Let’s make quarantine so wonderful…

The New Neo Posted on by

…they’ll be looking forward to it, not dreading it.

This is the sort of thing I’ve been suggesting:

What’s needed is a quarantine so luxurious that health care workers will look forward to their 21 day quarantine, or at least not dread it. What if the federal government took over an isolated resort, say on the Gulf Coast. Stocked it with finest foods and wines in the land, and the best films and recreation and wireless Internet access and volunteer musical acts ”” a French widow in every room, as a friend of mine used to say, equivalent to a very expensive vacation, available for free to any returning volunteer. The only catch is they couldn’t leave for 21 days. (They could bring their spouses and partners, if they wanted ”“but then the spouses couldn’t leave either.)

As for the money involved, seems to me it would be cheaper than all the contact tracing and disinfecting that would otherwise need to be undertaken. There is a problem, though—as this commenter points out, the quarantined would have to be quarantined from each other for the duration, as well. Then there’s the waste disposal problem.

And what of the staff? Would they wear full hazmat gear? Or would it all be done like this?:

Earliest satellite photos reveal a few things

The New Neo Posted on by

Found—some old satellite photos with grainy images:

Scientists have uncovered a cache of satellite images of Earth from the 1960s that had been forgotten in storage for nearly 50 years and that push back the first satellite images of our planet a full 17 years.

They reveal some surprises:

What they found astonished them: The images revealed new records for both the smallest maximum [Antarctic] sea ice ever recorded and the largest. The latter record was just broken this year. The two records were just two years apart, but the difference in sea ice extent was more than 1.5 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), an area twice the size of Mexico.

“We’re talking a 20 percent difference,” says Gallaher. “That’s a sizeable change.”

So many things we don’t understand. Like this:

The Nimbus satellites also caught images of the Arctic before warming from climate change accelerated. Gallaher and Campbell were surprised to see some mysterious holes in the ice in the old images.

Holes in the Arctic ice are a common phenomenon today, as the Arctic warms. But in the colder 1960s, a large patch of thin or melted ice was unexpected””and nothing like it was seen again until the 21st century.

“It’s an intriguing thing, but we haven’t figured out what it is, or verified what it is,” says Campbell. “It looks like open water, but it could be very thin new ice that formed in a break in the old ice.”

Intriguing, indeed.

This comment explains Massachusetts politics today—and Romney

The New Neo Posted on by

Today we have the astounding news that the uber-liberal Boston Globe has endorsed Republican Charlie Baker over Democrat Martha Coakley for governor of Massachusetts.

You may recall that Coakley is the person Scott Brown defeated for the Senate. She is an exceptionally tone-deaf and uncharismatic politician, and that’s been true in this campaign as well. However, there’s more going on here; the Globe doesn’t have that much to lose by endorsing a Republican. Every now and then the state of Massachusetts gets a hankering for a tad more efficiency, but just a tad. When that feeling comes over the electorate, it goes for a Republican. But it really doesn’t matter all that much, either on a national scale or a local one, because of the peculiar nature of Massachusetts politics.

During the 2012 campaign I tried to describe the political situation in Massachusetts in post after long-winded post. Here a commenter at Althouse does it in two succinct paragraphs, on a thread about why Charlie Baker may win:

The reason they don’t fear a Republican governor is because the Dems have enough state congressional seats to override any veto. They can push through any law that they want. Who cares if the governor is a Democrat or Republican? It’s a position of prestige, maybe, but little power.

Please remember that state-wide universal health coverage wasn’t Mitt’s idea. The legislature was pushing that through come hook or crook. Mitt tried his best to make it as market-friendly as possible, but he got rough-shodly run over, and now most people think Obamacare was based on Mitt’s ideas rather than the Democrat hacks that foisted it upon the polity.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not going into this again because I think Romney should run again. I don’t. I think someone new is needed in 2016. But it still annoys me that so many people swallowed a lot of garbage about so-called “Romneycare” hook, line, and sinker, never bothering to learn the complexities of the actual situation.

Such as:

The Massachusetts law is different in important ways from the plan that Romney pushed as governor. Few voters know, for example, that Romney strongly opposed the employer mandate and wanted an escape from the individual mandate — allowing people to instead be able to post a bond if they were uninsured and had big medical bills. When Romney signed the law, he believed it contained the escape hatch, but legislators removed it before final passage.

Romney vetoed eight provisions of the Massachusetts bill, and every one of his vetoes was overridden by the legislature. Should Romney have known this was likely? Yes…

And then along came Romney’s successor, Deval Patrick:

In the end, it didn’t matter what Romney thought about the employer mandate. The Democrats controlled 85 percent of the legislature. After the bill-signing ceremony was over, they went back to the State House and overrode each of Romney’s eight vetoes.

More crucially, as Jennifer Heldt Powell and Josh Archambault describe in a new book, The Great Experiment, it was Democrats and progressive activists who ended up implementing the Massachusetts health law, especially after Romney left office in January 2007. They took the law in a much different direction than Romney would have liked. And while Democrats have sought to credit (or blame) Romney for the passage of Obamacare, it is more accurate to say that the federal Affordable Care Act is modeled after the Democratically implemented version of the Massachusetts law, as opposed to the one that Romney had sought…

Everyone needs to understand the situation faced by a Romney, or a Charlie Baker, or any Republican governor, in a state such as Massachusetts, where the power for Republicans to change things is limited.

You might ask why Republicans run in Massachusetts, then, if it’s that bad. I think those Republicans who do want to change things are aware of how hard it will be, but want to do what they can and are not afraid of fighting overwhelming odds. Romney, for example, felt that the state was going under financially (which it was at the time), and he felt that he could at least help a little, even with the obstacles the Democrats would put up. And he did help, a little. But it required the sort of compromise that many conservatives don’t tolerate in a politician, and afterwards much of the good he had accomplished was undermined and undone by the left.

I hope Baker wins, and I wish him much luck. And I wish that people would look on subsequent national runs of any Republican who has had face the necessity of working with a strongly veto-proof Democratic legislature as not being indicative of what that person would do if he/she had more legislative support.

Squeaky wheel Kaci Hickox gets the grease: out of quarantine

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, that didn’t last long:

The New Jersey Department of Health issued a statement this morning that Hickox has been “symptom free for the last 24 hours,” and that it decided to discharge her after consulting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“After consulting with her, she has requested transport to Maine, and that transport will be arranged via a private carrier not via mass transit or commercial aircraft,” the department said.

Senior officials in the Christie administration said she will be driven in a car and escorted by officials from the state and Doctors Without Borders, the agency the Hickox worked for in West Africa.

“Health officials in Maine have been notified of her arrangements and will make a determination under their own laws on her treatment when she arrives,” the New Jersey statement said.

So New Jersey has passed the buck to Maine. I wonder what pressure was brought to bear on Christie? Of one thing I’m pretty sure: this is not a popular decision, if blogs are any indication. I’m not just talking about blogs on the right, either; even the few I’ve looked at on the left seem to have more than half the commenters siding against the nurse and with Christie, at least prior to today’s announcement.

Last night I noticed a rather strange statement from Hickox. If this is a bona fide quote, it’s scary that she’s working as a nurse:

“To quarantine everyone, in case, you know, when you cannot predict who may develop Ebola or not, and to make me stay for 21 days, to not be with my family, to put me through this emotional and physical stress, is completely unacceptable,” Hickox told Crowley. She added, “I feel like my basic human rights have been violated.”

Now, I’m all for treating people decently when they’re in quarantine, especially those who’ve just come back from working in Africa. That takes guts and sacrifice. So give them steak, nice movies on their widescreen TVs, hot fudge sundaes, whatever. If the authorities really did treat her badly, they need to improve things. For example, the article’s got a photo of a port-a-potty they provided her. That seems pretty yucky, but I wonder whether it has something to do with disposing of her wastes as biohazards rather than letting them go into the general sewage system? I’d like to hear their side, but so far I haven’t seen a word from them.

However, more importantly, how could she have missed learning what a quarantine actually is? Once more, with feeing, “To quarantine everyone, in case, you know, when you cannot predict who may develop Ebola or not…”

Does Ms. Hickox believe you must know that a person will definitely develop an illness in order to justify quarantining that person? I’m really, really curious, because of course one purpose of a quarantine is to separate a person who has been exposed to a dangerous illness from contact with the public until the time is up when they might get that illness. Preventive quarantines must cast a wide net compared to those who will actually come down with the disease. Of course, the term “quarantine” is sometimes used to refer to a person who is already ill, but that’s erroneous. The correct term for that is “isolation.”

My best guess is that Ms. Hickox, who is young, actually has no idea what quarantine is, it’s been so long since these things have been instituted, and she is actually confusing it with isolation, with which she would be familiar. Ah, but she’s the medical expert, and we’re not, right? The term “quarantine,” by the way, is from the Italian, and originated with the forty-day quarantine period instituted for plague.

I’ve noticed that, since Cuomo and Christie made their quarantine announcement, those who disagree and feel that quarantine is not necessary fall back on the old “we are the public health authorities, and we know that no one can catch ebola from someone who doesn’t have symptoms” routine. I’d love to see some scientific backup for an absolute statement like that, because forgive me if I don’t trust the CDC anymore on this sort of thing.

Seems to me that it can’t be a binary, either/or situation, but a continuum. Early on, the chance of contagion is likely to be very low but not zero, and then it increases exponentially. Since somehow the disease managed to get out of control in Africa despite the efforts of medical pepole, I really don’t think we know enough about this particular strain to make statements like the pronouncements I’ve been hearing. The risk with someone in Hickox’s situation may not be high, person by person, but the dangerous possibilities are, and it would be better to err on the side of caution in order to protect this country from what could turn into a conflagration. Make quarantine more pleasant, and most reasonable people (not Ms. Hickox) will consider it part of the deal they take on when they go to Africa to fight it and then return home.

I’ve also gotten sick and tired of people saying we can’t do this here and we can’t do that here because we must eradicate ebola in Africa. This is not an either/or proposition. We need to fight it in Africa and prevent its spread here—what is so hard to understand about that? Oh, I think most people do understand it, but the authorities put it out anyway because they think it sounds good, even though it doesn’t.

One thing I keep wondering is how this epidemic get so of hand in Africa, when previous ones had not? I’ve read that it might be because it spread to cities this time instead of remaining in more isolated rural villages. But why has it spread to cities? Was it just a matter of time? It’s also the first ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea; previous outbreaks were mainly in the Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Zaire, a very different part of Africa. That seems significant, but of what I don’t know.

Here’s a National Geographic piece I found that I thought might answer some of my questions but really doesn’t, although it’s interesting in other ways:

The virus probably will not go airborne, but it could conceivably increase its Darwinian fitness in other ways, becoming more subtle and elusive.

The genetic study by Gire and his colleagues (five of whom were dead of Ebola by the time their study appeared) found 341 mutations as of late August, some of which are significant enough to change the bug’s functional identity. The higher the case count in West Africa goes, the more chances for further mutations, and therefore the greater possibility that the virus might adapt somehow to become more transmissible-perhaps by becoming less pathogenic, sickening or killing its victims more slowly and thereby leaving them more time to infect others.

That’s why, the Gire group wrote, we need to stop this thing everywhere as soon as possible.

Note that word “everywhere.”

Our health care authorities are guilty of a combination of stupidity and hubris. They indicate that they believe they know everything there is to know about the science of the way this disease is transmitted, and are arrogant about it. But they don’t even know what they don’t know (such as, for example, that a temperature as high as 101.5 should not be the threshold for an ebola diagnosis, as we’ve learned to our sorrow recently). And yet they—with the full cooperation and urging of the Obama administration and many on the left—continue to say, “Trust us; we know best.” Meanwhile, they’ve acted in ways that make it clear there’s no reason to trust them at all.

Latest installment in Obama’s failure to protect: states should halt the quarantine

The New Neo Posted on by

Ten days ago I wrote a post about one of the most salient characteristics of the Obama administration: the failure to protect.

It’s happened time and again: the lack of security in Benghazi. The complete pullout from Iraq. The porous border with Mexico. The lawsuit against the state of Arizona for trying to enforce the protection the White House refuses to institute. The failure to impose visa restrictions on nationals from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea during the ebola epidemic that’s been raging there for many months.

And now we have this:

The Obama administration has been pushing the governors of New York and New Jersey to reverse their decision ordering all medical workers returning from West Africa who had contact with Ebola patients to be quarantined, an administration official said.

But on Sunday both governors, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, stood by their decision, saying that the federal guidelines did not go far enough.

And although Christie’s a Republican, Cuomo is a Democrat. More:

Federal officials made it clear that they do not agree with the governors about the need or effectiveness of a total quarantine for health care workers, though they were careful not to directly criticize the governors themselves.

A senior administration official, who did not want to be identified in order to discuss private conversations with state officials on the issue, called the decision by the governors “uncoordinated, very hurried, an immediate reaction to the New York City case that doesn’t comport with science.”

But the science on this one isn’t settled, although they like to imply it is.

Of course, the lawyers are getting into it, too. Kaci Hickox, a nurse recently returned from treating ebola patients in Sierra Leone, has been complaining about her treatment under quarantine:

Ms. Hickox has retained a well-known civil rights lawyer, Norman Siegel, to challenge the quarantine order and get her out of isolation. In an interview on Sunday, he said the order “raised substantial civil liberties issues.”

“The policy infringes on Kaci Hickox’s constitutional liberty interests,” he said. “The policy is overly broad as applied to Ms. Hickox and we are preparing to challenge it on her behalf.”

Articles about Hickox—who seems petulant and arrogant to me, from what I’ve read—keep mentioning she’s had negative tests for ebola. I hope that Hickox herself doesn’t think that has much meaning at this point—because it doesn’t have much meaning at this point. She should know that, since she’s a nurse:

The virus builds up in the body as patients get sicker. In fact, people in the early stages of Ebola infection often test negative for the virus, because there’s not very much in their blood.

If that weren’t true there would be no need for a 21-day quarantine; the only quarantine necessary would be one long enough to do a blood test and get results back. However, because of the possibility of false negatives (or rather, premature negatives), quarantines sometimes must be imposed.

I think the chances of Ms. Hickox having ebola are extremely slim. But she seems more interested in the public health of patients in Africa than in keeping the disease from spreading in her own country. I would think a nurse might understand that quarantine under these circumstances is not too much to ask. Yes, the quarantine conditions should be made better—she’s the first, and the accommodations sounded makeshift. But that doesn’t mean there’s no need for the quarantine itself.

But, why now? Why was there no hue and cry to quarantine returning medics during earlier epidemics? I believe there were two main reasons for that. The first was that those epidemics were much smaller then the present one, and since no cases happened to arrive here, we were much less aware of the possibilities of its happening. Now we realize it is all too possible. The second is that in previous epidemics fewer health care workers got the disease. One of the shocking hallmarks of the present epidemic is that many of those who have sickened and even died of ebola have been among the biggest experts in the field, people whom we can assume were highly experienced and taking all the precautions necessary.

And yet quite a few have died. Even before Thomas Duncan arrived here, it already had become clear there was something different about this epidemic. Perhaps the virus had mutated and become more easily transmitted. Perhaps the hazmat suits medical staff wore were no longer as effective for that reason. Whatever was going on, we needed to be ultra-careful until we figured out what that difference might be and resolved it.

Well, we haven’t figured it out, and we haven’t resolved it. Instead, authorities initially said that those who got the disease in the West (the two Dallas nurses and the Spanish nurse’s aide) weren’t careful enough; after all, the protocols can’t be at fault. But of course they can—and that’s where a quarantine of returning health care workers comes in. It’s only prudent, until we know more.

A certain kind of genius…

The New Neo Posted on by

…can write a masterpiece within the confines of almost any restriction. Tchaikovsky was just that kind of genius.

He was one of the greatest composers for ballet who ever lived, transforming ballet music from the light and inconsequential into the symphonic and timeless.

From the Boston Ballet website, about the music of “Swan Lake”:

One interesting story that survives illustrates both the power possessed by the dancer and choreographer to dictate musical changes and Tchaikovsky’s in­tegrity and perseverance. In 1877, Anne Sobeshchanskaya made her debut as Odette. She distrusted the original choreographer, Reisinger, so she went to the great choreographer Petipa and had him choreograph a new pas de deux for her to the music of Ludwig Minkus, for her to perform in Act Ill of Swan Lake. When Tchaikovsky heard of what was about to happen to his ballet score, he stated that whether his ballet was bad or good, he alone would take responsibility for its music. He offered to write a new pas de deux for her. Sobeshchanskaya refused saying she liked the choreography created for her Minkus score and would not change a step. Tchaikovsky then asked her to send him the Minkus score and pro­mised to send her a new pas de deux that would match the structure and form of the Minkus bar for bar, allowing her to per­form Petipa’s choreography to his new pas de deux. She was so pleased with the result that she asked him to write an additional variation. The entire new pas de deux was inserted into Swan Lake and was an im­mediate success.

How Tchaikovsky managed to write something so beautiful under conditions like that is beyond me. But how Tchaikovsky, or any other musical genius, can write music like that at all is also beyond me. But I’m certainly glad he did.

I was in a production of “Swan Lake” as a teenager at a summer camp for the arts long long ago. I still remember the first time we rehearsed with the full orchestra instead of just the piano. It was overwhelming. I actually shed some tears. To stand up on that stage and hear that music—

I could have selected almost any portion of the score to illustrate the point. But I decided on this pas de deux from the second act, where Swan Queen Odette finally overcomes her fear and she and the Prince dance a love duet.

There were many versions I might have chosen, so you might wonder why I put up this slightly blurry one of a live performance during the 70s. It’s Russian defector Natalia Makarova with Ivan Nagy of American Ballet Theater, a duo I saw many times in person, two of the greatest emotional interpreters of the roles. They were an almost perfect pair, delicate and subtle, and Makarova was technically magnificent for her time as well as combining a sense of magical enchantment and spirituality with a human quality. Compared to dancers today, her legs are not raised quite as high, but they are plenty high enough and I prefer that to the more gymnastic style:

Here’s a much more recent version of the same thing, in the more modern style, and the video is nice and clear. She’s a lovely dancer too, but to me too one-dimensional emotionally:

For those of you who have neither the time nor the inclination to watch the whole clip, here’s my favorite part. It highlights the emotional difference between the two couples, I think:

Non-citizen voters

The New Neo Posted on by

There may be quite a few non-citizen voters, and they may even decide elections in close races.

Why not? It may all be part of the plan.

And it may be harder to control than you might think, even if we had the will to do it. As Jim Geraghty writes:

But this section is fascinating:

“We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.”

Is it really that a significant number of illegal immigrants now have a fake photo ID that looks realistic enough to fool voter registration and ballot box authorities? If that’s the case, it’s not really accurate to call them “undocumented immigrants,” now is it? More like “forged document immigrants.” Or is it that the poll workers manning the polling places that day aren’t really bothering to examine the IDs shown to them?

But, as Geraghty also points out, the number of non-citizen voters who were even asked for photo-ID was very small, so it’s not so certain what the effect of voter-ID laws actually would be on the phenomenon of voting by non-citizens.

However, as Hugh Hewitt has said, If it’s not close, they can’t cheat.

[Hat tip: Ace.]

Megan McArdle has a novel idea

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t buy a house unless you can afford one.

I’m old enough to remember when that wasn’t a novel idea.

She makes the point that low-down-payment loans only work in a rising housing market, and then when there’s an economic downturn they destabilize the market further because of increased foreclosures. That seems obvious, but lots of things weren’t obvious during the boom years, when housing prices rose so steadily and for so long that people forgot basic economic truths.

I don’t think all that many people remember them even now. As McArdle observes, quite a few think that 2008 was an aberration and the boom years for real estate are the rule.

After all, don’t we all deserve houses?

School shooting in Marysville, Washington

The New Neo Posted on by

This is terrible:

What he saw was freshman Jaylen Fryberg go up to a table with students, “came up from behind … and fired about six bullets into the backs of them,” Luton told CNN. “They were his friends, so it wasn’t just random.”…

The shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Marysville police spokesman Robb Lamoureux told reporters.

Two girls are in the intensive care unit at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, and two boys are in ICU at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Providence spokeswoman Erin Al-Wazan said.

Three are “very critically ill” with “very serious” injuries, she said. One is in serious condition. One of the boys, age 14, suffered a jaw injury. The other, age 15, was critically injured in the head.

The shooter and his victims are members of the Tulalip tribe, and the two boys mentioned in the above quote are relatives of his:

My grandson and the shooter were best friends,” said the boy’s grandfather, Donald Hatch. “They grew up together and did everything together.”

The girls are not identified, but they were shot in the head and are in critical condition (another girl has died).

This is very different from the typical school shooting. Ordinarily the shooter is some sort of misfit—not always a bullying victim as sometimes thought, but often at least somewhat troubled in a way that was noticeable even prior to the shooting. Fryberg was apparently the opposite—a very popular and seemingly happy young man. He was also quite different in that he targeted a group of friends. I’m not sure, since I haven’t done an exhaustive study of the victims of school shootings, but I believe this is highly irregular and perhaps even singular.

My guess is that he was a sociopath. They often seem likeable, hide their antisocial nature quite well, and would have so little conscience that blowing away a bunch of friends might seem a good idea to them. They also are very difficult to spot, and if that’s the situation here the mental health field would have been of very little use.

[NOTE: By the way However, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators in the Columbine massacre, were initially thought to be of the bullied misfit type. However, later research has indicated this was an error or at least an exaggeration, and that they were relatively well-liked. However, they had gotten into trouble with the law, although they fooled even the legal system into thinking they’d learned their lesson and were pretty good kids. Who were their targets? Actually, everyone at the school, and their intent didn’t stop there. They were extraordinarily antisocial, nihilistic, and grandiose in their plans, most of which they had kept completely hidden. It was only their journals, read posthumously, that revealed the extent of their pathology and/or evil.]

[ADDENDUM: It’s no longer certain that the shooter committed suicide. He may have shot himself accidentally while a teacher was grappling with him—that is, if this report is true. It’s very unclear what the situation was.]

And now for something completely different

The New Neo Posted on by

And I mean completely different: toddler neo-neocon.

I came across these photos while looking for something else. This one has long amused me; I look so pouty! And, as was often the case back then, I’m sporting the off-the-shoulder look.

I think I’ve just turned, or am about to turn, three years old here, and I remember it well, although I have no idea what was annoying me so at that moment. My friend and I had just been given paper umbrellas from abroad (Japan?), and I loved loved loved mine. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and I wish the photo had been in color.

But the delicate umbrella didn’t last long. It ripped or broke fairly quickly, much to my sorrow (although that hadn’t happened yet in this photo). You can see why one of my mother’s nicknames for me was “sullen cherub”:

parasols1-001

The outfit, on the other hand, was much more sturdy. It lasted until I outgrew it, and even then I tried to save it for a while because I loved it, too. It was a light blue skirt of a fairly heavy material with embroidery, and a white peasant blouse. Both had been brought back from Mexico by my parents, who’d been on a two-week trip there. They’d left a woman in charge of me who scared me, telling me if I was bad they wouldn’t come back. Imagine my relief when they did return, and with the outfit, too, which matched my mother’s!

Mother-daughter outfits—do you ever see them anymore, or have they gone the way of the dodo? As you can see, this one made me very happy. No scowl at all here:

JeanMotherdresses

Is my mother making sure that blouse stays on my shoulder?

[NOTE: Speaking of peasant blouses and the off-the-shoulder look, I think I’ll put this 40s-50s icon up there. Why not attract some traffic?

No, this isn’t me, later:

RussellBlouse

The ebola Maginot Line

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve got an article up at PJ about—what else?—our response to ebola. I conceptualize our response as a series of barriers, each of which was breached one by one by one, in ways that were supposed to have been either impossible or highly unlikely.

One little quibble: my original title for the piece was as above, “The Ebola Maginot Line.” A subtitle, “Ebola in US was clearly preventable” was added before publication. But I would say instead that, although it probably was not totally preventable, its entry here might have been prevented with a few commonsense measures and almost certainly could have been delayed. In addition, our response should have been far better.

But none of that makes a good subtitle.

You can comment there or comment here. Better yet, both places!