This makes me a bit uneasy, I must say

The New Neo Posted on by

Science marches on:

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Australia and the U.K. has taught a small mass of human brain cells to play the video game Pong…

The mass, which the researchers call a cyborg, was created by placing human stem cells on top of a micro-electric array, where they grew into brain cells. In their configuration, the cells can both stimulate other cells and read the activity of others around them. Electrical signals are sent to the array to tell them where the ball is located. If electrodes to the right of a cluster fire, for example, the brain cells know that the ball is to their left. The distance of the signal gives the cells information regarding frequency. As with real Pong, the paddle can only move left and right. And also like the real game, the goal is to move the paddle into the path of the ball.

The cyborg was taught to play the game in the same way as are humans—by playing the game repeatedly to learn how to move the paddle in ways that result in success. In this case, it was feedback in the form of electrical signals in the electrodes.

The researchers found that the system was able to learn how to play the game in about five minutes—significantly faster than artificial intelligence machines. They note that the skill level of the system was far lower than for humans or AI systems, however.

I’ll be even more impressed when it graduates to Mario Brothers.

California taxation is killing the legal pot industry

The New Neo Posted on by

Not really a surprise, is it?:

Leading California cannabis companies warned Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday that the state’s legal industry was on the verge of collapse and needed immediate tax cuts and a rapid expansion of retail outlets to steady the shaky marketplace.

The letter signed by more than two dozen executives, industry officials and legalization advocates followed years of complaints that the heavily taxed and regulated industry was unable to compete with the widespread illegal economy, where consumer prices are far lower and sales are double or triple the legal business.

It’s partly the taxes, of course. California is well known for that sort of thing. But the reason there aren’t more dispensaries is that localities often vote against them. Are the letter-writers proposing the government force towns and cities to allow dispensaries that they don’t want? I don’t see how else it could happen.

Biden and COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of things puzzle me, and one of the big ones – although I should know better than to be surprised by it – is why anyone would have believed candidate Joe Biden when he said, in October of 2020:

It was an obvious absurdity, a rhetorical boast that not only was untrue, but had to be untrue. He didn’t offer anything much that he would do to accomplish this magical feat other than things Trump had already done – except for maybe a mask mandate (I seem to recall him shifting back and forth on that), which was never going to “shut down the virus” and everyone knew it.

And yet, people believed. They believed because they wanted to, but mostly because they had bought the “It’s all Trump’s fault!!” garbage. I have long been stunned by the susceptibility of even intelligent people to propaganda, but it cannot be denied.

By the way, whether more Americans have died of COVID (or “with” COVID) under Biden depends on when you start counting. But at any rate, the numbers are close and the gap will almost certainly be closed if such a gap exists, and of course under Biden we’ve had vaccination whereas under Trump there was no vaccination.

Now we have the Omicron variant, which is starting to become common and now accounts for most of the newly-diagnosed cases in the US, especially in certain regions. That could be a really good thing, if Omicron is as mild as some reports indicate. But we simply don’t know yet – although I think we should know, since Omicron has been around in some countries for over a month. I keep reading articles that say we don’t have enough data, and then go on to scaremonger. So I’ll just say the jury is out on it, but indications are somewhat encouraging so far.

Today Biden gave a COVID speech. I don’t watch his speeches, but here’s a report:

Most notably, the government plans to buy a half-billion at-home COVID test kits and mail them to people who want them, with deliveries beginning in January…

In January, the government will also start a website where people can order at-home tests to be delivered for free.

That makes a certain amount of sense. Why wait with other possibly-infected people in order to be tested?

I spent several hours last night trying to get some objective facts about Omicron. Other than the fact that it was becoming much more common in the US, there was really very little. It’s clear that it doesn’t spare the vaccinated. There also seems to be a trend towards milder cases. But are they milder in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated? That was true for Delta, but I can’t find any indication of whether it’s true for Omicron.

Biden urged people to get vaccinated, of course. I have no problem with urging people to do that; it does seem to mitigate severity for previous variants, on average. As I’ve stated many times before, I’m against vaccine mandates.

Interestingly, Trump announced the other day that he’s had a booster. I assume he’s also had two previous vaccines, despite also having had COVID. Apparently, indications are that having had COVID plus vaccination yields even more protection.

An aside: I personally know four unvaccinated people fairly well. One would like to be vaccinated but has a serious medical condition which means she cannot be. The other three are all on the left politically, and are rather extreme health nuts of the sort who won’t eat genetically altered food and who won’t drink tap water. Make of that what you will.

[NOTE: By the way, I don’t give much credit to results from the UK on Omicron or other variants, because a significant number of people there had the rather ineffective AstraZeneca vaccine, which wasn’t ever given in the US.]

Milan Kundera on the left’s dream

The New Neo Posted on by

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

3rd grade students in DC school psychologically abused by librarian

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a sickening story:

A staff member at a Washington DC school has been suspended after making third-grade children reenact scenes from the Holocaust, including getting them to pretend to dig mass graves and shoot victims, and telling them the Germans were angry “because the Jews ruined Christmas,” parents and officials said Sunday…

“There was a lot of sobbing and crying and distress and then momentarily we got an email to say that the children had reenacted the Holocaust,” one parent told the Fox5DC TV station. “This included the trains, dying in gas chambers, playing Hitler and mass graves.”

Some children were given specific roles, including one Jewish child who was told to portray Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and then to pretend to commit suicide at the end of the exercise, as Hitler did, the parent of the child told the Post.

The instructor told the children not to tell anyone, but they did. She has been suspended, pending an investigation.

This does seem to have been the idiosyncratic decision of one person rather than any approved official pedagogical device. The sad thing, though is that some of the actual programs one hears about these days are not far behind in terms of damage done to children.

It turns out this woman had quite a history. You might say she never should have been hired in the first place. For example:

The librarian — identified as Kimberlynn Jurkowski — was accused in a tutoring scam in New Jersey that defrauded the Atlantic City school district of thousands of dollars and had her teaching licenses suspended for three years by the state Department of Education in 2017…

A former Hamilton, Atlantic County resident, Jurkowski faced charges of theft by deception and fraud for allegedly billing the Hamilton school district for tutoring services for her two children that was never performed, according to the state’s order of suspension…

In December 2013, Jurkowski and Spencer were accepted into a pretrial intervention program for first-time offenders for six months, and Jurkowski was forced to forfeit her employment in the school district, according to the Department of Education ruling.

Does the DC school system check on these things before hiring someone? Or are they that desperate?

[ADDENDUM: More information and a photo of Jurkowski can be found here.]

Joe Manchin, unlikely hero of the republic – for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Manchin has held firm against Build Back Better – so far. Is he alone among the Democrats? We don’t know, but no one else has come out publicly against it.

From a comment at Powerline:

It’s such a joke that we have even come to this. This massive legislation or any transformational, highly impactful legislation should not come down to whether you can convince one person to vote for it. I’m not talking about “gang of 8” stuff, so that John McCain could wield more power than he deserved. But we are in a 50/50 Senate situation, and there is no effort whatsoever to work with even one Republican, much less a true bipartisan effort. I don’t believe in bipartisanship for its own sake, but getting 50% + 1 was never the way this was supposed to work…

That was what was so unusual about Obamacare back when it was passed. It was the first “transformational” legislation without bipartisan support (there was even a bit of bipartisan opposition). The Democrats had discovered something, which is that if they voted for a bill that gave people perks, even an unpopular bill with a downside, it would be hard to remove, especially if it destroyed the previous system (in this case, the existing system of health insurance) that was in place. Why tweak the old system when you can invent a totally new one that gives your favored groups what they want and screws others? You might take a small hit in the short run (2010 mid-terms, for the Democrats) but in the long run you will have made it harder for the right to function or to rid the country of the new system, because they will have to design another from scratch.

In the case of the federal voting bill known as HR1, the Democrats desperately want to pass it because it would make their future elections easier to win, and block Republican efforts to ensure that fraud doesn’t occur. Even before COVID gave the Democrats the excuse to do away with certain voting safeguards that some states had erected, HR1 was the very first bill they passed in the House in early 2019 when they got the majority as a result of the 2018 election. It didn’t make it in the Senate, but not because the Democrats wouldn’t dearly love to pass it. But Sinema has come out against ending the filibuster in order to pass it in a narrow vote.

This is interesting, from that expert on West Virginia (one of the reddest states in the nation), Bernie Sanders:

Well, I think [Manchin’s] going to have a lot of explaining to do to the people of West Virginia, to tell him why he doesn’t have the guts to take on the drug companies to lower the cost of prescription drugs,” he said. “West Virginia is one of the poorest states in this country. You got elderly people and disabled people who would like to stay at home. He’s going to have to tell the people of West Virginia why he doesn’t want to expand Medicare to cover dental hearing and eyeglasses.”

That is a good example of the leftist mindset. The idea is that voters – even voters in red states – only care about short-term gains and ignore long-term costs, and only look at bits and pieces of a bill rather than the whole thing. Sander knows, of course, that people on the right are not in favor of this bill and he even knows that it’s not popular with independents. But he doesn’t care. If it could be passed, he’d do it in a heartbeat – as would almost every single Democrat, whether they call themselves “moderate” or not.

Music and snobbery

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of my newish – or rather, renewed – interest in popular music, I’ve been listening to a lot of music old and new. No doubt it’s at least partly as an escape from the political dolors du jour. But it also has its own fascination for me. I find it highly entertaining and even calming to listen to my favorites from the 50s through the 80s. And this time, I prefer watching as well, if possible in videos or live performances.

When I was growing up, even though we were hardly poor, my access to music was almost laughably limited compared to today’s internet and digital age. It was mainly through the radio that I heard the songs of the day, although I could have watched a show like “American Bandstand” and if so I would have gotten more of the visuals. But I found that program boring, and for me the way I listened was to turn on the radio while I did my homework. In later years there were parties in college where hired bands would play cover versions of the current hits. Much later on, in my days as a young married woman and mother it was mostly back to the radio again, only this time in the car while doing errands.

And then at some point popular music became a miss for me much more often than a hit, and for the most part I quit listening. I find that the popular music of today leaves me almost totally cold, even that small portion of it that seems at least superficially like the music I loved in my youth. Where are the hooks I used to like so much? Why don’t I hear them? Why do the voices sound either slurred or tortured or boringly similar to each other, or all of the above? Why are the words so often meaningless or ironic or repetitive or obscene?

There are styles in music, but there’s also snobbery in musical tastes. I don’t think new music doesn’t appeal to me because I’m a musical snob; at least, I never have been one before. In fact, I’ve never cared what music other people liked or disliked, nor did I look down on anyone for their tastes. But I’ve noticed here and elsewhere that some people not only have strong opinions on music and what they like, but are also what I might call musical snobs – that is, they look down on those who like music that they consider inferior in some way.

I think there are at least two spectra on which people often judge musical tastes in this way. The first is a continuum from cool to uncool. That’s more for popular music such as rock or jazz or pop or disco or rap. The second is a continuum from lofty to populist, and it’s used more for classical music. But there is interface and the two graphs are essentially the same thing – what’s in among the cognoscenti and what’s out.

People not only have preferences – sometimes they can explain those preferences and sometimes not. And sometimes they are quite knowledgeable about music theory and technique and sometimes not. But preferences and knowledge aren’t what I’m talking about – I’m talking about disdain for those who like music that a person has decided is inferior.

I’m not just talking about the disdain some feel for my newly-beloved Bee Gees, although that of course exists. I’ve noticed that the music looked down on is often dance music, both in the pop world (disco being a prime example) and in the classical one (I’ve long noticed disdain leveled against mere ballet music). Why is that? Is dance music considered less pure in some way? Because in pop or rock I have a liking for music with a strong beat as well as harmony, and my favorite classical composers have all had works that have been used in well-known ballets (Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Bach, and Dvorak).

I’m no music expert, and although as the saying goes I know what I like, I don’t always know exactly and precisely why I like it. But in the last year or so of turmoil and angst I’ve been drawn more and more to listening to music and to thinking about it more as well, not just about what I like but about why people like what they like.

New Hampshire statistics on COVID hospitalizations and the unvaccinated versus the vaccinated

The New Neo Posted on by

New Hampshire has been relatively unscathed by COVID up till now, so among the entire population – vaccinated and unvaccinated – there probably hasn’t been as much previous community exposure as in many other states. Also, most of the prior deaths in that state were in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

The governor and legislature of NH are Republican, and the state doesn’t have a COVID history of draconian measures, nor have there been calls for mandated vaccination. The state is basically purple, although right now, as I said, Republicans are in control, and it retains a bit of its libertarian history (“Live Free or Die”). The vaccination rate in the state is somewhere between 55% and 65%, which for New England is slightly low.

Presently the state is experiencing a spike in COVID cases (Delta, not Omicron) that gives New Hampshire the distinction of having the highest per capita COVID rate at the moment in the nation. That’s cases, and of course a case rate is almost meaningless without looking at the seriousness of those cases. The news there is not good for New Hampshire, which is also experiencing a higher hospitalization and death rate than before, as well as a higher proportion of serious cases in people under 60 and not in long-term care.

What interests me the most, and what caused me to write this post, is that New Hampshire is offering unusually complete statistics on the proportions of vaccinated to unvaccinated people who’ve been hospitalized for COVID (or perhaps “with” COVID, although New Hampshire being New Hampshire and not Massachusetts or New York, my guess is that it’s more “from COVID” than “with,” as compared to other states).

The pattern is clear: the unvaccinated are heavily represented in the serious cases, much more than would be expected based on their proportion in the population. Somewhere between 35 and 45 percent of New Hampshirites are unvaccinated, but here are hospitalization statistics; you can take a look for yourselves.

As I’ve written many times before, I defend anyone’s right to remain unvaccinated for any reason whatsoever. But it does trouble me that quite a few unvaccinated people in New Hampshire are dying who might otherwise have lived, had they been vaccinated. Of course, some vaccinated people are dying, too, but it seems clear that vaccination confers a significant benefit over nonvaccination for those who actually do contract COVID, at least in New Hampshire at the moment.

That really does seem to be the case, although of course with COVID statistics it’s hard to know for sure.

[NOTE: By the way, neighboring Maine is experiencing a similar surge, although I can’t find any reports in Maine about the vaccination status of the hospitalized. Maine has a similar relative low previous community exposure to COVID, much like New Hampshire, although its politics are far more blue, and the government there has been much more aggressive about masking and that sort of thing. That part doesn’t seem to matter, as far as I can tell.]

California as abortion “sanctuary” state

The New Neo Posted on by

If Roe is overturned it will almost certainly leave decisions about abortion law in the hands of each state, for that state only. If Governor Newsom of California has anything to say about it, California will not only keep abortions legal, but will become what he refers to as a “sanctuary” for those seeking them, even from other states:

“We’ll be a sanctuary,” Newsom announced. “We are looking at ways to support that inevitability and looking at ways to expand our protections.”

The state of California, according to Newsom’s Democratic legislative allies, could provide travel expenses including gas, lodging, transportation and child care for those seeking to kill their unborn children. Already, some 15% of America’s abortions occur in California, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That number would skyrocket if the state began subsidizing abortions across the land.

When I first heard this “sanctuary” business, I assumed that the idea would be a form of abortion tourism that would bring money to the state. But if it’s being subsidized by the state in the proposed manner, that won’t be the effect.

So, what about money? Is California so flush with it that the state can afford this, and is it what the people actually want?:

Armed with an estimated $31 billion budget surplus, both Newsom and top Democratic state lawmakers seem prepared to make good on that promise. Senate Democrats on Wednesday outlined the budget proposal they’ll release in full next year, emphasizing that California has both the wealth and the political wherewithal to protect reproductive rights, while Newsom told the Associated Press that he sees California as a “sanctuary” for out-of-state patients seeking abortions.

Meanwhile, California centers that counsel pregnant women against abortion are making their own preparations and increasing staffing levels ahead of the expected influx of patients, said Jonathan Keller, president and CEO of the California Family Council.

Here are some of the state panel’s recommendations; there are others:

Create a California Reproductive Scholarships Corps to strengthen abortion access in underserved areas, including regions primarily served by health systems with religious affiliations.
Explore ways to offer medication abortion services to out-of-state patients via telehealth.
Remove existing barriers to abortions later in pregnancy.

That last sentence in particular is chilling.

California can do what it wants to with its money, revenue collected through some of the highest taxes in the US. But I find it hard to believe that this proposal is what the majority of Californians think is the best use of its funds – to facilitate and subsidize abortions throughout the land.