A bit belated, but still impressive:
Hamlin’s collapse and sudden death or cardiac arrest in young athletes
It was a terrible moment watched by millions: Buffalo Bills’ player Damar Hamlin collapsed after making a hit. He was in cardiac arrest but immediate medical attention caused his heartbeat to resume, and he is now in critical condition and intensive care.
As soon as I heard the news, I thought it was either a case of spontaneous cardiac arrest or a phenomenon known as commotio cordis, which I recalled from previous tragic incidents involving young athletes. This is what I wrote last night after hearing he’d been struck in the chest during the play that had just ended:
I was thinking the player might have been felled by some form of commotio cordis. I first heard of the phenomenon when this death occurred.
Hamlin is considerably bigger than the usual victim, but it is still possible that this is what happened.
Even if it’s not commotio cordis, the sudden cardiac arrest of healthy young athletes is not as unusual event as one might think or hope. I wrote this last night, as well:
…[Sudden cardiac arrest] happens to a certain percentage of professional athletes with some regularity. Go to the link. Read it. See the list towards the bottom under “notable cases.” And those are just cases of fairly well-known athletes who died. There are many many cases of people who are not professional athletes, or who had some sort of incident but didn’t die.
Note the dates.
There has been no recent uptick, by the way. But people are paying more attention, that’s all.
Here’s a statistic from the article: “a population as large as the United States will experience the sudden cardiac death of a competitive athlete at the average rate of one every three days, often with significant local media coverage heightening public attention.” The footnote for that quote is from an article written in 2012. Long before COVID or COVID vaccines.
It is a tragic phenomenon and unfortunately it’s not as uncommon as we would like.
In that comment I was addressing the idea that this had something to do with a COVID shot or with COVID. The ascribing of every bad event to something connected with the vaccine in particular is something I’ve noticed and noticed and noticed. The great majority of those doing so either do not understand statistics, misuse them, don’t care about them and only look at anecdotal evidence, or state that they distrust all statistics issued by official sources and consider them lies. That latter bit allows them to say or believe anything they wish, of course.
Believe me, I understand distrust of the CDC and the government. They’ve earned our distrust, to a large extent. But that doesn’t mean that the people who promote alternate theories and who post lies or errors about what’s going on are to be believed either. I have spent an enormous number of hours on this blog countering what they write, but mostly in the comments section here and so it’s difficult for me to locate much of it and to amalgamate it into one big post or several. It’s a time-consuming job, and I’m weary of it at this point. But I’ll just reiterate that everything of the sort that I’ve read is highly flawed.
As I said, though, I understand the distrust. However, the emotions of rage and frustration shouldn’t cloud our judgment. The whole thing is compounded by the fact that research involving human subjects, and the statistics involved, are not easy to understand and most people don’t understand them. I have an advantage at that because I’ve taken a statistics course at the graduate level, but that doesn’t mean I know everything either. But it means I have a relatively sophisticated understanding of the principles involved and can critique both the original research and the critiques of that research with some degree of understanding.
I don’t have an agenda except trying to get to the truth as best I can, using the tools and knowledge I have. Defending the government is not my goal, but debunking the government is not my goal either.
Most of the US and the Western world is vaccinated. I don’t know the exact total, but it’s vast. In that vast number of people, bad things will happen to some. Actually, eventually, bad things will happen to all. Only statistics can tell us what difference the vaccine makes, but to properly evaluate those statistics a vast number of things must be taken into consideration, among them the ages and relative pre-vaccine debility of the vaccine recipients, and the usual pre-vaccine incidence of those same events in a matched population.
I’ll add a recommendation to look at this article, this one, and also this.
That last link involves some research done in Minnesota in an attempt to figure out the cause of the excess deaths there. Here are some quotes:
COVID-19 comprised 9.9% of deaths [in Minnesota] in 2020. Other categories of causes of death with significant increases in 2020 compared to 2018–2019 included assault by firearms (RR 1.68, 95% CI 1.34–2.11), accidental poisonings (RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.37–1.61), malnutrition (RR 1.48, 95% CI 1.17–1.87), alcoholic liver disease (RR, 95% CI 1.14–1.40), and cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases (RR 1.28, 95% CI 1.09–1.50). Mortality rates due to COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 causes were higher among racial and ethnic minority groups, older adults, and non-rural residents…
Deaths due to assault by firearms were increased in individuals 15–34 and 45–64?years of age, with the greatest increase among those 45–64?years (RR 2.30, 95% CI 1.23–4.32) and women (RR 2.28, 95% CI 1.24–4.22) (Supplemental Table 2). There were also significant increases in deaths due to assault by firearms among Black Minnesotans (RR 1.82, 95% CI 1.35–2.45), non-rural residents (RR 1.73, 95% CI 1.35–2.20), and men (RR 1.60, 95% CI 1.25–2.04). When firearms-related deaths were stratified by sex (Supplemental Table 3), we found that the majority of these deaths were among men, though women saw a larger increase in firearms-related mortality in 2020 relative to 2018–2019.
Deaths due to accidental poisoning/overdose increased 49% in 2020 relative to 2018–19 (RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.37–1.61). Although the category includes all types of poisonings, nearly all accidental poisonings included one or more drug (98.4% across the 3 years). The proportion of accidental poisoning deaths that included one or more opioids increased from 55.6% in 2018–2019 to 63.3% in 2020 (RR 1.69, 95% CI 1.52–1.88). Accidental poisoning deaths increased substantially in nearly all demographic groups (Supplemental Table 4). The greatest increases occurred among racial and ethnic minority populations…
Deaths due to malnutrition were increased among residents aged 85?years and older (RR 1.76, 95% CI 1.27–2.45), women (RR 1.64, 95% CI 1.23–2.19), White individuals (RR 1.44, 95% CI 1.13–1.83) and rural residents (RR 2.50, 95% CI 1.55–4.04) (Supplemental Table 6). Their rates of death in 2020 were 60.4, 2.95, 2.6, and 3.1 per 100,000, respectively…
We did not find statistically significant increases in deaths due to other causes, including those hypothesized to be affected by pandemic-related changes in daily life and access to health care including cancer, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, dementia, kidney disease, motor vehicle collisions, and suicide.
As you can see, it’s a complex process, but all-cause deaths can involve a great many causes having nothing to do with COVID or COVID vaccines.
To get back to Hamlin – he is now reported to be sedated and in critical condition. That almost certainly means he is being purposely kept in a coma, cooled, and has been placed on a breathing tube. That is pretty much standard procedure after a cardiac arrest of any real duration. What they will probably do in the next few days is periodically withdraw the coma-inducing drugs for a short while at a time in order to test his reflexes and then later to see whether he can follow simple commands such as to squeeze a person’s finger. Those tests are to evaluate whether he is retaining function and what his long-term prognosis might be. Then if all goes well, they take him out of the coma and off the breathing tube on a certain schedule as he heals. He could make a full recovery, although he certainly might not, and anything in between, depending on how oxygen-deprived he was for how long. Prayers go out for a full recovery.
GOP discord in the House
The GOP margin is tiny, and a small portion of the conservative wing in the House sees its chance to wring more concessions from would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At least, I hope that’s what’s going on, because no realistic alternative for speaker has emerged.
At any rate, as expected, McCarthy failed to win the speakership on the first ballot. This cannot fail to warm the cockles of the Democrats’ hearts. Furthermore:
A group of five conservatives led by Biggs and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) have publicly stated that they will not support McCarthy under any circumstances and have called on him to stand down to make room for a more viable candidate.
Unless they come up with a truly viable candidate, I hope this is just pressure being applied to McCarthy. Here’s an article listing their supposed demands. And it contains this:
MORE NEWS —
In a private mtg yesterday, GAETZ, BOEBERT, PERRY told McCarthy they wanted their OWN legal entity in House to wage lawsuits.
The group also told McCarthy that they don’t mind if the speaker vote goes to plurality and @RepJeffries is elected bc they’ll fight him. https://t.co/UMSJX0DmFI
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) January 3, 2023
Now, there’s a fab idea – you think the current speaker candidate is unsufficiently conservative, so you decide to help put an extreme leftist in there instead – along the way, negating the votes of all the people who cast ballots for a Republican majority. I can only hope that’s either an inaccurate report or an idle threat they won’t carry through, because otherwise it’s one of the stupidest and most self-destructive things I’ve heard in a long time, and that’s saying something.
If there had been the expected red wave, I assume that McCarthy would be sailing it to victory at this point. But that’s not what happened, so here we are.
Open thread 1/3/23
Leftist professors and their influence on the world
I’m both fascinated and puzzled by this essay by Russell Jacoby, a professor (now emeritus) in UCLA’s history department.
He writes:
…[M]y ’60s generation [posed as] much more radical than previous American intellectuals. We were the leftists, Maoists, Marxists, Third Worldists, anarchists, and protesters who regularly shut down the university in the name of the war in Vietnam or free speech or racial equality. Yet for all our university bashing, unlike earlier intellectuals, we never exited the campus. We settled in. We became graduate students, assistant professors and finally—a few of us—leading figures in academic disciplines.
Excuse me? Excuse me? I’m a member of that generation, and although I’m not a member of any “academic discipline,” I’ve served my time as student and research employee in a number of academic institutions. I’ve also observed them from the outside. The serious real-world ambitions of the 60s radicals have been apparent for a long long time, maybe even from the start but certainly for many decades now.
What did the author think was happening in the teaching field? For example, did he notice – being a historian and all – the popularity of the history books of Howard Zinn in the American school system, including the public school system? Talk about being in an ivory tower – I think Jacoby was practically Rapunzel.
He writes:
Within 30 years, the timber and tone of faculties were refashioned. In the 1950s the number of public leftists teaching in American universities could be counted on two hands. By the 1980s, they filled airplanes and hotel conference rooms. In the 1980s a three-volume survey of the new Marxist scholarship appeared (The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, vol. 1-3). Endless new journals, each with their own followings, popped up, such as Studies on the Left, Radical Teacher, Radical America, Insurgent Sociologist, Radical Economists. In the coming years leaders of the main scholarly organizations like the Modern Language Association or American Sociological Association elected self-professed leftists.
So he had noticed. But somehow he didn’t seem to think it would matter. I have to conclude that he considered that some sort of academic game was being played, and that students would be able to slough off the lessons their teachers were so busy cramming into their heads. He seems to have thought there would be no important consequences in the real world.
But most students do go out into that real world, as opposed to staying in the cocoon of university life as professors. And that certainly was especially true for law students, who were among the first exposed most heavily to radical leftism (in the Critical Legal Studies movement), and many of whom graduated to become real-world movers and shakers.
I’m trying not to be too hard on Jacoby, because I can’t say that most of us – and I definitely include myself – realized just how fast it was happening and just how bad it had gotten. But anyone familiar with academia had to be aware that there was serious and widespread instruction and outright indoctrination in leftism going on, and therefore serious potential danger not to be waved away.
And yet Jacoby writes:
In a series of bestselling books—Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education, The Closing of the American Mind—conservatives raised the alarm: Radicals were taking over the university and destroying America, if not Western civilization. In The Last Intellectuals I differed. The new radical scholars were proving to be obliging colleagues and professionals. The proof? They penned unreadable articles and books for colleagues. They were less subversive than submissive. Earlier American intellectuals wrote for a public; the new radical ones did not. They were not public intellectuals, but narrow academics…
I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool.
This was denial of epic proportions.
I will give him credit, though, for admitting that he was wrong. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do.
Roundup
The holidays are over, and the news just keeps coming and coming…
(1) A mother’s story of how she was brainwashed into thinking she should raise her child without any messages whatsoever about belonging to one sex or another, and how the consequences of that decision finally were brought home to her and she changed her approach. It took a fairly dramatic situation to do it, too.
(2) A sizable majority – 63% of likely voters – wants the FBI’s involvement in social media censorship investigated. That’s impressive, considering how the MSM has sat on the story.
(3) Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker keeps running into snags. The narrow House majority for the GOP means he can’t afford to lose many votes. The conservative holdouts have been pressing him for concessions, and he’s granted some:
McCarthy’s central concession is allowing for any five Republican representatives to force of vote of no confidence in the speaker. He also vowed to end the practice of proxy voting and virtual participation in hearings, requiring lawmakers to be in Washington to participate in hearings and votes.
My problem with all of this is simple. I have no great love for McCarthy, but I’d like to know what challenger in the GOP can get the support to win the job. I don’t think supposed contender Andy Biggs has a chance of amassing the requisite number of votes, but who knows? Without a viable alternative to McCarthy, this doesn’t help the right – unless in the end they are doing this to get concessions from McCarthy in order to force him to the right and then will join the vote to elect him Speaker.
(4) It’s come out that Ray Epps wrote a text to his family on January 6th claiming that he “orchestrated it.” Andrea Widburg sums the situation up this way:
The videos of Ray Epps, a tall, gray-haired man urging people to the Capitol, that are posted at The Revolver will suffice to show that Epp’s behavior was open and perfectly met the Democrats’ own description of what constitutes an “insurrection.” (I’m not agreeing with their definition, I’m just saying that Epps meets it.)
What’s truly bizarre is affirmative disinterest that the Democrats and the FBI (but I repeat myself) are showing in Epps. And by “affirmative,” I meant that, despite the FBI having him on its radar, it erased him entirely from consideration, while the January 6 Committee called him a good guy.
(5) Blogger Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest, who’s also a sometime commenter here, is having various health problems. Good wishes and prayers are welcome.
The Democrats reveal the contents of Al Capone’s vaults Trump’s tax returns….
…and find nothing. They even have trouble pretending to find something.
What was wrong with the House Ways and Means Committee requesting Trump’s tax returns, and SCOTUS granting their release? Just about everything. Here’s the statement on it from the Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee:
…[T]he Committee Majority’s action set a dangerous new precedent. It is apparent from the proceedings that the Committee Majority set out with the goal of obtaining and publishing the former President’s full tax returns. Everything since then has been a search for a rationale or justification that would be acceptable to the courts. Committee Republicans are not focused on whether the former President should have made his tax returns public, which has been tradition. Nor are Committee Republicans focused on the accuracy of those tax returns – that is for the IRS to determine in the ongoing audits of the former President.
Committee Republicans are concerned that this politically motivated action unleashes a dangerous new political weapon reaching far beyond the former President and overturns decades of privacy protections for average Americans.
Going forward, the new precedent is that the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee have nearly unlimited power to target and make public the tax returns of private citizens, political enemies, business or labor leaders, or even Supreme Court justices.
And it was all for nothing. Trump always knew it. I strongly believe that the Democrats knew it, too, but thought they could spin it into something nefarious anyway. They certainly have been trying, but I think it’s one of those things that will be forgotten very soon, if it hasn’t been already. But the terrible precedent has been set.
I also blame SCOTUS for allowing it. Did they really buy the argument from the Democrats on the committee that it was just for a legislative purpose?
Legal Insurrection authors’ predictions for 2023
All the Legal Insurrection authors – including me – offer prognostications for 2023.
Open thread 1/2/23
Here it is: the very first open thread of 2023.
Happy New Year!
What are you doing New Year’s Eve?
And me? Glad you asked.
Nada, zip, zilch.
Oh, I might visit a nearby friend for a short while and have a sip of champagne, a tiny toast to the end of 2021, a year I’m pretty sure most people are not going to look back on with inordinate fondness. And I’ll toast with a fervent hope that 2023 will be a lot, lot better.
I don’t usually do much of anything on New Year’s Eve. I decided not to publish any long, involved, research-laden posts today, but to resume that come Monday.
Staying up till midnight is no problem for me, since I’m a night owl and always have been. Actually, even when young, I had somewhat of an aversion to New Year’s Eve. To the idea of a night when you were supposed to have fun or else. A reminder of the speedy passage of time. With alcohol drinking. And the obligatory midnight kiss, which wasn’t a fun moment if you didn’t like your date.
Once or twice I went to Times Square to see the ball go down in person and not just on TV. Curiously, those were some of my better New Year’s Eves. Maybe it was the people I was with those nights. We ate at Tad’s Steaks, just for laughs, but Tad’s wasn’t bad at all.
And three years ago the very last Tad’s in New York City closed down. I had no idea any of them had lasted that long.
So let’s drink to Tad’s:
The cafeteria-style chophouse is known for hawking inexpensive meat-and-potato dinners on red trays — meals that cost little more than $1 each when the first one opened in 1957. A steak lunch today can be had for as little as $9.
At its height, Tad’s had eight New York locations out of 28 nationwide. But come Jan. 5, 2020, the red neon sign in the window advertising “broiled” steaks at 761 Seventh Ave. will go dark — as will the vast grill that played host to smoky “steak shows,” where dozens of cuts could be grilled at once during the thick of lunch hour.
Happy New Year, everyone! I’m very grateful for all of you. Here’s to a wonderful 2023, full of love, joy, and good health!
And beautiful music:
[NOTE: Some of this appeared in a previous post.]
Crime and punishment
In connection with the arrest of suspect Bryan Christopher Kohberger yesterday in the Idaho student murders, there was a discussion in the comments of other cases brought to mind, such as that of Leopold and Loeb.
That case, which occurred close to 100 years ago, has remained unusually famous, probably because of the cold-bloodedness of the crime as well as the intellectual brilliance of its two youthful perpetrators, in addition to the fact that they were defended by the famously eloquent Clarence Darrow. If you’re interested, here’s a good site for information, including excerpts from Darrow’s famous summation speech. I had read most of that speech when I was quite young, and it was one of the reasons I went to law school, although as it turned out I was no Darrow.
In our discussion yesterday, a comparison with Raskolnikov, the killer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, also came up. Commenter “Chuck” wrote this:
Crime and Punishment was also the first thing I thought of. Then I thought, no, I don’t expect the perpetrator to have a spiritual rebirth.
Well, I wouldn’t bet on it either. But I thought I’d offer the following passage in evidence. It’s by Nathan Leopold. Now, you might consider it a self-serving lie, but I think it’s the truth because the latter part of Leopold’s life bore it out. He devoted himself to humanitarian endeavors both while in prison and after he was released on parole at the age of about 53. Here’s the statement:
Looking back from the vantage point of today, I cannot understand how my mind worked then. For I can recall no feeling then of remorse. Remorse did not come until later, much later. It did not begin to develop until I had been in prison for several years; it did not reach its full flood for perhaps ten years. Since then, for the past quarter century, remorse has been my constant companion. It is never out of my mind. Sometimes it overwhelms me completely, to the extent that I cannot think of anything else.
So that’s one example. His confederate, Richard Loeb, was murdered in prison at 31 by another inmate, so there’s no way to know what his trajectory would have been had he lived longer.