Category Archives: Uncategorized

The funny things you run across in White House transcripts. This is the same one in which alien DNA is mentioned, which falls into the category of shocking but not surprising, but this one is surprising:

[President Trump]: Today, I’m proud to announce one of the most important deals in the history of U.S. pharmaceutical industries. My administration has reached a historic agreement with a great American company — you remember this company; it’s called — from the good, old camera age, the old days — to begin producing critical pharmaceutical ingredients. It’s called Kodak. And it’s going to be right here in America.

So I want to congratulate the people in Kodak. They’ve been working very hard. Members of my administration are present in Rochester right now — Rochester, New York — a good place. And they’re trying to finalize this groundbreaking deal, and they will be announcing this deal. …

With this new agreement, my administration is using the Defense Production Act to provide a $765 million loan to support the launch of Kodak Pharmaceuticals. It’s a great name, when you think of it. Such a great name. It was one of the great brands in the world. Then people went digital, and Kodak didn’t follow. But now, under very extraordinary leadership, they are following and they’re doing something that’s a different field, and it’s a field that they’ve really hired some of the best people in the world to be taking care of that company and watching that company — watching over it. But it’s a breakthrough in bringing pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States.

Given the corruption of the Trump Administration, I have to wonder if Kodak’s using a kick-back scheme to get a needed injection of money.

For the record, Eastman Kodak (KODK) is up more than 300% today as I write this.

And, remember, especially for younger readers, for Trump’s generation, Kodak is a hallowed, iconic name, and there was widespread shock when Kodak imploded due to the advent of digital photography. In that sense, this may simply be Trump’s way of trying to return to the past.

Or maybe he invested in Kodak just prior to this announcement.

Or maybe, just maybe, Eastman Kodak has the capability to do what they’re being asked to do. Old style photography manufacturing did involve a certain amount of chemical expertise, after all. And, honestly, I hope that’s the case here.

But I won’t be surprised if we see Trump in court over this deal, either as President or personally.

On this thread, in case you feel like North & South America are the dens of iniquity, while the rest of the world is in recovery, don’t be so sure:

“Corona is coming back with all its might,” warned Bavarian state premier Markus Söder, according to German news site Merkur.

In France, new cases hit an average of 850 over the past three days — nowhere near the average of 2,582 in April. But the Health Ministry noted that recent progress has been erased, and Health Minister Olivier Véran warned of as many as 500 active clusters.

Remember the portulaca, or possibly pursulane as one reader suggested? Here it is, a month later:

It prospers.

If you simplify reality and assume that every driver has an N chance of having an accident – say, hitting and killing a pedestrian – then it seems likely that increasing the number of drivers and trips will end up killing more people.

And that seems to be the salient conclusion of this National Bureau of Economic Research report:

While ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft provide convenient transportation and flexible job opportunities, a new study suggests that these benefits may also come with a number of costs. Fatalities among automobile occupants and pedestrians, gasoline consumption, and traffic congestion have all risen since the ride-hailing services were launched in 2010, while public transportation ridership has fallen.

There are lots of caveats, of course – correlation vs causation, other factors such as smartphone distractions, and they think accident rates might go down as drivers gain experience.

I doubt it. I cannot help but note that ride hailing does not result in a reduction of trips, but in an increase in trips, speaking intuitively. Contrast this to mass transit, such as buses and subways, where there’s one driver responsible for far more passengers.

Of course there’s going to be more accidents with ride hailing.

Perhaps Uber, Lyft, and all the others should be subject to an additional tax to recover the productivity of those who are killed by them.

Nutation:

Astronomical nutation is a phenomenon which causes the orientation of the axis of rotation of a spinning astronomical object to vary over time. It is caused by the gravitational forces of other nearby bodies acting upon the spinning object. Although they are caused by the same effect operating over different timescales, astronomers usually make a distinction between precession, which is a steady long-term change in the axis of rotation, and nutation, which is the combined effect of similar shorter-term variations. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Hansen’s Star Map And The Precession Of The Equinoxes Circle,” Wally Motloch, Graham Hancock:

From CNN/Politic’s Stephen Collinson:

It also emerged Monday that Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who works in the President’s mask-free West Wing, tested positive for the coronavirus, in a sign of how flaunting basic precautions leaves no one safe from infection even if such steps are politically unpalatable.

[Bold mine.]

That would be flout. Flauting basic precautions would be hubristic. Overly dramatic. Chewing the scenery, even. Nom Nom Nom.

My Arts Editor tells me this is an old standard. I think it’s great.

When it comes to controlling the Presidential pardon power, it appears Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA) is ahead of me, according to Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith on Lawfare:

Rep. Adam Schiff’s bill, entitled “Abuse of the Pardon Prevention Act,” would do two basic things. First, for pardons for a “covered offense,” it would require the attorney general to submit to designated congressional committees all Justice Department materials related to the prosecution for which the individual was pardoned and all materials related to the pardon. It would also require the president to submit to the relevant committees all pardon-related materials within the Executive Office of the President. Covered offenses include offenses against the United States arising “from an investigation in which the President, or a relative of the President, is a target, subject, or witness”; offenses related to refusals to testify or produce papers to Congress; and offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (false statements), § 1505 (obstruction), § 1512 (witness tampering) or § 1621 (perjury), if the offense related to a congressional proceeding or investigation.

Second, the Schiff bill would criminalize bribery in connection with the issuance of a pardon. It would do so by amending the criminal prohibition on bribery, 18 U.S.C. § 201, to apply it with a plain statement to the president and vice president, and by making clear that under the bribery statute, the granting of a pardon or commutation is an “official act” and any such act of clemency is also “anything of value.” In effect, this amendment would criminalize the offer of a grant, or the grant, of pardons as part of a corrupt exchange.

Much like my thought, it doesn’t forbid the act a priori, but is an implicit threat that if the pardon power is misused, then it’s criminalized and becomes a matter not for the political arena, but for law enforcement and the courts.

Much less entertaining, but probably for the best.

If only it said
TIM CONWAY.

Have you ever come out of a test thinking you failed it, and were elated when you got a ‘C’, instead?

That’s how I felt about Bride Of The Gorilla (1951). Going in, the poster looked awful, and it didn’t get off to a great start. And, yet, there was unexpected nuance, such as the police commissioner, half European, half native, who attended University and then returned to the area of his youth to serve, and finds himself torn between his training and his Amazonian instincts.

Or the fate that befalls the casual racist at the heart of this sordid tale. Barney is his name (I kept thinking Barney Fife, but this Barney is played by Raymond Burr! Barney is not a good name for anyone), and he’s the supervisor on the Amazonian plantation of the elderly Klaas Van Gelder, and his youthful wife, Dina. She’s faithful to her husband, despite the presence of the handsome, rugged Barney, but Klaas and Barney are nevertheless in a fraught relationship, which terminates one night when Barney tells Klaas he’s leaving his employ, and Klaas, using a few choice words, socks him one. Barney’s return shot throws Klaas next to a poisonous snake, and Barney, perhaps a little overwrought, declines to save Klaas from the creature’s bite.

The next day, Klaas’ body is found, and the local doctor, himself a Dina devotee, performs the inquest, where he ascribes death to a heart attack and snake poison. All clear for Dina and Barney.

Except for the old, native crone, Al-Long, who, unknown to Barney, witnessed the death. But she has no tolerance for European ways; hers is the way of witchcraft. But does she turn Barney into a gorilla, as the poster suggests?

No!

This is more subtle. She curses Barney into thinking he’s turning into a gorilla, while everyone else just sees Barney. Barney Fife? No, no. Just Barney!

Soon enough, the marriage of Barney and Dina is falling apart, as Barney is staying out late, drinking from ponds and staring at himself, listening to things he’s never heard before, and, generally, being a pain in the ass.

Like I said, this is a ‘C’ all the way, but so much better than expected. The acting is professional, some of the cinematography was quite good, and if the story sometimes seems over the top, it could have been far, far worse.

All in all, a morality tale – not quite believable, but better than expected.

If you’ve ever wondered about the internal deliberations of SCOTUS, especially in this year of the pandemic, Joan Biskupic has a report on CNN/Politics that may interest you. Here’s one tidbit:

Roberts’ June decision saving the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program surprised advocates on both sides and even took some colleagues aback when he had first cast his vote many months earlier in private session, sources told CNN.

Roberts had generally supported Trump’s immigration policies, and in 2016 had privately voted against a related program for parents, rather than children, who had come to the US without papers, sources said. (That case, United States v. Texas, produced a 4-4 vote behind the scenes, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and no resolution on the merits.)

But the new reporting reveals that unlike Roberts’ 2012 move to uphold Obamacare and separate 2019 action to ensure no citizenship question on the 2020 census, Roberts’ action on DACA was not a late vote switch. He put his cards on the table soon after November oral arguments in the case and did not waver, sources told CNN. Roberts believed the administration had not sufficiently justified the rescission of the program benefiting some 700,000 young people and had then developed after-the-fact rationalizations.

Or this Georgia legal code decision:

Roberts’ winning streak extended to a Georgia copyright dilemma, heard in December, when he was able to turn his dissenting opinion into the prevailing view during the drafting process. He captured the majority from Thomas, who had initially taken control of the case once votes were cast in their private session after oral arguments.

The Georgia case decided in April, testing whether a state can copyright its annotated legal code, was not a high-profile one. But it offered an example of the rare but consequential vote-shifting that can occur behind the scenes and make a difference in the outcome of a case and law nationwide.

The court ruled that federal copyright protections do not cover annotations in a state’s code, based on the general principle, Roberts wrote, “that no one can own the law.”

SCOTUS watcher Professor Josh Blackman on The Volokh Conspiracy draws a conclusion:

Wow! “Guided by” As if Roberts was Kavanaugh’s “sherpa.” How demeaning of the Junior Justice? Whoever leaked this fact was trying to make Roberts look powerful, and Kavanaugh look weak. And that “guided by” line looks even worse in light of Kavanaugh’s separate concurrence …

But Robert doesn’t always look powerful, at least to Blackman. Regarding remote deliberations:

Indeed, Roberts encouraged his colleagues to be “brief.”

The chief justice thought there would even be sufficient time after justices had taken their turns for a round of open questioning. For that final round, he said, if anyone wanted to ask a question, he or she could try to break in. He encouraged them to be brief. The chief recognized that several justices might jump in at once. If that happened, he said, he would call on one of them to speak. If he mistakenly called on a justice who was not trying to break in, he had a fix for his colleagues: Try to ask a question anyway. [Biskupic]

This final leak does not make Roberts look powerful. It makes him look petty, and unconcerned for his colleagues. He made these decisions unilaterally, without taking into consideration the views of the other Justices.

Roberts motivations are various and not necessarily harmonious: conservative temperament, concern for legacy, dislike of Trump, perhaps internal divisions, and a liberal wing that has the capability of embarrassing the Chief Justice with ascerbic observations.

Both pieces are interesting reads.

Restful on the eyes, it is.

I think it’s already gone.

While discussing dinner plans with my Arts Editor:

ME: We could go to Mac’s [a local fish ‘n chips joint].

ARTS EDITOR: Yeah.

ME: We’d be eating outside in this 20 MPH wind.

ARTS EDITOR: Yeah.

ME: “Oh, noooooo! My fish is flying away! I ordered the cod!”

ARTS EDITOR: …!

SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts once again brings bewilderment upon the right-wing fringe movement that believes religion trumps all in the case of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Steve Sisolak, Governor of Nevada, et al:

Conservative lawmakers blasted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after he sided with the court’s liberal wing in a 5-4 decision Friday that rejected a Nevada church’s request to block the state government from enforcing a cap on attendance at religious services.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted early Saturday morning that Roberts had “abandoned his oath.”

“What happened to that judge?” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

“Freedom of religion is our first freedom. Yet SCOTUS has ruled that casinos can host hundreds of gamblers, while churches cannot welcome their full congregations. Justice Roberts once again got it wrong, shamefully closing church doors to their flocks,” Cotton added in a statement. [The Hill]

It’s starting to border on amazing that conservative lawmakers react with shock whenever a conservative justice refuses to adhere to their ideology. In this particular case, it’s not even a decision against the heart of the Nevada church’s case – it’s a decision to deny emergency injunctive relief, which basically means giving the church permission to conduct business as usual while its case proceeds in a lower Court.

That’s all.

No reasoning was presented for the majority opinion, so I can only guess that the majority has noted that churches have been a major vector for the spread of Covid-19, while movie complexes and casinos have not yet proven to be. I expect the latter may change, but at the moment why allow a church to possibly menace society while its case works its way through the court system?

Churches services are not essential services, no matter how red-faced priests, pastors, and faithful get about it. There are other options. Don’t confuse a potentially dangerous religious service configuration with a freedom of religion issue, like Justice Kavanaugh manages to do in his dissent:

For example, courts should be extremely deferential to the States when considering a substantive due process claim by a secular business that it is being treated worse than another business. … Under the Constitution, state and local governments, not the federal courts, have the primary responsibility for addressing COVID–19 matters such as quarantine requirements, testing plans, mask mandates, phased reopenings, school closures, sports rules, adjustment of voting and election procedures, state court and correctional institution practices, and the like.

But COVID–19 is not a blank check for a State to discriminate against religious people, religious organizations, and religious services. There are certain constitutional red lines that a State may not cross even in a crisis. Those red lines include racial discrimination, religious discrimination, and content-based suppression of speech.

I’m sorry, but if your religious service objectively endangers my health and life, you bet it better be suppressed. Kavanaugh tries to draw a red line, but I’m afraid the scuffing feet of Covid-19 has erased it – dispositively.

I see this as simply a ginned up issue to keep the base in line, rather than, once again, sober governance. Hysteria tends to be the Republicans’ stock in trade these days, and I’m getting tired of it. Cotton especially. He seems to be a ninny and a dick.

Good for Chief Justice Roberts.

The things you stumble across in RetractionWatch. Remember this cool bit of amber with something avian in it? The paper has been retracted by Nature, but not due to fraud:

We, the authors, are retracting this Article to prevent inaccurate information from remaining in the literature. Although the description of Oculudentavis khaungraae remains accurate, a new unpublished specimen casts doubts upon our hypothesis regarding the phylogenetic position of HPG-15-3.

When your epistemic bubble keeps telling you the government is evil and the private sector can do no wrong, you get shit like this:

[Serena Bumpus, regional director of nursing for the Austin Round Rock Region of Baylor Scott and White Health in Texas,] has fielded calls from nurses all over the country — some as far afield as the United Kingdom — wanting to know how they can help. But Bumpus says she does not have an easy answer.

“I’ve had to kind of just do my own digging and use my connections,” she said. At first, she said, interested nurses were asked to register through the Texas Disaster Volunteer Registry; but then the system never seemed to be put to use.

Later she learned — “by happenstance … literally by social media” — that the state had contracted with private agencies to find nurses. So now she directs callers to those agencies. [WaPo]

This was a prime role for the government to fill, and it appears to have been completely abdicated in Texas by the dollar-worshipping leaders of government. Think about it: she learned about it by accident.

That is unacceptable. But you can guess there’s more than one instance of that out there. The private sector has no experience and no motivation – but profit – with this situation.

This is the result of decades of preaching about the evils of government by the right, and the assertions, some very, very silly – I know, I read them when they were initially published – that the private sector can do darn near anything the government can do, ten times better and without corruption.

All of these are turning out to be lies. If my dear reader has bought into these assertions, this is the time to sit back in your chair and contemplate how they went wrong. Or go here (one of my personal prisms). Methods optimized for one sector of society rarely transfer to another. We’re seeing that in practice right now – especially the Southern states run by Republicans.

In the same paper referenced here on 5G technology inducing coronavirus, James Heathers (via RetractionWatch) notices a wee slip by the paper’s authors:

Remember, 5G causes 720 FACTORIAL different diseases.

I think there are about 13,000 diseases in the ICD-10.

That is a lot less that 720! which is – and you'll like this…

2.6e1746

As there are 10^82 atoms in the universe, this just might be shite. https://t.co/m0XcFbL2HC

— 🏴James Heathers 🏴 (@jamesheathers) July 23, 2020

Which makes me wonder, A) who are these jokers who wrote this paper, and B) who are the clowns who accepted it and published it?

At least it’s been retracted, eh?

Venereology:

Venereology is a branch of medicine that is concerned with the study and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. The name derives from Roman goddess Venus, associated with love, beauty and fertility. A physician specializing in venereology is called a venereologist.^[1] In many areas of the world, the specialty is usually combined with dermatology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the credentials of the authors of a withdrawn paper, “5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells.”

Readers respond to my post-analysis of the Trump-Clinton contest:

Worth pointing out: While poll-bashing in the wake of the Trump “victory” is a popular sport, the actual vote on Clinton v Trump was within a point of the consensus of the published legitimate polls. As predicted, Trump lost the vote. The distortions introduced by the electoral college put this beast in power, not the American people.

And thus Trump’s almost frantic cries of voter fraud. But his own hand-picked commission couldn’t find any evidence of massive fraud. Another reader responds to the first:

not even that. I believe there were 2 individuals (faithless electors they called them) whose states voted for Clinton but decided to cast their electoral vote for a third party. So, she really won the electoral college vote. If I had been her that would have been my lawsuit to win. Way better than hanging chads

Unfortunately, not true. From Taegan Goddard’s Electoral Vote Map:

Trump received 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227 electoral votes. Clinton won the national popular vote with 48.2% of the vote, while Trump received 46.1% of the vote. Clinton and Trump criticized each other over character issues and shared divergent views on America’s role in the world.

The map above shows Trump winning 306 electoral votes because that’s what would have happened if two Texas electors hadn’t voted against him.

Wikipedia notes there were ten faithless electors initially:

As a result of the seven successfully cast faithless votes, the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. Three of the faithless electors voted for Colin Powell while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote.^[8] The defections fell well short of the number needed to change the result of the election; only 2 of the 7 defected from the winner, whereas 35 were needed to defect in order to force a contingent election in Congress (a tally of less than 270).

The gap of almost 80 electoral votes was far too large to be affected by the two who defected from Clinton. The reader continues (the link at the end may be associated with the above, not the below):

… and the Supreme Court recently ruled that electors must vote the way their states voted. https://www.google.com/…/mobi…/article/amp/idUSKBN1480FQ

I believe the decision made clear that if there’s a state law requiring electors be faithful, it is not unconstitutional. However, in the absence of such a law, an elector cannot be legally compelled to vote for the candidate chosen by the state’s voters.

The Heisenberg Effect is also known as the Observer Effect. Nick Brown notices that, in academic circles, an Expression of Concern (EoC) doesn’t seem to mean what it used to mean:

When I first came across the concept, I was told that an EoC was a sort of preliminary step on the way to retraction. The journal acknowledges that it has received information that suggests that an article may not be reliable. This information seems, on the face of it, to be quite convincing. The journal is still investigating exactly what happened, but in the meantime, here is an early warning that people who are thinking of citing this article might want to think twice. We could see it as the equivalent of locking up someone who is accused of a serious crime: They have not yet been found guilty, their detention is only preventive (and often under better conditions than those who have been convicted), but the prima facie case is such that on balance, we probably don’t want to have that person walking around unchecked. …

However, it appears that many journals or editors are using the term “Expression of Concern” to mean something else. This article has had an EoC on it for six years now. The editors of Psychology of Music just issued this EoC, but according to Samuel Mehr they have no plans to escalate to a retraction. The author of that last paper has also had five EoCs in place at another journal for over a year.

This type of EoC basically comes down to the following statement from the editors: “We have good reason to believe that this article is garbage, and you should not trust it. But we’re not going to do anything about it that might hurt our impact factor, or embarrass us by getting us into Retraction Watch.” It’s like a restaurant menu with a small sticker saying “Pssst: The fish is terrible, please don’t order it”. (Plus, the sticker is permanent. It’s inside the laminated cover of the menu.)

[Bold mine.]

And where did I find this? In Retraction Watch, of course, in their weekly roundup.

Who watches the watchers? The answer would seem to be The Watched.

Deb’s begonia is coming along nicely.

Over the last few weeks there’s been a few articles concerning overpopulation out on the Web, a matter of some concern in today’s world. First up is an article in WaPo which discusses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on birth rates in the United States:

In a new report, economists writing for the Brookings Institution estimate that the United States could see “on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year” as a result of the economic recession triggered by the novel coronavirus.

The economists, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip Levine, derive their estimates from data on birthrates during the Great Recession and the 1918 flu pandemic. Both of those upheavals had a considerable negative impact on fertility. …

The reason? Children are expensive, and having a child is in many ways a financial decision. The loss of a job or otherwise uncertain prospects for a steady income lead many would-be parents to postpone having kids until things are more settled. In economic jargon, birthrates are “procyclical” — they tend to rise during times of economic growth and fall during recessions.

But I’m disturbed by this:

Economists use a tool called the value of a statistical life, or VSL, to help put losses of life on a level playing field with other policy considerations. Using a standard VSL of roughly $10 million, the permanent loss of half a million births works out to an economic loss of about $5 trillion over the coming decades.

Where VSL is:

The value of a statistical life (VSL) is the marginal rate of substitution between income (or wealth) and mortality risk. The VSL indicates how much individuals are willing to pay (WTP) to reduce the risk of death. Applied properly, the VSL can be used in benefit-cost analysis to evaluate the efficiency of government policies designed to reduce risk.

There is no mention of the benefit to society of not having those births occur due to the reduction in stress on the environment. One missed birth is meaningless, but in aggregate there will be some positive effect.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger seeks to soothe my concerns:

… a new study published in The Lancet with a paragraph-long title, Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study makes the point again:

Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR [total fertility rate] lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.

…

It’s happening almost everywhere; the working adult population is already dropping in China, it’s coming in India, and only sub-Saharan Africa continues to increase to the end of the century. The world population will peak after mid-century and decline significantly by 2100. This is good news, and bad news:

 Our findings show that some countries with fertility lower than replacement level, such as the USA, Australia, and Canada, will probably maintain their working-age populations through net immigration. Our forecasts for a shrinking global population have positive implications for the environment, climate change, and food production, but possible negative implications for labour forces, economic growth, and social support systems in parts of the world with the greatest fertility declines.

Concerns about labor forces can be alleviated through medical advances and voluntary reductions in consumption, preferably through price increases required by increasing wages to workers. I wish I was an expert in demographic forecasting, since it would be interesting to see how increasing prices would restrain population growth, as noted in the WaPo article, as well as Secular Cycles (Turchin & Nefedov).

Finally, Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine highlights the impact of plague on population, society, and, as a survivor of the AIDS epidemic himself, on individuals in this longish article:

It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.

It may have been the most devastating epidemic in the history of humankind — surpassing in its mortality rates any before or since, including the Black Death in the Europe of the mid-14th century. Smallpox arrived in America with the first Europeans and went on, with several other imported diseases, to wipe out up to 90 percent of the Native population in a relatively short amount of time — millions and maybe tens of millions died. …

We are wrong, therefore, to think of plague entirely as a threat to civilization. Plague is an effect of civilization. The waves of sickness through human history in the past 5,000 years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger the settlements and the greater the agriculture and the more evolved the trade and travel. What made the American plague of the 16th century so brutal was that it met a virgin population with no immunity whatever. The nightmare that humans had been dealing with and adapting to in Europe and Asia for millennia came suddenly to this continent all at once, and the population had no defense at all. The New World became a stage on which all the accumulated viral horrors of the Old World converged.

[My bold.]

And overpopulation appears to be the mechanism, which is why I’m unsurprised at the Covid-19 pandemic, and will expect another one soon enough – as does Sullivan. One problem is unsafe practices in crowded conditions, but defining and banning all unsafe practices is not a simple thing to do in, ah, practice.

Plagues have often been catalyzing events, entering human history like asteroids hitting a planet. They kill shocking numbers of people and leave many more rudderless, coping with massive loss, incalculable grief, and, often, social collapse. They reorder the natural world, at least for a time, as human cities and towns recede and animal life reemerges and microbes evolve and regroup. They suspend a society in midair and traumatize it, taking it out of its regular patterns and intimating new possible futures. In some cases, a society redefines itself. In others, trauma seems the only consequence.

Investments, emotional and intellectual, are made void, freeing the survivors to rethink their roles and goals in society, as the roiling of society shows its fault lines. I have to wonder if Covid-19 was a necessary requirement for the George Floyd murder to bring our racial injustice problem to light, as well as the toppling of statues honoring people who had done nothing worthy of such memorialization. Or was Covid-19 too mild of an epidemic? We’re not exactly dropping in the streets, are we?

And, like most traumatic incidents, individual changes can be dramatic. I shan’t steal Sullivan’s prose any longer – go read it for yourself. His description of the consequences of surviving the Spanish Flu by Katherine Anne Porter is a little horrifying.

All of which leads me to an endpoint of thinking about E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), a story of how most of humanity now lives in a vast underground honeycomb of apartments, served by machines, hardly ever seeing another person face to face, communicating via telecommunications, and their shared helplessness when things go awry. I read into it a meditation on how one approach to overpopulation, strict regimentation and dictation of the habits of the madding crowd, as it were, will have unintended and deadly consequences. There’s not really a great connection between this story and the articles I’ve discussed in this post, but The Machine Stops has stuck with me for more than forty years, and if it came to mind now, there’s a connection, if analogical in nature, that’s worth considering.

In case you were wondering why $600 was the weekly stipend, or “bridge payment,” to the unemployed from the Federal Government, Murfster35 on The Daily Kos thinks they know:

… there has always been something that bothered me about that $600 a week payment. As explained, it was meant to help families and workers cover the shortfall between what they would receive from unemployment, and what their full paycheck was before being laid off. And if that was the purpose, then the program was far oversubscribed for what it set out to do. Now my wife works in retail, so she’s not making Brad Pitt wages, and still, that $600 a week was multiples above what was needed to make her whole. I know that the whole object was to render as much aid to as many people as possible, but I would guess that in a majority of cases, people were actually profiting from the program.

The question that has bothered me every time I see that $600 in Teri’s account is Why $600 a week? The number can’t possibly be arbitrary, there has to be some kind of sensible reason behind it. It seems almost like the Democrats jammed it to the GOP because they had them over a barrel, which is fine by me, but that still doesn’t make sense. There has to be a reason why they settled specifically on $600 a week.

And last night, while just idly discussing the topic with Teri, it whupped me upside the head. Let’s start with a little simple math. It has to be simple if I’m going to do it. Start with $600 a week. Now, divide that $600 by a 40 hour work week. What do you end up with? $15.00 an hour!

Now that makes perfect, crystal clear sense. The Democrats have been pushing for a national $15 an hour minimum wage for at least the last three years. But there’s a problem with that, it’s purely conceptual. The Democrats talk about how great it would be, and everybody agrees that it would be great, but talk is cheap, and nobody had any way to know what it would feel like to make $15 an hour.

So the Democrats took the bull by the horns and showed them what it feels like to make $15 an hour. Without saying a word to tip their mitts, the Democrats used the terrible unemployment shortfalls to show every American making less than $15 an hour what it feels like to make $15 an hour. For 16 weeks they have handed the neediest Americans a weekly $15 an hour paycheck. And now the GOP wants to take it away.

Spreading discontent with Republican governance at every opportunity.

A friend sent me this missive concerning the Second Amendment by John M. DeMaggio (USN-retired):

The argument over the Second Amendment routinely centers on guns. But our Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” has just as much to do with casting off the stratification of the social class system and buttressing religious freedom. …

One cannot discuss the Bill of Rights independently but must consider it within a broader discussion encompassing two other pillars of our system of government: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Today people immediately consider “arms” to be guns. But in the long run-up to American independence — in medieval, pre-colonial and colonial times — arms for “bearing” were usually edged weapons, especially swords.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art tells us that in medieval times “generally speaking only noblemen were allowed to carry a sword in public.”

Plinio Correa de Oliveira writes in “What is the Symbol of Nobility and Power? And Why?” that “The people of the Middle Ages regarded the sword with a certain profundity, esteeming it as a symbol of man’s God-given nobility.”

French nobility prerogatives after 1440 included the right to “wear a sword.” The sword was used during the noble “dubbing ceremony,” still practiced by today’s British Crown. [The Hill]

Here’s the problem with his discussion – he insists on contextualizing the Bill of Rights, which is great, but then he proceeds to ignore an important part of the Second Amendment itself – the entirety of the text, which is

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

DeMaggio makes no mention of a well regulated militia, which makes his entire argument difficult to take seriously. If context matters, the entire Amendment, especially one so terse, should be addressed. Surely the clause considering a well-regulated militia needs a mention.

Worse yet, he engages in a bit of Fight-or-flight sleight of hand with his concluding paragraph:

I wonder if opposition to the Second Amendment’s right of people to “bear arms” might also be — at some level — a rejection of the “equal station” of all people, a reaffirmation of a sort of “Nobility,” a sense of privilege by an established “professional political class?”

This is a big red flag that this is not a serious essay, at least for me. The historical aspect has some mild interest to it, but as a serious defense of an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment, the contextual omission, the superfluous bit of rhetoric, and, additionally, the omission of any treatment of the differences between the weapons of today and the weapons of two, three, or four hundred years ago, really renders this piece as little more than a curiosity.

A reader reminds me of the events of four years ago when it comes to confidence:

The former Secretary of State leads Trump by 51% to 39% among registered voters nationwide, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows. (Time, July 2016 polls)

Yes, indeed, and he never really caught up. Here’s a time series of poll results from Real Clear Politics:

If only this had major events shown as well, such as the day Clinton sniffled and the right-wing media threw a tizz-fit over her poor health.

And, at the end, due to Electoral College oddities and a collection of independents and Democrats who didn’t trust Secretary Clinton, Clinton won the popular vote and Trump won the Presidency.

But history needn’t repeat itself. Among a positively huge host of differences, the most important might be Trump himself. Before the 2016 election, those who were paying attention knew Trump was untrustworthy.

Today’s FiveThirtyEight Trump Approval Results

But four years later, the gross incompetence facet of his personality has really, really come out. In fact, it’s so flamboyantly obvious that I’m actually discouraged that some 40% of the American public still approves of him. I suspect some 30% will stick with him even if he’s caught committing a crime, just because of his promises to bring back their version of the good times.

And Clinton had carried quite a load of mud from years of Republican Party assault on a person who was actually competent in her job, as both sides of the aisle acknowledged. Republican Party tenets couldn’t accept an expert, as we’ve come to see, and they still seethed from losing to Bill Clinton – twice.

But Biden, former Senator and Vice President, has never been under sustained attack, and is generally likable. His occasional lapses into stuttering, long-term union supporter, history of family tragedy, and other elements render him far more likable than Clinton, as at least I can see myself stuttering when making speeches on the topics he often addresses.

So, sure, there’s an element of “here we go again,” and that’s good – it’ll keep the partisans working and persuade the progressives to get out and VOTE. But it’s not a worrisome element for me. Each election is unique.