Bernie does what he does best: drops out of the race

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember that old Timothy Leary prescription – “turn on, tune in, drop out”? I bet Bernie does.

Today he announced he’s dropping out of the race, although he remains on the ballot for the rest of the primaries.

“I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth. And that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden and the path to victory is virtually impossible,” Sanders said.“I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful, and so today I am announcing the suspension of my campaign.”

He said that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic had hastened his decision to suspend his campaign, saying that continuing his presidential bid would only distract from efforts to combat the outbreak and damage it has done to the U.S. economy.

“I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” he said.

The most important work of all, of course, is to unite in criticizing Trump’s handling of the health crisis.

Truth is, Bernie was the front runner until the DNC became alarmed and decided to marshall its considerable forces – including the MSM – to do Sanders in.

So now they are left with a lot of angry Sanders supporters, Joe Biden, and a Possible Player to be Named Later.

Trump wasted no time:

This has been the strangest campaign season in my memory. And it’s not over yet. Now that the DNC has stopped Bernie, will they manage to stop Biden, which is a bit more complex procedurally but could be done? And if not, will they manage to drag him over the finish line somehow? Will the long push to get the public to hate and reject Trump be successful, even with Biden nominally at the helm? And if not Biden, than who?

What a mess.

RIP John Prine

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve loved this song for a long, long time:

This article says he died of COVID-19 complications. That last word is a bit confusing. He had a history of successfully treated lung cancer from 2013, so it’s not clear how that factored into it. Prine had been hospitalized with COVID-19 since March 26 and on a ventilator since March 28.

Once more, with feeling: Updike on Kundera

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat (slightly edited) of a previous post. It seems timely, as I think you’ll see as you read it.

Maybe it’s always timely.]

I’ve quoted the following excerpt before, because it’s one of my very favorites. It’s from the Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

I first came across The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in an excerpt published in The New Yorker around the time of the book’s English publication, 1980. The first paragraph of the book in its New Yorker version hit me with great force as soon as I read it, which is unusual for me. I understood immediately that I was in the presence of brilliance of a particular and unusual sort, a writer who said things in a way that resonated deeply with me. The work managed to mix political and philosophical observations with a fanciful fictional narrative (not exactly a novel but rather a series of linked and unconventional stories) all told in the idiosyncratic and blunt voice of an exceedingly perceptive and reflective author.

I’ll leave it to another perceptive and reflective author—John Updike, in his original review of the book—to describe it:

This book…is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out…

…[T]he mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history. Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among that moiety of Czechs–“the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half”–who cheered the accession of the Communists to power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new regime: “And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intelligent radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down.”

Kundera’s prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communists idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself—the most interesting political question of the century–why a plausible and necessarily redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom? Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare?

The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements; and we it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy cost to his life, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us 35 years ago.

That probably tells you more about Updike’s politics and quality of mind (see much more here) than about Kundera. However, I actually think that, although Kundera doesn’t directly spell out the answer to that “most interesting political question of the century,” the answer is inherent in everything he writes. In fact, come think of it, the answer is even subtly implied in that paragraph I quoted at the outset of this post, and it resides in that single word “forced.” In the inevitably vain effort to realize a dream that goes against human nature and reality, one must force compliance or abandon the dream. That necessity for force appeals to the worst in human nature and ultimately attracts the worst human beings rather than the best.

More on China’s media connections

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post that dealt with some of the propaganda efforts of China, and how they have bought influence in news media:

Now there’s this comprehensive article focusing on the American MSM:

The companies that own the major news networks, NBC, ABC, and CBS, all do significant business in China. On the print side, top U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times have been criticized for running paid China Daily inserts. What they were paid for these inserts is still unknown.

By contrast, conservative news companies are much less involved in China. Conservative radio giant Salem, whose attempt to buy Tribune several years ago provoked an enormous freakout from media reporters over consolidation, is all-American. And Fox, after several troubled attempts to break into the Chinese market—including sending a News Corp team to help build People’s Daily a website—has mostly given up, after selling its Asia-Pacific operations to Disney over the last two years.

Disney owns ABC and has a park in Shanghai. It also owns ESPN, which was criticized for its coverage of China’s retaliation against the NBA earlier this year over one team owner’s support of the Hong Kong protests. But other than ABC, Disney is relatively uninvolved in news.

Comcast, on the other hand, has a much larger footprint in the U.S. media landscape,

More at the link.

The US media has financial reasons and political reasons for defending China. They are, after all, on the left, and the left not only has a natural alliance with China, but since Trump has been clear (long before COVID) that he thinks China is a bad actor on the scene, the MSM wants to defend China in their continual campaign to invalidate Trump’s position.

It’s almost humorous, given the fuss that was made about Trump’s alleged Russian connection. Almost humorous, but not really at all.

COVID-19 as a cause of death

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes a person’s cause of death is obvious. An accident. Cancer. Heart attack.

But in no small number of cases there are choices to make when a doctor gives an official a cause of death. I’ve seen this many times, even among family and friends. When my mother died at almost 100, there were multiple factors, but perhaps the best choice would have been “old age,” although that did not appear on her death certificate. Another relative, profoundly weakened by cancer that was untreatable at that point, succumbed to pneumonia. I never looked at his death certificate, but it could easily have given either cause or both.

Doctors make these decisions all the time, and the sums of their decisions become the official statistics at the CDC.

For COVID-19, this is how it’s been going so far:

In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed’,” the [CDC] advises. “In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgment in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely.”

That clinical judgment, alarmingly, does not require administering a test to confirm the presence of the virus.

“Ideally, testing for COVID–19 should be conducted, but it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate without this confirmation if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty,” the guidelines state.

This is not surprising or unusual – for example, flu deaths are ordinarily based on clinical judgments rather than testing. But it is concerning, because so much is riding on the COVID statistics, reported every day in mounting numbers. In the heat of the moment, treating patients is the primary concern. But record-keeping (both in the US and in countries around the world) needs to be as accurate as possible.

Even if tests were mandatory, however, it still would be difficult in many cases – particularly those involving the elderly and already-infirm – to know whether it was COVID dealing the final blow or something else. Sometimes it’s very clear, for example when a previously hale and hearty person succumbs and the COVID virus has been confirmed by testing. But sometimes it is not clear at all. And it appears that in those cases there is a preference for listing COVID in the absence of knowledge as to whether the person even had the virus.

After all, flu is still going around, and it kills people too. We aren’t ordinarily testing for flu. Are we ascribing some flu deaths to COVID, if the above guidelines are followed? And if so, how many?

I’ve been having connectivity problems off and on today

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m pretty sure that my connectivity problems are connected to the fact that so many people are at home and online. Periodically I get thrown off, and then unpredictably my service comes on again. Anyway, most of the time I’m online, and I hope that continues.

So for the duration, if every now and then it seems as though my posting pace is a bit off, you’ll know why. At least, that’s my excuse.

Boris Johnson is in intensive care

The New Neo Posted on by

As if things weren’t disturbing enough, now we get this news:

Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care after his coronavirus symptoms worsened, Downing Street have confirmed.

The Prime Minister was admitted to St Thomas’ hospital in Westminster on Sunday after his coronavirus symptoms persisted for 10 days.

After tests and observation, his doctors advised that he be admitted to intensive care around 7pm.

A statement from Number 10 said: “Over the course of this afternoon, the condition of the Prime Minister has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital.

According to the article, once a person with COVID goes to intensive care, that person’s survival chances are 50/50.

Johnson’s case is upsetting on so many levels, and not just the political ones. One would imagine he has had the best of care (whatever that standard is in the UK). He was in the hospital when his condition worsened. He’s only 55 and has no known previous health problems except overweight. According to the article, he’s 5’9″ and at one point years ago weighed about 234 pounds, but has lost considerable weight in recent years although he remains “slightly overweight.” But slight overweight shouldn’t be a bid risk factor, and he’s also “an avid runner and cycler.”

I fervently hope he recovers.

China says to Italy (and the world): let’s make a deal

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Snow on Pine”]

Oh, the magnanimity of the Chinese government:

After COVID-19 made its way to Italy, decimating the country’s significant elderly population, China told the world it would donate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help Italy stop its spread. Reports later indicated that China had actually sold, not donated, the PPE to Italy.

Well, we already knew that – right?

Here’s the new twist:

A senior Trump administration official tells The Spectator that it is much worse than that: China forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that it gave to China during the initial coronavirus outbreak.

‘Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population,’ the administration official explained. ‘China then has sent Italian PPE back to Italy — some of it, not even all of it … and charged them for it.’

Now, these reports from unnamed “senior officials” are always a bit iffy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true.

We do know this:

Much of the supplies and testing kits China has sold to other countries have turned out to be defective. Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering that they were faulty. In some cases, instead of apologizing or fixing the issue, China has blamed its defective equipment on others. China condescendingly told the Netherlands to ‘double-check the instructions’ on its masks, for example, after the Netherlands complained that half of the masks they were sent did not meet safety standards.

And of course, there’s also this:

The official said China’s disinformation campaign delayed the US response by at least a month, as the coronavirus initially seemed to be a regional issue rather than a global one. As China downplayed the outbreak within its borders, nearly half a million people traveled to the US potentially carrying the virus.

It is infuriating, although unsurprising, that China is now trying to make itself out to be Lady Bountiful on top of everything else. And it is doubly and triply infuriating that so many people in the US media and Democratic Party seem to be buying what they’re selling. I don’t just mean that in the metaphorical sense, either. It became clear last fall that the NBA was financially beholden to China and afraid to stand up to that country. But that was just the tip of a huge iceberg. Even the leftist Guardian reported a little over a year ago on the phenomenon:

For decades, Beijing’s approach to shaping its image has been defensive, reactive and largely aimed at a domestic audience. The most visible manifestation of these efforts was the literal disappearance of content inside China: foreign magazines with pages ripped out, or the BBC news flickering to black when it aired stories on sensitive issues such as Tibet, Taiwan or the Tiananmen killings of 1989. Beijing’s crude tools were domestic censorship, official complaints to news organisations’ headquarters and expelling correspondents from China.

But over the past decade or so, China has rolled out a more sophisticated and assertive strategy, which is increasingly aimed at international audiences. China is trying to reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money – funding paid-for advertorials, sponsored journalistic coverage and heavily massaged positive messages from boosters. While within China the press is increasingly tightly controlled, abroad Beijing has sought to exploit the vulnerabilities of the free press to its advantage.

In its simplest form, this involves paying for Chinese propaganda supplements to appear in dozens of respected international publications such as the Washington Post. The strategy can also take more insidious forms, such as planting content from the state-run radio station, China Radio International (CRI), on to the airwaves of ostensibly independent broadcasters across the world, from Australia to Turkey.

Meanwhile, in the US, lobbyists paid by Chinese-backed institutions are cultivating vocal supporters known as “third-party spokespeople” to deliver Beijing’s message, and working to sway popular perceptions of Chinese rule in Tibet. China is also wooing journalists from around the world with all-expenses-paid tours and, perhaps most ambitiously of all, free graduate degrees in communication, training scores of foreign reporters each year to “tell China’s story well”.

Please read the whole thing.

[NOTE: And don’t forget Joe Biden and China.]

Let’s compare Vermont and New Hampshire on COVID-19

The New Neo Posted on by

Vermont and New Hampshire are somewhat similar states. But last night I noticed that, so far, they’ve had different experiences with CVID-19. That may even out or otherwise change over time. But right now these are the figures:

Vermont: 543 diagnosed cases and 23 deaths
New Hampshire: 669 diagnosed cases and 9 deaths

One other thing to remember is that New Hampshire has twice the population of Vermont, about 1,359,000 for New Hampshire to about 623,000 for Vermont. That makes the difference between their rates of COVID deaths even more stark, per capita. What’s more, New Hampshire has another factor that would seem to point to more deaths and more cases rather than fewer: larger cities, and more of them.

So, why the difference in rates of disease? It’s not that they’ve differed much in policy surrounding it; in fact, both states instituted much the same interventions at around the same time, and although I’m not 100% sure they were at the same stage of state outbreak back then, I suspect they were and it was early.

So I don’t have an answer. It’s not age; both states have quite similar percentages of people over 65: 18.1% for NH and 19.4% for Vermont. Vermont seems to have a lot of struggles with its health care system in rural areas:

…the health care systems in rural areas of Vermont have had financial trouble in recent years. Six of Vermont’s 14 hospitals lost revenue in fiscal year 2019, as financial pressures have caused rural hospitals across the country to close.

But New Hampshire’s rural hospitals aren’t in such great shape either.

Not only that, but New Hampshire has a lot of people in the southern tier who commute (or used to commute) to Massachusetts (particularly Boston) for work every day, and that may be the source of many of its cases. That’s not the situation in Vermont, which is directly over a much smaller and less populous part of western Massachusetts. So once again, you’d expect Vermont to have fewer cases and deaths per capita rather than more, compared to New Hampshire.

The only clue I’ve gotten as to why Vermont has more far deaths per capita than New Hampshire is that it has had outbreaks in 8 nursing homes and senior facilities (see also this). That’s a very vulnerable population, and although I can’t tell how many of Vermont’s deaths have occurred in such settings, it may be substantial.

That’s what happened in Washington state as well – an early outbreak in a nursing home that carried a lot of people off. New Hampshire isn’t talking too much about its own facilities and COVID, but my guess is they haven’t had anything like the magnitude of the problem that Vermont’s facilities have had.

This may point to the influence of chance: where a cluster happens to begin and the toll it can take depending on demographics and previous health of the victims. This can happen on a small level such as a county or state, or a larger one such as a nation.

AGW and COVID and plague: observations on models and interventions

The New Neo Posted on by

Modeling can analyze data about complex systems and make predictions. But the predictive value of modeling is hampered by the fact that models are only as good as the assumptions and statistics behind them.

Models have become ubiquitous in government planning and policy-setting. But that carries built-in dangers connected with the inherent problems with models and the predictions based on them, particularly if the policies recommended are far-sweeping and damaging in themselves.

The more catastrophic the prediction, the more likely a government or a populace is to become afraid, and to justify large-scale interventions that can negatively impact liberty, the economy, and quality of life in general. And all for what? To avert a catastrophe that never would have happened in the first place? A lot of people – even those who are generally science-oriented – have come to distrust the models and consider them deeply flawed or even deceptive, an excuse for government to clamp its hand ever more tightly around us.

If a government doesn’t follow the modelers’ suggestions about AGW, for example, and yet the catastrophe doesn’t appear when predicted, the forecasts are often just pushed into the future. If a government does follow the modeler’s suggestions and nothing catastrophic happens, those who advocated the draconian interventions can claim, “See, if you hadn’t listened to us it would have been absolutely terrible, just as we predicted. Now you must always listen to us, because we are correct.”

And yet there’s only one earth. We cannot do a controlled experiment because there is no second planet to act as a control. And although we can try our best to crunch the numbers, how can we know for certain whether the intervention made things better or not, or was necessary at all?

Pandemics are similar in that modeling and predictions are involved. But with pandemics we have more opportunity for checking our work. We can compare different countries and different interventions during the same pandemic, although that can take not just years but a century or more; for example, they’re still trying to decide whether certain cities in the US had interventions in 1918 that made an ultimate difference in their rate of death. After all, it’s not as though all cities in a certain country, or all countries on earth, are the same in terms of a host of factors that might make them more or less susceptible to a particular illness. Researchers have ways of adjusting for those differences. But the methods to do so are far from perfect. And yet we really need to know.

But that’s mostly ex post facto, and enormously consequential decisions must be made in real time. Choosing a model and deciding whether to intervene and how to intervene is very hard. Following advice that features a worst case scenario, just in case, can lead to enormous interventions that hurt a city or country (or world) and may have been unnecessary.

In the olden days, science didn’t have models and people were at the mercy of epidemics that ravaged their countries and sometimes much of the world. But even then, in their desperation they tried to figure out what to do:

Hippocrates and Galen are colossal figures in the history of medicine [offered guidance for plague], rendered in Latin as ‘Cito, Longe, Tarde,’ which translates as ‘Leave quickly, go far away and come back slowly.’…

When the Black Death spread through Italy in late 1347, some ports began turning away ships suspected of coming from infected areas. During March the following year, authorities in Venice became the first to formalise such protective actions against plague, closing the city’s waters to suspect vessels, and subjecting travellers and legitimate ships to 30 days’ isolation. This period was extended to 40 days some years later – hence the term quarantine. Further regulations established remote cemeteries for plague victims who in turn were collected, transported and buried in accordance with defined rules. But these measures were too little, too late. Plague took hold and Venetians died in their tens of thousands…

Other Italian cities tried similar measures. Further inland, in May 1348 the northern city of Pistoia introduced wide-ranging laws affecting many aspects of daily life. Restrictions on imports and exports, travel, market trading and funerals were all brought in, but again to no effect. At least 70% of the population died. But by contrast, another northern city, Milan, avoided a major outbreak. Whether this was due to control measures taken by city authorities, including sealing up three houses (with the occupants inside) after plague was discovered there, is debatable. The Milanese authorities could certainly be firm. From 1350 they decreed that all future plague victims and those nursing them would be isolated in a designated pesthouse built outside the city walls.

I’m grateful for modern science. But unfortunately, we may not be as good as we think we are – and certainly not as good as we would like to be – at predicting the effect of the major interventions we employ in our attempts to control the forces of nature.