Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick speaks out in favor of sacrifice for …

Dan Patrick, Texas’ Republican lieutenant governor, on Monday night suggested that he and other grandparents would be willing to risk their health and even lives in order for the United States to “get back to work” amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country,” Patrick said on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Patrick, who said he will turn 70 next week, said that he did not fear COVID-19, but feared that stay-at-home orders and economic upheaval would destroy the American way of life.

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren?’ And if that is the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said. [NBC News]

#ICYMI — I was on @FoxNews with @TuckerCarlson tonight. Click here to watch: https://t.co/potQsjdBID#txlege pic.twitter.com/2xLxYQQZVZ

— Dan Patrick (@DanPatrick) March 24, 2020

The “American way of life?” Really?

Or is it the recognition that a devastated economy in which the incompetence of the Trump Administration shines like a fireworks display bodes ill for the Republican Party in the November elections?

There’s a lot wrong here. The easy stuff is to point out that age is not a great proxy for identifying those who are especially at risk from this virus, and, in fact, Patrick is basically calling on everyone in ill health to put their lives on the line for the Republican Party’s political fortunes.

But it’s also shockingly short-term thinking. COVID-19 is not guaranteed to be a one-off event. Paint that on the back of your eyelids, folks. I would be delighted if the biologists or virologists came up with the breakthrough that would permit them to ascertain how to create safe and effective vaccines and cures for viruses in hours or days, but in the meantime, the only responsible course of action is to prepare for a repetition of this event. It may not be a coronavirus, it may take different forms, but it’s only prudent to assume it’ll occur again.

So, using Lt. Governor Patrick’s reasoning, who’ll be the next group to be sacrificed? What if the next pandemic is akin to the Spanish Flu, which victimized the young and healthy in a particularly gruesome death? All set to toss them into the shredder, Lt. Governor?

You may be wondering about the incompetency of this particular political specimen. Keeping in mind my constant and annoying harping on the toxicity of team politics (epitomized by the aphorism that, at election time, Republicans fall into line …), and the slightly more recent observation that the Republican Party is built on religious tenets, such as Abortion is evil, and the best way to climb to the top of the heap is not through demonstrated competency and ability to “work across the aisle,” but by determined clinging to those tenets, I found this entry in Wikipedia revealing:

Patrick opposes abortion and supported Texas’ “Mandatory Ultrasound Bill”, a bill signed into law in May 2011 by Governor Perry, which requires women seeking abortion to have a sonogram of the fetus taken at least twenty-four hours before the abortion is performed.

Patrick opposes abortion in cases of incest and rape. In January 2014, when he was asked about exceptions to outlawing abortion, Patrick said, “The only exception would be if the life of the mother was truly in danger…but that is rare.”

An abortion absolutist. Yep, that’ll demonstrate he’s an appropriate choice for higher office. It doesn’t matter if he’s in earnest or a hypocrite on the subject, or how competent of a leader he may be; the point is that he’s just demonstrated public incompetency in the matter of public health. It’d be fine if he had queried the experts on taking such a position and was rebuffed; I don’t expect anyone to get these things straight on their own.

But to take it public?

No, welcome to the tail-end of Republican team politics, where competency and coherent thought is not just second to allegiance to the religious tenets of the Party, never to be questioned or breached, but does not even exist.

This is what we have to look forward to if the Republicans are reelected in November. I’m an independent, not a Democrat, so if you’re an independent voter as well, take this to heart.

I was amused to run across someone screaming about the left weaponizing the COVID-19 pandemic, as if he’d never had a civics lesson in his life. Then I ran across this story from the weekend, which rather drives the hypocrisy of the entire debate right in to the nines:

I see that the skeptics movement, sub-section quack-chasers, is going to have to create a new sub-category for the damage that can be done by consulting with quacks:

Not In This Issue, though. The next issue, maybe.

These days, Plaquenil is better known by its generic name, hydroxychloroquine. It is the medication Trump has been hyping as a potential treatment for the novel coronavirus, even though it is not approved for this use and there is scant medical evidence so far that it works to treat the virus.

Trump’s push to use hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 has triggered a run on the drug. Healthy people are stocking up just in case they come down with the disease. That has left lupus patients like Valdez and those with rheumatoid arthritis suddenly confronting a lack of medication that safeguards them, and not only from the effects of those conditions. If they were required to take stronger drugs to suppress their immune systems, it could render them susceptible to more serious consequences should they get COVID-19. [ProPublica]

I had never expected that I’d be typing Quack-In-Chief, and yet here we are. Now legitimate consumers of a medication are at risk because the President indulged in unjustified speculations, all in service of his political career. Endangering his own constituents.

This is appalling. It should be grounds to impeach him all over again, but I suppose that’s out of the question. Hopefully he’ll be on the short end of the Nixon-McGovern stick in November.

NPR reports that at least one judge finds GOP shenanigans in Wisconsin to be unacceptable.

A judge has struck down the laws that Wisconsin Republicans passed in December’s lame-duck session of the state’s Legislature, restoring powers to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, if only temporarily.

A county judge ruled on Thursday that all of the laws and appointments passed by legislators were unlawful because they met in what’s known as an “extraordinary session,” which isn’t explicitly allowed under the state’s constitution.

Evers seized on the decision almost immediately, calling on the Wisconsin Department of Justice, led by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, to withdraw the state from a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

“As the governor has requested, please take whatever steps are necessary to remove Wisconsin from Texas v. United States,” wrote Evers’ chief legal counsel, Ryan Nilsestuen, in an email to the Department of Justice shortly after the ruling was released.

Evers and Kaul campaigned on leaving the case, but one of the lame-duck laws has prevented them from following through on their pledge.

The ruling also temporarily struck down 82 appointments that former Republican Gov. Scott Walker made during the waning days of his administration, all of which were confirmed by Republican state senators in the lame-duck session.

Note that this was a county judge. Often low-level judges get overturned or corrected. While the Wisconsin GOP was certainly dishonorable in its extraordinary session practice, I fear dishonorable isn’t a legal term.

And, yes, if the Democrats were to do something similar when thrust unexpectedly from power, I’d be equally disappointed.

Big hats: soup de jour!
(Don’t think “mutant bunny rabbit”! Oh, you just did.)

Lady of Burlesque (1943) is a surprisingly interesting whodunit mystery set at a burlesque house. The players are all in play: striptease ladies, comics, backstage crew, even the mobster who’s a little free with his fists. Adding to the interest is the fact that this movie derives from a novel written by famous strip tease queen Gypsy Rose Lee, so it’s reasonable to assume it’s truly reflective of backstage life as a member of a burlesque company.

Dixie Daisy is a new but leading member of the burlesque troop of the gentleman S. B. Foss, a woman ambitious for the next step up the ladder, and she works hard for her troupe. But when an injured diva returns, Dixie is sidelined.

And then the diva is murdered. Add in the diva’s abusive mobster boyfriend, and things get ugly, and just to sprinkle pepper on everything, one of the comics of the troupe is infatuated with Dixie – much to her aggravation.

A second body, though, really amps up the worries, and the troupe, wondering who has a hatchet to sharpen among them, has to decide if the show goes on or not, which leads to a finale that couldn’t be foreseen – but was some fun reaching.

The print we saw was a bit muddy, but not awful. The acting and staging was excellent, and if the pacing sometimes seemed a little off, it wasn’t terribly off-putting. We enjoyed that hour and a half more than we anticipated, and you might, too.

I don’t usually quote someone just to quote them, but conservative and rueful former Republican Max Boot really puts the, er, boot in on the Trump cultists:

This was the result of post-Cold War, post-9/11 complacency, with voters imagining that they could take peace and prosperity for granted. If the coronavirus should teach us anything, it is that governing is a deadly serious business. Electing a grown-up isn’t a luxury; it’s a matter of life and death. The price of “owning the libs” turns out to be far higher than even most Trump critics could have imagined.

Kevin Drum is trying to prognosticate:

Right now, New York City is the canary in the coal mine. Whatever happens there over the next month is most likely what will happen to the rest of the country in the month or two after that. Even if we’re successful in flattening the curve a little bit, that won’t change the eventual rate of infection or the number of deaths. It just spreads it out a bit.

I’m not so sure. When it comes to the spreading of air-borne disease, density matters. And New York City is one of the most densely populated cities in the country. I expect the densely populated city centers of the country to see a higher rate of infections, and possibly death, than the more lightly populated cities and the rural areas.

And while it’s difficult to see silver linings, at least cities like New York have excellent hospital services, even if they’re likely to be overwhelmed – or already are. Our rural areas have become sadly notorious for their decaying medical care systems. The last thing they need is for the pandemic to his them, because they’ll swiftly begin losing patients who could have been saved.

But I guess we’ll see soon enough.

The first poll concerning the Montana Senate race has come in, and I’m pushing my count of Republican Senate reelection races to ten, as Public Policy Polling finds …

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that races for U.S. Senate and House in Montana are both neck and neck. In the Senate race, Governor Steve Bullock [(D)] and Senator Steve Daines [(R)]are tied 47-47, with just 6% of voters undecided. In the House race, [Democrat] Kathleen Williams and [Republican]Matt Rosendale are tied 45-45, with 9% still undecided. Bullock and Williams both lead among independent voters, with an 8 point lead for Bullock (50-42) and a 12 point lead for Williams (51-39).

It’s fascinating that a state that I considered solid Republican, with Trump defeating Clinton by more than 20 points in 2016 (while Libertarian Gary Johnson picked up 5.64% of the vote, which I interpret as The conservatives beat the liberals by more than 25 points) now appears to be flirting with the idea of going Democratic. And just to add to the fun …

Susan Good Geise, a Republican county commissioner in Montana, told KTVH she’ll be the Libertarian Party’s new candidate in Montana’s U.S. Senate race – replacing a last-minute withdrawal.

Geise’s entry could change the dynamics of the race between Sen. Steve Daines (R) and Gov. Steve Bullock (D). [Political Wire]

My guess is that, if Geise gets any support, it’ll come from the Daines camp. My reason? Daines doesn’t seem to be an especially repulsive personality, so I think the Bullock support is sincere, rather than partially composed of Republicans Who Can’t Stand Daines. Libertarians tend to ally with the Republicans, so Geise may be the honorable alternative Libertarians will choose if the Republicans continue down their path of incompetent governance and repulsive personalities. They’re less likely to choose a Democrat, since the conservatives and libertarians still love their little fantasy that the Democrats are far-left socialists.

Still, the election is more than half a year away, which is plenty of time for any candidate to trip over their shoelaces.

From The Metro (UK):

An Italian hospital that ran out of life-saving equipment for coronavirus patients was saved by a ‘hero’ engineer who used cutting-edge technology to design oxygen valves within a matter of hours.

At least 10 lives were saved when technician Christian Fracassi came to the aid of an overwhelmed Brescia hospital that ran out of breathing tubes for an intensive care machine on Saturday.  Doctors raised the alarm after their regular supplier said they could not produce the valves on time – forcing them to come up with an alternative solution.

With the help of the editor of a local newspaper Giornale di Brescia and tech expert Massimo Temporelli, doctors launched a search for a 3D printer – a devise that produces three dimensional objects from computer designs.

Word soon reached Fracassi, a pharmaceutical company boss in possession of the coveted machine. He immediately brought his device to the hospital and, in just a few hours, redesigned and then produced the missing piece.

Now, despite the country battling an unprecedented health crisis, there is potential for a legal battle with local media reporting that the manufacturers of the valves are refusing to share their blue print for further production and could potentially sue for copyright breaches.

I would assume the same scenario could easily surface in the litigation-happy United States. Therefore, Congress should pass some legislation to cover such lifesavers:

If an action is taken in pursuit of the treatment of COVID-19 which would be considered to be in violation of copyright or trademark laws, the violation will be considered null and void, and no penalty will apply to all those in support of said action, so long as aberrational profits are not taken by those responsible.

I do believe I’ll be sending that on to my Congressional reps.

Erick Erickson promised last week that he’d not send any more emails to non-subscribers to his newsletter, and I sighed with relief. Aaaaaaaand … then he sent more emails. He thinks he’s doing a public service by conveying facts and opinion about the COVID-19 outbreak to non-subscribers, countering right-wing skepticism along the way. Maybe he’s right.

But he’s insisting on writing in political opinion, and I can’t help but laugh.

Senate Republicans have been spending like drunken sailors for several years. They have shown zero fiscal restraint. It is pretty damn impressive that as a virus sweeps across the nation, the private sector goes on lockdown, and the death toll rises that suddenly the GOP is interested in fiscal restraint.

As if he should be surprised. Erickson apparently has forgotten – or never accepted it occurred – the behavior of Congress, both wings, 2001-2007, when the Republicans held Congress and the Presidency, spent money like mad on all their pet projects, started two wars and refused to up taxes to pay for them, and generally behaved in a most irresponsible manner. The Party of Fiscal Responsibility became nothing more than a joke.

Here’s the thing – one incident, even a six year long incident, may be an aberration. Two, though, is a trend. Give the Republicans control of government and they turn into wastrels. Split control with the Democrats and they become fiscal hawks. We know the name for this behavior. It’s hypocrites.

But, worse yet, that trend means the Republican Party, and all those who adhere to it, are party to a toxic political culture. For all that Erickson likes to cite scripture and draw back in horror from liberals – his phrase from an earlier email, “baby-killers” – he doesn’t really seem to like to admit to the truth – that the Republicans’ behavior is congruent with a Party of hypocrisy, power-grubbers, and liars, all types of people who are ill-suited to being in the government of the United States.

Erickson should really ask himself how he can have such a flawed judgment that he embraces such an anti-intellectual position as calling abortion “baby-killing,” while tacitly endorsing the election of people who are so ill-suited to the task of running government that they’re actually damaging the United States.

And then trying to rationalize it all by labeling anyone who’s against Trump as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” while ignoring the documented fact of 16,000+ lies, prevarications, and unsupportable boasts in his idol of worship. Is this what Jesus approved?

Maybe it’s good that he’s trying to spread facts and thoughtfulness to a population of Americans who are known to be skeptical about official information, who think they can, with neither experience nor training, reason their way to their preferred outcome – “it’s all a hoax to damage Trump!”, to summarize a WaPo article I read today – but if he’s going to try to mix politics into it, even politics critical of his own Party, then he opens himself up to charges of guilt – and not just guilt by association.

Regarding John Ioannidis my correspondent remarks …

Ioannidis is an interesting guy who has played a great part in the retraction of many medical research papers over the last 15 years. https://www.theatlantic.com/…/lies-damned-lies…/308269/

And that certainly puts him up a couple of points in my book, too. A quote from The Atlantic article:

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

I still am bothered by the lack of nuance in the Stat article, but I’ll put it down to size constraints. And this won’t make him – or me – happy:

Health officials in New York City and Los Angeles County are signaling a change in local strategy when it comes to coronavirus testing, recommending that doctors avoid testing patients except in cases where a test result would significantly change the course of treatment.

A news release from the Los Angeles Department of Public Health this week advised doctors not to test those experiencing only mild respiratory symptoms unless “a diagnostic result will change clinical management or inform public health response.”

The recommendation reflects a “shifting from a strategy of case containment to slowing disease transmission and averting excess morbidity and mortality,” according to the statement.

The guidance said coronavirus testing at L.A. County public health labs will prioritized those with symptoms, health care workers, residents of long-term care facilities, paramedics and other high-risk situations. Others are encouraged to simply stay at home. [CNN]

This loss of information will make it harder to understand the virus & associated disease, from immediate infection to long term consequences. And there’s at least one article I’ve run across that suggests there are two variants at work here:

When Xiaolu Tang at Peking University in Beijing and colleagues studied the viral genome taken from 103 cases, they found common mutations at two locations on the genome. The team identified two types of the virus based on differences in the genome at these two regions: 72 were considered to be the “L-type” and 29 were classed “S-type”.

A separate analysis by the team suggests that the L-type was derived from the older S-type. The first strain is likely to have emerged around the time the virus jumped from animals to humans. The second emerged soon after that, says the team. Both are involved in the current global outbreak. The fact that the L-type is more prevalent suggests that it is “more aggressive” than the S-type, the team say.

I like the abstraction inherent in this tree, but I fear the photo failed to capture it.

I should have moved in closer and cut off the bottom houses and cars.

Just hours after I wondered about the data coming out of Africa with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, I ran across this article in NewScientist (14 March 2020) which may provide some answers:

African countries are both vulnerable and potentially more resilient to the coronavirus. On the one hand, the population is much younger than in Europe and China. The median population age in the UK is 40.2 and in China it is 37, but this figure is 17.9 in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. “If you look at the statistics from China, the people that have worse prognosis are the older people, not necessarily the young,” says Stephen.

They also suggest at least some of the African nations are vigilant about incoming visitors.

I had also noted Russia’s small reported numbers. Its median age? 39.6, comparable to the UK & China. CNN has a report today on Russia’s small reported numbers, and it feels properly confusing, as Russia often can be:

“The director-general of WHO said ‘test, test, test,'” Dr. Melita Vujnovic, the World Health Organization’s representative in Russia, told CNN Thursday. “Well, Russia started that literally at the end of January.”

Vujnovic said Russia also took a broader set of measures in addition to testing.

“Testing and identification of cases, tracing contacts, isolation, these are all measures that WHO proposes and recommends, and they were in place all the time,” she said. “And the social distancing is the second component that really also started relatively early.”

Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s state consumer watchdog, said Saturday that it had run more than 156,000 coronavirus tests in total. By comparison, according to CDC figures, the United States only picked up the pace in testing at the beginning of March, while Russia says it has been testing en masse since early February, including in airports, focusing on travelers from Iran, China, and South Korea. …

Anastasia Vasilyeva, a doctor for Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny and leader of the Alliance of Doctors union, made headlines with a series of videos in which she claims the authorities are covering up real coronavirus numbers by using pneumonia and acute respiratory infection as a diagnosis.

“You see they said the first coronavirus patient that died, that the cause of death was thrombosis,” Vasilyeva told CNN. “That’s obvious, nobody dies from coronavirus itself, they die from the complications, so it’s very easy to manipulate this.”

Moscow health officials denied the accusation and said they were testing pneumonia patients for coronavirus. The WHO’s Dr. Vujnovic also was skeptical about Vasilyeva’s claim.

“If there was a hidden, unrecognized burden somewhere it would be seen in these [pneumonia] reports,” she said. “So I do not believe this is happening, which does not say that you might not see an increase of cases in the next period, because we have seen that in many countries.”

I have no idea what to make of this. Cover up? So competent they make us look like a clown herd?

Finally, a reader sends this link to a site named Stat, with which I’m unfamiliar. The article bemoans the general uncertainty of knowledge concerning COVID-19, but I have to wonder if they think the professionals at the CDC are dunces. Then I ran across this paragraph:

The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

Perhaps the writer, John Ioannidis, is a victim of bad editing, or perhaps he doesn’t understand how to analyze the situation. Here’s the error as I see it: He’s taking age as a fundamental factor in determining risk.

It’s not.

Age is a proxy for making general statements about underlying health conditions. In general, the aged have less effective immune systems than do the young. But a proxy is always a step away from the fundamentals, and so when using a proxy, one must always view it with some slight suspicion, applying caveats of both qualitative and quantitative measures.

The health professionals have been at pains to emphasize that any sort of underlying health condition may put those who’ve contracted the virus at risk for a severe episode. These constitute the fundamental factors of the risk.

Taking Ioannidis’ paragraph as an example, once you realize age is a proxy, then you find a set of questions that need to be answered:

• Are elderly cruise line passengers more or less likely to be as healthy as the median elderly person in the population? If it’s more healthy, then adjust the derived rates for severe and terminal episodes up; if it’s less healthy, then adjust the derived rates down. By derived, I mean the absolute rate for elderly persons, regardless of context.
• How does the level of care delivered on a cruise ship compare to that at an average 1^st world hospital? I’ve never taken a cruise, so I am clueless.
• How did caring for infected cruise line passengers impact other non-infected hospitalized passengers?
• How did the stress of being at sea, with limited resources, impact the recovery of infect passengers? In particular, the psychological stress of having home countries turn your ship away – a dreaded plague ship, as it were – must take a toll on patients of a certain range of temperaments.
• Etc.

Some folks may view the cruise liner situation as an excellent isolated experiment, but I have my doubts that at least Ioannidis’ article understands the nuances of the situation, based on the toss-off nature of that paragraph. And I do get that precision to 15 decimal places is useless, but it would help to at least say, within a magnitude, how COVID-19 compares to the seasonal flu.

Watching the Trump Administration inevitably reminds me of the brutal Soviet government, which insistently saw everything through the lens of politics, even to the extent of attaching political officers to military units. Now, I’m not saying that’s literally happening here, not at all, but this Steve Benen report on Maddowblog concerning the upcoming release of employment figures, until now a source of joy for the Trump Administration, sent up red flags for me:

Ahead of the next report, which will be released next week, the Trump administration is reportedly asking states not to release their own preliminary tallies. The New York Times reported, “In an email sent Wednesday, the Labor Department instructed state officials to only ‘provide information using generalities to describe claims levels (very high, large increase)’ until the department releases the total number of national claims next Thursday.”

It’s not yet clear if state officials will go along.

It sure sounds to me like political management of what is simply a harsh reality.

Look, many readers will just shrug and claim a Democratic Administration would have done the same thing, and perhaps, under some hypothetical Democrats, it would have. But that’s just a form of the discredited argument called uh-whataboutism, which I find more and more reasons to ignore.

One of the lovely things about democracies is that, when properly run, people can learn to trust the government. This President personally has 16,000+ non-distinct lies, prevarications, and boasts to his name, and an Administrative record full of shame when it comes to foreign relations (migrant children in cages, extortion of foreign leaders, toadying to other foreign leaders), etc etc. Most Americans don’t trust him.

So when the Labor Department issues “instructions” to state officials, which I doubt it has any legal authority to do so, to hold back on details of their State’s employment situation, I have to think this is going to be all about the spin.

If Trump and his Administration had a record of honest dealing with the electorate, then we wouldn’t see this, and we wouldn’t have to consider whether or not we should simply disregard the upcoming release of the numbers as being possibly fallacious or whatever. We could simply say, Yes, it’s the COVID-19 response causing this, and it’s just some pain we’ll have to bear, and it’s good to see the Administration is trying to help those who’ve lost jobs.

Trump could have so easily spun it to his advantage in the upcoming elections. But, instead, he lies through his teeth constantly. This is what liars reap.

For those readers who had their hopes pinned on how the Earth circles the sun as explaining the warm up in temperatures, in particular based on this study in Scientific Reports, I have some bad news:

A prominent scientific journal has retracted a study claiming that climate change was due to solar cycles rather than human activity.

Last year, Scientific Reports came under fire for publishing a paper that researchers said made elementary mistakes about how Earth moves around the sun.

Today the journal, published by Nature Research, which also has Nature in its stable of titles, formally retracted the paper by a team at UK universities and an institution in Azerbaijan.

The withdrawn study had argued that the average global 1°C temperature rise since the pre-industrial period was due not to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions but to the distance between Earth and the sun changing over time as the sun orbits the barycentre, the solar system’s centre of mass. In a statement today, Scientific Reports said that was inaccurate. …

“Solar system orbital dynamics is extremely well understood, and it wouldn’t have taken much for the authors to have checked if their claims about the significance of the motion of the sun around the solar system barycentre were indeed correct,” [Astronomy Professor Ken Rice at the University of Edinburgh, UK] says. [NewScientist, 14 March 2020]

Which casts shade on the rest of the paper. If you click on the link to the study, it’s prominently marked as RETRACTED.

And, yes, at least one of the authors is upset:

Valentina Zharkova at the University of Northumbria, one of the paper’s authors, says the retraction was unfair and the corrections made to the paper were minor.

Apparently, the experts disagreed and made a convincing case to the editors of Scientific Reports.

A reader writes concerning how Italy has recently passed China in number of deaths from COVID-19:

Apparently there are a lot of Chinese nationals living and working for Chinese-owned factories in northern Italy, and a lot of travel back and forth for the Chinese New Year holiday: https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-chinese-workers-who…

That explains a lot – basically, northern Italy becomes a small province of China. But are we seeing the same thing in Africa, which also has some significant transitory Chinese populations? From the image on the right, it appears not – but, again, how trustworthy is the data? All those small dots mean a very small number of infections, and no deaths.

And Russia continues to have absurdly small numbers.

Source: Wikipedia

Way back when, comets were viewed with superstitious dread. They were considered harbingers of disaster, pestilence, doom and –

Ah, yes. Like what we’re going through now.

So Spaceweather has this report, which is rather like adding a pedestrian to a crosswalk in a movie. It’s decorative, goes with the mood, all that sort of thing.

COMET ATLAS IS BRIGHTENING FASTER THAN EXPECTED: Get ready for a wild ride. Comet ATLAS (C2019 Y4) is plunging toward the sun and, if it doesn’t fly apart first, it could become one of the brightest comets in years.

“Comet ATLAS continues to brighten much faster than expected,” says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. “Some predictions for its peak brightness now border on the absurd.”

The comet was discovered in December 2019 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Hawaii. Astronomers quickly realized it might be special. On May 31, 2020, Comet ATLAS will pass deep inside the orbit of Mercury only 0.25 AU from the sun. If it can survive the blast furnace of solar heating, it could put on a good show.

However, no one expected the show to start this soon. More than 2 months before perihelion (closest approach to the sun), Comet ATLAS is already “heating up.” The worldwide Comet Observation Database shows it jumping from magnitude +17 in early February to +8 in mid-March–a 4000-fold increase in brightness. It could become visible to the naked eye in early April.

Keep an eye out. I’m not superstitious and I’ve love to see a big ol’ comet.

As the COVID-19 pandemic closes much of the service and entertainment industries and renders superfluous, hopefully temporarily, many jobs in said industries, our social system is feeling the strain:

As Americans turn to unemployment insurance, some are finding they do not qualify. Or if they do, the average payment of $385 a week is modest. In some states, there is a week-long waiting period before the first payment arrives.

“Workers expect unemployment insurance to be there for them in a downturn. A bunch of workers are about to find out that it’s not,” said Martha Gimbel, a labor economist at Schmidt Futures who was formerly at Indeed.com. “This is a real-life nightmare. Every hole we allowed to grow in our social safety net is hitting us all at once.” …

Many economists are urging Congress to quickly boost funding for state unemployment insurance. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act that President Trump signed Wednesday included $1 billion to help states with administrative costs of processing unemployment insurance, but additional stimulus will be needed to cover more people. Twenty-three states were already running low on money in their unemployment trust funds before the pandemic hit. [WaPo]

If I were one of those searching for and not finding unemployment benefits, I’d be asking Where does the responsibility lie? And while I haven’t done the research to discover that, it seems likely the GOP, legendarily parsimonious with unemployment benefits, and well-known to have, as a minor religious tenet of the Party, the belief that everyone would refuse to work if they could get away with it, bears some responsibility.

Since the Democrats will be asking it, let’s ask ourselves: is it valid for the Democrats, stipulating that the Republicans are mostly guilty of rending the social safety net, to use these failures as an attack vector during the various campaigns over the summer?

No doubt the guilty will scream NO!, but I think it is a valid political question.

Look: it is the responsibility of government to provide for disasters and emergencies. The private sector has neither the authority nor the ability to coordinate for the various needs and requirements, and its motivations make it ill-suited to try. The government must be prepared and adequately funded for disasters. If it’s not, then either the disaster is beyond imagining – and, despite President Trump’s ribald attempts to claim the answer is that it was beyond imagining, it was really on the radar of disaster specialists for decades – or someone or some group is a systemic failure.

And there’s no reason that the political enemies of the screwups shouldn’t take advantage of it; indeed, it would be a dereliction of duty to not do so.

And, hey, if the Democrats are the responsible Party, then the Republicans should be at their throats, instead.

But in the end, a disaster doesn’t make the associated political questions invalid. After all, we should be all about preventing them, not rationalizing them.

From the Centers for Disease Control:

FIGURE 2. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) hospitalizations,* intensive care unit (ICU) admissions,† and deaths,§ by age group — United States, February 12– March 16, 2020

* Hospitalization status missing or unknown for 1,514 cases.
† ICU status missing or unknown for 2,253 cases.
§ Illness outcome or death missing or unknown for 2,001 cases.

Perhaps the 20-40 year olds think it’ll be a lark to get COVID-19, but stays in the ICU are never pleasant, or so I gather from family members who’ve done so.

That said, there’s something else to bear in mind: for survivors of COVID-19, we have no idea, apparently and expectedly, of the long-term consequences of infection. It’s not unknown for pathogens to have long-term effects, even if the victim survives the acute phase. For example, measles can cripple your immune system:

The toll of measles on the immune system

Many of the deaths attributable to measles virus are caused by secondary infections because the virus infects and functionally impairs immune cells. Whether measles infection causes long-term damage to immune memory has been unclear. This question has become increasingly important given the resurgence in measles epidemics worldwide. Using a blood test called VirScan, Mina et al. comprehensively analyzed the antibody repertoire in children before and after natural infection with measles virus as well as in children before and after measles vaccination. They found that measles infection can greatly diminish previously acquired immune memory, potentially leaving individuals at risk for infection by other pathogens. These adverse effects on the immune system were not seen in vaccinated children. [“Measles virus infection diminishes preexisting antibodies that offer protection from other pathogens,” Michael J. Mina, et al, Science]

Perhaps survivors of COVID-19 become sterile, have diminished cognitive capacities, or some other life-defining problem.

Treating COVID-19 as nothing more than a minor flu may be more costly than you youngsters – get off the lawn beach! – think.

Here we are on the set of Game of Thrones, folks. Please don’t meddle with the stage pieces. [Sotto voce: Damn kids. I should never have taken this position as tour guide.]

What could possibly go wrong?

Yet, in Knives Out (2019), Harlan Thrombey, master of the murder mystery form, is found with his throat slit and the knife still in his hand the next morning, and the fun begins. Between children who’ve been sucking at his teat for their entire lives, grandchildren twisted by their parents, and faithful nurse Marta, there’s no shortage of suspects.

Into this delightful mess strides private detective Benoit Blanc, an American of non-specific Southern extraction (actually, my Arts Editor gagged a little on the actor’s accent), hired anonymously to travel to Massachusetts and assist the local police in the investigation into what appears to be a suicide.

Slowly, methodically, and quietly, he begins to unravel the story presented, not realizing there’s not one, but two deceptions clouding the view.

But the lead here is nurse Marta, the Ecuadoran who may be here legally, but her Mom’s not. Who may have been Harlan’s best friend, but is doing horrible things for him. Sort of horrible. Maybe horrible?

And looking at a bleak future, paved in green paper. You were wondering? Of course you were. And she hates it.

Knives Out doesn’t hit all the targets. The gratuitous use of shock is ineffective – so the grandkid is a Nazi who pleasures himself in odd places, that’s just not really a big shock, but then today’s culture specializes in shock. A second victim, well, I didn’t even recognize her, and I was paying attention. She should have been given some sort of distinguishing characteristic. A third eye, poor taste in art, SOMETHING.

But the storytellers do have their clever moments, and I won’t spoil them except to say I did enjoy the opening sequence of police interviews. It’s not unique, but it’s well done and gives a bit of insight into all these family members.

There may not be anything profound in Knives Out, but the plot didn’t seem to have any holes in it, bad people got some sort of comeuppance, and it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours. Just don’t worry about his mother, or who the hell was the mother of all these kids. Maybe they popped out of Harlan’s forehead. Or something equally scandalous.

Some minor bits of news for you Senate campaign fans out there.

• The Republican March 31st Alabama primary run-off contest between favored Tommy Tuberville and former holder of the Senate seat Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has been postponed until July 14. It’ll be interesting to see if the rivals continue to flay each other, thus alienating the opposition’s supporters, or if a temporary truce is called. If the former occurs, look for Senator Jones (D) to increase his chances of retaining the seat.
• The same NBC News story also reports “Five other states also have postponed their primaries because of the coronavirus pandemic: Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland and Ohio.” However, Kansas is not, but the Democrats are urging voters to use mail-in ballots.
• Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) now knows his Republican opponent: former Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran. There’s still little to suggest Durbin will face a tough challenge.

… is that you then draw questionable conclusions, questionable further questions, and other such adventures in FallacyLand. So consider this:

Yeah. Russia, with a population of 144 million, or very roughly one tenth of its neighbor China, has no deaths.

Really?

And I have heard nary a word on the subject.

I wonder if epidemiologists are adjusting for possibly bad data out of Russia.

Meanwhile, Italy, with a population of 60 million, is nearly at 3,000 deaths, which is very near China’s totals. Again, how trustable is this data?

Jeroboam:

1. A wine bottle holding 3 liters (approximately 0.8 gallon) of sparkling wine.
2. A wine bottle holding 4.5 liters (approximately 1.2 gallons) of still wine. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “America’s germaphobes were ready for this — and have been for too long,” Karen Heller, WaPo:

Baker suffers from health anxiety disorder, also known as hypochondriasis. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is its frequent companion. Germs are the mortal enemy. Tony Shalhoub’s detective character in “Monk,” with his phobia of unclean surfaces and bountiful supply of sanitary wipes, is the disorder’s poster child.

Baker’s home is never without end-times supplies of bleach, hydrogen peroxide and the twin set of germ weaponry in our newly confined world order, dainty bottles of hand sanitizer and jeroboams of disinfecting wipes.

Senator McConnell (R-KY), leader of the Senate but in trouble in his reelection race, is looking for a bit of leeway from his probable opponent:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign called on a potential Democratic opponent — former Marine Corps pilot Amy McGrath — to stop running political advertisements during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Amy McGrath’s decision to blanket the airwaves with deceitful ads during the coronavirus outbreak is tasteless and shameful,” said McConnell campaign manager Kevin Golden. “As Kentuckians adjust their daily lives and schedules to help stem the outbreak, the last thing they need to see on TV is negative political advertising. The McGrath campaign must stop airing all of their advertisements.”

McGrath has been running advertisements in Kentucky since July, when she first announced her campaign for U.S. Senate. Recently, she has been running national ads on MSNBC and Fox News in an effort to boost her already prolific fundraising totals. [Lexington Herald-Leader]

Meanwhile, in Ohio …