year of arriving. To qualify, they must show a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group — which could cover gays or abused women.

Immigration courts across the country granted 51 percent of asylum claims last year, government statistics show. Such courts in New York City, which heard more cases than in any other city, approved 76 percent, among the highest rate in the nation.

How about in the individual category? For fans of the TV show The Good Place, the actor Jameela Jamil should be a candidate. Insects are three of the ten plagues in Exodus: lice, flies, and locusts; from Wikipedia:

In interviews, Jamil has mentioned several bee attacks in her life, including being hit by a car at age 17 when running away from a bee. In 2015, Jameela claimed that while she was interviewing musician Mark Ronson in the Hollywood Hills, the ‘biggest swarm of killer bees’ she had ever seen made them retreat. Ronson contradicted Jamil’s version of events, describing ‘one or two individual bees’ and walking ‘slowly inside’ in response. Jamil related that while filming the first season of The Good Place in 2016, she was chased by a dark swarm of bees and again got hit by a car. In 2019, Jamil states she ran away from bees while crossing the road to the UN headquarters to give a speech.

(see the “bee on my arm” at about 1:15 into the “Solar Panel Guy” recording at jollyrogertelephone.com)

Exodus talks about boils. Jamil:

In 2015, Jamil mentioned that she left the BBC Radio 1 Official Chart Show because of a breast cancer scare in 2014, and had lumpectomies on both breasts, in which she says she lost a ‘large chunk’ of breast tissue. However, in the 3 October 2019 Hardtalk interview, she concurs with the interviewer that she had a breast cancer scare ‘in 2016’, and that this precipitated an immediate move to Los Angeles after ‘a week’ waiting for test results that showed it to be a single ‘benign lump’.[105] Separately in a segment recorded in 2016 for Fashion Targets Breast Cancer, she instead describes having ‘recently’ experienced ‘a lump in her breast that showed signs of precancerous cells’. Also in October 2019 in the same month as the HardTalk interview but not in the interview itself, she stated she suffered from actual cancer twice, having cervical cancer in 2016 and 2019.

In 2020, a social media user accused Jamil of having Munchausen syndrome and falsifying or exaggerating specific public claims of health issues. For instance, Jamil claimed to have had a peanut allergy at birth and had recently posted an image of a peanut snack, ….

What if you search for “children’s haggadah”? One of the first results is from JewishBoston. The document fails to disclose that the Ancient Egyptians who purportedly oppressed the Jews are not the same people (except for a few Copts who have survived) as the people who live in Egypt today (i.e., even if we believe the story we should not hold a grudge against a modern person who says “I am Egyptian.”). It also fails to disclose that scholars doubt the historicity of the tale and that the Ancient Egyptians may not have been bad people. So the false victimhood narrative lives on!

(Separately, this Haggadah devotes roughly 1/10th of a page to telling us that “Nearly 50 Million Americans suffer the oppression of hunger.” So… our neighbors are starving. By contrast, “feminism and women’s rights … gay and lesbian Jews … spit out the seeds in their orange segment to reject homophobia and hatred” is a full page story:

More about the Good Orange Woman from the Jewish Women’s Archive.)

Whether or not you’ve Jewish… Happy April Fools’ Day!

Related, from the Labor Seder put on by a temple in Falls Church, Virginia (median household income $125,000 per year):

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