Monthly Archives: August 2021

Getting back to my “daily” entry – stop laughing back there! – of a critique of pictures from a toxic email from a conservative friend – he only passed it on – here’s the next entry:

Unfortunately for the good Senator, the world is full of idiots and – I fall into this category – clumsies.

But it’s the missing context that’s important here, for Senator Kennedy recently opined as to the legislation he’s most proud of … being the 2017 Tax Reform bill that has greatly inflated the Federal deficit. (If I find a link, I’ll update this email. It’s escaping me at the moment.)

He may have attended Oxford in England, but it’s not at all clear he understands what makes for good legislation, or good reasoning.

So this part of the toxic email is dangerous because it promotes dangerous illusions concerning gun control with a cute little slogan.

And in our current spate of murders, enabled by our failure to implement gun control, as well as the deflation of police morale, this is not an acceptable message to be sending.

A week or so ago I pointed out, in relation to the Afghanistan withdrawal, that there’s a rush to judgment going on that’s quite unjustified, and suggested that Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan might actually turn out to be a plus. Steve Benen on Maddowblog, as well as others, is beginning to think this may be true:

[David] Rothkopf’s argument is worth considering in detail, though there was one point of particular interest.

If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame. … Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement.

It’s an important observation that has gone largely overlooked. The incumbent American president had a profoundly difficult call to make and dangerous circumstances in which to make it. But Biden had the courage to make the decision anyway.

Meanwhile, Erick Erickson, who I noted had already gotten into the swamp here, has elected to plunge in as deeply as he can go:

In 1990, after George H. W. Bush broke his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge, House Republicans, guided by Ed Rollins, walked away from President Bush. They criticized him and distanced themselves from him. The ones who stayed with Bush lost. The ones who criticized him survived. A bloodbath is coming in the midterms for the Democrats even without redistricting. The ones who want to save themselves can and should now work with the GOP to hold Biden accountable for his broken promises.

I’m proud to be an American. But I’m ashamed of my government and demand Congress do its job instead of serving as chief apologist for the second branch.

There’s a lot wrong with Erickson’s reasoning, but propagandists’ reasoning does not have to be correct, it just has to appeal to the audience. But, just for fun: The Republican adherence to the religious tenet that there’s no such thing as a good tax has proven to be a false view of reality; additionally, it cost the Republicans the White House for eight years, and led to the prominence of Newt Gingrich, who has turned out to be a canker sore on the neck of the Republicans.

And only now he wants Congress to do its job. Before, it was Trump Derangement Syndrome this and that. He couldn’t shrug off the January 6th Insurrection, but give him time: he may yet come around to the viewpoint that those under arrest are, bizarrely, political prisoners rather than a pack of five-year olds petulantly demanding an election be reversed … because. Just because.

If post-analysis of the withdrawal doesn’t reveal any gaping mistakes, it’ll be no skin off Erickson’s nose, because he’ll just ignore it or denounce it as more evidence of the left’s degradation. But it may rescue the Democrats from disaster in 2022.

databob on Daily Kos is pissed off at the government of Florida:

As has been explained in other diaries, Florida has been engaging in a horribly duplicative duplicitous practice of reporting Covid-19 deaths based on date of death, not date of report. This has led to the kind of totally misleading chart such as the one today on the CDC Covid tracking site [omitted.] …

So the 6 deaths reported on 8/23 morphed into 53, and even the 126 deaths reported on 8/1 is STILL going up more than 3 weeks later, from 126 to 130.

It’s impossible to get a good estimate of how many people are actually dying from Covid-19 because of the way deaths are being reported, but the (current) total for the week beginning 8/5 is really scary: 1,400 Floridians died of Covid-19 during that week which is 200 per day.

And that total of 1,400 is going to go up even more, for several more weeks, as the DeathSantis administration here in Florida continues its deadly game of misdirection by pretending that death totals are going down precipitously, when in fact, they are nearly as high as they were a year ago, and trending higher.

There’s no great mystery here: DeSantis is desperate to make his chosen strategy of pretending no emergency exists appear to work.

In the television world of GOP politics, appearances is all. The most primitive GOP politicians simply parade about shouting lies about their performance, much like Governor Noem (R-SD). Governor DeSantis understands that plain-speaking data can sink him, but manipulated data, particularly that which he can argue is still in some way true-if-not-useful, combined with the public short-attention span theatre of the American public, can still save his ass.

But appearances are not reality. If you’re thinking of visiting Florida, take precautions. DeSantis may be shouting that all is well, but looking at revised numbers suggests Florida is in the grip of a pandemic, and that it’s not going well.

Evolutionary biologists often talk about selection pressures:

Any cause that reduces or increases reproductive success in a portion of a population potentially exerts evolutionary pressure, selective pressure or selection pressure, driving natural selection.^[1] It is a quantitative description of the amount of change occurring in processes investigated by evolutionary biology, but the formal concept is often extended to other areas of research.

Think of it this way: in a mixed population, genetically speaking, if a new environmental pressure is brought to bear on a portion of the population vulnerable to it, other less vulnerable portions of the population will flourish, relative to the oppressed, and this may lead to evolution of the sub-population to become less and less vulnerable to that environmental pressure.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is what we’re seeing with the delta variant of Covid-19:

“The mask was off only momentarily, not an entire day or hours. We want to make the point that this is not the teacher’s fault — everyone lets their guard down — but the thing is delta takes advantage of slippage from any kind of protective measures,” Tracy Lam-Hine, an epidemiologist for the county, said in an interview.

The case study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and highlighted by CDC director Rochelle Walensky during a briefing on Friday, highlights the potential danger for children under the age of 12 — the only group in the United States ineligible for coronavirus vaccines as a hyper-infectious variant tears across the country. [WaPo]

The tendency for bacteria to become immune to targeted antibiotics is an example of the problems associated with evolutionary pressures. The antibiotic destroys most of the bacteria, but if some are resistant, but not otherwise superior to their brethren, they remain hidden until the antibiotic strips away their cousins. Once they are no longer suppressed by those cousins, they can run rampant in the patient. A lack of antibiotic specific to them, or a lack of recognition of the problem, can lead to long-term damage or death.

The evolutionary pressure may be the masks, which have kept a lot of people from being infected. Until now. Now the delta variant may have changed to make it through masks, or it’s simply more efficient at infection so that a single mistake is more expensive.

It’s a real medical conundrum that infectious disease docs must face quite often.

Flexitarian:

Flexitarian is a term coined to describe individuals who mainly eat a plant-based diet with the occasional meat or dairy added in. The word flexitarian has been around for a while but hit the mainstream in 2008 with the publication of the book “The Flexitarian Diet” by nutritionist Dawn Jackson Blatner. [The Spruce Eats]

Noted in “Real milk, no cows needed: Lab-made dairy products are now a reality,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (14 August 2021, paywall):

Formo ferments caseins and whey and then uses standard cheese-making to turn them into mozzarella and ricotta. Like many in the industry, its founders are driven by a desire to replace ethically and environmentally troubling animal products with guilt-free replicas. “In the Western world, the demand for dairy products is kinda limitless,” says CEO Raffael Wohlgensinger. Demand is rising in Asia too. All this is putting unsustainable pressure on the environment, but many consumers are loath to give up cheese. “The biggest consumer pain point for flexitarians who want to get rid of animal products is cheese because plant-based products are not performing well,” says Wohlgensinger.

Without reference to what other folks have to say when it comes to Afghanistan – I’m too busy to go read them – it occurs to me to observe that the media does tend to prefer to observe the moss on the trees rather than the forest. Not exclusively, of course, but what I’m leading up to is this:

Within the greater picture of American foreign relations, what does the Afghanistan withdrawal do for us?

Let’s break it down.

• How important is Afghanistan? Despite the accurate old aphorism that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, it’s not a strategic plum. It has mineral resources, but nothing exclusive or overly important. The mountains are not as important as mountains used to be, now that we have air power. It’s another country, particularly backward from the American point of view, which shed the Western values overcoat which we attempted to dress it in.
• Is Afghanistan the home of terrorist organizations? Not for the last twenty years, as liberal Jonathan Rauch observed. The particular goal of neutering the Taliban and al Quaeda in Afghanistan has been robustly accomplished.
• But doesn’t the previous point no longer apply with our withdrawal? Well, that’s an interesting question that can only be answered by the passage of time. But consider the emergence of ISIS-K, the group responsible for the terror bombing that killed thirteen Americans and 160 (last I heard) Afghans. From what I’m reading, ISIS-K has emerged because there’s a species of Afghanistan zealot who believes the Taliban is too soft, too weak. Think about that, that being said about the organization which fought and essentially won a twenty year war with America (although it was a close thing), rooked President Trump, and thoroughly fooled American intelligence agencies. And add in the soft reports that the Taliban is trying to reassure its newly “conquered” citizens that, no, widespread violence will not be spread by the Taliban, or that the Taliban is attempting to reassure foreign investment sources that various citizens’ rights will be guaranteed. They’re desperate for cash to run the country. While we’ll never like the Taliban, we may find that a Taliban desperate to retain authority and international respect will be willing to suppress terrorist organizations trying to make a home in the hinterlands – especially if it’s destroy or be destroyed.
• So was, and should, Afghanistan be a top concern in American foreign relations? In my amateurish and simple estimation, no, except because we were an occupying foreign force. Without that, the only reason they might crack the top 100 is because they’re a neighbor to Iran.
• So as the withdrawal winds down, how does leaving Afghanistan advantage us? Now we can concentrate on more important national adversaries, such as #1 China and #2 Russia. This is extremely important. Yes, we employ thousands of diplomats and support personnel, so you wouldn’t think that it matters if we were in Afghanistan, but the fact is that the President often lends a hand to the State Dept for prestige reasons, and Afghanistan sucking down resources tends to distract the President – regardless of their name. And then there’s the hits on prestige, leaks of military technology, and the whole concept of soft power. We’re a big, rich country, but China is 3-4 times larger and hungry. By closing down the Afghanistan operation, we can better focus on the much harder problems of China and Russia.

Don’t get distracted by the insta-opinions of the partisan pundit core on either side. If one must read them, don’t let personal preference win the day, but rather prefer those pundits who express opinions out of sync with their side. Like Rauch, above.

Me? Patience and more patience. Yes, we have thirteen dead. It’s a tragedy. But it could have been far, far worse. If we had decided to stick around, we would have lost more than thirteen over the following months and years.

I’m looking to see most or all the Americans get out, and as many Afghans who have helped us also get out. With no more dead. If that happens, Biden wins the moral victory and possibly the messaging victory. If the Taliban make a determined effort to keep terrorist organizations out of Afghanistan, then Biden wins hands down.

But there’s still a long ways to go.

I rather like this new take on steganography:

Secret underwater messages could be camouflaged as the clicks and whistles of whale or dolphin calls, fooling eavesdroppers by making them believe they are hearing marine animals.

Marine mammal sounds can affect military sonar systems, so they are usually deemed ocean noise and filtered out. This makes these animal signals a stealthy solution for communicating secretly underwater. …

Mimicking marine mammals to communicate underwater isn’t a new idea. But previous approaches mainly used artificial sounds that imitate animals and focused on just one type of call – either clicks or whistles – limiting their camouflage potential. Since many whales and dolphins live in groups, their calls naturally overlap. If someone heard only one kind of call in isolation it would raise suspicions. [NewScientist (7 August 2021)]

Artificial Intelligence is used to filter whale song from underwater noises, so if you can fool it you’re safe.

It’s cool.

Much like his cousin, the Loch Ness Monster, here Zigra’s likeness is captured as he looks for a taxi.

Gamera vs. Zigra (1971) is a deeply forgettable tale of Earth being invested, again, by an alien force. When kaiju and deeply patriotic turtle Gamera hits the spaceship with his (underwater) flamethrower, the spaceship is transformed into, well, it looks like a cross between a giant shark and a swordfish.

A little fighting, a little threatening of the kids (“Gamera is friend to all children!“), who’ve stowed away on a bathysphere this time, and Gamera takes the day. Zigra is notably clumsy on land. I don’t know why he (…?) thought he could live in the sea and harvest humans for dinner. Maybe he thought they’d be paralyzed with laughter.

At least this one didn’t feature reusing footage from other films. I think.

Yeah. Forget I wrote this review. There may be socially redeeming value to this movie, but I cannot imagine what it might be.

I was ruminating this afternoon that evolution deniers often face a real challenge when it comes to transitioning to accepting evolution as true:

Evolution is imperceptible to the unaided human senses, and thus intuition.

We’re not equipped to observe, say, a semi-aquatic species equipped with legs evolve over hundreds of thousands of years or more into the legless blue whale species, say. It’s just not possible with our current biological equipment and lifespan. We didn’t evolve that capability because knowing about evolution wasn’t important for our species’ survival for the first 200,000 years – or, really, any other creature.

And some people really need to be able to reach out and touch something in order to believe it.

But imperceptibility is a problem in many realms. WaPo recently published a profile of Britain’s most famous shepherd:

[James] Rebanks represents one possible future for farming, which is set to be transformed in the promise of a post-Brexit, zero-carbon world. The British government plans to strip away all traditional farm subsidies and replace those payments with an alien system of “public money for public goods.”

What are these public goods? Not food. Bees! In 21st-century Britain, the goods will be clean water, biodiversity, habitat restoration, hedgerows, pretty landscapes, wildflowers, flood mitigation and adaptation to climate change. All the stuff the public wants, according to the pollsters.

While I was fascinated by Rebanks and how a small farmer with a degree in history and an inherited farm has somehow captured a lead position when it comes to returning to what he hopes is sustainable farming, it was the riff on industrial farming which is truly important:

Lost in Kabul last week:

Marine Corps Rylee McCollum
Marine Corps Cpl Daegan Page
US Navy corpsman Maxton Soviak
Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz
Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee
Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover
Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosariopichardo
Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui

Rest In Peace

I can’t help but wonder if the docs and nurses in Texas, Florida, and Mississippi, where nurses are reported to be resigning in droves, have considered executing a citizen’s arrest on their respective governors, citing malfeasance and a refusal to do their jobs.

It might get their attention.

To be honest, I’m having trouble reading any analysis of the withdrawal from Afghanistan because I know it’s going to be slanted, distorted, and even out and out dishonest. It’s bad enough from the right that I don’t even trust lefty Professor Richardson. No particular example other than she sounds … ah … reasonable. Which means this is an emotional reaction on my part. I actually generally figure Richardson to be about as fair and accurate as can be, as she’s a historian by trade, trained to evaluate fairly – although historians are notorious for viewing history through their own prisms of biases. But I still am extremely wary of groupthink.

But there’s a difference between that and, say, what Erick Erickson, the Limbaugh replacement, is peddling. Consider this:

Also, had the Biden administration done a better job, it would have been preventable. That’s the most important thing to note here, is that so much of this could have been prevented because all Joe Biden had to do was nothing. All he had to do was nothing. In fact, H.R. McMaster was on CNN earlier today. They were essentially asking him to call out Donald Trump and blame Donald Trump. And what H.R. McMaster said was, in fact, no one bound the Biden administration to this. No one required the Biden administration to maintain what Donald Trump did.

This is not hard, Erickson.

1. Former President Trump essentially promised the Taliban their prize if only they’d stop killing Americans. This wasn’t so much Trump fulfilling a pledge as him, in his usual clumsy way, setting up a trap for Biden in case he won.
2. So the Taliban, seeing the grapes dangling in front of them, did so.
3. Biden beats Trump.
4. If Biden had reneged on the deal, the conflict resumes. Obviously, obviously, obviously. Americans dying and we’re stuck in a quagmire, and we’d damage American reputation and be stuck in a war that Biden’s been against.
5. So Biden did the adult thing: he grasped the nettle as best he could. Keep in mind that it was Trump who requested the Afghan government release thousands of Taliban prisoners, and it was Trump who reduced American troop numbers to 2500; the latter is important because if he increases the numbers, then the Taliban have reason to suspect American malfeasance.

None of this is hard. This is all straightforward.

Erickson, for all his piousness, is little more than a propagandist.

And I’m avoiding reading either side with regards to this conflict. I honor and mourn our fallen.

I’ve never been one to get all excited about symbolic meanings or secret messages, so I have to admit the latest conspiracy theory from the QAnon-folk leaves me a bit baffled:

On Aug.16, hundreds of Afghan civilians swarmed an Air Force C-17 cargo plane after it landed at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Before military officials could unload the aircraft, security concerns led the crew to take off as some Afghans clung to the side of the aircraft.

In the days since, conspiracy theorists have pointed to viral videos of the deadly events as evidence the conflict in Afghanistan is not actually happening. Proponents of this “false flag” theory are highlighting the number 1109 on the side of the cargo plane as a signal the events are somehow connected to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

One lengthy Instagram post from Aug. 18 presented the conspiracy this way: “I find it an odd ‘coincidence’ that the US plane that was in the Afganistan (sic) Taliban video was 1109, which seems to be hinting at 9/11 and thus another false flag event to provoke WW3 and order out of chaos and the crowning of the Antichrist false Savior and One World Leader.” [USA Today]

I know that such fields as Christian Art have well documented symbolic images, which make some sense when it comes to getting messages across compactly when it costs substantially to go with a more prolix, if I may use such a term in painting, message. Hidden messages are more of a mystery to me.

I mean, Why have a hidden message at all? What function does it serve to hint that a plane carrying refugees is somehow connected to the 9/11 attack of 2001, and that it means the whole Afghanistan withdrawal is a hoax – even though 9/11 was not?

Yeah, once you ask that question, the whole edifice comes tumbling down.

I don’t know what the conspiracy theory experts have to say – and, yes, they’re out there – but, to me, it feels like the conspiracy theorist who has sussed this sort of thing out of whole cloth is climbing the social ladder. Look at me, they say, I’m smart enough to see the clues.

It’s all about self-importance.

This is related, in an odd way, to this dude, who thinks – or grifts – that because the number 45 came up in a football score – uh, sort of – that means God wants our 45th President to remain President. And he wants to be known as the guy who saw it.

The climb up the social ladder to power and prestige can lead to some rather odd rungs.

I must add, full disclosure, that this sort of reasoning even applies to me, only I don’t use the religion or conspiracy theory route. I just see some potential future event happening due to an occurrence in the recent past, and I put it on the blog. A lot of it is just me venting, but if other people think it’s an insightful thought, then, hey, it puffs me up, too.

Sort of.

From NewScientist (7 August 2021):

Supermassive black holes have such an intense gravitational pull that they bend light right around them, allowing us to see an “echo” of the side that would otherwise be hidden from view. We have now seen echoes of X-ray bursts from behind a black hole, confirming a prediction of general relativity.

How?

Dan Wilkins at Stanford University in California and his colleagues used the NuSTAR and XMM-Newton X-ray telescopes to observe these flashes of radiation coming from the supermassive black hole in a galaxy called I Zwicky 1. They saw that a flare of X-rays was sometimes followed by a second, slightly dimmer flash as the radiation bounced off the accretion disc in a sort of echo.

Presumably, the accretion ring, at any given point, is only a few light-seconds away from the black hole.

I really like the visual I’m imagining.

Walter Einenkel on Daily Kos reports on the tactics of the owners of Nabisco…

While record numbers of families struggled through lockdowns and steep unemployment, the wealthiest individuals and companies have enjoyed record profits during the global coronavirus pandemic. One such example is Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelēz International. Fortune says that Mondelēz International pulls in more than $3.5b in profits every year. The Guardian reports that in the second quarter of this year, Mondelēz reported “more than $5.5bn in profits and spent $1.5bn on stock buybacks in the first half of 2021.” Belgian businessman Dirk van de Put made just under $17 million as CEO of the confectionery, food, beverage, and snack company.

The median annual pay for a Mondelēz International employee? Just $31,000.

At the beginning of August, around 200 Nabisco bakery union workers in Portland staged a walkout. Three weeks into the strike, union workers have joined them in Colorado, Virginia, and Chicago, Illinois—the latter is where Mondelēz International is headquartered. The striking workers are represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM). Cameron Taylor, a business agent for Local 354, told Oregon Live that the strike results from workers’ dissatisfaction with ongoing contract negotiations with the company. “This company made record profits throughout the pandemic, and then they come to the table and they want concessions. It’s absolutely a slap in the face.” In total, the strike is reportedly representing more than 1,000 Nabisco workers across the country.

Sounds like the folks who own Oreos didn’t get the memo that screwing over workers isn’t as acceptable as it used to be.

I think I’ll be skipping the Oreos fix for a while….

Remember AG Ken Paxton (R-TX), who filed the enormous dud of a lawsuit, Texas v Pennsylvania, when the former President found himself losing the last election? He was, and remains, under FBI investigation for taking bribes.

Except not in his mind, as the Houston Chronicle, errrr, chronicles:

Embattled Texas AG Ken Paxton releases anonymous internal investigation clearing himself

I keep trying to convince myself that, No, the GOP is not a party made up of fourth and fifth-raters.

And then a headline like that comes rolling along and disproves me. Again.

Remember the abuse and deaths of First Nations’ people as reported a couple of months ago? In a NewScientist (7 August 2021, paywall) interview with Samir Shaheen-Hussain there’s a bit more horrifying information:

Roxanne Khamsi: Were you aware of the scale of the involvement of the medical community in the residential school system before writing your book?

Samir Shaheen-Hussain: Oftentimes, we only thought of it as being run by the government and churches, which is the case. But what was a surprise to me was the extent of the active role of physicians and scientists in causing suffering to these kids and certainly not preventing death – and potentially even sentencing these kids to death in many cases. …

In 2015, [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada] estimated that up to 6000 children died at the schools, many from tuberculosis. Why did that disease run so rampant?

There are several reasons. One is that the schools were notoriously poorly ventilated. The kids were often forced to live in close quarters. From an infectious disease perspective, that is going to make it much easier for tuberculosis to spread. The other element is that children were systematically malnourished, if not starved. And if you’re malnourished, you’re not going to be able to mount much of a defence against various infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.

What role did physicians play in exacerbating the tuberculosis outbreaks?

In the early 1900s, Indigenous children who were being taken away from their families and put into residential schools had to get a medical certificate. Physicians in that context could have played a role in making sure that children who had tuberculosis, for example, were not allowed to go into residential schools.

Similarly, even when tuberculosis was endemic in many of these schools, which it was, they could have prevented healthy children from going into them. Physicians could have played a role in essentially shutting down the entire residential school system by saying that it’s not a healthy place for Indigenous children. But that didn’t happen.

And …

In the summertime, some of these kids went back to their community and then TB would spread to many in these communities as a result – if it wasn’t already there.

Scientists and doctors are heir to the same flaws of the flesh mind as is everyone else. It’s not surprising, though – morality is a system of thought, not unlike that of chemistry, but with regard to voluntary behavior rather than the prescribed behaviors of elements and molecules. As such, it requires study and digging at foundations, just as most breakthroughs do. Accepting its current conclusions, as many of these doctors did, is easier.

In this regard, one might as well just blame the Catholic Church, again, as a purported custodian of morality.

An award should go to the folks running Vaccine Talk:

Anthony Buchanan considers himself a scientific, independent thinker. But for months, the Foreman, Ark.-based arborist couldn’t decide what to believe about vaccines. Google searches turned up conflicting information, and his Facebook feed was dominated by vaccine-skeptical posts and memes.

Then Buchanan came across a private Facebook group called Vaccine Talk that billed itself as “an evidence based discussion forum” for pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine folks alike. As he followed the discussions, occasionally chiming in with a question of his own, he noticed a pattern.

“On both sides, there’s people telling the truth, at least their truth,” said Buchanan, 32, who last month became infected with the coronavirus. “But on the pro-vaccine side, there was just more logic” — and more links to solid research. “On the anti-vaccine side, there was more conspiracy.”

Now he’s going to get vaccinated.

As covid-19 cases surge in the United States, jeopardizing the reopening of schools and offices and rekindling debates about mask and vaccination mandates, the battle to win over the vaccine skeptical has taken on fresh urgency. Much of that struggle is happening on social media, where misinformation about the vaccines continues to flourish. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all established rules against posting false information about covid and vaccines. Yet just this weekend Facebook said the most-shared link on its site from January to March this year was a factual article about the CDC investigating the case of a Florida doctor who died two weeks after taking the vaccine. The article was widely shared by anti-vaccine pages. [WaPo]

Not everyone has the same faith in science – a notorious oxymoron – that I do, and it would pay benefits for all of us to treat the vaccine hesitant as simply people who have important questions that need answering.

Kudos for taking the time to make it work!

We’re both regretting this gig, I believe I can say for the Colonel.,

Appointment With Death (1988) is sloppy, uninspiring rehash of the Agatha Christie novel of the same name. Who killed the wicked old witch? Everyone’s drearily motivated, and Peter Ustinov’s rendition of Christie’s Poirot has an ugly, unconvincing accent. The bones of a good murder mystery are here, but the acting is mostly stiff, characters a bland lot, and many character interactions are unconvincing.

Or maybe it was the broadcast TV editing. Poirot’s accent ended up on the floor.

I’m several days behind on this one, but I still want to honor it.

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4

— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021

In other lands, the Chinese attempt to buy influence and loyalty via the Covid pandemic may be failing:

A GROWING number of countries that have been depending on vaccines developed in China are losing faith that these alone can rein in the coronavirus as they face continued surges in infections and the spread of the more transmissible delta variant.

On 1 August, Cambodia became the latest nation to approve the use of a different vaccine as a booster shot. It will administer the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine as a third dose to bolster immune protection for those who have already received two doses of the Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines.

In the past month, Bahrain, Indonesia, Thailand, Uruguay and the United Arab Emirates have all begun mixing and matching vaccines in a tactic known as heterologous vaccination in the hope of improving protection and stemming transmission.

Although China’s two leading vaccines have gained emergency approval from the World Health Organization, not much phase III trial data has been made public for either. The jabs from Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech both use inactivated virus particles to provoke an immune response. This is a more traditional approach than the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccines, but has yielded worse results. [“Countries are mixing and matching vaccines to tackle the delta variant,” NewScientist, (7 August 2021, paywall)]

This is an important consequence for the autocrats of China. They’ve been attempting to sell autocracy as a better way of governing; by doing so, they would earn credibility and influence convertible to prestige and wealth.

Falling down on their promises gets them little to nothing. And while no one is likely to challenge them militarily, it does make the leadership look bad, a valuable consideration in face-conscious China.

Their lack of greater influence may be one of the most important, yet invisible, results of the pandemic.

Steve Benen & associates continue to puzzle over the behavior of far-right conservatives when it comes to medicines:

Erick Erickson sketches out the 2022 Republican strategy, based on how far over his ski tips he’s getting in relation to the Afghanistan withdrawal:

That’s an NBC poll. NBC polling leans Democrat. Polls of “all voters” lean Democrat. And the GOP is only one point behind in a poll that alreadly [sic] leans Democrat with a margin of error greater than 1%. That means, in the real world, a majority of voters want the GOP in charge of Congress. That’s without redistricting, etc.

Biden and the Democrats are cratering everywhere, which is why you don’t see a cavalcade of Democrats rushing out to defend Biden. In fact, the Democrats are internally split even over infrastructure, which was supposed to be Biden’s big win. This not only suggests the GOP will take back the House, but will take the Senate too. That then undercuts pressure to end the filibuster.

To be sure, events can change things, but this Afghan situation will be exacerbated when the trapped Americans get home and start telling their stories and people head into Thanksgiving and Christmas paying way more for holiday meals and presents than they did last year.

This is shaping up to be terrible for the Democrats and will give the GOP an opportunity to learn no lessons from 2020.

And, as he says, there’s lots of time. What has Erickson forgotten?

1. Patience. The electorate that still has its mind open will judge the Afghanistan withdrawal on final results, not the hurried, partisan reactions of folks like Erickson, as I said yesterday. Professor Richardson, in fact, observed that … on CNN this morning [Aug 22?], Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004, noted that more than 20,000 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan without a single loss of an American life … This may mark the beginning of the end of effective condemnations of President Biden: a Republican strategist noting the withdrawal has positive attributes.
2. The pandemic. The tragically rising numbers of illness and death are not only reasons for mourning, they will be turned into weapons by the Democrats. While a few rogue members of the left have been against vaccination, it is the right that has been, for the most part, rabidly against it. The positions of several GOP governors with regard to mask mandates and vaccination mandates will be dead-weights on the Republicans, and names such as Abbott (TX), DeSantis (FL), McMaster (SC), and Noem (SD) may become quiet curse words in Republican strategists’ mouths.

Kevin Drum thinks the withdrawal is going well, and notes why Erickson might not:

But you’d never know this thanks to an immense firehose of crap coming from the very people we should least believe. This includes:

• The hawks who kept the war in Afghanistan going for years with lies and happy talk, and who are now desperate to defend themselves.
• Republicans who figure this is a great opportunity to sling partisan bullshit. Their favorite is that Biden has destroyed America’s standing in the world, an old chestnut for which there’s no evidence whatsoever.
• Trumpies trying to avoid blame for the execution of their own plan. It is gobsmacking to hear them complain about slow processing of Afghan allies when they were the ones who deliberately hobbled the visa process in the first place.
• Democrats who, as usual, are too damn cowardly to defend the withdrawal for fear of—something. It’s not always clear what.
• Reporters who are sympathetic to all this because they genuinely care about the danger that the withdrawal poses for people they knew in Afghanistan.

These are excellent points to keep in mind when evaluating the withdrawal, and are a good starting point for formulating standards and evaluations.

For my part, I remain patient. How many Americans and Afghan allies, awaiting evac, end up dead may be the best metric. But questions regarding equipment left behind will be important. Not that I expect the Afghans to use them against us, because high-powered weapons require high power training, but they can be sold. I hope they were rendered useless before or during the evac.