Unsightly Mental Blemishes

From the US Government Accountability Office’s report 2019 LOBBYING DISCLOSURE Observations on Lobbyists’ Compliance with Disclosure Requirements:

What GAO Found

For the 2019 reporting period, most lobbyists provided documentation for key elements of their disclosure reports to demonstrate compliance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, as amended (LDA). For lobbying disclosure (LD-2) reports and political contribution (LD-203) reports filed during the third and fourth quarters of 2018 and the first and second quarters of 2019, GAO estimates that

• 90 percent of lobbyists who filed new registrations also filed LD-2 reports as required for the quarter in which they first registered (the figure below describes the filing process and enforcement);
• 95 percent of all lobbyists who filed could provide documentation for lobbying income and expenses;
• 20 percent of all LD-2 reports may not have properly disclosed one or more previously held covered positions as required; and
• 45 percent of LD-203 reports were missing reportable contributions, which was a statistically significant increase compared to prior years.

Except as noted above, these findings are generally consistent with GAO’s findings since 2010. Under a new law, lobbyists are required to report certain criminal convictions. GAO found that, of the 161 lobbyists it successfully identified, no lobbyist had failed to report a conviction.

If you wondered about management of lobbyist ethics, this might be the place to start, although I’m not sure how to contextualize some of the findings:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (USAO) continued its efforts to resolve noncompliance through filing reports or terminating registrations, as well as imposing civil and criminal penalties. USAO received 4,220 referrals from both the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House for failure to comply with reporting requirements cumulatively for years 2009 through 2019. Of the 4,220 referrals, about 41 percent are now compliant and about 59 percent are pending further action.

Perhaps a time series, revealing trends? Or are lobbyist activities such that a violation has a non-linear effect on the system? I’m sure government watchdog groups have a better handle on this than I.

And the how:

To determine the extent to which lobbyists can demonstrate compliance, we examined a stratified random sample of 98 quarterly lobbying disclosure (LD-2) reports with income and expenses of $5,000 or more filed during the third and fourth quarters of calendar year 2018 and the first and second quarters of calendar year 2019. We selected the randomly sampled reports from the publicly downloadable database maintained by the Clerk of the House of Representatives (Clerk of the House). This methodology allows us to generalize some elements to the population of LD-2 reports. We then surveyed and interviewed each lobbyist or lobbying firm in our sample. Our questionnaire asked lobbyists about their income and expenses and accompanying supporting documentation. In our follow-up interviews, we asked them to provide written documentation for key elements of their LD-2 reports.

This documentation included the amount of income reported for lobbying activities, the amount of expenses reported, the houses of Congress or federal agencies lobbied, lobbying issue areas, and the names of lobbyists listed in the report. We reviewed whether lobbyists listed on the LD-2 reports properly disclosed (1) prior covered official positions and (2) certain criminal convictions at the state or federal level as required by the Justice Against Corruption on K Street Act of 2018. We also reviewed whether the lobbyists filed the semiannual report of federal political contributions.

A bit mind-numbing, unless you’re a statistician, perhaps employed by a law firm. Then it’s red meat.

As I made breakfast, I filled my glass with the last of the 2% milk, glance at the wife, shook the empty container, and said, “This is OK, yes?

“Oh, yes, now we can go back to the whole milk!”

Stare at the 2% container. Pause. “Oh, that’s right. We cut this half and half with bourbon, didn’t we? Sure made the Raisin Bran tasty.”

A gagging sound was recorded by the FBI recorders at this time.

Harold Crick, like a lot of people, has his work in the back of his brain, and as a tax auditor for the IRS, it involves counting and numbers. Which is fine.

Except someone is commenting on it. In a slightly snide tone.

In his mind.

And Harold doesn’t like it.

But Harold has a bigger problem: the voice is that of his author, Karen Eiffel, who is narrating his life, and she tip-taps his ups and downs on her old electric typewriter, constructing a masterpiece of literature – although she doesn’t know it. And there’s something else she doesn’t know, or cannot figure out.

How Harold should die.

Dude. I’m a professor of literature. That means I have to shower in public facilities.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) plays with the barrier between an author and her characters, asking questions concerning art, primarily the priority art takes in the ladder of importance. As Harold tries to understand what’s happening to him, going from therapist to auditee to therapist to, finally, a literature professor, he asks himself Why me? And that leads to questions about the people he audits, and how he can, perhaps, help them.

And how treating them better brings positive results to his own life.

But an offhand bit of literary foreshadowing clues Harold in to the fact that his story is coming to a sudden end sometime soon, and this lends urgency – as if he needed more – to discover if she really exists. When he finds that Eiffel lives in his own city, things become a bit more interesting, as this is one thing she hadn’t expected.

And brings the question of the purity of art vs the value of a life into salience.

This story is treated somewhat lightly, like, say Groundhog Day (1993), and perhaps this is why the final behaviors of Harold, while highlighting the masterpiece of literature which is Eiffel’s work, also might be seen as excusing them from suffering the consequences. But, slightly more grating, the entire ending is plopped in the audience’s lap. To my mind, most stories require an ending, a final commentary on the consequences of the actions of the characters. But some stories ask questions for which there may not be a final answer. Karen Eiffel had thought she was merely writing a story, a serious story, yes, a story that drove her to smoke and stand on the roofs of tall buildings, contemplating long falls, but just a story. Then Harold, who she knows intimately as a good and improving man, knocks at her door.

And she finds she holds the power of life and death over him. The storytellers ask, What should Eiffel do?

But that’s the wrong question. Slyly different is this question: What would you do?

And by providing an answer to the first question, the storytellers lose the opportunity to open a conversation with their audience.

What would you do?

A reader remarks on the similarity of the campaign tactics of Secretary of State Clinton and Senator Sanders:

Because she was a piece of crap liar and he was a socialist…. its time to PURGE through any means necessary the DNC and bring back the old ways instead of destroying the country!

I must thank my reader for reminding me, however inadvertently, that I really should be sending a Thank You note to the Republican Party. As I’ve noted before, the Republicans, through their relentless, and possibly unethical, investigations of Secretary Clinton have effectively and thoroughly cleared her of any wrong-doing, and confirmed that a vote for her was a vote for an ethically clean candidate, which is far more than can be said for our current President.

I do note my reader appears to be slightly liverish, as he has just endorsed violence in pursuit of his political goals. As most of us know, the old ways did not include violence between the political Parties of the United States. There was certainly other forms of violence, usually racist or xenophobic in nature, usually led by benighted racists and implemented by Americans who had foresaken sacred American traditions. But violence was neither endorsed nor tacitly accepted.

And whether or not Sanders is a socialist, it’s worth noting the relative placidity and prosperity enjoyed by certain Scandinavian countries who’ve carefully adopted certain socialist policies. Knee-jerk hostility towards socialism seems unwise, although of course the turgid nature of Great Britain during its socialist period is a warning that socialism is not a panacea, either.

Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston (R) is not happy about a plan by fellow Republican and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to permit all voting to occur by mail:

Georgia state House Speaker David Ralston (R) is coming out against a recent effort taken by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to mail absentee ballot request forms to all voters in the state amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying the move could be “devastating” for Republican candidates. …

Ralston said one of his main problems with the mass-scale voting effort were the possibility of fraud. He also pointed to concerns he thinks voters may have about “breaches of security systems and data systems.” [The Hill]

Sure. But that’s a problem for both parties, and needs to be resolved by the Secretary of State’s office. Especially in view of this incoherent comment:

“So, here, you know, the process keeps going up and up and up and so a multitude of reasons why vote by mail in my view is not acceptable,” Ralston went on, before adding “the president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

And neither the President nor Ralston provides any detail on why that should be true, and why it should be part of the debate. If they can find a way to prove that such voting disadvantages Republican voters, they might have something, but so far I haven’t seen anything and nothing comes to my mind in support of it, either.

However, I have a smidgeon of sympathy for this:

At an earlier point in the interview, when discussing the vote-by-mail effort in Georgia, Ralston said he thinks that it should instead be in the “purview of the legislative branch where members of the state House and state Senate” to “consider and debate and discuss and vet these things and then decide if that’s going to be the policy of this state.”

“But to simply have this become an administrative decision made apparently on the fly during this crisis, to me, is just a — is very, very unwise and it’s poor policy,” he added.

I think a debate to decide if it’s a legislative issue or not would be appropriate. I’d like to hear Raffensperger’s response, too, because while to Ralston this may seem like a panic reaction, to me it looks like the Secretary of State looked at the situation and decided that there was no way to ensure the safety of voters using physical facilities, but mail remains safe.

Perhaps Raffensperger just needs to present the safeguards they’ve implemented to Ralston.

Or perhaps Ralston is thinking of how Republicans will lose control of those physical voting facilities.

But they’ll still have the mail-in ballot facilities to control. I’m not sure how I feel about this, now that I’ve sort of thought it through. Are there adequate safeguards on mail-in voting? There’s usually very little actual voting fraud, year after year, but it’s harder to measure vote suppression. Perhaps this is nothing to worry about. Maybe this even gets around vote suppression.

This article in Discover on microbiome, or gut biome, comparisons across species was thought- and visual- provoking, wherein the question is why bats & birds appear to have a bacterial desert in their GI tracts:

[Microbiologist Jon] Sanders and his team think there are several possible reasons why birds and bats ended up with such limited, scattershot microbiomes. Both organisms have short, speedy digestive tracts. Maybe their intestines are so efficient that digestive bacteria don’t help much, Sanders says. And many eat insects, a menu that might not make gut bacteria flourish. The fact that other insect-eating mammals, like anteaters, also had somewhat less-defined gut communities backs up this possibility.

It’s also possible fewer gut microbes facilitates flying. “These animals have profound evolutionary adaptations to decrease weight,” Sanders says. Gut bacteria might be heavier baggage than you’d think. Human intestines carry about a pound of bacteria at a time, and in other animals, gut bacteria account for a higher percentage of total weight. For example, if we had as much gut bacteria as a cow, we’d be lugging around nearly 40 pounds of microbiome, Sanders says. That’s enough weight to slow you down, so maybe it’s worth it for birds and bats to drop as much gut bacteria as they can.

Have they evolved to not require the large microbiomes, to even actively reject them? Or is it the act of flying that keeps their microbiomes small? Very unfortunately, they do not address flightless birds.

‘cuz I’m thinking if it’s just the consumption of insects that eradicates the microbiome, I’m going to have third thoughts^[1] about becoming an insectivore.

And the visual of being a cow in human form … with 40 pounds of microbiome! It may put a whole other spin on Cordwainer Smith’s concept of the Underpeople^[2]!

¹ I’ve been having second thoughts about it for years now.

² If you’re not familiar with the name Cordwainer Smith and have been known to read science fiction, he was one of the finest authors of his era in the field, in my humble opine. No doubt his Chinese background had something to do with his conception of story and myth.

With one chart, any Trump cultist reader is confronted with a question: Do you believe the President is an inveterate liar?

If yes, then you must explain why you embrace such a liar, and, BTW, who taught you that it’s OK to lie nearly as often as you take a breath? I’m not kidding, nor am I being provocative. That’s simply how it is with him.

And if you don’t think he’s a liar, then you have a far, far bigger problem. Here’s the chart of doom (I apologize for its clumsiness, I have not mastered Datawrapper):

What’s this? This is a timeline of Trump’s reelection campaign rallies, along with two dated tags: The one where he proclaims he knew it was a terrible pandemic all along (17 March 2020), and, giving him the benefit of the doubt, a tag only one month before, 17 Feb 2020. What do they show?

They show campaign rallies in Phoenix, Colorado Springs, Las Vegas, North Charleson, and Charlotte, with a total estimated attendance of 62,000. The dates were taken from Wikipedia, the link is in the chart; the estimated attendances were found in various sources, either Heavy.com (which is either pro-Trump or neutral, I couldn’t really tell) or local news sources. But the point, of course, is that a campaign rally is a prime place to spread the virus that causes COVID-19.

That’s right. If President Trump is not the inveterate and compulsive liar that the records show that he is, then he purposefully and maliciously lured his own supporters into a situation where a debilitating and sometimes deadly virus can infect them. And then they could go out and infect all of their friends and relatives.

For my outraged Trump-supporting reader, this is not a pack of lies to enrage you, and, unless you have personally visited a New York City hospital and verified the reports of ICUs being overwhelmed and hundreds dead are all lies, you’re stuck, before God and anything you may hold holy, with a harsh and grating question, and it’s not why you’re not planning to drop out of the Trump cult tomorrow.

IT’S WHY AREN’T YOU CALLING FOR TRUMP’s IMMEDIATE RESIGNATION?

That’s how serious – and simple – of a moral question this has become.

I suggest my conservative readers who’ve made it this far just accept that he’s a compulsive liar, and try to figure out how you can live with that fact, instead. The other proposition – that he deliberately ignored the good health of his supporters – should make you physically ill.

Readers may remember that the process by which the FBI requests domestic surveillance warrants from the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court was heavily criticized as corrupt. The DoJ Inspector General has completed the review of the process, and Lawfare’s Jeremy Gordon reports:

A new report released by the Justice Department inspector general found errors or lost information in all the FISA applications concerning U.S. persons it reviewed following its report on the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into members of the Trump campaign. Each of the 29 applications sampled for review contained inaccuracies, including missing files in four FISA applications and errors or inadequately supported facts in the 25 other applications.

The FBI’s response?

[Associate Deputy Director of the FBI Paul] Abbate’s letter emphasizes that in many areas, the OIG’s report did not turn up evidence of problems. For example, Abbate notes that the OIG did not take a position on the materiality of any of the errors it identified and did not evaluate whether support for factual assertions missing from Woods Files may have existed elsewhere, such as in case files. In areas where the report did identify problems, Abbate writes that many remedial measures the FBI began to implement after the Crossfire Hurricane report will also address process errors identified in the OIG report, and states that the FBI fully accepts the report’s recommendations. Specifically, Abbate states that the FBI, in conjunction with NSD, will “build on existing accuracy reviews and enhance compliance with the Woods Procedures.” The FBI’s general counsel has directed every relevant division to ensure proper maintenance of accuracy subfiles for all FISA dockets stretching back to Jan. 1, 2015, which “exceeds the OIG’s recommendation” that the FBI do so for all pending cases.

It’d be interesting to know the category of the root cause: managment slackness, technology, corruption?

A singing, piano playing hunchback discovers the downside to deceit, even well-meaning deceit, in The Phantom Broadcast (1933) and, for all that it has some technical issues in the cinematography and especially the audio, it works remarkably well. Norman Wilder is the manager and accompanist of the handsome crooner Grant Murdock, whose regular radio concerts, in front of a live studio audience, has made him a national heart throb, with love letters by the pound, a stable of women eager to date him, and even a mobster who’d like nothing more than to replace Wilder.

The hard way.

But the mob boss is unlucky, because the hunchback Wilder is too wily to let himself get taken down in a hit. Drawn car curtains and a quick slip out the door, that’s understated and effective.

But the real trick is that Murdock is just standing around looking good. It’s Wilder, hidden behind a partial partition, who’s doing the real singing. The mob boss would have been wildly unlucky if he’d been lucky.

Meanwhile, Murdock, who is more than complicit in the shared deceit, is also more than willing to take advantage of the money, adoration, and cute singers. As the ego grows, so does the romantic ambitions, and it looks like he’ll be doing exceedingly well for himself.

Or at least he would have, if he hadn’t turned up dead.

Thing is, Wilder walks into Murdock’s apartment, pistol in pocket, ready to take the bullying, womanizing, out of control Murdock down, only to find him face down in a puddle of blood, and a tell-tale compact box in his hand – a compact with the initials of the woman Wilder loves, Laura Hamilton, who already has a husband. What to do? Of course, we know what’s coming, and he confesses to the police over the phone.

And then Laura walks in and says, Whaaaaaa – not me! I just got here!

And now the pickle juice is up to Wilder’s neck. Will he get out of it? Or will he share the fate of gent from Notre Dame? Join us next week for … a not so bad story. I was surprised and pleased, although not bowled over. I just wish someone could clean up that audio.

Getting away from the COVID-19 pandemic, some readers may remember the story about the tiny little pharmacy that could. That is, lower the boom on meds’ purity levels, specifically, that of Zantac and a contaminant, NDMA. Well, looks like they were right:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced it is requesting manufacturers withdraw all prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) ranitidine drugs from the market immediately. This is the latest step in an ongoing investigation of a contaminant known as N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) in ranitidine medications (commonly known by the brand name Zantac). The agency has determined that the impurity in some ranitidine products increases over time and when stored at higher than room temperatures and may result in consumer exposure to unacceptable levels of this impurity. As a result of this immediate market withdrawal request, ranitidine products will not be available for new or existing prescriptions or OTC use in the U.S. [US Food and Drug Administration]

I wonder if you can return unused portions for refunds; I certainly wouldn’t ingest this product, even if you’ve carefully stored it properly, because you don’t know how it was stored post-production, pre-delivery. The FDA does recommend immediate disposal, as visiting stores or other places that accept discarded drugs is not recommended at the current time.

If this is a result of farming production out to foreign manufacturers – and that’s not addressed in the FDA letter – then, in combination with the threat to drug manufacturing posed by COVID-19, we may see a slow withdrawal of previously outsourced manufacturing back to the States, along with redevelopment of domestic sources of materials. According to this CNN article, Sanofi has been experiencing pain and >ahem< feedback over this product for a while.

I suppose it depends on how much actions like these cost the pharmas and their allied manufacturers.

I was rather amazed to read that Bernie Sanders, the all-but-vanquished challenger and former favorite to win the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination committed what I see as the same error as did Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, according to The Daily Kos:

But beside that, it’s clear as always that this was never a campaign built to expand beyond its core base. You can see it in their excuse for losing.

To recap, the campaign decided early on that it wasn’t going to try and expand its support beyond its core base. “Sanders aides believe, he’ll easily win enough delegates to put him into contention at the convention. They say they don’t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.” The assumption was that the field would remain fragmented.

It was a stupid assumption for lots of reasons. But it was their bet, and they were shocked (SHOCKED!) when it didn’t pay out. “In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events—most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign,” the Times wrote. “Mr. Sanders had been ‘on the brink of winning,’ Mr. Tulchin argued, ‘until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.’” …

But fact is, Sanders was running at about half the votes he received in 2016. He wasn’t on the brink of winning. He was just leading a multi-candidate field with a fraction of his previous support. As I wrote previously, “He even managed to lose ground in Mississippi, where he’d only gotten 16.6% of the vote in 2016.”

Much like the Hillary Clinton strategy of ignoring those votes thought to be out of reach – or safe – Sanders, for perhaps different reasons, pursued the same strategy.

And so what happened? Sander’s total popular vote count was at around 30% when there were dozens of candidates in the race, and when the field compacted, it was still 30%. Let’s call that unprecedented—how a candidate so alienated the entire Democratic electorate that he picked up no one when everyone else dropped out.

If the left hopes to achieve power in the future, it’ll have to do a better job vetting candidates. Because we are doomed to eternal failure if people keep baking candidates who proudly refuse to build a majority coalition.

And that’s not a message which will go down well in certain quarters of the left. Much like the fringe-right that has been taking over the Republicans since the days Gingrich was Speaker, compromise is galling to some on the left because they are certain they are absolutely right; all they lack of the right’s mindset is the certainty that God stands behind them.

The fringe-right has gotten around the usual roadblock to power by using a crowbar made of the abortion issue: Democrats are pure evil because they believe in abortion-rights, aka “killing unborn babies!”, and therefore you’d better fall into line. Yeah, my old hobby horse of toxic team politics.

I don’t know that the left will ever find a way over the roadblock of purity, though. If they can’t compromise, then they’re doomed to being idea originators, waiting for years or decades for their ideas to be subjected to robust debate, and only maybe followed by adoption.

And yesterday we found the explanation.

One of us must have bumped the temperature control. Or the fridge has a mind of its own.

Concerning techs and officials a reader writes:

Oh, but you know, those “techs” are just unskilled labor in the eyes of those “officials” who simply gesture in the general direction of the techs and grunt at them to fix the problem, and don’t go to dinner or sleep until it is fixed while taking all the credit once it is.

Heh. Another provides a link to the Washington State Department of Health page devoted to COVID-19:

Oh my! I’ve been following the numbers here for weeks. And I just noticed a couple days ago they moved to a Microsoft BI charting system, whatever that is. Wonder if that’s related.

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus

And, a picture is worth a thousand words … and, if the circumstances were less tragic, I’d say that those thousand words were all “d’oh!”

While a lot of science is being curtailed due to COVID-19, the shelter in place and general shutdown of travel and commerce also makes for some unexpected science, such as this lovely measurement map from the European Space Agency (ESA):

Cool stuff. This is why we fund space agencies, folks. Subtle stuff like this can be very important to know.

Not in Turkmenistan, one of the world’s most closed countries. There, the government has banned the word “coronavirus” from the Turkmen vocabulary in a move to suppress all information about the pandemic, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Tuesday.

And that is placing its citizens in danger, the group said.

The state-controlled media in the autocratic nation, which borders Iran, is prohibited from using the word. You can no longer find “coronavirus” in health information brochures that have been distributed to hospitals, workplaces and schools, according to the Turkmenistan Chronicle, one of the few independent news outlets, whose website is blocked inside the country.

I don’t know why I get peeved at this, but I do:

Most deaths Tuesday were in New York, where 332 people were reported dead. Michigan reported 75 deaths, New Jersey reported 69 and Louisiana reported 54. Nationwide, there were more than 24,000 new confirmed cases reported Tuesday.

The new total did not include deaths from Washington, where officials are working to fix a glitch in the health department’s system for tracking the outbreak. The state, one of the country’s early epicenters, has been unable to provide updates on its figures since Saturday. [WaPo]

Is this a problem with a human process? If so, then no peeve. But it sounds to me like a bug in a software program. Software engineers, programmers, IT people, techies – these are not officials. They are, for want of a better word, techs.

Not officials. Stop that, WaPo. And everyone else.

Wow, being dead sure makes me hungry! Who’s on the menu today, honey?

Zombie Honeymoon. Zombie Honeymoon.

It sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?

It’s not.

Zombie Honeymoon (2004) addresses the unexpected implications of ‘until death do you part‘ when your spouse becomes a zombie, and it approaches them in a very somber, if frenetic, manner.

Denise and Danny are on their honeymoon on the beach in New Jersey when something staggers out of the surf, assaults Denise’s newly minted husband as he sleeps, and barfs on him before disappearing. As the emergency room doctor and nurse roll Danny into a room, he flatlines, and despite the doctor’s best efforts, he dies.

For about ten minutes.

Then he pops awake, proclaims himself fine and ready to return to the duties of honeymooning, and proves it in a most enthusiastic manner. But such activities can be quite energy intensive, and now the police are visiting, asking about a missing hospital roommate, and although the police leave empty-handed, soon enough Denise catches Danny dining, and it isn’t el fresco – it’s in the bathtub with intestines everywhere. Good thing the main course seemed to be on the edge of dying anyways, eh?

But Danny is remorseful, pleading with Denise, and she’s really got a problem here. Is Danny still her husband, having been dead ten minutes? Is she still required to be loyal and all that rot? Don’t forget the hormones and intense love she’s feeling, and she makes that choice that maybe most of us wouldn’t – but it isn’t unbelievable.

Sadly, Danny becomes less and less fun as the hunger increases, and the fact that he’s a vegetarian doesn’t really slow him down. We may cheer the loss of one really irritating friend – that character should have been rewritten – but, in general, this isn’t about the scant humor, but the loss of life brought on by Denise’s choice, the question of loyalty to one’s husband vs loyalty to society.

And, ultimately, whether Danny’s love for Denise will mean he’ll have her with a modicum of olive oil, or if the crazed monster he’s become still has a shred of humanity in it.

I mean, besides what he’s eaten.

Relentless and fast-paced, which overcomes some predictability, I did overly enjoy the candlelit dinner scene, which I think transforms the story from a somewhat predictable exploration of moral questions into something the next step up. This is better than it sounds, since I found the paranormal scene irritating and predictable. It’s a little hard to recommend it, as the violence is – unsurprisingly – unsparing, and the story doesn’t feel fully rounded, perhaps because we are talking about zombies, after all. But if you have a couple of hours to burn and enjoy a surreal situation explored by earnest storytellers, this might be right up your alley.

Patience, patience:

The UK may soon be getting tests for detecting COVID-19 antibodies:

The UK has ordered 3.5 million antibody tests designed to reveal whether people have been infected with the new coronavirus. The UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who today announced he himself has tested positive for the virus, has said these tests will be a “game changer”, but the reality is they might not have that much of an impact in the short term. …

Antibody tests, by contrast, detect the antibodies our bodies produce to kill the virus, which we keep producing even after the virus is eliminated. These tests can reveal who has been infected even after they have recovered. Handheld tests that require only a drop of blood can give results in 10 minutes, and can be mass produced quickly and cheaply. …

How accurate do the tests need to be? “It’s very difficult to say,” says Emily Adams at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK, who is helping assess the tests developed by Mologic, one of the companies supplying the UK. Part of that process will be working out what accuracy is required for different uses, says Adams. …

The antibody response to the coronavirus may be delayed compared with other infections. The tests can be used only 14 days or more after people develop symptoms, says Adams. [NewScientist]

My Arts Editor and I will be very interested in taking this test, if it ever makes its way to the United States, after the recent revelation – at least for us – that symptoms congruent with stomach flu have been associated with COVID-19, and, I’ll tell you, we each had one doozy of a dose of stomach flu, from roughly the last week of February to the end of the first week of March. Possibly the worst I’ve ever had.

It does cross my mind to wonder, given it’s been seen in a low percentage of cases, if it happened to be concurrent infections.

When you think you’re smarter than you are:

An Australian astrophysicist has been admitted to hospital after getting four magnets stuck up his nose in an attempt to invent a device that stops people touching their faces during the coronavirus outbreak.

Dr Daniel Reardon, a research fellow at a Melbourne university, was building a necklace that sounds an alarm on facial contact, when the mishap occurred on Thursday night.

The 27 year-old astrophysicist, who studies pulsars and gravitational waves, said he was trying to liven up the boredom of self-isolation with the four powerful neodymium magnets.

The rest, in The Guardian, is here.

No doubt some wealthy baron tried this. But the servant always got a bit twitchy.

It’s silky smooth, for all the raw personality flaws on display. Gosford Park (2001) covers the goings-on at the named British estate, sometime after World War I, where a collection of upper-class Brits, plus servants, plus an American film producer and his fairly cloddish servant have all gathered to eat, shoot pheasant, and gossip.

Their host is Sir William McCordle, wealthy factory owner, randy upper-class chap with that superiority complex that everyone hates, even his children, and especially those who need his support, financial or otherwise, to achieve their goals – or even stay afloat. And therein lies the rub, because virtually everyone who isn’t a servant, and perhaps one or two of them, might have a reason to do him in. Nearly everyone’s related to them, but he sees himself as king of the castle, not kindly benefactor – and that doesn’t play well in this landscape.

One attempt on his life goes awry, as someone – perhaps his son – appears to mistake Sir William for a peasant. Excuse me, pheasant. But, after much aggravation and an inadvertent admission of fooling around, eventually his body is found, both poisoned and stabbed, and now the plot may be afoot – but not necessarily for the killer. After all, the man had little in the way of ethics or morals, but plenty of energy for all those drab and dirty little pursuits for which the upper classes are most famous – taking advantage of everyone beneath them.

If you’re looking for a sharp whodunit, wend your way elsewhere, because the storytellers of Gosford Park are more interested in exploring how the superstructure of British society of the time is supported by all those folks underneath – even down at the police station. In a sense, the knife in the back of Sir William is emblematic of the knife of corruption and disconnectedness which has slowly been tearing apart and leveling British society ever since.

Oh so smoothly does Gosford Park do it in. No one, even those taking it between the shoulder blades, actually realizes it’s going in.

President Trump decided to further deflect blame for his vast incompetencies in connection with the COVID-19 outbreak this weekend by blaming … the medical profession and hospitals:

So let’s make some points about motivations, the first prior to the quote, and fallout.

I think we’re seeing some first-class projection here. That is, if Trump was a hospital administrator, he would be figuring cost vs price and trying to drive up the price by hoarding. Of course, that would be unethical, if not out and out illegal, so he would have to cover it up in order to preserve his reputation.

And, since the world is like Trump, or they’re suckers (see: Trump University), he assumes hospitals do this. Or, at least, are most likely to look like they do. Such is the Trump way when responsibility threatens to come a-calling.

And the fallout? The medical profession remains one of the most respected in society, which may reflect negatively; hospitals, however, are the entities that charge outrageous fees and resist publicizing prices, so they’re not so high on the list.

What would I like to see now? Undoubtedly, there are medical professionals in the Trump cult. I’d like one, or several, of them to step forward with evidence backing up Trump’s claim, OR step forward to say, No, there’s no evidence for this claim, and I’m no longer a Trump supporter.

It’s called having self-respect.

It would appear that North Korea is a little worried about COVID-19, according to an analysis by Benjamin Silberstein on 38 North:

The North Korean response to the global coronavirus outbreak has been uniquely strict by global standards. In late January, the country announced a complete suspension of foreign tourism and, soon thereafter, closed off its border almost entirely to all travel and the transport of goods. By early February, it appeared the border to China was practically shuttered, an extreme move given that China accounts for 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade. The government took even more drastic measures against smuggling operations along the border to China. Usually, the state turns a blind eye to much of this smuggling, and a great deal of it can occur relatively freely thanks to rife and institutionalized corruption. But in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, the state has announced harsh punishments against smugglers and stepped up monitoring operations along the border. Chinese authorities have warned residents on its side of the border that anyone who gets too close to the border risks getting shot by North Korean soldiers. Symbolically, the government even refused to take in over twenty defectors that the Chinese government was going to repatriate, in fear of the virus.

I am not aware that the North Korean medical sector has any particular strengths, and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong un must be terrified of President Trump gaining leverage over him, unless he thinks he can survive the loss of 1-2% of his population without a revolution.

And that’s certainly possible. Silberstein’s conclusion?

The North Korean government is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it lacks the tools to control and contain a virus outbreak inside the country. On the other hand, the measures meant to keep the virus out could also have disastrous consequences. A decision by the state, for example, to shut down the country’s marketplaces to stem the spread of the virus would deal a major blow to the public’s access to food. Depending on the situation in China, Beijing may provide aid to North Korea should the food situation become difficult—as it almost certainly did after last year’s poor harvest—but this cannot be taken for granted.

It’s not hard to see any cure or vaccine being withheld if it’s under the control of President Trump, while the rest of the West would probably deliver it on humanitarian grounds. The Chinese? I’m not sure.

Trying to keep it out until it burns out is the North Koreans’ best bet, probably. They are used to deprivation, and thus may not revolt.

Match-less:

Delightful attention to detail.