Monthly Archives: July 2020

Getting away from our ongoing catastrophes, a couple of weeks ago Ward Farnsworth, who has written a book on convincing writing, published a come-on, as it used to be called, on The Volokh Conspiracy:

In any event: advisers on English style have long said that it’s best to use Saxon words when you can, because those words are most clear and forceful. If you need a single rule, that’s as good as any. But Lincoln didn’t create his great effects by sticking to one kind of word or another. He created them by skillfully mixing the two kinds of words, and doing the same with other aspects of his language.

For example, [President Abraham] Lincoln especially liked to start a sentence with Latinate words and then end with a Saxon finish.  Look at this famous passage from his “House Divided” speech in 1858:

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

The first half of the sentence has lots of Latinate words: opponents, slavery, arrest, course, ultimate, extinction, advocates. Then it ends with 14 words of one syllable in a row, all of them Saxon except “States” (which might as well be). He expresses the hope in large, uplifting words, and the threat in words that are short and simple. The first round sets up the second.

So is Farnsworth suggesting that English is a more expressive language precisely because it’s a hybrid? I’m not sure I’d buy into that without a convincing underlying theory. Just guessing, but I suppose we could postulate that the longer words force the brain to work harder to absorb the point of the first half, while the shorter, sharper ending words accelerates and emphasizes the need for action by not distracting the brain with long words which take longer to process – especially if they’re unfamiliar.

Unfortunately for me, I think the communication context of Lincoln’s time is not much like our current context. I’ve always found reading the Gettysburg a bit baffling, although it’s really just a matter of taking it a bit slow and envisioning, where necessary, what he’s trying to say.

For my part, I prefer uncommon sentence construction and unfamiliar words in order to make the reader slow down and think, at least when I’m trying to write something that I think will require some thought. I’ll have to remember Farnsworth’s recommendations next time I write something.

I wasn’t aware of this observation when I wrote about the Alabama primary earlier today:

Turnout for the Alabama GOP Senate runoff  was abysmal, and one Republican strategist told the New York Times you can’t just blame it on the coronavirus.

Said Angi Stalnaker: “The story here is that Trump cannot turn out votes in the reddest state in the country. That should worry him.” [Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire]

This changes the predictive calculus slightly, making it more fuzzy because we don’t know why the Republican Party voters were unenthusiastic. Was it concerns about Covid-19 and polling locations? Are they already sick of Trump? Just not interested in a primary runoff?

Or were both victor Tuberville and loser Sessions simply that much of a turnoff?

In any case, I’ll upgrade incumbent Senator Jones’ (D-AL) chances slightly. He still has a hill to climb, but the Republicans, by failing to field a respectable candidate, may fumble away their easiest pickup opportunity this November.

This, to be honest, is not unexpected, at least in retrospect. As the more moderate, but more competent, people are chased out of the party by the shrieking RINOers, the median member’s characteristics moves farther and farther rightward, and ideology and competency does have a loose correlation. While there have certainly been highly competent ideologues on both sides of the spectrum, my observation is that the competent people also tend to look at the world with more encompassing vision, and realize that ideology is sometimes a block around the ankle rather than a balloon ride over the mountains.

And those who gained traction via the RINO tactic didn’t have much more to offer, to be honest. It’s not an intellectually impressive approach to moving up the political ladder; one can only say that it has worked, so far.

Yesterday’s rambling Rose Garden rant is here, and CNN’s fact check is here. Just in case you want to check out one of Trump’s speeches. It incorporates a lot of his favorites, such as “Pelosi dancing in Chinatown”. I gave up when it got to the Q&A.

It’s quite the drone-fest, isn’t it? It’s his signature style – if you say everything in the same pitch, then it becomes harder to recognize a lie just by the quaver in the voice or the body language. He’s built some fake reasoning to support some of his contentions, but others he just flings out there.

It’s not hard to see why some people get taken in by it. It’s sneaky, mixing patriotic language with lies, mischaracterizations, and a short-sighted focus on money (see his bit on the Paris Climate Accords).

If you haven’t done it, it’s an interesting experience.

They’re just not quitting this season, posing in the sun like a rebellious nudist.

Maybe those Asian beetles could be done away with, please?

One of the great slug-fests:

I’ve been wondering about how effective reparations might be structured, and it appears that a city in North Carolina has decided to charge ahead and do what it can:

In an extraordinary move, the Asheville City Council has apologized for the North Carolina city’s historic role in slavery, discrimination and denial of basic liberties to Black residents and voted to provide reparations to them and their descendants.

The 7-0 vote came the night of July 14. …

The unanimously passed resolution does not mandate direct payments. Instead it will make investments in areas where Black residents face disparities.

“The resulting budgetary and programmatic priorities may include but not be limited to increasing minority home ownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice,” the resolution reads. [USA Today]

I think reparations will have to come from both the highest levels and the lowest levels, and Asheville is leading the way in the latter category. Why the lowest? Because some areas have ongoing dissimilar outcomes, racially speaking, that must addressed locally. For example, I hope the issue of property taxes reparations is assessed – but that can only be properly performed locally, because the corrections may have differing sources.

I’ll be fascinated to see how we continue to treat this most important of issues – and who sets up a mighty howl when they begin to realize that taxes must go up, not only to cover the costs of making it through the pandemic, but for these reparations for the very unjust way the black community has been treated in the United States.

I’ve lived in a safe Democratic district these days, and have only once seen a Republican challenger come through to chat. I’m hoping to see one this year, and when they say they’re for lower taxes, I’ll just say, “Why?”

It appears the former Senator and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) is finished with politics, having lost his primary battle with former football coach Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for the right to contest with the current Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) for his old Senate seat – decisively:

A 20+% point loss doesn’t bode well for any future for Sessions. He’s earned himself the reputation of a big failure along with that of being a lickspittle, but then he was running in a state which is still, reputedly, strongly pro-Trump.

And that will be the key for Tuberville. Between now and November will Alabama continue to be pro-Trump? That’s how this race will run, because Tuberville, beyond his frantic clutching of Trump, literally has nothing else in the tank. He’s a successful football coach, a failed hedge fund manager, and that’s it.

He’s the embodiment of the Trump / Ryan amateur-hour debacle to which we’ve been a witness: not only is he for what Trump is for, but he loves him, too. And he dares not criticize Trump, because, frankly, Tuberville has no relevant accomplishments that would soften Trump’s outrage at being criticized.

Can sitting Senator Jones (D-AL) beat that? Ask a few Alabamans. I’m still a little appalled, if unsurprised, that Tuberville won. Frankly, the Alabama GOP, by serving up a far-right denizen of the swamp and a football coach with no relevant qualifications as their primary candidates, for one of the most important elected positions in the nation, marks them as unserious and incompetent.

Here’s something that reminds me of Professor Turchin’s Secular Cycles, as Jennifer Rubin writes in WaPo:

Joe Biden’s campaign puts together a near-genius ad for Texas:

This is important for a couple of reasons:

1. Trump isn’t mentioned. By not doing so, straight-up politics is pushed out of the limelight. This is an appeal to the emotions that the campaign thinks many people are feeling as hospitals fill up and businesses close down, and it focuses people on the candidate who is offering leadership, and takes the focus off the candidate who’s just putzing around in the background and randomly thumping his chest. This is a video about compassion and competency.
2. By not focusing on Trump, it gives the viewers the opportunity to think about other Texas Republicans, such as their local representative, who is up for reelection in November, or Senator Cornyn (R), also up for reelection, who inserted his foot in his mouth yesterday concerning children catching Covid-19, or even their Governor Abbot and Lt. Governor Patrick, both Republicans, but they are not up for reelection until 2022. Once again, Biden offers compassion and competency; all the Republicans have urged a quick return to opening the economy, a course of action that has put a lot of people in the hospital, and Texas, a big state that should probably be broken up for Covid-19 measurement purposes, in the top ten for daily new cases of Covid-19 per capita.
3. Biden gets to use his trademark reputation for bringing people together. We all know that sometimes he’s worked with unsavory sorts, but his ability to work with any reasonable person is gaining appeal in a country that’s long been tearing apart along partisan lines.
4. Finally, he may have forty years in government service, and, sure, maybe the partisan trolls will try to make him out to be a denizen of the swamp – but forty years of service is forty years of experience, and the drooping polls for Republicans across the boards suggest Americans have decided to dump their long-time date with freaking amateurs and try out experience and professionalism for a chance. Former Speaker Ryan (R-WI) once expressed confidence that experts weren’t necessary to run a country, but I think independents and moderate conservatives have run out of patience with that bit of right-fringe nonsense. This ad reminds us of Biden’s length of service, and, without mentioning Trump once, offers that experience. He doesn’t engage in magical thinking, unlike Trump. He’s told us that things will be tough. But he’s a realist, and maybe Americans have had enough.
5. This will force the Republicans to defend a State they may have regarded as secure. From the Texas Tribune:
   

   There have been a series of polls in recent weeks finding a tight contest between Biden and President Donald Trump in historically red Texas.

   One poll released Sunday found Biden leading Trump by 5 percentage points among likely voters, while another survey that came out the same day gave Trump a 1-point lead among likely voters, well within the margin of error.

   That has to be shocking for Texas Republicans.

Look for more effective ads from Biden’s campaign. Someone sure did this one right.

Fuliginous:

Pertaining to or resembling soot in such features as colour, texture or taste; sooty, dusky. [from 16th c.] [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Tucker Carlson whitewashes the racism of his show and his former top writer,” Erik Wemple, WaPo:

In a network of ideologues, Carlson occupies a particularly fuliginous fringe. Even the network’s leaders in Saturday’s note to colleagues characterized Neff’s postings as “deeply offensive racist, sexist and homophobic.” On the other hand, Carlson apparently couldn’t even bring himself to echo those same denunciations. That’s because Carlson has spent his entire career as a Fox News prime-time host — nearly four years — skewering those who call out President Trump for being, well, racist, sexist and other offensive things. Those spotters of hatred are a prime target for Carlson, a lure for viewers. There was no way that he was going to use his own show to call out racism by its name.

From The Guardian:

It’s no secret that nature can be brutal and violent, but a new Queensland Museum report on the death of some snake eels reads more like the plot of a horror movie than a scientific paper.

Snake eels are a family of eel species that live most of their lives burrowed in the soft sand on the floor of the ocean.

When eaten alive by predators, they will use their hard pointed tail tip, which is for digging, to burst through the fish’s stomach in a bid to escape digestion.

But unfortunately, this isn’t enough to save them. Unable to burrow through a fish’s hard ribcage, they become trapped and die, their body slowly mummified in the gut cavity of their captor.

It’s said that the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, quit believing in God after observing some of Nature’s more cruel ploys. I have no idea if it’s true, but I hope fish and eels are just as unthinking and unfeeling as they appear to be, because, just like parasitic wasps and their prey tarantulas, this is horrific. If there’s a God, he’s a sadist.

Yesterday I wrote about the statistical artifacts of being a congenital liar, which led to observations concerning how a congenital liar must still have integrity, just not the sort of integrity most of us share.

Lying is a species of corruption. Most of the time it’s unimportant or self-corrects, but when it, along with the other behaviors of corruption, become a determined part, a tool, of someone’s existence, corruption can force that person, a victim of its cruel requirements, into bad decisions. Take, for instance, President Trump and the conservative reactions, prior to and after, the commutation of Roger Stone:

Among those opposed to Trump’s decision to spare his longtime adviser from having to report to prison next week was White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to a person familiar with the situation. Multiple White House officials even advised the president against the commutation, according to a second source. …

Attorney General William Barr discussed Stone’s sentence with Trump and recommended clemency not be offered, according to multiple sources, and other White House officials, including Meadows, also advised the president against the commutation.

Trump was warned of these vulnerabilities, according to one of the people familiar with the discussions, who said the president was told “it was a big mistake.” [NBC News]

The President didn’t get the reaction he wanted from the conservative media, according to WaPo. So why did President Trump charge ahead? Stone has admitted – I won’t even say All but admitted – that he has some very important information that Trump didn’t want released, so he held a sword over Trump’s head. Trump had good reason to issue the commutation.

But one must keep in mind that corruption is rarely isolated. There are other actors holding important information on Trump, and he knows they’re watching his treatment of Trump. Corruption is a team sport, after all, and those out on the front lines, facing a prison term, will need reassurance that they, too, can be rescued.

Or they’ll drop their load into the FBI’s lap.

That Trump commuted Stone’s sentence is no surprise.

But notice how this just makes Trump even more visibly corrupt. Trump knows this, and thus the ceaseless yammer about how the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that his base wasn’t going to go away because of the commutation – but this is another reason, among literally hundreds, for the independents, who hold his political fate in their hands, to vote against him and his enablers in Congress.

My point, though, is that corruption may seem like a way to game the system to those who consider themselves clever – but Trump is becoming an object lesson in how corruption can force its users into actions they’d rather not take.

What I find horrifically funny was this, also from the same NBC News report:

When asked about why the president would flout the advice of top advisers, one of the sources said the president believed Stone was treated unfairly by prosecutors and that the Russia investigation was an illegitimate “witch hunt.”

Trump’s decision to ignore the advice of those arounds [sic] him was also rooted in the president’s belief that his base would not disapprove of his decision to commute Stone.

Which suggests he’s either lying to his own advisors, or he’s demented. He knows the Mueller investigation was not a witch hunt – or, at least, he should. If he really, truly believes that all of the indictments and observations of obstruction of justice and straight out lying, as documented by Mueller, was not corruption, then once again he’s demented.

It’s really that simple.

It’s well known that all “artificial intelligence” systems are sharply limited in their domain. IBM’s chess playing Deep Blue doesn’t drive a car. But what happens when the domain itself begins a tectonic shift?

I initially felt a little bad at the thought of quoting Erick Erickson, the conservative dude who keeps me on his non-subscriber list to whom he nevertheless sends mail, because it is a mass email, not something I can point at as documented.

But, hell, the guy who once accused all anti-Trumpers as having Trump Derangement Syndrome, which made me giggle madly at the thought of this allegedly devout guy defending an inveterate liar, sexual infidel, cager of children, etc, the guy who had asserted he trusted Governor Kemp (R-GA) in the matters of Covid-19 response, a state now in today’s Top Ten for Covid-19 infections per capita, and was able to somehow ignore this …

I had people show up at my house to threaten my family and witnessed an organized effort to have me kicked off the radio. In fact, some of the very people most outraged about cancel culture right now were trying to cancel me because they just hated I wouldn’t hump Donald Trump’s leg with them and still won’t.

And now, only now, has he figured out that maybe, just maybe, those Republicans, whose supporters tracked him down for purposes of intimidation, who he judged to be better qualified for election than the hated Democrats, really aren’t all that … admirable:

The President of the United States was just fine in good times and got a lot accomplished, in spite of himself, but a person’s character is revealed in crisis and we should not be surprised that the man is revealed in crisis to be unfit for leadership during a crisis. Lest you think otherwise, the rest of the world is starting to go back to normal and the virus is running rampant here.

The very people that told us not to wear masks in February and March and then ridiculed Joe Biden for wearing a mask now have an erection for a President wearing a mask as if his own Surgeon General and other leaders were not telling us otherwise and he himself was treating mask-wearing as a sign of weakness.

Yes please, let me repeat this — THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TOLD US NOT TO WEAR MASKS BECAUSE IT WOULD DO US NO GOOD.

But frankly, my issue is not really with the President. It is with his apologists who have shown themselves to be full of invective without much insight. The people who told us 2016 was a “Flight 93” election have crashed the plane and are now fighting over who to blame. Along the way, they showed themselves to lack the valor and integrity of those aboard the real Flight 93. Go down the rabbit hole of deep insight among that crew and you’ll realize many of these people are all bluster. Their ideas are as completely incompatible with the structure of our republic as the left’s ideas are. Their “nationalist-conservative” hybrid approach can’t work in a democracy when more than half the people hate their standard-bearer and they think they can somehow use the mechanisms of a national bureaucracy to steer a country to “national greatness” but can’t even fight a freaking microscopic virus with any credibility. Drag-queen storytime delenda est my left butt cheek. Good luck with that.

And he’s surprised that the man who was impeached for international blackmail and caught committing civil offenses prior to his election has attracted the worst? That who Trump endorses seems to be chronically, even terminally incompetent, capable of only … humping Trump’s leg?

I’ll be just a moment. I have to sit back and smile. Erickson himself is a victim of his ideological fixation and team politics.

But Erickson has limits. He can only vaguely see the damage being done by the Republicans, from whom he conveniently distances himself. Biden?

Do you know the difference between Joe Biden and a tomato? A tomato is actually a fruit, not a vegetable. The leading luminaries of Reliable Sources on CNN, the gabfests of MSNBC, etc. have spent an inordinate amount of time on the mental fitness of Donald Trump to be President and have totally ignored their preferred candidate is a cadaver with a pulled back face who will be controlled by far-left activists.

The Democrats are too scared to even speak up against the mob right now because they are afraid the mob will turn on them. The mob is absolutely going to turn on them because the Democrats’ entire governing coalition is about ending the Trump Administration. Once it ends, the mob turns on itself like the orcs of Mordor with no hobbits around.

And, yet, his preferred candidate has surrounded himself with incompetent ideologues who are incapable of thinking the world is different from their dreams, people who live in delusions. The test for Biden and his team lies not in being perfect, because they won’t be, but it will be in how they adjust their strategies as they encounter reality. Obama did quite well in that area, and I expect Biden to emulate his old boss.

Trump? He still thinks domestic politics are stuck in the 1950s.

So, that’s my schadenfreude for the next six months.

This poor guy. Ill? Just can’t choke down what he’s been asked to swallow and regurgitate? Finding magical thinking is harder when you try to say “Saint Trump”?

This is @RepGrothman *today* at the Wisconsin Republican convention (which was held in-person) pic.twitter.com/MnsVlJryLE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2020

In any case, this was at the non-virtual Wisconsin Republican Convention. I sincerely hope neither he nor any of his compatriots were ill.

But this is not a good omen, for those of us who believe in omens.

Only one purple clematis has done well this year, sad to say. We’re used to three or even four going crazy. Here’s some close ups.

This is something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, and WaPo dumped it in my lap:

Here we see President Trump’s alleged lies on a time series graph: how many per month. It’s apparent that the average number of lies appears to be increasing, although, since months are not the same size, there’s a bit of vapor involved; weekly would have been better, while daily, which is an option, turns out to be too granular.

Of course, data like this demands an explanation even as it provokes outrage. I speculate there are three possible explanation, non-exclusive. The first is the obvious: the more stress President Trump feels, the more he lies. Thus, the peaks prior to the mid-terms and during the impeachment process.

The second is an effective liar must maintain integrity. That is, if a liar takes an opportunity to lie, now they must continue to tell that lie. While cultists will tolerate being lied to without regard to integrity, independents may take a dim view of losing track of one’s lies.

Finally, a third reason: the network effect. Assertions often have relationships with each other, and a lie is an assertion that just doesn’t happen to be congruent with reality as it’s widely known. A lie can force more lies on other subjects, simply in order to have it all make sense. This is, in fact, the construction of a narrative: a collection of assertions that should contain a story arc, true or false. Where one lie exists, there can easily be more to support the first, and soon they must be repeated – at least for a politician of Trump’s sort.

So it seems unsurprising to see the average slowly rising.

This guy was on Mueller’s team of prosecutors and is reacting to the commutation of Stone’s sentence:

Time to put Roger Stone in the grand jury to find out what he knows about Trump but would not tell. Commutation can’t stop that.

— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) July 11, 2020

Which raises the question: will a President Biden do that? Or will he leave that to his Attorney General? I would advocate for the latter, as the Executive is not the chief law enforcement officer.

But more importantly, much like President Ford, the next President and their AG will be confronted with an undoubtedly criminal (or possibly criminally insane) former President and his cronies, for whom a sizable part of the population still has loyalty, and will be convinced that the Democrats were, to quote a friend, “out to get [them].”

This will be quite a conundrum. Alienate part of the electorate, or decline to prosecute, thereby legitimizing a number of activities (international blackmail, lying to the nation and to Congress, deliberate crippling of the government, abandonment of allies – among others)?

I’ll vote for the latter, but I’ll understand if there’s a certain hesitancy to go beyond cleaning up the messes left behind by the Trump Administration and its minions in Congress. It’s important to send a message that certain behaviors can never be tolerated. Some of those messages are necessarily sent by the voters, and I hope and expect that a number of Republican Senators, perhaps as many as ten, will fall in the upcoming elections.

That would be the healthy thing to do.

But many of these messages can only be sent in criminal courts. Stone had one delivered, but being the morality-free type, it didn’t bother him. But others, it will, as will the spectators who haven’t signed an oath in blood to remain loyal to the bitter end. As this largely older group of people die off, the bitterness go away, too.

Justice isn’t usually easy.

I should have started this subject years ago. Magical thinking refers to thinking that is clearly at odds with reality. The kick-off is this:

The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings of the U.S. coronavirus response.

In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official said Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” The official gave NBC News a list of nearly a dozen past comments by Fauci that the official said had ultimately proven erroneous. [NBC News]

And illustrating the absurdity of the situation is Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT):

Don’t let this feel normal.

It’s nuclear grade bananas to have White House staff sending reporters opposition research on their own top infectious disease doctor in the middle of a worsening pandemic that has already killed 130,000.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) July 12, 2020

Evidently, Fauci’s message is at odds with the desired political message, and since politics always changes reality, it’s time to discredit the expert.

Or, to return to my old prism analogy, the jokers who made this decision have had their prism of politics firmly welded to their face. Reality is merely an annoying gnat to them, right up until their own relatives start dying.

While I have little sympathy with calls for term limits, as I dislike seeing experience being forced out the door, and the term-limited can always get elected to other posts, I can understand the frustration when something as irresponsible as this occurs. It’s just like the Soviets – sacrifice anyone, friend or foe, to keep power.

Keep an eye out for other Soviet tactics.

Exhibit A: Grumpy old man. Did he do it?

Perhaps this is stretching a point, since, as a movie, it’d run about 10 hours, but if you like mysteries, and don’t mind reading captions or you speak Dutch, De 12 van Schouwendam (2019) may be right up your alley. A man shows up in a Dutch village who resembles a teenager who disappeared 25 years ago. Soon villagers are wondering what happened to the teen-aged girl who also disappeared at the same time – and our guy happens to have the girl’s jewelry.

And a bump on his head. He doesn’t know where either came from. In fact, he doesn’t even know who he is.

And then the bodies suddenly start piling up, bringing in a detective from the Dutch version of the FBI.

This is structured to let information leak out very slowly, giving the audience plenty of time to chase down all sorts of dead-ends. Just about every character has something going on in the background which feeds into the plot. And even better?

There’s more than one terrible secret hiding behind closed doors. It’s like one of those terminally dysfunctional English country villages which look so idyllic and are really just centers for murder practice.

And the big reveal is a real hoot and a holler.

If you have the patience for it, Recommended.

A few weeks ago I speculated that the lack of Republican solidarity on SCOTUS in the matters of what we call ‘culture wars’ might not be a matter of ideological inconstance, but that the side taken by the liberals is actually the right side. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, whose proposal for a new constitutional philosophy of interpretation I incidentally critiqued a few weeks ago, disagrees. He prefers a more nuanced interpretation:

What are the principles underlying our unwritten constitution? It is best understood as a sociopolitical order that privileges a particular set of commitments held passionately by educated urban professionals and what Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel have termed “gentry liberals.” Among these, and relevant to the current term, are ensuring a high rate of immigration, encouraged by policies against full enforcement of the law, and protecting sexual expression and liberty, including contraception, abortion and unconstrained expression of sexual preference and gender identity. These beliefs are not spelled out explicitly in law, yet they exert a gravitational force that powerfully influences the justices’ interpretations.

Here are the hollyhocks sharing the picture frame.

If you are a regular reader of the blog, first, thank you! But, second, if you use Facebook to get notifications of new posts – because I put them up manually – you may wish to look into using the RSS Feed to receive email notifications of each post. The link is somewhere on the right.

Why? Because Facebook is becoming a trifle iffy. A few weeks ago I lost access to Facebook for reasons never explained, except they claimed I had breached community standards. I examined their community standards and couldn’t see a breach. Upon appeal and delivery of a picture of myself – I contrived to look appropriately grim – and possibly my phone number, they returned access.

A week ago, on trying to send a link to a post to a friend via FB Messenger, it refused and said I had done that too many times recently, which was just silly – I probably don’t do that more than once a month.

Today, I noted that at least one of my FB posts linking to UMB was odd – it just said go to the link for more information, rather than retrieving a preview of the post.

So I’m wondering about the reliability of FB as a marketing platform, for which I pay nothing, for my blog, for which I receive nothing and pay a fee to Bluehost to host. Such are the needs of psychological venting.

In any case, an RSS feed might be a bit annoying, but at least you’d know when I belched again. And that’ll make your world complete, now won’t it?

A reader responds to my follow up on the American withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO):

And in what way is it spreading around the globe? A few newly hit countries are still seeing rises, but in most of the world, just like the US, it’s done. Look at the current death rates from COVID for any European country, or the US for that matter. There is no US “surge.” We’re doing about half a million tests a day, and based on previous research it’s estimated that about 30% of the US population has already had COVID, so every “new” case is just a report of an old one. And that data is totally useless.

Did I miss something, or did the CDC not stop conflating infection tests with antibody tests? They admitted to that blunder something like a month ago, and I had assumed they fixed it. If they did, then the statement every new case is a report of an old one would seem to me to be false. Infection tests are for cases in which the virus is active in the body; antibody tests are for the antibodies which are generated by the body either during the infection, or after the infection has been resolved. Infections are expected to resolve within, as I understand it, at worst a couple of months; that’s an extreme. Most numbers I see are for positive infection tests, not labeled positive antibody tests.

Based on previous experiences with pandemics, mostly the 1917-1918 influenza, the statement that Covid-19 is done because we’re seeing a decline in cases in many countries is unsupportable. The double spike seen in that outbreak was not a data signal from the pathogen’s interaction with the human population. It was a signal from human psychology and how it interacted with the pathogen. In other words, the second spike came from human behavior. Given that and that our behaviors of today don’t seem to be that different from 100 years ago, a behavior inconsonant with good public health measures could easily reintroduce an incline in those numbers. Say, reopening bars or churches.

When we look at the US numbers, deaths, hospital beads [sic] in use, ICU beds in use, ventilators in use, are all flat or declining.

I put this current map from Global Epidemics to make the point that I think numbers taken at the granularity of the United States are worthless. We’re a nation of states that, by and large, formulate their responses to the pandemic without reference to the other states; attempting to summarize our current status on a national basis may be useful for predictions for unaffected parts of the nation about potential futures, but to suggest that it’s done when hospitals not coincidentally located in the states colored red in the above map are reporting nearing overflow conditions (Florida, Texas) strikes me as meaningless. Questions this sort of map provokes is whether the colors map faithfully to human behaviors, such as staying home in green Vermont while going to bars in red-colored Texas, as well as increasing usage of hospital beds, ICU beds, and deaths due to Covid-19 in the red and orange colored states.

The WHO was absolutely worthless during this event. The inaccurate numbers they reported and based models on, along with the inaccurate statements of everything from transmission methods, incubation periods, and even symptoms sparked inappropriate government responses around the world. We’re better off without them.

I’m baffled by this statement. The WHO is a front-line organization that serves to

The WHO’s broad mandate includes advocating for universal healthcare, monitoring public health risks, coordinating responses to health emergencies, and promoting human health and well being. It provides technical assistance to countries, sets international health standards and guidelines, and collects data on global health issues through the World Health Survey. [Wikipedia]

My bold. Given that such advice can only be given as deductions from information, which, by definition, is in short supply at the beginning of a pandemic, the quality of their recommendations is inevitably going to be worse early than later. They and their nation-partners are busy learning, and, in this case, studying a pathogen which seems to stimulate an unusually large variety of symptoms. Its reactions to medications are, of course, unknown at the beginning, and given the difficulties of designing and implementing medical studies, speedy improvements in advice are unlikely. And then add in the unreliability of those nation-partners’ data in some cases! I’d have difficulty supporting the reader’s conclusion, I’m afraid, especially in the face of the obvious political facets of the President’s announcement.

Finally, the reader remarks …

This is older now, but time has proven the data in it to be completely accurate.

Covid-19: What The Data Tells Us [by Josh Ketter]

Right off the bat, I’m not going to dispute this guy’s data or analysis. I’m a working dude, it’s not my area, and I don’t have time. But frankly I am skeptical of anyone who’s jumping up and down claiming the experts are wrong but he’s right – unless he has an interesting credential or work experience to throw into the mix. This could lead into a post about how non-experts should approach this sort of missive, but I’ll defer that to another day – and maybe I’ve written it already, I don’t recall.

But here’s just a couple of points (I’m having some physical problems with typing, so I’m limiting myself) that bother me.

The topic of immunity. Ketter’s just a dancer. That is, he spends a fair-sized paragraph trying to elide the current truth concerning the length of post-infection immunity, which is We don’t know. We just don’t know if you’re life-long immune to Covid-19 after surviving a bout, or only for 5 years – or only for 5 minutes. This is important because prescribing future human behaviors until a cure or vaccine is developed and distributed must pivot on the value discovered for the reinfection rate over time. There’s no choice or wiggle room. If immunity is non-existent, then we’ve got a problem, because we can’t just keep going to the hospital over and over again – or, for those who are primed to the economic side, missing work over and over. If immunity is 5 years, the problem is a lot less severe. But to suggest that the problem has passed, and that it wasn’t as severe as thought, without a value for the reinfection rate, is flat out nutty. I’ll also note the hidden contradiction in that paragraph: he references cousin coronaviruses to fake up some possible values for the immunity period, without noting that MERS had a case-fatality rate (that is, the ratio of known deaths from MERS to the number of known MERS cases) of .34, or 34%. There’s a really good reason epidemiologists became very worried about Covid-19 when it popped up – it’s bad enough losing 1% of the population for any country, but a 30% hit would cause absolute chaos.

The topic of collateral damage. Again, his coverage of the topic is incomplete. Here’s his visual aid, of which I’m properly envious:

Nowhere does he mention that these values are all affected by our response to the pandemic. Identification of specific problems is only half the battle, the other half is focusing on and tuning our response to the pandemic. For example, if suicide due to unemployment is forecast to be a problem, then cover the income problem for the duration of the emergency might be the initial response, followed by investigating how to support the businesses that provide the jobs until the pandemic has resolved.

The point is that these are not numbers written in stone by Mother Nature; what we do will affect them, so we should be mindful of these forecasts and let them guide our responses. Suggesting the vulnerable should just suck it up and die, and telling people in front line positions that, hey, thanks, and that’s it doesn’t really cut it, now does it?

Stopping now. It’s too nice out and the hands need a rest.