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Dude! How do you eat?!

The silent The Man In The Iron Mask (1929) is the sequel to The Three Musketeers (1921), and, much like its predecessor, it’s paired, at least in this print, with depressingly inappropriate music.

However, the story is far more exciting, as the Queen, who we’ve already met, inadvertently bears twins, rather than just a single heir. As the second boy is born several hours late, with hardly anyone to witness it, Cardinal Richelieu decides that, in the best interests of France, the infant boy should be exiled without the knowledge of even his existence to be known to anyone. To that end, D’Artagnan’s love, Constance, present at the birth, will be exiled to the Mantes convent.

But Milady deWinter, now a virtual free agent after having failed the Cardinal in the previous story, happens to be in charge of the conveyance to Mantes, and spends her time on the way and then at the convent worming information out of Constance.

During all this, the Musketeers have heard that something is going on, and fly to Mantes as well. They arrive just moments too late to save Constance, as Milady shoves a knife in her, but they capture deWinter and discover she’s already a criminal; they promise her a visit to an executioner, and no more is she seen.

Sadly, the original three Musketeers find themselves beset by overwhelming odds, and end up staring down the barrels of, ah, muskets. Richelieu, though, sees D’Artagnan as useful to France, and makes a deal: if the three originals separate to the corners of the kingdom, and D’Artagnan stays in France in service to the King, they may live. They sadly agree.

Twenty five years later, the first boy is now a preening peacock on the throne of France, and the second boy was snatched from his exile by Rochefort, from the first story. A sneaky plan is hatched: assassinate the greatest blade in the kingdom, D’Artagnan, and switch the two now-young men. The second Louis, quite sullen, will then be beholden to the plotters, and they’ll reap great profits from manipulating him.

Well, as you may have guessed, plans go awry, and the kidnapped king, snapped into a modest iron mask, has sent a message to D’Artagnan, who survived the assassination attempt while appearing to have fallen to it. Summoning his old companions, he assaults the prison holding the King, and when his companions arrive, an uneven battle turns in their favor, but at a cost; their flight back to Paris cost even more, as old friends fall to vengeful blades.

After some fighting, the original boy is restored and France is saved (whew!), and D’Artagnan goes staggering off, duty fulfilled.

There’s a surprising lack of dialog-boards in this movie; the viewer must pay attention and attempt to guess at the dialog, and while this can off-putting, it can also draw the audience in.

The willingness to kill off characters is also interesting. It’s too bad no attempt is made to portray how Constance’s death affected D’Artagnan over the next twenty-odd years, as that could enhanced his standing in the story. Incidentally, the makeup applied to Douglas Fairbanks, who portrays both the young and the old D’Artagnan, is most convincing. Well done.

I also thought it interesting that neither of the twins was positively portrayed; quite frankly, tossing both of them into the river and putting D’Artagnan on the throne might have served France better. It’s a lesson, inadvertent or not, in the futility of absolute monarchy.

And it’s entertaining. Settle in and see how movies were enjoyed ninety years ago. Eat some popcorn. And stare intently.

I found this November report, forgotten among my many tabs, from NewScientist concerning wind speeds to be interesting:

An increase in wind speed in recent years is good news for renewable energy production. Average global wind speed had been dropping since 1978, but this trend has reversed over the past decade.

Zhenzhong Zeng at Princeton University and his colleagues analysed data on wind speed recorded at ground weather stations across North America, Europe and Asia between 1978 and 2017.

The researchers found that from 2010 to 2017, average global wind speed over land increased by 17 per cent – from 3.13 to 3.30 metres per second. Before this, from 1978 to 2010, wind speed had been falling by 0.08 metres per second – or two per cent – every decade. The reversal came as a surprise, says Zeng.

It may be enough to observe that climate change is adding energy to the system, which can then power the wind.

I’ve observed on an occasion or two my discomfort with green energy systems that don’t seem to have been designed with the idea that disturbing an energy landscape may have negative consequences of its own. However, if we’re talking about “excess” winds, the harvesting of the wind may actually result in an environment that more resembles the environment before industry and other human activity began changing it so radically.

According to Digiconomist/BitCoinEnergyConsumption.com, and if you believe energy usage as a proxy for currency popularity is acceptable, then the answer appears to be no:

The downward spike was on March 18, and I haven’t any good guesses why that would have occurred; the recovery appears to suggest Bitcoin is still chugging along. Another proxy is, of course, the value of a bitcoin in US dollars, which BuyBitCoinWorldWide provides in a time series:

It appears more or less healthy so far, doesn’t it?

Long time readers have seen my rants on the state of software warranties. Jane Chong provides an overview of the issues of software warranties, and the role that Congress may play in the future of same, on Lawfare:

This Vox article on Alaska’s oil dividend, roughly equivalent to UBI, and its effect on human fertility, also details how social science researchers construct comparison entities when none is available:

Also in 2018, UChicago’s Damon Jones and UPenn’s Ioana Marinescu found that the dividend does not deter people from working, and actually increases part-time work. Jones and Marinescu employed what’s known in the social sciences as a “synthetic control” method. Basically, they combine a number of other states whose patterns of employment, part-time work, and related statistics roughly match Alaska’s in the years before the policy was enacted. None of the states alone is a good comparison, but if you combine them carefully, you can come up with a “synthetic Alaska” for comparison.

The new fertility paper, from Yonzan, Kelly, and Timilsina, also uses a synthetic control design. Because they’re interested in fertility, not employment, they rely on states’ fertility rates, average time between births, and abortion rates to construct synthetic controls whose trends matched those of Alaska before 1982.

Fascinating and clever. Of course …

This is just one study, and there are some reasons for skepticism. Synthetic control studies are useful, but there’s always a risk that the other states that make up the “control” differed from Alaska in ways other than not having the dividend program. For the fertility rate comparison for 15- to 44-year-olds, the synthetic control is a weighted average of mostly Wyoming, a bit of Hawaii, and a very small bit of Washington, DC; these are all obviously quite different places from Alaska in ways that might influence fertility rates. That only matters for the analysis if they started to differ increasingly after 1982 but not before, but it’s hard to rule out that possibility.

Very interesting idea, and the caveats still apply for non-synthetic controls as well.

Just a little too weird. I find myself reading an article on Singapore experiencing a second spike in COVID-19 infections:

Encouragingly for the rest of the world, the city-state seemed to have suppressed cases without imposing the restrictive lockdown measures endured by millions elsewhere.

And then the second wave hit, hard. Since March 17, Singapore’s number of confirmed coronavirus cases grew from 266 to over 5,900, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. [CNN]

Meanwhile, I have this video playing on YouTube:

Yep, that’s Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman screaming at each other over a childhood incident involving a pail.

My sense of what’s appropriate just went diving out the window.

On a related note to my disassembly of some malicious propaganda, conservative Rich Lowry actually talks a bit of sense. I’ve read him very little, as every time I do I’m appalled, but this time his dart hits the target:

A growing chorus on the right is slamming the shutdowns as an overreaction and agitating to end them. A good example of the genre is an op-ed co-authored by former Education Secretary William Bennett and talk-radio host Seth Leibsohn. It is titled, tendentiously and not very accurately, “Coronavirus Lessons: Fact and Reason vs. Paranoia and Fear.”

They cite an estimate that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 Americans. Then, they note that about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. For this, they thunder, we’ve imposed huge economic and social costs on the country?

This is obviously a deeply flawed way of looking at it.

If we are going to have 60,000 deaths with people not leaving their homes for more than a month, the number of deaths obviously would have been higher — much higher — if everyone had gone about business as usual. We didn’t lock down the country to try to prevent 60,000 deaths; we locked down the country to limit deaths to 60,000 (or whatever the ultimate toll is). [National Review]

Precisely. I might note that similar reasoning applies to folks who complain that our military always prepares to fight the last war and not the next war. Well, yes, in fact they prepare for the last war so well that they don’t have to fight it again, now don’t they? Complainers don’t realize that they’ve just defined success, not failure.

Sometimes success is hard to recognize.

There’s one related point, and Vox makes it:

President Donald Trump just dramatically redefined success on the country’s response to the coronavirus.

Barely a month ago, Trump claimed the coronavirus would go away on its own. Then he said it paled in comparison to the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, which killed about 12,500 Americans. Now he’s saying that the estimates showing Covid-19 could kill 100,000 Americans — roughly equivalent to two Vietnam Wars or 38 September 11 attacks — actually reflect how effective he’s been.

During a news conference on Sunday, Trump said that a final US coronavirus death toll somewhere in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 people would indicate that his administration has “done a very good job.”

And if it’s only 60,000 deaths? Then he’s bigly outstanding?

This’ll be a slight twist on the old The results justifies the means – it’ll be Ignore what I did, just look at my results and by the way I get to define what’s good.

I hope honest third-party assessors will be able to honestly message about this nonsense.

Miss Fisher, in the midst of nowhere, going nowhere.

Whether or not you’re a fan of the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries TV series or not, you’ll not want to see the first movie deriving from the series, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020).

The problems start with the script, which has a myriad of mistakes. For example, the movie starts with a sort-of exciting prison break of a young woman in Jerusalem, which ends in Miss Fisher facing being scraped off a train as it speeds into a rough-hewn tunnel. Soon, her former compatriots receive the news of her death, and a memorial service to be held in England. Of course, she shows up as an aviatrix, shrugs off the fact that everyone has been grief stricken for months while claiming she wasn’t aware of the news, all the while not explaining how she can be showing up in England – a long ways from Jerusalem – at the estate hosting her memorial service.

It’s Just Crap.

The theme seems to be “Isn’t Phryne Fisher cool?” Such a lightweight theme requires heavy support from the other elements of the film, and, frankly, they were not there. Only two other characters, other than Miss Fisher,  make it to the movie. Love interest Detective Robinson simply pouts his way throughout, exuding a repulsive miasma of frustrated moralism, and Aunt Prudence is not afforded the scope necessary to contribute whatever it is she usually contributes. Other characters? Purely characters-of-convenience, obviously present to smooth Miss Fisher’s path to success, and while there’s an attempt to make it appear they have separate lives, perhaps only the Assistant Police Superintendent manages to get there, riding his facial hair to success.

I’m not kidding.

There’s a dose of idiotic supernatural malarkey, a medley of cheap, poorly made costumes and bad make up (in contrast to the lovely costumes and make up in the series, observed my Arts Editor, who’s a fan), a dearth of characteristically clever lines, and shoddy CGI effects. I mean, look, the train had a certain charm, but it was obviously CGI, and the rest of the effects were also obviously CGI – a little too clear, etc. It was apparent that the movie makers hired a third-rate firm to do the work – or did it themselves on some hyped up home computers.

OK, so I’ve rubbished the film. You don’t want to see this. But, hey, my conscience is barking at me: What about Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? It has at least some of the elements of Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, doesn’t it?

Well, sure, but it handles them far better. Consider the supernatural element. Dr. Jones is quite determinedly agnostic, even an atheist, right up to climactic scene in which a divine power reaches down and saves his bacon – accidentally, as it happens. Only when faced with hard evidence – a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up the Nazis that happens to loosen the ropes binding him and Marion – is he at least forced to acknowledge there may be something out there.

Miss Fisher? Mention some nonsense about a curse associated with seven solar eclipses and a monstrous emerald, and her eyes roll back in her head, she nods vacantly, her brain slips out of her ear and crawls away, and we’re merrily off to some buried town in the Arabian desert to put the emerald back. For a woman who’s supposed to oh-so-clever, her credulousness measurement is right off the scale.

I need to talk to the Director about this scene!

And let’s talk about Dr. Jones. Part of the charm of this classic flick is that nothing really comes easy – except maybe the ladies – to our battling archaeologist. Think of the scene in which his arch-competitor, Belloq, has trapped him in the buried temple and taken possession of the Ark – and then the Nazi commander tosses Marion, his love interest, in after Jones, who’s trying to keep an army of poisonous snakes from overwhelming him. Aaaaand … he’s snake-phobic.

But he battles his way out. And that’s not even the worst. Think of Marion’s death in the exploding car.

Miss Fisher? Her worst conundrum is figuring out which guy at the Church is the one she’s supposed to meet. Well. Let’s not get too mussed, eh?

This is a script that needed two more drafts. The first is to insert the setbacks that permit Miss Fisher, and even her companions, to demonstrate their persistence and cleverness, and thus build credibility with the audience – and even a theme.

The second? To begin the conversation with the audience. Look, story tellers have the privilege of directing your attention one way or another, and visual story tellers have a slight advantage over literary storytellers in that it’s easier to present a cornucopia to the eye. This is the conversation.

But this doesn’t have to be an honest conversation. I’m not talking profoundly dishonest, but there are at least two possible conversations: the one where the audience sinks into their Barcaloungers with a vacant look and their brain in idle, or the one where the audience is on the edge of their seat, evaluating everything they see, and trying to figure out what’s going on. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one example of the latter, another would be the instant classic The Usual Suspects (1995). As for the former? I can’t think of any. They’re usually drek.

So here’s how Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears might have better started in terms of conversation. The movie opens in the dusty streets of Jerusalem, looking like any stereotypical Arab city – buildings made of big rocks, lumpy roadway, everyone in robes. Along comes a woman in colorful blue robe, face covered.

At this early juncture, my Arts Editor said, “That’s Miss Fisher!” And, indeed, she was right.

But she shouldn’t have been. It should have been a collection of beautifully clad women, perhaps dancing through the streets in some impromptu performance, silently screaming We’re Miss Fisher!, and as the attention of the guards of the prison (remember, prison break?) is distracted, a dusty old woman in the dull robe of a worker woman darts into the entrance of the prison, secures the door, and begins the process of saving the pretty young woman who’s facing unjust death. Hello, Miss Fisher!

The audience is clued in that not everything is as it seems, and gets them out of their damn loungers.

As it is, Miss Fisher displays minimal cleverness, and made this into a vast waste of our time and the producers’ money.

And their fencing scene was mercifully short, because neither of them had a clue. They might as well have been seals balancing the foils on their heads.

When it comes to climate change, here’s a notable problem for the scientists, from a couple of months ago:

There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.

Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario.

Wait for it …

The scientists involved couldn’t agree on why—or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began “talking to each other like, ‘What’d you get?’, ‘What’d you get?’” said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model. [Bloomberg Green]

Sadly, I’ve never worked on computer models of anything, but I can see how such models, particularly those working in a Bayesian-type mode in which real-world results are iteratively fed into the model, which then adjusts its internal calculations so that its early predictions would have matched observed reality (think of it as a psychic going back and adjusting their claims after the murder victim’s body is found), might find it difficult to explain to its human creators just why it came out with a particular result.

Something for modelers to consider in the future.

Meanwhile, the modelers are trying to understand if the predictions are wrong – or if there’s something to it. Let’s hope the predictions are just wrong.

From the right-wing bloodstream comes another misleading mail, designed to, well, keep them together and distrustful of their fellow Americans, regardless of the cost. It’s short, so I’ll just quote the whole thing, with minor changes to formatting to make it easier to read:

1/1/20 – 4/1/20
WWW.WORLDOMETERS.INFO/

---

10,670,908 Deaths from Abortions
2,807,806 Deaths from Starvation
2,061,853 Deaths from Cancer
1,254,997 Deaths from Smoking
422,032 Deaths from HIV
338,886 Deaths from Traffic Accidents
269,209 Deaths from Suicide
246,250 Deaths from Malaria
211,416 Deaths from Unclean Drinking Water
122,062 Deaths from Seasonal flu
46,491 Deaths from Corona Virus

Readers who are paying attention will know the obvious response to this missive, but I think it’s important to go through this piece by piece, in order to understand how this is put together and its objective.

First, note the link to WorldOMeter, a reputable statistics source. This signals that this is a serious e-mail and validates that the group at which it is aimed is serious and a member of the intellectual community.

But, in order to tell the right-wing group that this should be taken seriously by them, the first statistic is … number of abortions. You can’t be a member of today’s conservatives without adhering to the ideology that abortion is equivalent to the death of a human. The position is easily disassembled intellectually, and my understanding is that it has no basis in Christian theology. But it’s one of those ties that bind. My willingness to dispute this as a valid death statistic marks me as outside of the conservative group, BUT as an American, I would hope and expect that my fellow Americans, who I think have received this email as part of a malicious anti-American scheme, will pause and complete reading this missive.

After that little bit of subtle political advertising, we get a bunch of causes-of-death and numbers. I will stipulate that the numbers were accurate when taken for my purposes, because I’m too lazy to actually check … and they seem likely.

So lets talk about categories. Categories help us define valid comparisons and assess risk and thus how seriously we should take threats. Are all these sources of morbidity in the same category?

No. This is the second clue that this is not a missive to take seriously. So let’s talk about why all these apples are actually oranges, chunks of rock, and monkey brains.

Smoking, Traffic Accidents, and Suicide

These are the results of human behavior, implying they are reducible, if we’re only willing to take certain actions, such as invest in better mental health services, stopping smoking, or drive more sensibly (or take the bus).

Importantly, these numbers are known and expected, and when one deviates upwards, steps can be taken to discover why and to fix it.

Cancer

For the most part, cancer is the result of shitty bad luck. Since Smoking is separately listed, we needn’t caveat about lung cancer, leaving only a few cancers known to be caused by pathogens, such as HPV. Most occur because of said bad luck or are heritable, which I’d argue is also bad luck, as one cannot pick one’s parents.

But many cancers are treatable, and treatments for more are under development. Most cancer death rates exhibit a downward trend. From the National Cancer Institute:

In the United States, the overall cancer death rate has declined since the early 1990s. The most recent SEER Cancer Statistics Review, released in April 2018, shows that cancer death rates decreased by:

• 1.8% per year among men from 2006 to 2015
• 1.4% per year among women from 2006 to 2015
• 1.4% per year among children ages 0–19 from 2011 to 2015

Malaria and Seasonal Flu

False-colored electron micrograph of a sporozoite, which causes malaria (Wikipedia)

These are diseases with high transmissibility. You get it, it’s dangerous, and it’s difficult, in the proper localities, to not get it. But what’s interesting is that we have extensive experience with these illnesses. There are preventive strategies available: annual vaccines for the flu, with fluctuating effectiveness, and treatments. Malaria has been developing resistance to the drugs used to treat it, but the keyword is developing. For prevention, night time netting is advocated on the personal level, and strategies to make the transmission vector, mosquitoes, unable to carry the parasite causing malaria are under development by the medical community.

HIV

I saved HIV (which names a virus; one can argue people suffer and die from AIDS, the illness HIV causes in humans, but it’s a semantic quibble) for its own category because it is an example of a disease in transition in the context of human society. When it first appeared, it swiftly caused utter panic in the homosexual community, because the death rate was high, it was as likely to kill the old as the young, it was an ugly way to die, and it spread disproportionately through homosexual sexual contact. (Update: Andrew Sullivan accidentally corrects me to note that the anal sex practices of male homosexuals in particular; female homosexuals, or lesbians, are less likely than heterosexuals to contract HIV.) Members of the community from that era speak of attending funerals weekly, or worse, for young friends and relatives. Survivors sometimes have PTSD.

Today? If you live in a Western country, it’s generally little more than a nuisance. From Wikipedia:

The management of HIV/AIDS normally includes the use of multiple antiretroviral drugs. In many parts of the world, HIV has become a chronic condition in which progression to AIDS is increasingly rare.

So why is it even listed by WorldOMeter? Not all parts of the world have supplies of the necessary drugs, or the medical personnel qualified to test, diagnose, and prescribe for it. This will change over time, and at some point, assuming progress is not interrupted by a world-wide catastrophe, the initial HIV years will be an historical event, still highly disturbing for those survivors, but for those who didn’t experience it, just another dry chapter in a history book.

COVID-19 (listed here as Corona Virus)

How does COVID-19, aka the Wuhan virus, differ from the above?

• How does it kill us? We don’t know, although we’re making progress.
• How transmissible is it? We know it’s at least high; it may be ultra-high.
• What is the infection rate in a normal human society? We don’t know.
• Who is more vulnerable? We know there’s evidence that people with health problems may be more vulnerable, but what then of the stories of extremely old people surviving, while apparently healthy younger people don’t make it? We don’t know.
• What percentage of those infected will require hospitalization in order to survive? Technically, we don’t know; medical personnel know the answer, in combination with the unknown infection rate of the previous point, is “way too high.” If you are or were a member of the law enforcement community, insert the profane adjective of your choice in the previous sentence, and then say it with conviction.
• What is the death rate “in the wild” (i.e., without support in a hospital)? We don’t know.
• Do survivors have immunity? We don’t know. (There have been reports out of South Korea of survivors suddenly showing symptoms again, but the meaning of this is not yet clear.)
• Are there negative consequences for survivors, like that suffered by measles survivors (damaged immune systems)? We don’t know. (We also don’t know if there are positive consequences.)
• Can a safe treatment be found for it? Despite the babblings – and that’s what they are – of President Trump concerning various anti-malarial medications, yes, the answer is “we don’t know.”
• Can a safe vaccine for it be developed? We don’t know.
• Suppose we can develop a safe vaccine, will it give us life long immunity? We don’t know. Maybe it’ll be an annual injection, like the flu.

See, that’s the difference between COVID-19 and all those other illnesses. We don’t know. But here’s one we do know:

• Given the high transmissibility and infection rates, and the apparently high rate of people needing strong support in a hospital, do we have sufficient Intensive Care Beds available? No, not in a normally functioning American society. We know that. That leads to medical personnel deciding who should die – these ten Covid-19 infected people, the car accident victim in the corner, the kid who fell out of a 4th story window and fractured his skull, the four gunshot victims, and our colleagues the five nurses and two doctors who have become desperately ill with COVID-19. This is why shelter in place orders are required in most American settings – because then we have a better chance of not overrunning our hospitals with desperately ill people.

Returning to the beginning of this post, when I said some readers will know the perfect rejoinder to this email, I will now add that. Recall that the time period on the email is January to end of March of this year. Victims of COVID-19 numbered 46,491, world wide.

Today is April 18. WorldOMeter now lists 156,338 deaths. NOT infections, which is listed at 2,280,490. Another source, Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, has comparable numbers.

In the last 18 days, that’s a 200% jump, and that’s with some significant changes to human society in an attempt to forestall the worst – so that when you become ill, there’s a hospital bed and a reasonable chance of you surviving.

So at some point I mentioned the missive to which I’m responding was malicious. Listen, folks, whoever the joker was who wrote that mail, they deliberately eliminated all context that might have clued you, the conservative reader, in to the seriousness of this disease. They could have shown you a graph of how the infection and death rates have been increasing as the infection spreads. They could have discussed important factors, likely victim trends, I mean an entire host of important things.

Instead, they stripped out the variable of time and presented you with a snapshot. Whoever this person is, they wormed their way into your community with the abortion flag, they invoked what has become the traditional conservative skepticism of any news not coming from Fox News, and they lowered the hammer of presenting incomplete information.

Look, readers, count up the unknowns I listed above. Look at how the deaths around the world continue to increase. I’ve been watching since Jan 21, and I’ve been horrified at the numbers jumping upwards at higher and higher rates, first in China, then Italy, now the United States. This missive to which I’m responding is designed to keep you skeptical of the American mainstream, to deepen the schisms that keep America from achieving its potential, to keep us distrusting “the other side”. It does it by presenting numbers, generally considered ideologically neutral, without mentioning that the numbers, no doubt accurate on the day they were taken, only matter in the context that’s been stripped. It plays on the ideas of Gee, this is just common sense, without every acknowledging that humanity’s common sense, unless trained academically, doesn’t understand infection and death rates trending up like we’re seeing.

This is a serious situation. Stay American. The comment that accompanied that email, received just a day or two ago by me, indicated the sender hadn’t even checked the numbers. Get smart. Or watch your friends and family die.

If you’re a little concerned about the food supply and processing plants shutting down, this WaPo article will do nothing to calm you down:

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC)

There’s not been a lot of Senate campaign news due to the Covid-19 outbreak, but I’ve been wondering about North Carolina Senator … Richard Burr (R). That’s right, not Senator Tillis (R-NC), who is in a tight re-election fight with Cal Cunningham (D), but with the other North Carolina Senator, who is not even up for re-election.

Burr’s term ends in January of 2023, and he has announced that he’ll be retiring then, but his retirement could be hurtling at him much faster, because he may have walked down the same path as former Representative Chris Collins (R-NY), who shortly should begin serving a sentence for insider trading. Regarding Senator Burr, NPR has the latest:

Sen. Richard Burr’s sale of up to $1.7 million in stocks shortly before the recent market crash was one of the lawmaker’s only market-beating trades since record keeping began eight years ago, according to a new study.

The new analysis, presented by researchers at Dartmouth College, shows just how unusual the North Carolina senator’s transactions were. On a single day, Feb. 13 of this year, Burr unloaded a significant portion of his net worth — a departure from his typically low-volume trading history. …

The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman’s trades and pricate statements about how the coronavirus pandemic would affect American life have become the subject of Justice Department and law enforcement inquiries.

It doesn’t take an indictment for Burr to decide to retire early, it might only take bad publicity for a man looking forward to retirement. If he does?

At that juncture, I’m not sure whether Governor Cooper (D-NC) would have the option to appoint a replacement until a special election can be held, or if the seat would be empty until that election. But it’s not impossible that North Carolina will have not one, but two Senatorial seats up for grabs in November, or at least the second empty shortly thereafter.

And that would make the next election just that much more harder for a GOP that is beleaguered in a State that had been acting as one of their bulwarks. Burr was won his last re-election by less than 6 points, which was disappointing considering the fact that he won by more than 11 points in 2010, and 2016 was the year of Trump and the GOP winning both Congress and the Executive.

That, and the shocking victory of Governor Cooper (D) in 2016, suggests the wheels are coming off of the North Carolina GOP. Look for Burr to be under tremendous pressure to both resign and not to resign. If he does, Trump will not have happy things to say about him, but will hug the GOP nominee to replace him with enthusiasm, in the belief that it’ll help the cause – an opinion not based on fact.

The November elections have some real potential for great stories.

Another reader responds to my post regarding the dangers of large food processing plants:

Your article about food supply issues has me thinking. In my lifetime I have seen family farms transition to parts of larger operations. My family’s property is no longer farmed by family, but by a tenant who is renting many acres to make his living more lucrative. We, as a society, have become less and less responsible for our own survival resources and dependent upon others for necessary goods and services.

80 years ago (pulling a number out of my hat), many people living in rural areas grew and preserved their own food, including animals that provided milk, eggs and meat. Slaughtering of animals was an experience, to be sure. I remember my daddy dressing out a hog in our barn that he had ‘grown.’ I helped my grandparents dress chickens. We used to take a hog or beef to a slaughter house in our area for processing and then rent a freezer locker in which to store our meat.

To spare you my walk down memory lane, people have made decisions that relinquished their accountability for their resources to others for a price they were willing to pay. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. All of this has occurred in the guise of free enterprise. I can find a privately run meat market in a town 30 miles away. While I’m not likely to go to WalMart for my Easter ham, I did go to my local grocery store and buy a Smithfield ham. I don’t see how it would be possible to regulate the packing plants that have evolved over time to be what they are. It hurts me to see the farmers mowing their tomato crop and dumping milk because the COVID situation has drastically curtailed the market for their product. This will undoubtedly impact me, the land owner, who depends upon income from grain crops. The current situation is devastating, but I don’t see how current industry can be regulated to go backwards, for that seems to be what your regulation would require.

People have given up so much independence and self sufficiency. They can’t prepare their own food, maintain their own nails and hair, or manage their own children. It has become a house of cards. Regulation might be better to require classes to equip students with skills in food preparation, food growing, clothing construction, etc. We did that 50 years ago. I believe students would be genuinely interested in these topics. In order to retool anything, that is where a change will gain the most traction.

I’m sure I have simply served to frustrate you, but I have shared my thinking, however disjointed. I am retiring at the end of this school year after I’ve put all my last 4 weeks of instruction online.

I think my reader thinks I want to go back a little further than I want to go, but perhaps I misunderstand the nature of our food processing. While the consolidation of family farms into corporate farms is a separate and serious issue, I’m thinking about processing the food, such as slaughter and other activities. Right now, it appears we have a few huge plants to do it, and when more than just a few goes down, our food supply becomes imperiled.

It seems to me that we either find a way to make those plants impervious to natural disaster, or we replace these big plants with a host of smaller plants that are geographically dispersed.

Insofar as self-sufficiency goes, there are so many trade-offs. The Do It Yourself-er (DIYer) has a long tradition in this country, and the thought of being the master of your own house has its necessary charms, yet it’s undeniable that someone who fixes their own toilet or installs their own light fixtures has just deprived a plumber or an electrician of some income, which translates to a tiny hit in the GDP.

And, judging from the workmanship from previous owners of my own home, of dubious or even dangerous quality – another tradeoff.

The DIYer has also deprived themselves of time that could have been dedicated to improving on their own specialty in their own vocation.

Yet, too much specialization has its own tradeoffs in terms of development of a balanced personality, of knowledge outside of a specialty etc.

I think the country must have, and to some extent always has, an ongoing debate over how much specialization vs ability to master disparate tasks is good for the citizenry. And I have no idea if there is even an answer to the question, except that the well-rounded person with an active, inquisitive mind and an active physical life is probably more of an asset to society than the hyper-specialized person … who wins a Nobel prize in Medicine.

Sigh.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog is aggravated with the latest body to occupy the position of White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany:

It was against this backdrop that White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, in just her second week on the job, declared on Twitter yesterday, “Under President [Donald Trump’s] leadership we have quickly developed the most expansive and accurate testing system in the world.”

That’s certainly one way to look at the current landscape. The other way is to notice that there is no such U.S. testing system. The Washington Post reported overnight, “There is no national testing strategy, but rather a patchwork of programs administered by states with limited federal guidance.”

It’s too bad she’s too cowardly to make such a statement in a press conference, like we used to have. Then she would have to acknowledge the simple question, Who told you that?

If she comes back with a name, then that person can be tracked down and interviewed.

If it’s “Well, this is my observation,” you tell her that she’s not qualified and will not be taken seriously.

By all reports, our testing system is not robust, and whether this is the fault of the private sector, of the CDC, of the White House, or for previous Congresses (for not providing funding), I don’t know. But we do need to work with honest facts, not politically convenient lies. Coming off the latter just leads to further delays, lives lost, and all that sort of thing.

Ya gotta wonder if anyone she knows is ashamed of her.

Or perhaps me on getting pizza:

In response to my suggestion that governments are falling down on their job, a reader remarks:

Water-carrier is a good term here. This is end-stage capitalism, wherein the capital has captured the regulatory (read: public interest) process. Though the neoliberal Democrats have their share of the blame — a large share, mind you — it’s also the result of many decades of domination of the political scene by reactionary conservatives, i.e. most Republicans.

Which I don’t dispute, along with a sophisticated psychological attack.

But I’m interested in the phrase end-stage capitalism, which I’ve run across before and not paid much attention. Let’s take it literally: what does it imply?

For me, it suggests there’s a limited lifetime, a deterministic fate to the entire capitalistic+democratic scene. It reminds me of a software engineering term for one variety of development: The waterfall model.

In this model, you never get to go back and correct your mistakes. As each step in the life cycle of developing a software product is completed, it is passed on to the next team, which does its bit, and it never goes back to a prior step for problem correction.

Sounds like madness, doesn’t it?

But the comparison does raise the question of why can we not correct our errors and then continue on? The suggestion that this is end-stage capitalism might imply, at least to the socialist, that at some time the entire capitalist way of doing things will go away.

And I have to wonder if that’s necessary. After all, the replacement of mercantilism with capitalism has certainly led to some amazing gains in terms of material success, although there’s no denying that a host of injustices, human and otherwise, have accompanied many of those gains. So that leads to this question:

Do we throw everything away because mistake-prone humans have made mistakes? Or do we try to correct the errors while retaining the spirit of hard work and smarts will bring you rewards?

I lack confidence in the term end-phase capitalism. This may be the instructive phase of the consequences of near laissez-faire capitalism, where we learn that it does not result in an endless sea of creative chaos, but instead leads to an inhuman chase after monstrous profits. That may be more accurate.

But we shall see over the next few years. Will Americans continue to follow the Republicans down the rabbit hole of money worship? Or will they draw back and rethink how they conduct their lives?

When everyone looks like they came from a pack of playing cards.

The Three Musketeers (1921) is a silent retelling of the classic Dumas tale, or at least so I wish. It was paired with a collection of anachronistic classic music that drove my Arts Editor and myself up the wall.

That music, combined with an opening that has, at best, languid pacing, it gets off to a dubious start. This is a thorough story, first introducing us to Cardinal Richelieu and the suspicious King Louis, and the mutual loathing of Richelieu, who’s really quite creepy, and Queen Anne. Then we are introduced to the noble roots of our hero, D’Artagnan, in a little town in Gascony, where his father, an impoverished nobleman and former Musketeer, has sought to instill French nobility principles in him. One which brought us to laughter was “… Remember, my son, that your ancient nobility gives you the right to the best in France,” followed by admonishments to fight as much as he can, and take what he thinks he deserves.

It explains the outright theft we see later.

But never mind that. Through some mildly clumsy plotting, D’Artagnan manages to become a cadet in the Musketeers, bump hurriedly into the eponymous heroes, and murder, or at least injure, the Cardinal’s men seeking to arrest them. But while I say clumsy plotting, I have to admit that a fake message to the Duke of Buckingham, would-be lover to Queen Anne, was a nice touch. While the Duke is unexpected, it gives Anne the chance to gift him with a fancy something-or-other with twelve diamonds.

And then comes Cardinal’s gambit, sending Milady de Winter to England to steal the buckle, and bring it back to doom the Queen.

Well, Milady accomplishes the first, but while she’s at it, the All for one and one for all crowd is busily in pursuit, sacrificing themselves to keep D’Artagnan rolling along, and at Calais he is easily enough across the Channel. Arriving too late to intervene in the theft of the buckle, D’Artagnan stows away aboard her ship, and daringly steals the buckle back.

And now it’s the rush back to Paris, where Anne is in dire straits as the Cardinal prepares to close his fist around her throat. D’Artagnan, deprived of companions, manages to fight his way to Anne’s apartment, thus saving her before collapsing in a heap.

Perhaps the most surprising plot twist? The Cardinal’s reaction to his defeat, which I shan’t reveal.

And the most disappointing character? The Cardinal has a truly foreboding assistant, a Father Joseph – who ends up doing nothing, nothing at all. Very depressing. Maybe he ended up on the cutting room floor for this print.

A silent movie that clocks in at two hours long is not a trivial thing to watch, and the accelerated movements common to movies of this age take away from what could have been really inspiring brawls, but overall it’s not a bad movie.

Even if Douglas Fairbanks does look a trifle smarmy.

There’s also one for salt.

Erick Erickson keeps promising to stop sending mail to people who don’t send him money, and then he sends mail anyways. This one is useful and informative, especially if you’ve been bewildered by the report that New York is suddenly upping its Covid-19 death count by 3000+:

The CDC changed the guidelines for a number of reasons. First, “there are too many cases of flu to test and confirm so laboratory-confirmed data is a vast underestimate of the true number of cases.” Second, “influenza and pneumonia syndrome are diagnostic codes used by all hospitals. Capturing this number will reflect a fuller picture of influenza and influenza-related serious illness and deaths in the United States during the pandemic.”

Currently, with COVID-19, to get a very accurate picture, the CDC has used only confirmed testing in its nationwide reporting. But we know testing is insufficient. As a result, just like with the flu, the CDC is asking states to keep a record of presumed cases for later analysis and to accurately document on death certificates if COVID-19 is suspected.

How do they know COVID-19 is suspected? Well, if someone has all the symptoms and we know they either were around an infected person before the symptoms or others got it after coming into contact with them, we can be sure they had COVID-19 even if they did not get tested. Likewise, if they have air sac damage and symptoms consistent with COVID-19, we can know they had it, even if they did not get a test.

The New York Times may not have explained this well, but it is not difficult to understand.

Put more broadly, we have been comparing COVID-19 confirmed deaths to flu deaths, which have included both confirmed and presumed deaths. What New York City is now doing is providing a better apples to apples comparison. Now, in their public release of data, New York City will have confirmed and presumed COVID-19 deaths just as all previous reports of flu deaths in New York had both confirmed and presumed deaths in that total.

This gives us a fuller picture of what is happening. There’s no conspiracy and no effort to make it seem worse than it is. The situation is bad. Getting an accurate picture of just how bad it is makes sense.

Or, as is often said in science, you can be precisely wrong, or you can be imprecisely right. At the numbers we’re now talking, we can be off by a few and still be making proper decisions.

And thanks to Erickson for stating this precisely. I don’t subscribe to The New York Times, as I already have a sub to The Washington Post and that takes up more than enough of my time, so I have no idea if they performed as poorly as Erickson would have his readers believe – I suspect Erickson sometimes misinterprets the mainstream media in order to condemn them. But this was a nice clarification, and I certainly don’t have time to call up the CDC for clarification, as he did.

A few days ago I posted an entry concerning the food desert caused by the centralization of groceries, particularly in rural areas. This occurs at Walmart, typically.

However, another centralization point, that could be a danger to Americans, has become apparent, and that is food processing plants. This is what clued me in:

“We have plenty of hogs, chickens and cows. But they all have to go through these packing plants that are big enough that if one closes down because workers get sick, it’s not a trivial amount.”

I gotta say, running around in those costumes must have been a bear.

The Magnavox Theatre (1950), much like Studio One, was a run of hour long, disconnected stories, which I will treat as movies. Their lone episode which was not broadcast live, and which we recently enjoyed, was The Three Musketeers, the classic Dumas story of love, duty, and the subversion of the King – from all sides, his wife the Queen, Cardinal Richelieu, even the cadet-Musketeer who finds himself assisting the Queen – and he’s not aware of it.

Such are the ways of despotic power.

It’s the old story here, as England is currently occupying part of France, and the Cardinal, despite his ecclesiastical trappings, is outraged at England’s brazen ambitions, and angered by the vacillating King. Now Queen Anne has a secret tryst with the English Duke of Buckingham, and, as a memento, gives two of her prize jewels, which were gifts from the King, to the dashing Duke. The Cardinal, suspecting something is up, has his henchman Rochefort keeping an eye on the Queen and her maid, and this is when we encounter D’Artagnan and the eponymous heroes of the tale, as the former has already bumped into the latter, agreed to serial duels, been interrupted by Richelieu’s men that are enforcing an edict against dueling, beat them all up, and ended up becoming pals as D’Artagnan becomes a cadet of the Musketeers.

D’Artagnan rescues the maid from Rochefort’s assistants and is, perforce, introduced to the Queen and Duke in a most hurried way. But Richelieu’s special assistant, Milady, has spotted the jewel gift, and soon there’s a plan afoot to steal the jewels from the Duke by Milady, manipulate the King into requiring the Queen to wear them, and then reveal her perfidy – or at least love for the wrong guy – for all to see.

Thus, the frantic dash for England, arriving just late, and then the frantic dash back, all the while leaving the various Musketeers behind to hold off the bad guys, if in fact any are bad – it’s refreshing that everyone thinks they’re working for the best interests of France, rather than it being depraved lunatics vs those whiter than fresh-driven snow.

(Can you tell we’ve been enduring snow squalls in April around here?)

A rousing climax, and some commentary on amatory technique close our classic tale. While I think the acting was good, and damn near everyone is dashing or lovely, as required, the quality of the print was poor. The fencing was little more than bodies wiggling blurrily around on the screen; one never got the sense of a hero in dire straits and battling his way out of it through some resourceful trick. And a story like this really requires flashy color; the black & white of this flick is disappointing.

Still, it’s compact and, most of the time, it’s possible to tell a Musketeer (or wannabe) from the Cardinal’s men.

Fun, but not great fun.

CNN/Politics is reporting on the faux-wisdom of Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-IN):

An Indiana congressman said Tuesday that letting more Americans die from the novel coronavirus is the “lesser of two evils” compared with the economy cratering due to social distancing measures.

Speaking with radio station WIBC in Indiana, Republican Rep. Trey Hollingsworth asserted that, while he appreciated the science behind the virus’ spread, “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

“The social scientists are telling us about the economic disaster that is going on. Our (Gross Domestic Product) is supposed to be down 20% alone this quarter,” Hollingsworth said. “It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward that direction. That is our responsibility and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.”

Sophisticated analysis? No. It’s one of those fallacious appeals to authority via the Big boy and big girl pants remark – that is, the grownups are now going to make a hard decision and you lesser beings had better let the grownups do that for your own good. That’s the implicit message here.

There’s no particularly insightful argument. He makes an assertion, without support, that minimizing deaths through social distancing and flattening the curve, will cause more economic damage than having more people – by an order of at least one magnitude, if not, horrifyingly, two – die in agony.

And wear out the medical profession.

While many other non-COVID-19 patients who would ordinarily be saved would also die due to the well-documented scarcity of medical resources that his suggestion would entail.

Of course, this is not entirely surprising from a representative who has an MBA from Wharton and founded and ran a couple of companies – but never studied government. His values are those of the private sector, not the public sector.

And he may not have actually done any research, but just shot his mouth off. While I have no opinion on the validity of this work, as this is just a newspaper report, the University of Wyoming has been doing some research:

This seems more than a bit ridiculous:

“The truth is, from this moment on, Americans must ignore lies and start to listen to scientists and other respected professionals,” Pelosi wrote. She said she had reached these conclusions after prayer and reflection over Easter Weekend. [WaPo]

I find my confidence in the House Speaker shaken (and I regard her as a supreme political operator) if she had to use prayer and reflection to figure out the bleeding obvious.

Someone tell me that this is just part of her political scheming and she’s not that much in need of prayer.

The Trump Campaign wasn’t kidding when it sent a cease and desist letter to television stations carrying this add:

Donald Trump issued a cease and desist letter to stop our ad from running because he doesn’t want Americans to know the truth about his failed leadership. Help keep it on the air by donating herehttps://t.co/ZeRIriA3Y8 pic.twitter.com/Jdh1GY9HHS

— Priorities USA (@prioritiesUSA) March 26, 2020

because now one of those television stations is being sued. From the Trump Campaign press release:

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. today filed a lawsuit against WJFW-NBC of Rhinelander, WI for defamation in the wake of an advertisement carried by the station that contained intentionally false and defamatory statements about President Trump. The ad produced by Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy, and broadcast by WJFW-NBC, used digitally manipulated clips of President Trump’s voice to fabricate unsubstantiated meaning in the President’s words. The suit, filed in Price County, WI circuit court, followed a cease-and-desist letter and supporting documentation sent on March 25, 2020. In spite of the letter and documentation, WJFW-NBC continued to run the defamatory ad.

The station owner, for the record, seems a little baffled:

“Why they selected my little station in Northern Wisconsin, I have no idea,” Rockfleet Broadcasting President R. Joseph Fuchs told TPM on the phone Monday. Rockfleet owns three stations including WJFW-TV, the NBC affiliate in Rhinelander, Wisconsin targeted by the campaign. [TPM]

Because, Mr. Fuchs, this is how bullies operate. They pick out a little guy who they think can’t fight back and make an example out of him. In the realm of the law, now they have a precedent they can hide behind. For the record, the press release includes a number of quotes which they believe prove that Trump is being misquoted. I’ll leave that for a court to decide.

But I think Priorities USA, the creator of the ad, should double down by enhancing the ad. As I detailed here, add in the following information:

1. Trump’s remark that he “always knew this was a serious pandemic”.
2. The dates and sizes of campaign rallies prior to that remark (I do not believe he’s held any since).
3. Tote them up for a grand total of his supporters that he’s intentionally endangered.

The sputtering would be impressive.