In a way their models seem similar: accept extra death up front, in return for getting though the epidemic faster. Sweden, of course, merely 'accepted' the risks; NY actively encouraged death via its nursing home policy.
The graph at the link shows that, in fact, the models didn't work out the same way at all. They did both get to near-zero death rates, though.
Local Wokeness
California repeals law against discriminating on the basis of sex, race, and similar things in order to begin actively discriminating.
Seattle approves massive tax on high earners.
Asheville passes reparations for slavery for black residents, though in fact Asheville had almost nothing to do with slavery and was a tiny mountain community largely uninvolved in the Civil War.
Seattle approves massive tax on high earners.
Asheville passes reparations for slavery for black residents, though in fact Asheville had almost nothing to do with slavery and was a tiny mountain community largely uninvolved in the Civil War.
"Please Wait While Your Experience Loads"
So sayth the DOT tax website, not taking into account that long waiting to pay my taxes is in fact part of the experience.
So, the Battle Scenes in "Arms and White Samite" Were Pretty Accurate It Seems
Archeological evidence of medieval battle victims shows the sorts of injuries resulting from the application of medieval arms in the hands of men trained to use them, and unsurprisingly, it's pretty gruesome- and quite effective.
One thing that surprised me in this is some of the seemingly valuable articles that were buried with the dead, either out of an unwillingness to go through the gore to retrieve them, or respect for the dead, or perhaps something else. At any rate, it's clear to me that Grim did his homework to make the battle scenes in his tale as realistic as possible, as evidenced by the dig in Gotland near Visby, and some other locations, and what was retrieved there.
One thing that surprised me in this is some of the seemingly valuable articles that were buried with the dead, either out of an unwillingness to go through the gore to retrieve them, or respect for the dead, or perhaps something else. At any rate, it's clear to me that Grim did his homework to make the battle scenes in his tale as realistic as possible, as evidenced by the dig in Gotland near Visby, and some other locations, and what was retrieved there.
I have a better idea
Lucianne reports that the Los Angeles teacher's union wants to hold up re-opening the schools until charter schools and police forces are de-funded. I say let's keep the police and the charter schools, add vouchers, and let the public school do whatever they want.
Another Sweden Orthodoxy
Previously it was “Sweden admits it was wrong.” Now it’s “don’t call their zero death rate a success.”
The invaluable Mike K
A fellow named Mike K comments at a lot of sites I frequent, including The New Neo and Maggie's Farm. He also has a blog, A Brief History, and published a terrific memoir of his days in active medical practice, War Stories: 50 Years in Medicine. He's in his 80s now and, although I keep hoping he'll write another book, perhaps his blog is the best I can reasonably hope for. Still, his mother lived from 1898 to 2001, declining, he says, only in her last six months, so it's too soon to count him out. How I wish he would commit more of his memories to print.
I've just picked up an audio version of a book he recommended, My Brother Ron, about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The recommendation occurs in his obituary for the author, which describes some of Mike K's own experience with psychotic patients during his residency.
I've just picked up an audio version of a book he recommended, My Brother Ron, about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The recommendation occurs in his obituary for the author, which describes some of Mike K's own experience with psychotic patients during his residency.
No shock to me
What is a shock is how clueless professional opinionizing are about how regular people react to riots and looting.
Good on Malawi
A determined populace, an honorable military, and a constitutional system peacefully overturn a crooked election in a poor African nation that usually flies under the radar.
COVID Rx news
I'm not sure what happened to all those promised chloroquine double-blind trials. Lately I mostly read arguments from doctors on the front lines that they're liking the results of using chloroquine rather early in a case, though they're unsure whether it's helpful when delayed until symptoms are severe. Unfortunately, this may not mean much except that a patient sample consisting of people who aren't yet very sick are going to do pretty well for the most part no matter what treatment they get, because only a small minority of patients draw the black bean and get horrifically sick. You really need careful studies to tease out slight gains in the rate of patients who avoid getting much more ill depending on whether they receive a particular early treatment. This is how we get widespread stories that melatonin, vitamin C, zinc, etc., are working great, because lots of people took them and didn't die. Nevertheless, I'd still ask my doctor for immediate chloroquine and a Z-pack if I tested positive or showed symptoms, and would cheerfully take the treatment if he prescribed it, because it shows promise of helping and seems to have an awfully small downside.
Meanwhile, there's perhaps a little good news for the much smaller subset of patients who did draw the black bean and are now seriously ill: Remdesivir appears to help quite a bit, though it's definitely no magic cure. Unfortunately the recent good-news study was conducted by Remdesivir's manufacturer, so we have to take it with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, there's perhaps a little good news for the much smaller subset of patients who did draw the black bean and are now seriously ill: Remdesivir appears to help quite a bit, though it's definitely no magic cure. Unfortunately the recent good-news study was conducted by Remdesivir's manufacturer, so we have to take it with a grain of salt.
Flynn Update
As expected, Sullivan is asking for an en banc ruling to allow him to continue the trial.
"Experts Say...."
This genre of expert opinion is less impressive than one might hope.
Look, you can't do anything about the weather. We are already doing everything we know to do about the pandemic, though we can make adjustments as better information becomes available. So really, expressed in terms of what we can change, the issue is just police and their relationship to the community. The spike in violence is merely about the police withdrawing from their duties in fear that pursuing those duties may lead to their aggressive prosecution (as in Atlanta) or physical attack (as in many places).
New York City dissolved its plainclothes gun crime unit; gun crime is suddenly way up. Correlation doesn't establish causation, but since the whole argument for having a gun crime unit was that it would cut down on gun crime, there's a pretty good case to be made that there might be some causation going on here. Atlanta police withdrew from policing after one of them was charged with capital murder for killing someone who was actively resisting arrest. Crime is suddenly way up as police are withdrawn from the city. Correlation; causation? Well, that was the whole argument for the police existing in the first place. Either we were always wrong about what police accomplish, or the obvious problem is that policing is not going on.
So, the issue is just this: can we arrive at a solution at which police perform their duties in a way the community can accept as fair and equitable, in return for lower violent crime rates; or can we not, such that we must accept either more brutality from police or else more crime? Cities will survive and prosper if the first is true; they will wither if either of the secondary set is true. People will leave, taking their tax base with them.
Oddly enough, Blue America's fate is in its own hands here. All they have to do is make an accord with the police that both sides will respect. It's not an issue out my way.
The spike defies easy explanation, experts say, pointing to the toxic mix of issues facing America in 2020: an unemployment rate not seen in a generation, a pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 people, stay-at-home orders, rising anger over police brutality, intense stress, even the weather.... Jerry Ratcliffe, a Temple University criminal justice professor and host of the “Reducing Crime” podcast, put it more bluntly: “Anybody who thinks they can disentangle all of this probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”So actually your experts know exactly what is going on, but for some reason want to describe it as a mysterious tangle rather than a problem with a fairly clear set of solutions. Why might that be? The very next line in the story explains:
President Donald Trump has seized on the violence for political gain, accusing Democrats of being weak and suggesting the crime wave is being driven by recent protests calling for racial justice, police reform and drastic cuts in law enforcement funding.Ah.
Look, you can't do anything about the weather. We are already doing everything we know to do about the pandemic, though we can make adjustments as better information becomes available. So really, expressed in terms of what we can change, the issue is just police and their relationship to the community. The spike in violence is merely about the police withdrawing from their duties in fear that pursuing those duties may lead to their aggressive prosecution (as in Atlanta) or physical attack (as in many places).
New York City dissolved its plainclothes gun crime unit; gun crime is suddenly way up. Correlation doesn't establish causation, but since the whole argument for having a gun crime unit was that it would cut down on gun crime, there's a pretty good case to be made that there might be some causation going on here. Atlanta police withdrew from policing after one of them was charged with capital murder for killing someone who was actively resisting arrest. Crime is suddenly way up as police are withdrawn from the city. Correlation; causation? Well, that was the whole argument for the police existing in the first place. Either we were always wrong about what police accomplish, or the obvious problem is that policing is not going on.
So, the issue is just this: can we arrive at a solution at which police perform their duties in a way the community can accept as fair and equitable, in return for lower violent crime rates; or can we not, such that we must accept either more brutality from police or else more crime? Cities will survive and prosper if the first is true; they will wither if either of the secondary set is true. People will leave, taking their tax base with them.
Oddly enough, Blue America's fate is in its own hands here. All they have to do is make an accord with the police that both sides will respect. It's not an issue out my way.
One small step
There are still people here and there trying to maintain their allegiance to honesty and clarity.
The enemy gets a vote
That's "enemy" as in Kurt Schlichter, and myself.
Diversity is the value du jour, but is there any diversity of opinion in your life? Poll your pals (you can phrase it as a solicitation for confirmation so no one mistakes you for one of the wrongthinking others) about some of the issues of the day. Isn’t abortion cool? Regular people should not have scary rifles, right? White Fragility was really eye-opening, huh? Anyone in your life likely to answer “No?” Well, lots of people in your country would. If you were shocked and stunned that Tom Cotton suggested letting the 101st Airborne go to town on the rioters, you need to get out more.
But the rigorous intellectual solidarity of your caste might not strike you as a bad thing. After all, your views are manifestly right, and to disagree with them is a moral failing deserving of consignment to the lowest circle of cancellation hell. In fact, some of your kind consider it a moral obligation to cut such reprobates out of your life – begone Mom, and take your “All lives matter” anti-intersectionality cisgendered patriarchal colonialism with you!I wish I could enjoy Schlichter's wish-fulfillment novels more. They're a comeuppance-fest, but he needs a co-writer or something. Compared to him, John Ringo has a feather-light satirical touch.
Broken English
I'm beginning to wonder if Dr. Fauci has a command of what I assumed was our common language. "It's a false narrative to take comfort in a falling COVID death rate." I assume he's not nuts enough to believe that a falling death rate literally is a bad thing. What he appears to be trying to say is that it would be a mistake to conclude that a falling death rate is the same as a zero death rate, and therefore that COVID poses no further risk, so everyone should hop into a giant communal hot tub and plant sloppy kisses on a million total strangers daily.
I'm pretty sure that's not what "false narrative" means, particularly since no one is even remotely pushing any such plan. Also, a "narrative" is not a "plan." What would the narrative be here, if not that premature death is, on the whole, undesirable? Does Fauci think a narrative is building that a falling death rate means the virus went "poof" overnight? Granted, that would be false if anyone ever said such a thing. I think the concept he's struggling for is "straw man."
The idea that examining risk trade-offs between two highly undesirable alternatives (widespread death from respiratory failure vs. economic suicide) shouldn't even consider a dramatic change in one of the risks seems so ridiculous that I hesitate to attribute it even to a hack bureaucrat, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion. As has become distressingly common in group-think headquarters lately, Fauci is having trouble avoiding the mental trap of assigning every possible risk factor either a 0% or a 100% score.
The spectacle of cancel culture isn't confined to cancel culture. We're losing the power of rational public discourse in a frantic search for purity. A minuscule taint of risk rules whole fields of human activity out of bounds. This gets us padded playgrounds. It gets us gun bans that morph into knife bans and soon, I'm sure, bans on anything that can be ground into a shiv and stuck in a bar of soap. It leads to banning substances in parts per bazillion, even classifying CO2 as a toxin. It leads to a "gluten free" label on my shampoo, for Pete's sake. It leads to insatiable human-resources departments with reams of policies and mandatory sensitivity training. It leads, in fact, directly to thought crimes and mandatory re-education of the impure enemy among us. It leads to a President who drives everyone crazy by habitually having to walk around saying, "Oh, BS, give me such a break, already."
I'm pretty sure that's not what "false narrative" means, particularly since no one is even remotely pushing any such plan. Also, a "narrative" is not a "plan." What would the narrative be here, if not that premature death is, on the whole, undesirable? Does Fauci think a narrative is building that a falling death rate means the virus went "poof" overnight? Granted, that would be false if anyone ever said such a thing. I think the concept he's struggling for is "straw man."
The idea that examining risk trade-offs between two highly undesirable alternatives (widespread death from respiratory failure vs. economic suicide) shouldn't even consider a dramatic change in one of the risks seems so ridiculous that I hesitate to attribute it even to a hack bureaucrat, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion. As has become distressingly common in group-think headquarters lately, Fauci is having trouble avoiding the mental trap of assigning every possible risk factor either a 0% or a 100% score.
The spectacle of cancel culture isn't confined to cancel culture. We're losing the power of rational public discourse in a frantic search for purity. A minuscule taint of risk rules whole fields of human activity out of bounds. This gets us padded playgrounds. It gets us gun bans that morph into knife bans and soon, I'm sure, bans on anything that can be ground into a shiv and stuck in a bar of soap. It leads to banning substances in parts per bazillion, even classifying CO2 as a toxin. It leads to a "gluten free" label on my shampoo, for Pete's sake. It leads to insatiable human-resources departments with reams of policies and mandatory sensitivity training. It leads, in fact, directly to thought crimes and mandatory re-education of the impure enemy among us. It leads to a President who drives everyone crazy by habitually having to walk around saying, "Oh, BS, give me such a break, already."
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