Steps
Project Gutenberg's series of Biblical exegeses continue to engross me. Most recently I've been working on the Gospel of Matthew, learning lots of Greek and enjoying the technical challenges--but I'm always brought up short by the verses when Christ says, "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to Me." "I was hungry, and you fed Me. I was thirsty, and you gave Me to drink." I thought of this message again while watching a clip of an interview with recently deceased Sidney Poitier, in which he recounts how a patron of the restaurant where he bussed tables taught him to read after hours. The man saw a need and addressed it personally with great simplicity. Six or seven decades later, Poitier could scarecely recount the story without choking up.
Businessmen
Here's a nice bit of news about my little town. Our county airport is one of the sanest spots in local government. The director attracts businessmen who have their heads screwed on straight, including this couple who moved here after the 2017 hurricane and started innovating. FAA rules make it quite difficult to run an airport-based B&B, but they managed to work it out.
Go, Mighty Bulldogs
Georgia has not won a National championship since 1980, when soon-to-be Senator Herschel Walker was carrying the ball. Georgia has been in a national championship game recently, versus Alabama which beat her in the second half after a massive Georgia lead in the first. Alabama also spoiled an undefeated Georgia year this year in an upset win over a UGA team that was considered a ready favorite.
So tonight the championship game comes down to these two again. Can Georgia defeat the Crimson Tide, given the huge psychological advantage Alabama has? We shall see.
UPDATE: Indeed they could. Congratulations to the National Champions, the mighty Georgia Bulldogs.
CDC Director Walensky on Comorbidity in COVID Deaths
NOTE: See the update at the bottom of this post for essential context.
According to Walensky, over 75% of COVID deaths occurred in people with 4 or more comorbidities.
4 plus is actually a surprise for me; I would have guessed 1 or more. I wonder what the percentage is for people with no comorbidities.
To compare with the flu, according to the CDC, anywhere from 12,000 to 52,000 people died in the US from the flu each year from 2010 to 2020. According to the WHO, the number is 290,000 to 650,000 worldwide. Presumably, most people who die from the flu also have comorbidities. According to the CDC, the US has had about 835,000 deaths from COVID since Jan. 21, 2020, or an average of roughly 417,500 annually.
UPDATE: Elise has very helpfully pointed out that the context for Walensky's remark was a discussion of COVID deaths among the vaccinated. Contrary to what I first thought, she was NOT saying that 75% of all deaths from COVID had 4+ comorbidities. Instead, among the tiny number of vaccinated people who have died from COVID, 75% had 4+ comorbidities. That's a big difference.
Return of Omerta
The new mayor of New York City appointed his brother to a high-paying NYPD leadership position. Asked if he understood that this provoked concerns about nepotism among taxpayers and voters, he responded:
I don’t understand that. Protection is personal. With the increase in anarchists in this city, we have a serious problem with white supremacy.
I admit that I was under the impression that 'white supremacists' were supposed to be fascists rather than anarchists in the current narrative, but whatever. The point is that this makes perfect sense. If you cannot trust anyone except blood kin with your safety, then of course it makes sense to appoint blood kin to manage your security arrangements.
It makes sense the way it makes sense for the mafia, anyway. Even in Dune, House Atreides trusted a non-family member -- Thurfir Hawat, Master of Assassins -- with the security of their core leadership.
How it makes sense in New York City is harder to say. Indeed, it seems to make nonsense of the whole idea of a community like New York City, which is predicated on the idea that people from all over can come together and form a community of mutual respect and common faith. If that is no longer true -- if 'white supremacy' means not only that white people cannot be trusted as ranking police, nor that people of your own race could suffice, but that no one but your own blood kin can be -- then the whole structure that made New York City possible has vanished. No city of the sort New York aspired to be could survive such a truth, if indeed it is true.
"Little" Evidence
The important caveat here is that there is "little scientific evidence" that biological males have advantages in sport. That merely means that relatively few studies have dared to consider the question, unsurprising in an environment in which studying it would quickly end your career.
There is, however, plenty of anecdotal evidence -- for example, the fact that they keep cleaning up in sports competitions. The case they open with is a great one. There's little scientific evidence that this person has advantages over biological females; however, 'she' just set two Ivy League records, thus out-competing every woman in that league who has ever competed in this sport.
"No Evidence" Again
I had never heard the phrase "mass formation psychosis" before it was apparently used on a popular podcast (which I did not hear, as I never listen to podcasts -- if you can't write it down for me so that I can read it quickly rather than dawdle over it for an hour or two, it can't be that important). I do notice that there is a rush to discredit the idea among the very people who would be responsible for it, however.
Reuters' approach is particularly amusing.
“Mass formation psychosis” is not an academic term recognized in the field of psychology, nor is there evidence of any such phenomenon occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple experts in crowd psychology have told Reuters.
"Term X doesn't mean anything" is actually incompatible with the claim that "there is no evidence that X is occurring." In order to measure whether or not X is occurring, we would have to know what X is well enough to study the question. Maybe it doesn't mean anything, but that only means that whatever is happening can't be described that way; it doesn't mean that nothing is happening.
There is definitely evidence that people have departed from reality on the question: Justice Sotomayor's claim that 100,000 children are on ventilators with Omicron is rooted in something, but it isn't reality. Yet I heard a very similar claim from my mother in our last conversation, which predated the SCOTUS hearing (the latter of which she won't have listened to anyway: she gets her news exclusively from morning TV shows on the major networks of her youth). She is prepared to come out of retirement to teach her granddaughter kindergarten so that the child will not be forced to return to school for another year, lest she be exposed to a disease that poses almost no risk at all to a five year old in good health. This, in spite of the clear and obvious benefits the child is experiencing from going to kindergarten -- hers has chickens they are raising, and many friends she's come to love after more than a year in isolation.
I don't know what "mass formation psychosis" is supposed to mean, or if it's a real term in use by psychologists in academia. But I do know that I worry about the level of paranoia I see from people about all this. I'm not talking about those who have legitimate concerns that are well-grounded in numbers. I'm talking about the Sotomayors and, well, my-mothers out there. They're clearly not grounded in reality, and they are causing harm while presumably meaning to help. Somehow mass culture is supporting them in this, because these people have no other obvious point of connection besides exposure to the mainstream press.
The dam breaks
We seem to be entering what you might call a preference cascade. Many unspeakable truths suddenly are being spoken all over the place.
In the Covid era, the Biden administration and its state-level allies have made a hard pivot away from the nudge approach towards an embrace of mandates. The presumed justification for this shift is that the severity of the Covid crisis required more drastic measures. But something else differentiates Covid technocracy from its predecessors: a remarkable incuriosity about whether the strictures it imposes actually work. This incuriosity has become all the more glaring in recent weeks, as Omicron has brought cases to unprecedented levels in cities like New York, where both vaccine passports and mask mandates are in effect.
The nudge approach, on the other hand, is at least ostensibly outcome-oriented: it assesses interventions on the basis of their measurable impact. So one of the problems with mandates, from the nudgers’ perspective, is that they risk conflating intention and outcome. Mandates are often difficult to enforce and generate backlashes, and thus may prove counterproductive. But they may remain in force, despite failing to achieve their objectives, because they demonstrate a moral commitment to a desired aim.
And as Zients’s holiday announcement demonstrated, when mandates fail to achieve the desired results, it is the fault of those who don’t follow the rules, not those who imposed them. A more empirical approach would treat the reality of noncompliance as part of what needs to be measured in order to assess the efficacy of a proposed policy. But such a strategy would imply that the technocrats themselves, rather than the anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers, should be held accountable for policy failures. Small wonder it has fallen out of favour.
Before last year it might have seemed obvious that the guiding ethos of technocracy was cold utilitarian calculus, but in the past two years it has become something like the opposite: moral fervour. Various factors brought about this shift, but the reaction of the technocrats and their constituency to Trump, with his “war on the administrative state” and love of the “poorly educated”, was arguably the crucial one. Tinkering behind the scenes, as was favoured in the Obama era, was no longer a viable approach for a class that felt its interests threatened.
Early on in the pandemic, the writer Alex Hochuli described the pandemic as “technocracy’s end-of-life rally”. At least temporarily, it had put the experts maligned over the previous half-decade back in the drivers’ seat. But the populist fervour that had driven the Trump movement re-energised itself in reaction to lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Initially, this seemed to place the technocrats in an unassailable position, since they could impugn their allies as aiders and abettors of disease and death.
A boost
I'm agnostic about how dangerous the vaccines are; the signal is awfully noisy. Boy, oh, boy, though, I'm having a hard time seeing any doubt about their efficacy against serious illness. That's not a noisy signal.
I'm still completely uninterested in forcing anyone to get vaccinated or boosted, but I'm glad we did. We're exactly at the age when it makes sense.
Something must be done, this is something
It's discouraging when the Supreme Court of the United States has members who are demonstrably incapable of thinking through the legal sources of government power. No one on that court should ever be caught saying something like this:
Justice Elena Kagan said federal agencies have expertise in disease management and suggested OSHA has the authority to make the mandate because “this is a pandemic in which nearly a million people have died.”The government has a power the Constitution doesn't grant because a lot of people have died? It's a style of thinking called "A policy I favor" because "facts on the ground I hate." That's not even a good explanation for why she likes the policy, let alone a stab at an explanation for why the federal executive branch has the power to implement the policy. Was it an illusion that our society ever possessed the ability to consider two critical questions--(1) whether the policy will actually have the desired effect and (2) whether the proposed agent has the legal authority to implement the policy, even assuming it would have the desired effect?
I'm really losing patience with the argument that I have to agree to some policy of uncertain cost and benefit because otherwise I must not care about the bad things that are happening. Yes, it's a bad disease. Yes, I bitterly regret that it's hurting and even killing people. No, it doesn't follow that every harebrained scheme will make things better. Nor does it follow that everyone who objects to a harebrained scheme either denies that it's a bad disease or doesn't care about sick people. It's because it's a serious problem that's actually hurting and killing people that I insist that we find things to do about it, if we can, that don't make things worse. As in the case of global hot/cold/wet/dry mania, I advocate sticking to policies that are neither pointless, more harmful than beneficial, nor an illegal use of state power that will come back to bite us later--very possibly without even having helped in the crisis we argued was great enough to justify jettisoning both the Constitution and considerable material prosperity.
Illegal Parading Day
Since they had the misfortune to schedule it opposite a real holiday, I missed yesterday’s extravaganza.
Was it prudent for the President to call a protest that close to the building where the contested votes were being counted? No, though everyone who attended had a constitutional right to do so. Was it appropriate for a minority to march on Congress? Sure: that’s also constitutional, and they were there at the invitation of the President of the United States.
Was it ok for a small subset of those to batter the police lines? Obviously not. People who broke the law should take responsibility, and the courts are issuing punishments. Aside from some high profile cases, judges — though clearly offended by the affront to the majesty of government— are mostly assigning less jail time than prosecutors ask. The offenses were almost all misdemeanor ones. No one brought guns or knives, no one was killed by the rioters.
If they stuck to punishing the guilty according to the standards of the law, not a word of protest would they hear from the American right. Instead, they have to try to turn it into a bloody shirt to wave against tens of millions who never did anything wrong.
Greenwald is right, again, which is a phrase I would never have expected to type once let alone several times. This is an insult both ridiculous and dangerous, and far more of the latter than any threat posed by last year’s riot. (It may not be more ridiculous.) These people should all be ashamed.
Twelfth Night
The last day and night of Christmas is upon us. The evening is traditionally spent removing Christmas decorations, After this, the long and barren winter begins.
There are only a little more than seventy days until Spring, although for observant Christians the forty days of Lent are (sometimes only mostly) among them. It's a time of difficulty and discomfort, but also purification.
But one last pleasant day first. We are having a lasagna I made yesterday as a last feast, although I'm 'fasting' a bit already, having decided to do the Dry January thing this year. I did a dry April last year in preparation for a Strongman tournament and was happy with the experience, so I've decided to include it as an occasional thing.
UPDATE: My youthful participation in Christmas pageants had convinced me that all the events happened at once, the Wise Men and the angels and the shepherds all at once. But if this is the day for the Wise Men, it’s probably the day for this carol too.
Introducing the numbat
This little guy's name came up in a letter-scramble word game at the NYT that I'm addicted to working every morning. I'd never heard of him, but he looks like a mash-up between a possum, an armadillo, and a fox. He eats termites. Some really peculiar creatures developed on the isolated Australian continent.
Let the money follow the student
Vouchers and school choice just got a leg up in Arizona, where parents will receive $7K/year to send their kids to a private school if the public schools shut down again even for a day.
And no need for them ever to go back, I hope.
Stealing and Wealth
I am greatly bothered by an article that AVI linked to at his place with some additional discussion. I left a comment there outlining my objections, but I want to expand with at least one example I know well from personal experience and education.
The comment I left may be helpful in clarifying where I'm going with the historical discussion, so here is the relevant part.
Even granting that the real source of the increase is the free market -- things like the miracle of compound interest, or the ability to invest in growing industries and factories and the like -- the premise leaves out something very important about how one obtains the capital to make such initial investments. Let's say that, due to these economic miracles, we could become rich with an investment of merely $100,000 -- that this will produce an increase like she's discussing, so that it will become worth $2,500,000 in time (and that will continue to grow).Yet I do not have an extra $100,000 to invest. If, however, there is a legal and successful way for me to rob another man for it -- taking it out of him in labor, or a legally contrived way of stealing his house, or whatever else -- then I can make the investment. And then I will become rich, and my descendants even richer! He will become destitute, and his descendants will not enjoy the increase in wealth that mine do. They may become better off if 'a rising tide lifts all boats,' as they may become well-paid servants of my descendants. Nevertheless, the initial theft really matters and produces long-term differentials in wealth and power.
The particular example I'm going to discuss is the economic history of the American South, but I think the general issues outlined here apply also to the other examples the original author gives, e.g., British India, the West African slave trade, and so on. To quickly outline one of these examples: The West African slave trade enriched a lot of West African slavers, as the author notes; they did not become nearly as wealthy as some of the others it enriched because they did not plug that wealth into the new industrial-age free market and investment system like the owners of the slave ships in Boston and New York had done. Even granting her point about the importance of the free market and investment systems, though, the initial investment that made Boston and New York so wealthy compared to other places was provided at least in part by inputs from slaving in the famous Triangle Trade.
I. Antebellum Theft
America's South has long been its poorest and most benighted region, but this was not always the case. Before the Civil War, it was a tremendously prosperous region. This was driven by one of these forms of stolen wealth too, the slave system, whereby a man's whole life of labor was plugged into investments by another man who stole it.
America's South has long been its poorest and most benighted region, but this was not always the case. Before the Civil War, it was a tremendously prosperous region. This was driven by one of these forms of stolen wealth too, the slave system, whereby a man's whole life of labor was plugged into investments by another man who stole it.
This combination of theft and the new systems of compound interest and investment in emerging industries worked extremely well. Plantation houses built in the South were some of the finest homes being built anywhere in the world, and they were accompanied by beautiful gardens, fine churches, elegant cotton shipping cities like Savannah or Charleston or Mobile, colleges and education. One of the highlights of this period was the poet Sidney Lanier of Georgia. In addition to his own poetry, he was a scholar of music and a translator of works out of Middle French and Middle English. He was especially interested in popularizing the high civilization of the Middle Ages for boys, and one of his works -- The Boy's King Arthur -- was illustrated by N. C. Wyeth and is still in print today. (I highly recommend both this and The Boy's Froissart for anyone with boys old enough to read longer works.)
Now this land, so rich and prosperous, had been a positive wilderness not very long before. Indeed, parts of Alabama and Mississippi were still in the process of being settled and transformed even as the civilization was flourishing. Just a few decades earlier, at the time of the Revolutionary War, most of it was unsettled; King's Mountain in North Carolina was the site of a battle in which a militia of outright frontiersmen had defeated the British Army.
II. The Effects of Post War Theft
Just as illustrative of the principle of stolen wealth's effect on the system, though, is the story of what happened after the Civil War -- the transformation of this region from wealth and education into poverty and a lack of education that made it the mockery of America for generations (indeed, one sees it still). The war itself was devastating, but what really destroyed the South for generations was the economic system imposed upon it after the war. This was a form of economics also used in colonialist economies in South America and India, and will help to illustrate those cases too.
I've written about this before, for example in 2013 when discussing a mystery that bothers historians -- why were the slave narratives captured by the CCC in FDR's day inclined to describe the antebellum South as a happy time?
There are some other theories about why the former slaves had such positive things to say about their lives on the plantation. The one to which I am most inclined is that they were all much older when they gave the interviews, and spoke with the natural nostalgia of the old for the sunny days of youth. Memory paints the memories of those days, in nearly all of us, with rose colors.But there are other possibilities too. For one thing, economic conditions in the South cratered after the war, so that life after the war was markedly harder for everyone -- especially, as is usual, those on the bottom. The traditional market for Southern cotton was lost, as the English mills had turned to India during the war's blockade. The South's mills were destroyed, so it was relegated to being a producer of raw materials for Northern mills at rates set by Northern banks. The economic system imposed by the North was a brutal colonial-style monoculture built around cotton production, and colonial monocultures are notoriously harsh places to live (here as in Latin America, India, and elsewhere). Until the boll weevil collapsed the cotton economy in the late 1920s, the South was ground down by the usual effects of such economies: the price of the monocultural good (cotton, here) dropped every year, because supply increased every year as those commanding the economy forced ever-greater production of the single cash crop. Under those circumstances, quality of life dropped, again especially for the poorest and those most dependent on agriculture. Naturally those who had been slaves who had only known how to work cotton farms, or who were directly descended of slaves who had, were very likely to be a part of the very lowest agricultural classes tied to the cotton monoculture. They would have endured the worst conditions imposed by the economic system.So it is possible (indeed it doesn't seem unlikely) that happiness is greatly influenced by economic realities. When the interviews were conducted from 1936-8, the boll weevil had collapsed the cotton economy, and the Great Depression had followed on its heels. While the boll weevil eventually allowed the South to escape the monoculture economy, at first it meant a severe economic depression for the region, which was then followed on by a severe depression worldwide. The former slave speaking in 1937 would be looking back on a life that had, in economic terms, ground ever worse each year of his or her life, capped by ten years' complete economic failure. The pre-war plantations may really have seemed like a better place by comparison to that. They may really have been, if not a better place, a happier place.
Another thing the CCC was doing at that time was reforesting Warwoman Dell in northeast Georgia, which had been denuded by this system so the land could be used for cotton production -- required by the banks in order to obtain the loans, at interest. Warwoman Dell is in the mountains in land completely unsuited for cotton, but the system was totalizing and grinding.
All that money -- all that interest -- impoverished almost everyone in the South, black and white, except a few robber barons called the Bourbon Democrats who managed to sit atop the misery in comfort. The invented the deep racism and the Jim Crow system to keep the poor whites afraid of the poor blacks, with whom they shared almost every practical and political interest. Instead, they spun narratives -- two exemplars of this being Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind -- out of the bones of the old civilization, still widely visible a hundred years ago in ruined plantation houses and the remains of old mills. That civilization was indeed gone with the wind, destroyed not so much by the war as by the effects of seven decades of economic theft activity by northern banks and the aforementioned robber barons.
Nevertheless a lot of wealth was extracted from this system, even though it led to an ever-increasing decline in the price of the cotton it was over-producing (the ever-increasing supply being the reason for the ever-decreasing price). The ever-cheaper cotton went north to be turned into finished goods and sold at a profit. The interest on the loans went north and was added to the banks' capital, to be invested in emerging industries. Between the one form of extraction and the other, a great deal of investment was available to be invested for the miracles of the free market, from compound interest to new forms of technology. This partly explains how the United States became the richest nation in the world in the same period, capable of raising armies and navies that would be victorious in two World Wars.
These investments may eventually have produced a rising tide that lifts all boats; things are better in the South economically than they once were (although the last two years have reversed many recent gains). Yet the reason the South has long been the poorest and most benighted region of the United States is because of this economic theft; and the reason it was once extremely wealthy and profitable was because of another economic theft. The free market and these economic miracles it produces may well drive the vast increases in wealth; but whose children become wealthy is very much informed by acts of extraction.
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