Were the lockdowns the worst public health decision in 100 years?

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve had a running discussion here on whether the lockdown was the worst decision ever in America. I think it was up there, but I can think of worse. One example I’ve given of a decision I believe is worse was the failure of the right to fight the Gramscian march through the universities with sufficient vigor back when it might have mattered. Another is the substitution of equality of outcome for equality of opportunity. Another is the failure of voters to see the leftist intent of Barack Obama. Still others might be the imposition of the permanent income tax and/or the direct election of senators.

You may come up with others, but those are the ones that quickly come to mind for me.

But the question I’m asking – sparked by this article, is whether the lockdown was the worst public health decision in the last 100 years:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University recently said the COVID-19 lockdowns are “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” adding that “lockdowns themselves impose great harm on people.”

“I stand behind my comment that the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation,” said Bhattacharya.

“At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the “non-essential” class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.”

So he’s not just talking about the US; he’s talking worldwide – because one of the peculiarities of this historical moment is that the decision affected most countries, as though lockdowns were as contagious as the virus itself or perhaps even more so.

In the US – the country I know best – I believe that initially it really was a public health decision, borne of fear, the unknown, and the desire to be as safe as possible and buy time to prepare. But not long after, the lockdown took on another life and was propelled by much more than the public health considerations, as people in charge saw the crisis as a golden opportunity to accomplish a host of things they might otherwise have difficulty achieving.

First and foremost was to harm Donald Trump’s presidency and chances of re-election. Mission accomplished. Next was the sheer exercise of power over the little people. That can be very intoxicating, particularly for the left, and they learned a lot from it. One of the things they learned is that fear can encourage Americans to part with a very significant amount of liberty. What useful information that is to the left! Not only is power intoxicating and even contagious for those in charge, but fear is apparently contagious to much of the public, and the habit of fear is hard to break.

Another possible motive in this country was to harm the non-elite and reward the elite. The latter can work from home more easily. Working class people, or for example people in the restaurant business or the hair salon business, would find it a great deal more difficult. Teachers, that mainstay of the Democratic Party, were protected. I don’t think this particular effect was necessarily plotted out in advance from the very start, but as things developed it became clear that this would be a serendipitous side effect of the lockdown for the left.

Voices of warning were drowned out almost from the start. I recall writing a post one year ago, almost to the day, that mentioned that the amount of fear seemed way out of proportion to the actual risk involved with COVID. I wasn’t the only one saying this, but we were in the minority. It’s interesting to go back now and read it; here’s an excerpt:

But COVID-19 is not shaping up to be that sort of event, and there’s no reason to think it will be. However, although many measures are prudent – handwashing, increased testing, hospital preparedness, some measure of social distancing at least for a while – the degree of fear I see and hear is far greater than anything I can recall in my lifetime around a medical event…

Now it seems the chief focus of the Democrats’ reaction to this crisis is to criticize Trump and score political points.

It’s rather ironic, though, that I ended that post by noting, as a hopeful sign, that governors Newsom and Cuomo were cutting Trump some slack. At the time, they were actually praising him. That certainly didn’t last long, did it?

Farmers’ debts and racial payoffs

The New Neo Posted on by

If this isn’t unconstitutional then the Constitution has no meaning anymore:

As many people know, congressional Democrats got their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill passed this week. However, some of the radical policies inside the bill have gone largely underreported.

One of those policies is a provision that farmers receive certain aid only if they are a racial minority.

According to the American Farm Bureau Foundation, about $4 billion of the bill will be used to pay off up to 120 percent debts of farmers.

However, the only farmers eligible for these benefits are those who are considered “socially disadvantaged,” which the law defines as a “group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. “

The foundation said that includes “Black, Hispanic, Native American or Asian American” farmers.

Everyone but white farmers, that is, and there is no need to prove that a person was actually discriminated against. Note that not only does the debt get forgiven, but the person gets a payment as well amounting to 20% more than the debt (supposedly to offset taxes).

Not only does this discriminate against white farmers, but it also discriminates against black or other minority farmers who have managed to actually pay off their debts. Sorry, no reward for you – you were silly to play by the rules and be so conscientious.

The Biden administration doesn’t need to answer questions

The New Neo Posted on by

Politico has noticed that few people from the Biden administration have been appearing on the Sunday news programs:

Just one senior administration official was booked on the five major Sunday shows: Treasury Secretary JANET YELLEN on ABC’s “This Week.” She fended off questions on whether $1.9 trillion in new spending would drive inflation and balloon the debt. Sunday show producers tell me the White House only offered medical staff like ANTHONY FAUCI, who appeared on CNN, NBC and FOX, and MARCELLA NUNEZ-SMITH, who went on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” This was despite requests for chief of staff RON KLAIN, VP KAMALA HARRIS and Biden himself. Senior communications staffers like JEN PSAKI, KATE BEDINGFIELD and SYMONE SANDERS were not even offered to explain the bill.

“They’re leaving a vacuum on the Sunday shows,” said one senior producer, who called the whole thing “baffling.”…

Biden, who hasn’t held a news conference since he took office, is expected to interview with local media during his roadshow. And, as the administration official alluded to, he will sit down this week with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America,” while Harris will be interviewed by CBS’ Gayle King on “This Morning,” sources tell Playbook.

And I’m sure that George will ask Biden some very hard-hitting questions – not.

Why would Biden or anyone in his administration feel they have to answer to the press? They know how the press carried their water during the campaign as well as after. They know that Biden has been treated with kid gloves (or an even softer equivalent) and will continue to be treated that way until it is decided he needs to go. Once (and if) it is felt that he needs to go, the departure will be engineered in the kindest way possible in terms of the administration and the continuance of the Democrats in power. They have little to nothing to fear from the press, any more than the Soviets were afraid of Pravda. The press may mouth a bit of annoyance at not being given the courtesy of a press conference, but not enough annoyance to matter.

A more interesting question to me is whether the general public who voted for Biden knows or cares. My guess is for the most part the answers are “no” and “no.” That is, a great many people don’t pay enough attention to know. For example, they might read some headlines and the first few paragraphs of an article saying that Biden made a great speech the other day, and since the MSM is in agreement about that, and nearly everyone they know is in agreement too, they conclude that it must be true and there’s no need to actually watch the speech or think too hard about it. As for caring, those who do notice Biden’s decline and therefore do know probably don’t care all that much, for the most part, because they consider it worth it all to have gotten rid of Trump, and they also trust that other Democrats are really in charge and will deal with any real business as it arises.

As I watched the polls measuring public opinions about the press drop over the last decade or two, I recall that a lot of people said it meant that the MSM had less and less influence over people. That evaluation made sense in the abstract, but it never fit my perceptions of the actual people I knew and know – and I know a lot of Democrats, both relatively moderate ones and those who lean more leftist. None of these people seemed to lose a particle of faith in the party line, even if some of them lost some faith in the press. It reminds me of something I once read about advertisements, which is that even ads a person finds distasteful or manipulative end up affecting that person and have a tendency to make the person more likely to buy the product anyway.

That’s what I see happening with Democrats and the MSM. And it’s only gotten worse over time, as the press has gotten more preposterous and more overt in its pro-Democrat/leftist bias.

Close harmony: Part IIC (the Bee Gees continued)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: You knew it was coming, didn’t you?]

One of the things that seems to separate Bee Gee lovers from Bee Gee non-lovers (or even Bee Gee haters, of which there are quite a few) is tolerance for emotion in pop music or rock music. The Bee Gees had one big subject – love and especially heartbreak in love – and although all their songs are not on that subject, an awful lot of them are.

Of course, that’s true of pop music in general. But the Bee Gees’ voices – in particular, Robin’s high vibrato – were especially laden with emotion. Again, that’s not always true of the Bee Gees – see “Jive Talking” for example. But it’s true often enough over their five-decades-long career as a group. The three Gibb brothers often cited the influence of Roy Orbison, who was one of the first men in pop/rock to sing with great emotional vulnerability, and also – like the Bee Gees after him – had great range and sometimes sang in falsetto. The Bee Gees also acknowledged the Everly Brothers as a big influence, and they had plenty of emotion in their voices, too – as well as close harmony.

Here’s a YouTube reactor voicing a common emotional experience on listening to the Bee Gees. You hear many variations on this theme of emotion:

If you’re interested in their voices and what they could do with them, please watch the tail end of an interview the three did in 1989, just a throwaway moment when the interviewer asked them if they might sing something. They’ve been sitting at a table joking and casually talking with him for about 34 minutes and not singing at all. There is no music and no instruments. But after a moment of further joking, they suddenly oblige and jump into a brief sample of their singing, without any preparation at all. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled for the video, so just click on this link and start listening at 36:48, going to the end.

Here’s an isolated vocal track from “Nights On Broadway” which makes it easier to hear the different voices. There is no music here, so the silences represent instrumental portions in the finished produt. The first solo voice is Barry’s, then there are harmonies, followed by Robin singing part of the next verse solo, then harmonies again. They often used to trade off leads like that with Robin taking the most emotional lines of the song and making it seem as though the audience is hearing more of the person’s inner thoughts when he sings. Barry’s falsetto made its very first appearance in this song, mostly towards the end. In-between there’s a slow bridge I find especially beautiful:

Because the Bee Gees were completely self-taught – no singing lessons, no music lessons, unable to read music – their harmonies were unusual and apparently didn’t follow the normal patterns, giving them a unique (and I think haunting) quality. Barry explains (in a very recent interview):

When the Bee Gees recorded their songs, and when they did their acoustic medleys in concert, they insisted on using only one mic [words in brackets are mine]:

Chateau d’Herouville studio assistant Michel Marie [who helped with recording some of their “Saturday Night Fever” songs in France in the late 70s] recalls being amazed by the way the Bee Gees recorded their harmonies. “When I learnt they would be three to sing, I set up three different headphones and three different mics. They said ‘No, no!’ and asked me for a single mic, and no headphones — just a little speaker close to them. They sang together around the same mic, looking at each other. And when I heard them, I knew what ‘good singing’ meant : even on the first take, they were perfect, in tune, in the rhythm… I was not used to that from French singers!”

More about that:

Music engineer John Merchant began working with the Bee Gees in the late ’80s…

“The way most artists record vocal harmonies is to record one [part] at a time and get that polished,” he said. “Then, you would stack the other harmonies on top of it. [The Bee Gees] would do that sometimes, but more often, they would go out with the three of them on one mic and work out how the harmonies should be, together…

Karl Richardson, an engineer who began working with The Bee Gees in the ‘70s, once said he’d tried to record them on separate mics, but it never really worked the way a single microphone did.

“The nature of their voices lent themselves to recording this way, too: Robin almost always had this cool vibrato in his delivery; Maurice had hardly any; and Barry would sometimes have vibrato and sometimes not, and when he did, it was more like tremolo,” Richardson said. “This gives you a very unique blend, which might at first seem very different from one another, but you have to remember that they’re brothers, so they have this DNA thing going.”…

Of course, recording simultaneously did present a challenge, in that all three vocal parts had become inseparably intertwined.

“If one harmony is too loud or too quiet, it’s baked in that way,” Merchant said. “There’s no way to do any of the cheats using the tools in the studio to fix intonation and balance. You can’t change any of that. And that takes real craft.”

…[T]he Bee Gees would do as many as 40 or 50 takes to make sure everything was perfect. It wasn’t because they rejected new technologies, Merchant said; in fact, they were quite willing to explore and invest in new developments as long is it didn’t compromise their musical integrity. They simply preferred to have things done correctly upfront and “let the musicality come from the musicians, and not from the techniques in the control room.

When it came to songwriting, Merchant said the Bee Gees would come in to the studio for marathon sessions where they’d set up a simple drum groove on the drum machine and toss around musical ideas for hours. Barry might play guitar while Maurice would play keyboard, and Robin would sing and come up with melodic or lyrical ideas…

The Bee Gees’ trademark harmonies were often accompanied by equally rich orchestral or brass arrangements. Though none of the brothers had ever learned [to] read music, that never stopped them from constructing lush musical worlds. Merchant said Barry would typically sing the instrumental ideas he had, which would then be transcribed and performed by other musicians…

…”It was unbelievable. Barry would change chords, and Maurice would be there immediately, like he knew where Barry was going. They locked in together in a way…

“They always knew what the other person was capable of, and so they would not rest until their brother had delivered that,” Merchant said. “It could be in terms of writing lyrics or melody or song structure or performances or arrangements. In all those things, they would challenge each other consistently.”

The brothers said they had ESP, and I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any. They also felt that their songs existed in some sense before they wrote them, and that they just received them – pulled them out of the air. This is not an uncommon thing for artists to say, including poets. Sometimes it’s almost like automatic writing. Of course, the skills must be there already, and the Bee Gees certainly had the skills.

[ADDENDUM: I probably should show the finished product with “Nights on Broadway.” Here it is (the gorgeous bridge begins at around 2:59). In this version Maurice does the falsetto ending, but in the studio version it’s Barry:

Live, 1975.]

The history of the 2020 election challenge cases

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a summary:

Courts Repeatedly Refused To Consider Trump’s Election Claims On The Merits: The losing side needed to know that a fair shake was given, and that justice prevailed, even if it wasn’t the outcome they wanted. That did not happen after Nov. 3.

No, it did not, although the press and the Democrats much prefer to pretend that it did.

The guilt and victimhood of the fathers – reparations for slavery

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s what Oregon is contemplating:

In Oregon, they’re trying to figure out racial justice.

Hence, Democrats have introduced a bill that will grant $123,000 to black Oregonians in an effort toward reparations.

Among the requirements, as stated by the legislation:

“A person is eligible…if the person demonstrates that the person: (a) Is descended from an American slave; (b) Has identified as African-American on legal documents for at least 10 years before the date of the application…”

I have quite a few questions.

–How far back can the ancestor be?
–Is just one ancestor enough?
–What if the claimant is very successful and/or very rich?
–And does it matter if that same person has slave owner ancestors, too? Because this is fairly common among black people in America, for obvious historical reasons.
–Or, what if the person is to all intents and purposes white – white looking, raised as white, and only found out about the ancestor through DNA testing and/or genealogical research 10 years ago?
–Would grandparents and their children and each of those children’s children all be separately eligible? In a large family, that could be quite a bit of money.

Also, I wonder what effect such payments would have on black people who receive them. It’s over a lifetime, and would amount to between two and three thousand dollars a year per person. I believe it would be likely to increase antagonism between the races (which seems to be a major goal of the left lately), augmenting the feeling of victimhood among some black people and the feeling of resentment among some white people, particularly those white people who are hurting financially.

And what about white descendants of fervent abolitionists from the past? Or of men who died fighting for the North in the Civil War? Do they get a pro-rated tax reduction? And what about descendants of those who came to this country after slavery was abolished? Is it just tough luck for them? I’m sure the left would say they all are the recipients of white privilege. But if so, why limit the payments to black people with slave ancestors – why not all black people?

[NOTE: The way we’re going these days makes me think of the Borges story “The Lottery in Babylon.” It’s a great story, if you haven’t read it.]

[NOTE II: It occurs to me that both posts I’ve written today, although seemingly unrelated, are on the topic of payments involving race.]

This payout by the city of Minneapolis won’t affect the Chauvin trial – no, not at all

The New Neo Posted on by

The Minneapolis City Council has made a decision to settle a civil lawsuit:

The city of Minneapolis on Friday agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from George Floyd’s family over the Black man’s death in police custody, as jury selection continued in a former officer’s murder trial.

Council members met privately to discuss the settlement, then returned to public session for a unanimous vote in support of the massive payout. It easily surpassed the $20 million the city approved two years ago to the family of a white woman killed by a police officer.

Floyd family attorney Ben Crump called it the largest pretrial settlement ever for a civil rights claim…

These cases are Crump’s specialty, and lying to the press about them is also his specialty (I’ve written about Crump before, in particular here in connection with the Jacob Blake case, and he was involved in the Trayvon Martin case as well as the Michael Brown case and of course the Floyd case). I don’t know exactly how it works, but I’ve read that lawyers take one-third of settlements, and if so then Crump will net a cool nine million.

More from Crump:

It wasn’t immediately clear how the settlement might affect the [Chauvin] trial or the jury now being seated to hear it. Crump said the settlement is a way “to help shape what justice looks like” rather than waiting for a result from a legal system that many Blacks distrust.

“The one thing we know as Black people … is there is no guarantee that a police officer will be convicted for killing a Black person unjustly in our country,” Crump said. “That’s what history has taught us.”

It wasn’t immediately clear? It certainly can only have a prejudicial effect on the Chauvin trial – as has almost everything that has transpired in the news so far. Crump’s statement that the settlement will “help shape what justice looks like” is one of the rare times he’s telling the truth, but that truth is pernicious. It shouldn’t help shape what justice looks like, although it probably will.

And of course there’s no guarantee that “a police officer will be convicted for killing a Black person unjustly in our country.” Nor is there any such guarantee if a white person is unjustly killed, although Crump couldn’t care less about that. The city of Minneapolis may be happy to agree that Floyd was killed unjustly, but the evidence in the case has yet to be heard in a court of law and the evidence I’ve seen so far supports the alternative conclusion that he was killed by the drugs he ingested.

And lastly, if you follow the statistics, black people are actually slightly less likely to be killed by police officers (justly or unjustly) than white people are if you take into account the differing crime rates for each race, and the vast majority of killings of all people by police are in self-defense. Crump isn’t interested in those statistics – and neither is Google, by the way, because I couldn’t get to the articles discussing it at Google and gave up after several pages of looking. DuckDuckGo was much better, as it usually is: I found this article at position number three on search page one. For those interested, Heather Mac Donald has done a lot of good work on the subject, for example this book.

That $27 million represents 15% of the entire budget of the Minneapolis police, by the way, close to 2% of the city’s entire budget for the coming year.

But I understand why the City Council made the decision it did, actually. First of all, the members are decidedly to the left. But secondly, the standard of proof for a civil suit is much lower than for a criminal proceeding, and the pretrial propaganda has been such that the city would probably lose any such battle no matter what exculpating facts might emerge in the trial.

Frankie Valli is hanging on

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe he’s 86 years old here:

By the way – yes, I always liked The Four Seasons in my early youth, along with the Everlys and Roy Orbison, and some of the Motown groups. Do I especially like falsetto singing – considering that I also like the Bee Gees, as you know? Not especially. But I like those particular people and groups, and falsetto singing was and is fine with me too, if it’s done well. But harmony is my thing above all, and the Four Seasons had lots of that.

Speaking of which – this was a later song from Valli (1975). Not one of my favorites, but still sort of nice, and apropos to the topic of harmony:

Valli was still touring until recently. Here he is in 2016:

People often would say he was lip-syncing in his recent concerts such as the above clip. I thought that was highly likely, until I saw the stuff he’s done during the lockdown. Whatever he does or doesn’t do in concert, he can still sing.

[NOTE: Ha, ha! You were expecting the Bee Gees, and you get Frankie Valli. But never fear, the Bee Gees lie in wait.]

Another must-read…

The New Neo Posted on by

…from Glenn Greenwald:

House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms: Democrats’ justification for silencing their adversaries online and in media — “they are spreading fake news and inciting extremism” — is what despots everywhere say.