Interesting: Like many traits, bullying and victimization have moderate-to-high heritability, with the family home apparently having little impact. https://t.co/akSR0QKyLt pic.twitter.com/V0b27Rw4Cn
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 27, 2020
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Data Talks
I see wonderful things
Daily reminder that turtles are not “inside” their shells. They *are* their shells. pic.twitter.com/CS8UcDE3o2
— Ada McVean 🐢 (@AdaMcVean) April 21, 2020
Antifa are human too.
"All capitalists must die. But if I'm being honest, their cheesecake is exceptional." -- Antifa https://t.co/oy9SsmMxdz
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 31, 2020
The excitement of the posturing Antifa or the needs of the black middle class - pick a side.
Having pulled a neck muscle, I was up much the night due to the pain. Sitting upright without moving my head up or down, left or right, was the best I could do. Not easy to read a book in that position.
I ended up scrolling through Twitter in the small hours of the morning. I don't know whether the uniqueness of the experience was due to a perhaps less moderated feed at 2-4am or whether it was courtesy of the faux protests in cities all across the nation.
Dozens and dozens of videos shot by individuals. Little news reporting. Lots of first hand accounts.
What I observed in the dark hours of the night:
The black middle class, businessmen, and celebrities, seemed reasonably of one voice - "Quit destroying things."
Black politicians ranged from "I empathize, please be nice" to "Not on my watch."
But that very apparent dichotomy of masked white Antifa provocateurs trying to wind up the youthful black "protesters" was very striking. Antifa being the far left element of the Democratic Party who have historically been useful but are, by their own anarchic nature, unpredictable and uncontrollable.
The DNC depends on the black coalition but also responds to the emotionalism and radicalism of the hard left Antifa. Last night's videos demonstrated that the hard left and the black establishment middle class do not share much common ground.
Will the DNC shake hard left radicalism in order to better answer the needs of the black establishment middle class or will they continue to enjoy the titillating pleasure of the mob at the expense of the black establishment middle class? The moral answer should be obvious but so far there is a lot of ambivalence of making that choice. I don't know how much longer that avoidance of decision can last.
I ended up scrolling through Twitter in the small hours of the morning. I don't know whether the uniqueness of the experience was due to a perhaps less moderated feed at 2-4am or whether it was courtesy of the faux protests in cities all across the nation.
Dozens and dozens of videos shot by individuals. Little news reporting. Lots of first hand accounts.
What I observed in the dark hours of the night:
Widespread across dozens of cities.I have to wonder, is this the wedge that cracks the coalition?
Highly concentrated in a few downtown neighborhoods of those cities.
Only the most tenuous connection between the protests and anything specific such as George Floyd.
Majority seemed, by their own self-reports, to be there just to be a part of what was going on.
All the cities are Democratic administrations, usually for decades.
A persistent conflation in official news reports of protesting and rioting. Citizen reports were almost consistent describing rioting.
Many of the affected cities have minority Mayors and/or Councils and/or Police Chiefs and/or police forces. These were Left or Black government structures trying to address black youth rioters. Frequently without success.
A bifurcation between kowtowing and leadership. For example, in Minneapolis, the Mayor's words and actions were deferential to the rioters and they ignored him. In Atlanta, the Mayor acknowledged anger and then said something along the lines of "This is not how you express that anger. This is not in the spirit of MLK. Behave. Go home." She then deployed the police and the National Guard to enforce that recommendation.
Riots had two distinct elements. The much larger, generally young black youth inclined to follow invitations to destroy, riot and loot. The much smaller number, but critical to turning a protest into a riot, of white Antifa thugs all masked up and breaking windows and dispersing cash to the rent-a-mob.
The blatant lying of some Mayors was astonishing. The attempt to claim that the provocateurs were obviously white supremacists trying to stir up young black protesters into rioting was laughable on its face. Video after video of masked white Antifa driving the chaos did not juxtapose well with the desperately quixotic mayoral claims that this was all the work of Nazis and the Aryan Bortherhood.
The black middle class, businessmen, and celebrities, seemed reasonably of one voice - "Quit destroying things."
Black politicians ranged from "I empathize, please be nice" to "Not on my watch."
But that very apparent dichotomy of masked white Antifa provocateurs trying to wind up the youthful black "protesters" was very striking. Antifa being the far left element of the Democratic Party who have historically been useful but are, by their own anarchic nature, unpredictable and uncontrollable.
The DNC depends on the black coalition but also responds to the emotionalism and radicalism of the hard left Antifa. Last night's videos demonstrated that the hard left and the black establishment middle class do not share much common ground.
Will the DNC shake hard left radicalism in order to better answer the needs of the black establishment middle class or will they continue to enjoy the titillating pleasure of the mob at the expense of the black establishment middle class? The moral answer should be obvious but so far there is a lot of ambivalence of making that choice. I don't know how much longer that avoidance of decision can last.
It's unsettling, this otherizing, and I don't think Governor Evers noticed he was doing this.
From "We cannot let the work of a few undermine the pain felt by our Black neighbors or distract from the source of this grief and anger—we must remember George Floyd..." by Ann Althouse. I keep referring to my irritation with the implicit sexism and racism of the left. Althouse is pointing out an example from her Governor (of Wisconsin)
A series of tweets by our Governor, Tony Evers.
He says "our Black neighbors," so he is assuming that the reader is not black. Black people are the other. Speaking only to white people, apparently, Evers portrays black people as emotional: "the pain felt... this grief and anger.... anger and grief... our neighbors who are hurting." He tells us, "we must respond with our empathy and compassion." In this conception, we the white people have empathy and compassion, not raw and dangerous emotion like anger, and we are the ones who are spoken to with the implied belief that we are capable of controlling ourselves and behaving in a forbearing, beneficent manner as we look upon The Other, our black neighbors. It's unsettling, this otherizing, and I don't think Governor Evers noticed he was doing this. Ironically, he wants the "us" group he's addressing to be vigilant about "systemic" racism.
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Data Talks
Usage of 'Dang' in the United States #Map #Maps #Terriblemaps #TerribleMap #USA #Dang pic.twitter.com/VY45R1YnJL
— Terrible Maps (@TerribleMaps) April 25, 2020
I see wonderful things
Some species evolve shells and other built-in armour for protection; others evolve the intelligence to create their own armour from the objects in the world around them. Exhibit A: This octopus with a coconut shell. https://t.co/fQI5qlyVKm pic.twitter.com/iWVYVr8CbF
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 22, 2020
Best of the Bee
Study Finds You Should Only Worry About Executive Overreach When The Other Party Is In Power https://t.co/5O8qNTRESx
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 29, 2020
A Comparative Literature Student
An essay with all the hallmarks of being irritating ends up being fresh and engaging. When I Was in Love with a Comparative Literature Student by Max Diamond.
Friday, May 29, 2020
Data Talks
I'm at @PublicDiscourse today writing up my take on why I don't think lockdowns work.
— Lyman Expand the House Stone, AKA 石來民 (@lymanstoneky) April 22, 2020
I use data from 13 regions around the world, as well as all US county data, to show that lockdowns have no demonstrated connection to reduced deaths. https://t.co/3V7mY7UkEi pic.twitter.com/OfkWTByayw
I see wonderful things
hooded pitohuis are poisonous
— Ben Freeman (@BenGFreeman1) April 21, 2020
which I suspect explains why they just sit there calmly, waiting for you to agree that they taste terrible
also: if you touch the bird & lick your finger, your tongue turns numb! pic.twitter.com/hl3zbsjv1n
Tracks in the Snow, Moonlight, 1899 by Gustaf Fjaestad
Tracks in the Snow, Moonlight, 1899 by Gustaf Fjaestad
Click to enlarge.
Talking about themselves to themselves
In Atlanta there is an NPR program, Political Rewind which is intended to be a balanced review of local news and politics across the spectrum. It has a moderator but a rotating/evolving cast of perhaps as many as half a dozen guests in any given program. Usually members of the press, academia, the legislature, occasionally from campaigns, occasionally guest appearances. It attempts balance and probably goes further than most in achieving it but it is still, on average pretty solidly center left.
I like the idea and motivation of it and I like the local focus over a national, though too frequently, when it suits guest agendas, local does integrate with national.
And as an aside, having just mailed my ballot yesterday, we need way more local reporting than is provided. There were easily a dozen or more elected judge positions on the ballot, regrettably mostly uncontested. And for the contested, no matter what the position - Judge, Sheriff, Legislator - there is virtually no searchable news on them. You are comparing candidates with no history, no reporting, no empirical means of distinguishing them.
Back to Political Rewind.
This tended to be a harder left cast than normal. Or at least the fifteen minutes I caught. Much of the discussion about Covid-19 and reopening. Pretty firm lamentation of ignorant governors and careless political leaders reopening before the medical experts had blessed those decisions.
Listening to the nattering and whining brought home two realizations. Even though Political Rewind at least attempts some balance, it is still deeply flawed because it is all and only political and institutional insiders talking. It is entirely the political establishment insiders talking about themselves to themselves. It is a meta-bubble. There are no independent thinkers or panelists outside of politics. It is actually a leading example of the very problem that we are experiencing - the steady drifting apart of the citizenry from their political establishments.
The insight is that the rectification of the highly flawed news model is not just a mattering of viewpoint balance along the spectrum, though that would be nice. The bigger issue is to bring balance between average informed citizen viewpoints versus establishment insider viewpoints. That's where the real divide lies.
The second insight was marginally related.
At some point one of the public healthcare professionals was asked something about the CDC's performance during the crisis. He gave a very rosy description completely unmoored to what is seen from the outside. The moderator had the courage to repose the question based on some of the publicly visible embarrassments such as ventilators.
The participant double downed, assuring us of the fine job being done and rejecting the criticism. What was the basis for rejecting the criticism? He got carried away launching a diatribe about the goodness of the CDC workers, how smart they are, how hard they are working and the importance of listening to experts. The moderator accepted that and moved on.
As an outsider, I am looking at the serial failures of the CDC as an institution and cannot comprehend how the insider does not see those failures as well. The mixed messaging on masks, the confusion about ventilators, the incapacity to establish common and useful measures of epidemic exposure, the failure to step-in on disasters such as assisted living policies, the simple unpreparedness, unavailability of critical supplies, the poor action planning, the flawed testing kits, the regulatory inertia, etc. They have a single mission and they failed pretty comprehensively.
We need the CDC as an institution but we need them to be effective. And it has nothing to do with funding. They are well funded, there are thousands of other equally worthwhile programs which need funding and there are limits to those funds.
The fact that they are good people and smart people has nothing to do with the fact that their performance has been worse than we should have anticipated.
And that is the second insight. Political Rewind suffers from a particular blind spot, and I think it is pretty common in the media. Academics have historically had to work hard to get fired. Journalists are accustomed to being fired but because of retrenchments and industry shrinkage rather than performance per se. Even politicians, nominally always at risk from elections, aren't really fired that often. The incumbent reelection rate tends to be in the upper nineties. Some have the decency of stepping down or declining to run again when they are caught in the bed of their mistress, with their hand in the financial cookie jar, or some other notable personal failure. But if they run, they win.
None of them are accustomed to being held accountable for outcomes over which you have little control - an experience widely shared outside those fields. In business, revenues go down, people get fired (or sidelined or reassigned to obscure positions). Projects are delayed, people are switched out. A project comes in 50% over-budget, bye you're gone.
Not all the time, not every company and most critically not necessarily obviously. But everyone knows. Deliver or suffer career damage. People are accustomed to being held accountable and held accountable for events beyond their control.
It is unpleasant and brutal, but it keeps the organization fiscally healthy and ensures a good circulation of talent and experience. It is a means of self-cleansing.
If I am an academic commentator shield from consequences, of course it is unpleasant to be the target of criticism and consequences, especially if you are not used to it. But to claim that good, smart and moral are a justification for withholding criticism? Purely a function of a solid bubble separating you from everyone else.
So not just that Political Rewind guests are Mandarin Class but also that they are unaccustomed to being held accountable for performance arising from factors beyond you influence. Everyone else lives that life.
Very intriguing.
I like the idea and motivation of it and I like the local focus over a national, though too frequently, when it suits guest agendas, local does integrate with national.
And as an aside, having just mailed my ballot yesterday, we need way more local reporting than is provided. There were easily a dozen or more elected judge positions on the ballot, regrettably mostly uncontested. And for the contested, no matter what the position - Judge, Sheriff, Legislator - there is virtually no searchable news on them. You are comparing candidates with no history, no reporting, no empirical means of distinguishing them.
Back to Political Rewind.
This tended to be a harder left cast than normal. Or at least the fifteen minutes I caught. Much of the discussion about Covid-19 and reopening. Pretty firm lamentation of ignorant governors and careless political leaders reopening before the medical experts had blessed those decisions.
Listening to the nattering and whining brought home two realizations. Even though Political Rewind at least attempts some balance, it is still deeply flawed because it is all and only political and institutional insiders talking. It is entirely the political establishment insiders talking about themselves to themselves. It is a meta-bubble. There are no independent thinkers or panelists outside of politics. It is actually a leading example of the very problem that we are experiencing - the steady drifting apart of the citizenry from their political establishments.
The insight is that the rectification of the highly flawed news model is not just a mattering of viewpoint balance along the spectrum, though that would be nice. The bigger issue is to bring balance between average informed citizen viewpoints versus establishment insider viewpoints. That's where the real divide lies.
The second insight was marginally related.
At some point one of the public healthcare professionals was asked something about the CDC's performance during the crisis. He gave a very rosy description completely unmoored to what is seen from the outside. The moderator had the courage to repose the question based on some of the publicly visible embarrassments such as ventilators.
The participant double downed, assuring us of the fine job being done and rejecting the criticism. What was the basis for rejecting the criticism? He got carried away launching a diatribe about the goodness of the CDC workers, how smart they are, how hard they are working and the importance of listening to experts. The moderator accepted that and moved on.
As an outsider, I am looking at the serial failures of the CDC as an institution and cannot comprehend how the insider does not see those failures as well. The mixed messaging on masks, the confusion about ventilators, the incapacity to establish common and useful measures of epidemic exposure, the failure to step-in on disasters such as assisted living policies, the simple unpreparedness, unavailability of critical supplies, the poor action planning, the flawed testing kits, the regulatory inertia, etc. They have a single mission and they failed pretty comprehensively.
We need the CDC as an institution but we need them to be effective. And it has nothing to do with funding. They are well funded, there are thousands of other equally worthwhile programs which need funding and there are limits to those funds.
The fact that they are good people and smart people has nothing to do with the fact that their performance has been worse than we should have anticipated.
And that is the second insight. Political Rewind suffers from a particular blind spot, and I think it is pretty common in the media. Academics have historically had to work hard to get fired. Journalists are accustomed to being fired but because of retrenchments and industry shrinkage rather than performance per se. Even politicians, nominally always at risk from elections, aren't really fired that often. The incumbent reelection rate tends to be in the upper nineties. Some have the decency of stepping down or declining to run again when they are caught in the bed of their mistress, with their hand in the financial cookie jar, or some other notable personal failure. But if they run, they win.
None of them are accustomed to being held accountable for outcomes over which you have little control - an experience widely shared outside those fields. In business, revenues go down, people get fired (or sidelined or reassigned to obscure positions). Projects are delayed, people are switched out. A project comes in 50% over-budget, bye you're gone.
Not all the time, not every company and most critically not necessarily obviously. But everyone knows. Deliver or suffer career damage. People are accustomed to being held accountable and held accountable for events beyond their control.
It is unpleasant and brutal, but it keeps the organization fiscally healthy and ensures a good circulation of talent and experience. It is a means of self-cleansing.
If I am an academic commentator shield from consequences, of course it is unpleasant to be the target of criticism and consequences, especially if you are not used to it. But to claim that good, smart and moral are a justification for withholding criticism? Purely a function of a solid bubble separating you from everyone else.
So not just that Political Rewind guests are Mandarin Class but also that they are unaccustomed to being held accountable for performance arising from factors beyond you influence. Everyone else lives that life.
Very intriguing.
Clay tablets, the Mesopotamian equivalent of Twitter
Astronomers in ancient Assyria also called each other out on their bullshit, in case you were wondering.
— Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid (@Moudhy) May 26, 2020
Balasî accuses another scholar who allegedly spotted Venus of being “in complete ignorance”.
“I repeat: he does not understand the difference between Mercury and Venus” pic.twitter.com/YJte9qOihG
Crimes so large we look past them
Probably the single most coherent and summary explanation of the great unacknowledged scandal(s) of the past three years. From What the 'Obamagate' Scandals Mean and Why They Matter by Charles Lipson.
The mainstream media, as a player and abettor to much of the scandal has a major stake in preventing a clear description of what happened. It is astonishing just how much smoke is still being blown around facts now out in the open, documented, and attested. Lipson lays out the three inter-locking scandals and provides a thumbnail sketch of what happened. His reporting broadly matches my interpretation of what has been happening the past three years.
The only major additional scandal that I don't see listed is the CIA's spying on Congress in 2014 and perhaps earlier. We know it happened but I have never seen a clear explanation of why it happened, why the CIA Director was not fired, and why there were no other consequences to the crime.
Worth a read for the simple act of cogently presenting the facts.
The mainstream media, as a player and abettor to much of the scandal has a major stake in preventing a clear description of what happened. It is astonishing just how much smoke is still being blown around facts now out in the open, documented, and attested. Lipson lays out the three inter-locking scandals and provides a thumbnail sketch of what happened. His reporting broadly matches my interpretation of what has been happening the past three years.
Scandal No. 1: Massive, illegal surveillance of American citizens, using the database of the National Security AgencyThose are the big items.
Scandal No. 2: Spying on the Trump campaign
Scandal No. 3: Covering up this spying, continuing it during the new administration, charging that Trump was not legitimately elected, and impeding his presidency with major investigations, based on false charges
The only major additional scandal that I don't see listed is the CIA's spying on Congress in 2014 and perhaps earlier. We know it happened but I have never seen a clear explanation of why it happened, why the CIA Director was not fired, and why there were no other consequences to the crime.
Worth a read for the simple act of cogently presenting the facts.
The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
From Maigret’s Room by John Lanchester.
The cosiness and comfort are needed to balance the harshness of Simenon’s worldview. The canvas is primed with domesticity; the picture painted on it is in dark shades. Maigret is often given credit as a person who understands, whose strength is patience, empathy, a reluctance to judge. And yet the things he understands are desperately bleak. In this, Simenon is true to the French literary code. The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition. At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all. The side notes and off notes and internal dissent are all there, of course, but they are subtextual, subtle, inexplicit. The main current of the English novel is in the direction of Happy Ever After, along the lines of Lady Bracknell’s deathless observation: ‘The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’ When you turn from that tradition to the work of Laclos, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant and Proust, it’s like getting a glass of ice water in the face. Everybody lies all the time; codes of honour are mainly a delusion and will get you into serious trouble; the same goes for love; if you think the world is how it is described in consoling fictions, you have many catastrophic surprises in store. Above all, the central lesson of the French tradition is that people’s motives are sex and money, and you can write about those things as sex and money, directly, no euphemisms required.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Data Talks
On August 2, 1971, Dave Scott performed one of the most legendary experiments, literally an out of this world one: the galilean 'hammer & feather' held on the Moon https://t.co/hIniYxpVvQ pic.twitter.com/W6NTJ6cQrJ
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 26, 2020
I see wonderful things
Myxogastria is a class of slime molds that contains 5 orders, 14 families, 62 genera and 888 species. Among these, Elaeomyxa Cerifera, identified in 1942, is a fungi with fruiting structures that split open to release spores which sparkle like a disco ball https://t.co/exZ5lrcSdR pic.twitter.com/8OM3jvZbWa
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 21, 2020
Extreme Pareto
From The Most Important COVID-19 Statistic: 43% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population by Avik Roy.
Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
2.1 million Americans, representing 0.62% of the U.S. population, reside in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. (Nursing homes are residences for seniors needing help with activities of daily living, such as taking a shower or getting dressed, who also require 24/7 medical supervision; assisted living facilities are designed for seniors who need help with activities of daily living, but don’t require full-time on-site medical supervision.)
According to an analysis that Gregg Girvan and I conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, as of May 22, in the 39 states that currently report such figures, an astounding 43% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
(Among states reporting their death totals, 42% of COVID deaths have taken place in long-term care facilities; we estimate the share as 43% for the full U.S. population, based on incorporating the demographics of the non-reporting states.)
Let that sink in: 43% of all COVID-19 deaths are taking place in facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population.
A waste of time and money, and an erosion of government/expert trustworthiness
Interesting how juxtaposition brings emphasis and salience. I was aware of all three of these studies when they came out. And of course, you have to wait for replication and confirmation. But the conclusion seems so compelling when you lock them together in a tweet.
Those three conclusions have been borne out by other research I have seen. I am not dismissing them. Just pointing out the step-change in argument effectiveness when conjoined. The conclusions are:
People's behaviors and personal choices drive health outcomes. Not fast food. Not wealth. Not food deserts.
The three studies are:
Fast food outlets, physical activity facilities, and obesity among adults: a nationwide longitudinal study from Sweden.From the Abstract:
Interesting recent studies on health inequality:
— Inquisitive Bird (@Scientific_Bird) May 28, 2020
1) Neighborhood availability of fast food outlets not associated with obesity.
2) Lottery wealth not associated with later health.
3) "We reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality." pic.twitter.com/CWgb98zfu2
Those three conclusions have been borne out by other research I have seen. I am not dismissing them. Just pointing out the step-change in argument effectiveness when conjoined. The conclusions are:
1) Neighborhood availability of fast food outlets not associated with obesity.All three have been popular and expensive interventions at different places and different times. All the interventions yielding no improvement in outcomes.
2) Lottery wealth not associated with later health.
3) "We reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality."
People's behaviors and personal choices drive health outcomes. Not fast food. Not wealth. Not food deserts.
The three studies are:
Fast food outlets, physical activity facilities, and obesity among adults: a nationwide longitudinal study from Sweden.From the Abstract:
Availability of fast-food outlets and lack of physical activity facilities appear unlikely to cause obesity in Swedish adults. Other potentially modifiable environmental factors within specific social and cultural settings that may influence obesity risk should be examined in future studies.Association Between Lottery Prize Size and Self-reported Health Habits in Swedish Lottery Players. From the Abstract:
In this study of Swedish lottery players, unearned wealth from random lottery prize winnings was not associated with subsequent healthy lifestyle factors or overall health. The findings suggest that large, random transfers of unearned wealth are unlikely to be associated with large, long-term changes in health habits or overall health.Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality. From the Abstract"
We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. We then estimate a structural model of grocery demand, using a new instrument exploiting the combination of grocery retail chains’ differing presence across geographic markets with their differing comparative advantages across product groups. Counterfactual simulations show that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10%, while the remaining 90% is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the argument that policies to increase the supply of healthy groceries could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality.One could hope that such findings would curb the inclination to conduct statist interventions to change people as if they were programmable automatons. It is a waste of time, money, and it is counter to the Constitutional design. We can hope, but should not anticipate that that is what happens.
Best of the Bee
Nation That Revolted Over Three-Pence Tax On Tea Now 'Pretty Cool' With Government Locking Everyone In Their Homes https://t.co/NbQ48FIPjR
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 27, 2020
And that's all we'll ever know about him.
From The Pragmatics of Patriotism by Robert Heinlein. It was a speech he made at the US Naval Academy (of which he was a graduate) in the 1973 Forrestal Lecture.
What you do have here is a tradition of service. Your most important classroom is Memorial Hall. Your most important lesson is the way you feel inside when you walk up those steps and see that shot-torn flag framed in the arch of the door: 'Don't Give Up the Ship.' If you feel nothing, you don't belong here. But if it gives you goose flesh just to see that old battle flag, then you are going to find that feeling increasing every time you return here over the years... until it reaches a crescendo the day you return and read the list of your own honored dead - classmates, shipmates, friends - read them with grief and pride while you try to keep your tears silent.
The time has come for me to stop. I said that 'Patriotism' is a way of saying 'Women and children first.' And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did.
In my home town sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut straight through it.
One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her. But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman's foot loose. No luck.
Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free... and the train hit them. The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed - and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself. The husband's behavior was heroic... but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him.
THIS is how a man dies. This is how a MAN . . . lives!
- Tomb of the Scottish Unknown Soldier, Edinburgh
'They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old;
age shall not wither them nor the years condemn;
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them''
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Data Talks
College professors are quite left-leaning. In all departments.https://t.co/bRqtYdpmmu pic.twitter.com/5kRVUf5NwX
— Jurij (@jurijfedorov) April 22, 2020
Eine interessante Geschichte by Julius Müller-Massdorf (1863–1933)
Eine interessante Geschichte by Julius Müller-Massdorf (1863–1933)
Click to enlarge.
Oh to be so directionally right and so misleading in the detail
A wonderfully illustrative New York Times article this morning: The Coronavirus Is Deadliest Where Democrats Live by Jennifer Medina and Robert Gebeloff.
The problem is that it illustrates many different things in one article. I'll try and break them down.
I think the NYT is correct in their broader thesis that Right leaning geographies are having a different experience of Covid-19 than left leaning geographies. Partly it has to do with the prevalence of Covid-19 deaths in those different locations but also, and much understated by the NYT, to do with policy responses to Covid-19. But first an overiew.
There are always two movies playing
Scott Adams makes this argument all the time. For any set of events, there are always two movies because different people register different interpretations, different observations, and different levels of importance to the same evidence. A governor shuts down her state. One audience see a movie about a governor trying to save a percentage of the population from death by Covid-19. Another audience sees a governor killing off 30% of small businesses and ruining the financial stability of 60% of the population. Same event, two movies. That is partly what is happening in this article.
What you see is where you live
This is a variant of the argument I have been making for years; that we underestimate the potential bubble effect arising from the geography of the consolidated media sector. Only a small number of companies produce the majority of "broadcast news". And the great bulk of the journalists of those companies reside primarily in geographies which are radically different from the America in which most people live. I am making up the numbers but perhaps 50-70% or more of big time name journalists and pundits live in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. There are a few in outposts such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Virtually none in Phoenix or Tulsa, or Peoria, or Louisville, or Cincinnati, etc.
There are actually two bubbles. One is the Ben Rhodes bubble - the journalists are young with expensive credentials from big name universities, overwhelmingly left leaning, language oriented and innumerate, glib rather than considered, no experience outside of media and academia, and little executive experience/awareness.
That bubble is real and important but probably less than the other bubble. The second bubble is that they live in the same few places and experience a distinctly different manner of life from everyone else.
They live in those few big cities which are all hard left governed, last experienced a Republican governor more than a half a century ago. Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, etc. are dramatically more unequal than the rest of the country, far more likely to see homelessness up close, extreme poverty, have very unique housing issues, experience much more intense crime, see much more economic segregation, experience far worse performing schools, live among a much higher percentage of foreign born, there are many more government programs, far fewer cars, much more mass transit, etc.
It is not necessarily bleak - those cities also have much greater wealth, much more cultural variance/enrichment, a greater concentration of elite pastimes, etc.
The issue is that they are substantially different from anywhere else in the nation. If you are a journalist, the world you see every day, the concerns most manifest, are substantially different than anywhere else. It comes across to those outside the cities as a hard left, statist, social justice vision of life when I suspect, to a greater degree than we acknowledge, that the difference in reality being reported is simply a product of difference on geographical reality.
It is not that journalist are seeing a different movie from the same facts as viewed by the rest of the nation. It is that they are actually seeing different facts in the first place.
Clickbait writing is pervasive
Mainstream media has been experiencing wrenching consolidation and retrenchment for nearly two decades now. They rely on cheap 27-year old inexperienced journalists more, on press release journalism more, reporting opinions over facts more, and have abandoned editorial standards. They are in the commodity stage of the media S-curve. Massive cheap competition, unsupportable legacy brand structures, declining revenues, commoditization of product, and all the other ills of that territory at the top of the sector sigmoid curve, just before some transformation that cannot be fully anticipated.
They have to get clicks on their articles which drives journalists to write more baldly, with less subtlety, and consequently less accurately.
From the article.
"The staggering American death toll from the coronavirus" - No, not staggering. Average all causes mortality in the US runs about 235,000 per month. Since the first Covid-19 death in early February, the normal all causes mortality would be very roughly 940,000. And we know that virtually all those reported Covid-19 deaths are a function of comorbidities. People are dying a few months earlier due to Covid-19 combined with an underlying deadly condition. The number of people dying solely from Covid-19 is small or vanishingly small. It is becoming increasingly clear, in the US and across the OECD, that Covid-19 seems likely to look pretty similar in its rates and curve shapes to more than a dozen similar Covid like outbreaks since 1945. Outbreaks which did not involve quarantines or shutdowns.
"deaths, now approaching 100,000" - Not yet. As of May 26th, the CDC reports 75,283 deaths so far and a dramatic decline from the peak weekly death total in mid-March of 15,400 to 2,500 in the most recent week. Remembering that these are deaths with associated Covid-19, not deaths from Covid-19. The decline is rapid and the models have dramatically overforecast deaths so far. 100,000 deaths is more dramatic than 75,000 but 75,000 is by far the more reliable number. Will we hit 100,000? Probably, but not with certainty given the current trend lines. Perhaps by the end of the year which is much further than the imminence implied by "approaching."
"The devastation, in other words, has been disproportionately felt in blue America" - Narrowly true and misleading. "Toll" would be the more accurate word. Devastation conflates death toll with Covid-19 impact. Perhaps 40,000 of the 75,000 deaths are in the small blue areas. That is indeed a concentrated death toll. However, the devastation in those areas is largely driven by the responses to the Covid-19 threat, not the Covid-19 deaths per se.
"there are starkly different realities for red and blue America right now." - Well . . . you are going to have to be pretty narrowly precise in your definitions for that to be true. I live in a deep blue neighborhood, in a deep blue mega-city in a red state. We have been shut down at the city level for two months or so. Economically it has been devastating. In terms of death numbers? Not so much. Are we living with stark differences? There are a handful of rural counties with an excessive outbreak. A couple of poor neighborhoods in the big city. Are there stark differences between Red and Blue? In a few places under a few circumstance, but not broadly it would seem. In my state, outbreaks don't align with the red and blue distinction. In New York it does. More on this later.
"Staggering", "approaching 100,000", "devastation", "starkly" - This is not, per se, a left-right issue. This is a journalism issue. It is exaggerated overwriting in order to drive clicks for desperately needed revenue. It is not balanced or accurate reporting.
Data Visualization Struggles
The lead authority in this area is Edward Tufte. There is both an art and a science to data visualization and mapping. Regrettably, the software package tools have outstripped disciplined data visualization good practice, forcing viewers to work hard to interpret what is being presented (or, as often, what is being misleadingly omitted).
Don't get me wrong - I love good data visualization, it can be a great trigger to insight and/or productive discussion. The challenge is that SW can produce data visualization which has not been well designed.
The NYT leads it article with a visually clean pair of maps:
Click to enlarge.
They have been doing a lot of this type of mapping in the past year.
It is clean, but what does it tell us? How easy is it to extract useful information from it? For one thing, there is no meaningful scale. Big circles are more than small circles but how much more? We don't know.
It is a map of "reported cases" rather than the more certain "Covid-19 deaths" measure. We know that there has been marked varaiance in definition of what counts as a Covid-19 case and even about what counts as a Covid-19 death. We know some locations have operationally struggled with aggregating the numbers. We have seen plenty of instances of very large adjustments. Producing a dramatic visualization of bad data comes close to malpractice.
You have to stare for a few minutes to begin to discern anything from the side-by-side maps in order to understand just what it is that they are mapping. Broadly we can sense that Covid-19 deaths are less frequent in red areas than in blue areas (smaller circles) but we can also see that Covid-19 seems more broadly spread in red areas than in blue (more circles).
But if you are cognitively querying the representation, you are now having to integrate facts not in evidence. We are dealing with death counts rather than death rates. Is that the right measure? We know that density is a factor in here, that should push us to rates rather than counts given that Democratic strongholds tend to be dense.
The above representation is not dissimilar in nature to the misimpression left by a map that was widely touted after the 2016 election. Trump won with a pretty commanding 304 to 227 electoral votes (masking a more fragile reality than that conveys).
The map circulated which circulated and made the win seem even more commanding was this
Clcik to enlarge.
It shows the county level returns as won by Trump (red) or Clinton (blue). It inadvertently prioritizes geography over population. The map is not factually wrong, but by ignoring population counts and focusing on geographical entities, it tends to exaggerate the dominance of the win. An interesting article here covering the different approaches to visually representing the election results.
The NYT, by using side-by-side maps, with count rather than rate, forces us to attempt to impute some sort of equalizer to take into account density. Pretty messy.
Innumeracy and Empiricism
This is a not unsurprising and indeed well-established pitfall for the news media. They recruit from a pool which is focused on words rather than numbers and when attempting to report something that has a measurable aspect, they frequently commit numeric pratfall after pratfall.
You can see an example in the third and fourth paragraphs of this article. Remember they led with maps that represent death counts.
It is especially true in the Covid-19 instance. Big countries are likely to have bigger absolute death counts. But death rates allow you to determine how effectively you responded to the crisis. The states with the largest death rates are those, including New York, which chose to move Covid-19 cases from hospitals to assisted living facilities with the highest concentrations of those with comorbidities coresident. Counts gives you a weak indication of size of state. Rates gives you a stronger indication of response effectiveness.
For the rest of the article, they primarily focus on rates but it is a sharp discontinuity to lead with a "counts" graphic and then in the text focus on the more appropriate "rates". You keep trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.
"Over all, African-Americans and Latinos have had higher infection and death rates from the virus." - Another example of motivated reasoning and innumeracy. It appears from all the research I have seen so far that the causal factor in infection and death rates between races is entirely due to prevalence of pre-existing conditions (obesity, diabetes and blood pressure in particular) and cultural norms rather than race per se. The NYT is keen on race as a driver of inequities, but the evidence does not seem to support that conclusion. They slip it in anyway.
Motivated Conclusions
"Right-wing media, which moved swiftly from downplaying the severity of the crisis to calling it a Democratic plot to bring down the president, has exacerbated the rift." - At least three issues here.
I don't know about right-wing media, but there was certainly much debate among nominally qualified experts in January and February as to how much peril Covid-19 represented to Americans and to the world. Some models estimated millions of deaths in the US and other experts estimated in the low hundreds of thousands. There were many, not particularly associated with the right, arguing from epistemic experience rather than models, that, while dangerous, Covid-19 would look more like a bad flu season than the Spanish Flu.
This was not downplaying the crisis. This was debate about the possible implications of something broadly unknown. It was also a proxy for the long-standing debate between experiential evidence and model evidence. With the most recent CDC report in the Washington Post of a possible bad flu-like rate, it is inaccurate to characterize the early debates as "downplaying". That is a motivated conclusion on the part of the NYT reporters. From the WP article.
Those whom the NYT characterizes as "down-playing" the crisis at the beginning were talking exactly about this sort of range now being suggested by the CDC, 0.1% to 0.4%, in which 0.26% falls squarely. At the low end (0.1%) about a normal flu season, in the middle, about like a pretty bad flu season such as we have every decade or so, and at the top end (0.4%), just outside the worst flu seasons.
If the rate turns out to be at the lower end of the range as those debating in January and February forecast, then it is hard to accurate to claim that they were downplaying. They made a lower forecast than that which apparently the NYT reporters believed was reliable. Reality has, so far, proven the low range forecasters to be more accurate. Characterizing those forecasters, whether left or right, as "downplaying" appears to be a shoddy motivated conclusion.
I sit in a sports bar with a friend before a game. We have a heated debate. I think, based on recent performance, playing styles of the opponents, recent injuries, etc. that this will be a low-scoring game. I forecast that my local team will win 2 to 1. My friend thinks it will be a high-scoring game and that we will win 7 to 5.
By the seventh inning the score is my team 2 and the opponents 1. Of course anything can still happen but my low scoring forecast appears much more likely than my friends high-coring forecast. I was not downplaying, I was forecasting.
"Calling it a Democratic plot to bring down the president" - Now we are into political opinion blogging. I read pretty widely and voraciously. I don't recall anyone claiming that it was "a Democratic plot to bring down the president." I recall lots of right leaning commentators reminding everyone of Democrat Party Elder Rahm Emmanuel's famous dictum,
It doesn't help the NYT reporters that there are plenty of instances among Democratic Party leaders echoing this sentiment specifically about Covid-19, ranging from bringing down Trump, to implementing the Green New Deal, to restoring focus on Global Climate Change, etc. Right leaning commentators have been concerned that Democrats would try and leverage Covid-19 to their benefit and Democratic party leaders and journalists have confirmed that they are explicitly trying to do that.
Making a strong claim such as that Republicans were "calling it a Democratic plot to bring down the president" is so easy to demonstrate. Just find a Republican who made that claim and link to their quote. I am sure there is a county Republican Chair somewhere that made some variant of that claim. I suspect that the problem for the NYT reporters is two-fold. They get a quote that is very close to their claim but the link reveals that it is from a peripheral person. Or, they get a muscular statement from a senior, more central Republican and it reveals that they are talking about the larger issue os exploiting a crisis, which would make Democrats appear bad.
Democrats are explicitly seeking to take advantage of Covid-19 to advance their objectives and are quoted as attempting to do so. Republicans are doing the same. Each establishment party is exploiting a crisis to advance their respective objectives. For the New York Times reporters to focus on the one and not the other is simple advocacy. For the New York Times reporters to make a claim without a supporting link is simple advocacy and malpractice.
"And even as the nation’s top medical experts note the danger of easing restrictions, communities across the country are doing so, creating a patchwork of regulations, often along ideological lines." - It is as if the reporters wrote this May 25th article two or three weeks ago and failed to update it. Several states began an aggressive opening up about four weeks ago. It is true that there were "experts" and plenty of media criticism of those state openings and expert forecasts of killing fields in those states as Covid-19 came crashing back without the lockdowns. And none of it happened. Death rates have been dropping or holding steady.
Bubble Effect/Excessive Deference to Experts
There seems an effort by the reporters to convey that right leaning areas are irrational in their response to Covid-19 even though the reporters are affirming that right leaning critics are correct in their assumptions. We have already discussed that the left claimed an epidemiological disaster if states opened and are confounded that that has not happened.
The right leaning critics also appear to have been correct to distrust the motivated forecasts of the "experts."
"Public opinion polls do show widespread support for stay-at-home orders, but also indicate that Republicans are less likely to see the virus as a significant threat to their health." - Which is not surprising given the thesis that the reporters are validating in their own reporting. They are reporting that Republicans are less likely to see the virus as a significant threat to their health because it is in fact, depending on where they live, not much of a threat to their health, particularly given the absence of prior comorbidities.
Similarly:
"Some skepticism around the impact of the pandemic can be traced to a distrust of the government that has grown among conservatives in the last decade" - And indeed, though the reporters do not allude to it, the Covid-19 has stripped away much of the veneer of competence which we hope and expect to be there when needed. The global experts of WHO failed to declare a pandemic long past the point when it was obvious there was a pandemic. Equally, the experts of WHO, along with many others in the US, recommended for the first few months of the pandemic that personal masking was not effective and indeed counterproductive. Until they changed their minds.
CDC, who has all along supposed to be focused on epidemic diseases, stumbled from disastrous decision to disastrous decision. No executable plan. Badly executed plans. Inadequacy of stockpiles. Focusing on the wrong problems (ventilators). Bad modeling. Unuseful of inaccurate forecasting. Failed testing. And on and on.
All the government experts were concerned about overwhelming the health system which never came close to being overwhelmed by caseloads. A handful of states governments insisted that those with Covid-19 infections should be warehoused in assisted living facilities - a position criticized at the time, done anyway, and now acknowledged to have been among the most grievous of failures.
You would have to be insensate to not acknowledge that both over the longer term and in regard to the near term of the pandemic, that many people, not just on the right, are now distrustful of government and for pretty obvious reasons. It might be more prevalent on the right but it is by no means limited to the right. Since the seventies, it is pretty rare that even 50% of Americans at large trust the government to deal with domestic problems. It has been below 40% since 2014.
The NYT reporters want to make the loss of trust in government a right leaning issue when it is clear that the loss of trust in government is common across the spectrum. Another instance of bubble bias influencing what they are reporting.
I won't belabor it past this point. An interesting article with some useful information but horribly twisted by prior assumptions, partly partisan, partly ideological, partly geographic, partly innumeracy, partly absence of editorial oversight, etc.
With a good editor and another day's worth of research and cleaning up, they could have had a great article rather than mush.
But their core focus - that some areas are living an entirely different pandemic is true. And it is also true, though unacknowledged in the article, that a disproportionate degree of the harm arising from Covid-19 is not in the nature of the disease but in the policies which were adopted to fight the disease.
The problem is that it illustrates many different things in one article. I'll try and break them down.
I think the NYT is correct in their broader thesis that Right leaning geographies are having a different experience of Covid-19 than left leaning geographies. Partly it has to do with the prevalence of Covid-19 deaths in those different locations but also, and much understated by the NYT, to do with policy responses to Covid-19. But first an overiew.
There are always two movies playing
Scott Adams makes this argument all the time. For any set of events, there are always two movies because different people register different interpretations, different observations, and different levels of importance to the same evidence. A governor shuts down her state. One audience see a movie about a governor trying to save a percentage of the population from death by Covid-19. Another audience sees a governor killing off 30% of small businesses and ruining the financial stability of 60% of the population. Same event, two movies. That is partly what is happening in this article.
What you see is where you live
This is a variant of the argument I have been making for years; that we underestimate the potential bubble effect arising from the geography of the consolidated media sector. Only a small number of companies produce the majority of "broadcast news". And the great bulk of the journalists of those companies reside primarily in geographies which are radically different from the America in which most people live. I am making up the numbers but perhaps 50-70% or more of big time name journalists and pundits live in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. There are a few in outposts such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Virtually none in Phoenix or Tulsa, or Peoria, or Louisville, or Cincinnati, etc.
There are actually two bubbles. One is the Ben Rhodes bubble - the journalists are young with expensive credentials from big name universities, overwhelmingly left leaning, language oriented and innumerate, glib rather than considered, no experience outside of media and academia, and little executive experience/awareness.
That bubble is real and important but probably less than the other bubble. The second bubble is that they live in the same few places and experience a distinctly different manner of life from everyone else.
They live in those few big cities which are all hard left governed, last experienced a Republican governor more than a half a century ago. Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, etc. are dramatically more unequal than the rest of the country, far more likely to see homelessness up close, extreme poverty, have very unique housing issues, experience much more intense crime, see much more economic segregation, experience far worse performing schools, live among a much higher percentage of foreign born, there are many more government programs, far fewer cars, much more mass transit, etc.
It is not necessarily bleak - those cities also have much greater wealth, much more cultural variance/enrichment, a greater concentration of elite pastimes, etc.
The issue is that they are substantially different from anywhere else in the nation. If you are a journalist, the world you see every day, the concerns most manifest, are substantially different than anywhere else. It comes across to those outside the cities as a hard left, statist, social justice vision of life when I suspect, to a greater degree than we acknowledge, that the difference in reality being reported is simply a product of difference on geographical reality.
It is not that journalist are seeing a different movie from the same facts as viewed by the rest of the nation. It is that they are actually seeing different facts in the first place.
Clickbait writing is pervasive
Mainstream media has been experiencing wrenching consolidation and retrenchment for nearly two decades now. They rely on cheap 27-year old inexperienced journalists more, on press release journalism more, reporting opinions over facts more, and have abandoned editorial standards. They are in the commodity stage of the media S-curve. Massive cheap competition, unsupportable legacy brand structures, declining revenues, commoditization of product, and all the other ills of that territory at the top of the sector sigmoid curve, just before some transformation that cannot be fully anticipated.
They have to get clicks on their articles which drives journalists to write more baldly, with less subtlety, and consequently less accurately.
From the article.
"The staggering American death toll from the coronavirus" - No, not staggering. Average all causes mortality in the US runs about 235,000 per month. Since the first Covid-19 death in early February, the normal all causes mortality would be very roughly 940,000. And we know that virtually all those reported Covid-19 deaths are a function of comorbidities. People are dying a few months earlier due to Covid-19 combined with an underlying deadly condition. The number of people dying solely from Covid-19 is small or vanishingly small. It is becoming increasingly clear, in the US and across the OECD, that Covid-19 seems likely to look pretty similar in its rates and curve shapes to more than a dozen similar Covid like outbreaks since 1945. Outbreaks which did not involve quarantines or shutdowns.
"deaths, now approaching 100,000" - Not yet. As of May 26th, the CDC reports 75,283 deaths so far and a dramatic decline from the peak weekly death total in mid-March of 15,400 to 2,500 in the most recent week. Remembering that these are deaths with associated Covid-19, not deaths from Covid-19. The decline is rapid and the models have dramatically overforecast deaths so far. 100,000 deaths is more dramatic than 75,000 but 75,000 is by far the more reliable number. Will we hit 100,000? Probably, but not with certainty given the current trend lines. Perhaps by the end of the year which is much further than the imminence implied by "approaching."
"The devastation, in other words, has been disproportionately felt in blue America" - Narrowly true and misleading. "Toll" would be the more accurate word. Devastation conflates death toll with Covid-19 impact. Perhaps 40,000 of the 75,000 deaths are in the small blue areas. That is indeed a concentrated death toll. However, the devastation in those areas is largely driven by the responses to the Covid-19 threat, not the Covid-19 deaths per se.
"there are starkly different realities for red and blue America right now." - Well . . . you are going to have to be pretty narrowly precise in your definitions for that to be true. I live in a deep blue neighborhood, in a deep blue mega-city in a red state. We have been shut down at the city level for two months or so. Economically it has been devastating. In terms of death numbers? Not so much. Are we living with stark differences? There are a handful of rural counties with an excessive outbreak. A couple of poor neighborhoods in the big city. Are there stark differences between Red and Blue? In a few places under a few circumstance, but not broadly it would seem. In my state, outbreaks don't align with the red and blue distinction. In New York it does. More on this later.
"Staggering", "approaching 100,000", "devastation", "starkly" - This is not, per se, a left-right issue. This is a journalism issue. It is exaggerated overwriting in order to drive clicks for desperately needed revenue. It is not balanced or accurate reporting.
Data Visualization Struggles
The lead authority in this area is Edward Tufte. There is both an art and a science to data visualization and mapping. Regrettably, the software package tools have outstripped disciplined data visualization good practice, forcing viewers to work hard to interpret what is being presented (or, as often, what is being misleadingly omitted).
Don't get me wrong - I love good data visualization, it can be a great trigger to insight and/or productive discussion. The challenge is that SW can produce data visualization which has not been well designed.
The NYT leads it article with a visually clean pair of maps:
They have been doing a lot of this type of mapping in the past year.
It is clean, but what does it tell us? How easy is it to extract useful information from it? For one thing, there is no meaningful scale. Big circles are more than small circles but how much more? We don't know.
It is a map of "reported cases" rather than the more certain "Covid-19 deaths" measure. We know that there has been marked varaiance in definition of what counts as a Covid-19 case and even about what counts as a Covid-19 death. We know some locations have operationally struggled with aggregating the numbers. We have seen plenty of instances of very large adjustments. Producing a dramatic visualization of bad data comes close to malpractice.
You have to stare for a few minutes to begin to discern anything from the side-by-side maps in order to understand just what it is that they are mapping. Broadly we can sense that Covid-19 deaths are less frequent in red areas than in blue areas (smaller circles) but we can also see that Covid-19 seems more broadly spread in red areas than in blue (more circles).
But if you are cognitively querying the representation, you are now having to integrate facts not in evidence. We are dealing with death counts rather than death rates. Is that the right measure? We know that density is a factor in here, that should push us to rates rather than counts given that Democratic strongholds tend to be dense.
The above representation is not dissimilar in nature to the misimpression left by a map that was widely touted after the 2016 election. Trump won with a pretty commanding 304 to 227 electoral votes (masking a more fragile reality than that conveys).
The map circulated which circulated and made the win seem even more commanding was this
It shows the county level returns as won by Trump (red) or Clinton (blue). It inadvertently prioritizes geography over population. The map is not factually wrong, but by ignoring population counts and focusing on geographical entities, it tends to exaggerate the dominance of the win. An interesting article here covering the different approaches to visually representing the election results.
The NYT, by using side-by-side maps, with count rather than rate, forces us to attempt to impute some sort of equalizer to take into account density. Pretty messy.
Innumeracy and Empiricism
This is a not unsurprising and indeed well-established pitfall for the news media. They recruit from a pool which is focused on words rather than numbers and when attempting to report something that has a measurable aspect, they frequently commit numeric pratfall after pratfall.
You can see an example in the third and fourth paragraphs of this article. Remember they led with maps that represent death counts.
Democrats are far more likely to live in counties where the virus has ravaged the community, while Republicans are more likely to live in counties that have been relatively unscathed by the illness, though they are paying an economic price. Counties won by President Trump in 2016 have reported just 27 percent of the virus infections and 21 percent of the deaths — even though 45 percent of Americans live in these communities, a New York Times analysis has found.And just like that they shift, without notice or explanation, from death counts to death rates. Both views are important and worthwhile but both measures convey something different about the dimensions of the crisis. You should not be eliding the two as if there were no difference.
The very real difference in death rates has helped fuel deep disagreement over the dangers of the pandemic and how the country should proceed.
It is especially true in the Covid-19 instance. Big countries are likely to have bigger absolute death counts. But death rates allow you to determine how effectively you responded to the crisis. The states with the largest death rates are those, including New York, which chose to move Covid-19 cases from hospitals to assisted living facilities with the highest concentrations of those with comorbidities coresident. Counts gives you a weak indication of size of state. Rates gives you a stronger indication of response effectiveness.
For the rest of the article, they primarily focus on rates but it is a sharp discontinuity to lead with a "counts" graphic and then in the text focus on the more appropriate "rates". You keep trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.
"Over all, African-Americans and Latinos have had higher infection and death rates from the virus." - Another example of motivated reasoning and innumeracy. It appears from all the research I have seen so far that the causal factor in infection and death rates between races is entirely due to prevalence of pre-existing conditions (obesity, diabetes and blood pressure in particular) and cultural norms rather than race per se. The NYT is keen on race as a driver of inequities, but the evidence does not seem to support that conclusion. They slip it in anyway.
Motivated Conclusions
"Right-wing media, which moved swiftly from downplaying the severity of the crisis to calling it a Democratic plot to bring down the president, has exacerbated the rift." - At least three issues here.
I don't know about right-wing media, but there was certainly much debate among nominally qualified experts in January and February as to how much peril Covid-19 represented to Americans and to the world. Some models estimated millions of deaths in the US and other experts estimated in the low hundreds of thousands. There were many, not particularly associated with the right, arguing from epistemic experience rather than models, that, while dangerous, Covid-19 would look more like a bad flu season than the Spanish Flu.
This was not downplaying the crisis. This was debate about the possible implications of something broadly unknown. It was also a proxy for the long-standing debate between experiential evidence and model evidence. With the most recent CDC report in the Washington Post of a possible bad flu-like rate, it is inaccurate to characterize the early debates as "downplaying". That is a motivated conclusion on the part of the NYT reporters. From the WP article.
The question of the true lethality of the virus remains the subject of controversy. When the CDC put out its guidance last week, it estimated that 0.2 to 1% of people who become infected and symptomatic will die. The agency offered a “current best estimate” of 0.4%. The agency also gave a best estimate that 35% of people infected never develop symptoms. Those numbers when put together would produce an “infection fatality rate” of 0.26, which is lower than many of the estimates produced by scientists and modelers to date.Though written with some bias, the majority of that Washington Post article is pretty good at acknowledging that the numbers are not certain, reliable or consistent, that the model forecasts have been widely variant and effectively unreliable, and that there is still much unknown and debated.
Those whom the NYT characterizes as "down-playing" the crisis at the beginning were talking exactly about this sort of range now being suggested by the CDC, 0.1% to 0.4%, in which 0.26% falls squarely. At the low end (0.1%) about a normal flu season, in the middle, about like a pretty bad flu season such as we have every decade or so, and at the top end (0.4%), just outside the worst flu seasons.
If the rate turns out to be at the lower end of the range as those debating in January and February forecast, then it is hard to accurate to claim that they were downplaying. They made a lower forecast than that which apparently the NYT reporters believed was reliable. Reality has, so far, proven the low range forecasters to be more accurate. Characterizing those forecasters, whether left or right, as "downplaying" appears to be a shoddy motivated conclusion.
I sit in a sports bar with a friend before a game. We have a heated debate. I think, based on recent performance, playing styles of the opponents, recent injuries, etc. that this will be a low-scoring game. I forecast that my local team will win 2 to 1. My friend thinks it will be a high-scoring game and that we will win 7 to 5.
By the seventh inning the score is my team 2 and the opponents 1. Of course anything can still happen but my low scoring forecast appears much more likely than my friends high-coring forecast. I was not downplaying, I was forecasting.
"Calling it a Democratic plot to bring down the president" - Now we are into political opinion blogging. I read pretty widely and voraciously. I don't recall anyone claiming that it was "a Democratic plot to bring down the president." I recall lots of right leaning commentators reminding everyone of Democrat Party Elder Rahm Emmanuel's famous dictum,
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.Influenced no doubt by Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (page 89), in the section marked communication "in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication."
It doesn't help the NYT reporters that there are plenty of instances among Democratic Party leaders echoing this sentiment specifically about Covid-19, ranging from bringing down Trump, to implementing the Green New Deal, to restoring focus on Global Climate Change, etc. Right leaning commentators have been concerned that Democrats would try and leverage Covid-19 to their benefit and Democratic party leaders and journalists have confirmed that they are explicitly trying to do that.
Making a strong claim such as that Republicans were "calling it a Democratic plot to bring down the president" is so easy to demonstrate. Just find a Republican who made that claim and link to their quote. I am sure there is a county Republican Chair somewhere that made some variant of that claim. I suspect that the problem for the NYT reporters is two-fold. They get a quote that is very close to their claim but the link reveals that it is from a peripheral person. Or, they get a muscular statement from a senior, more central Republican and it reveals that they are talking about the larger issue os exploiting a crisis, which would make Democrats appear bad.
Democrats are explicitly seeking to take advantage of Covid-19 to advance their objectives and are quoted as attempting to do so. Republicans are doing the same. Each establishment party is exploiting a crisis to advance their respective objectives. For the New York Times reporters to focus on the one and not the other is simple advocacy. For the New York Times reporters to make a claim without a supporting link is simple advocacy and malpractice.
"And even as the nation’s top medical experts note the danger of easing restrictions, communities across the country are doing so, creating a patchwork of regulations, often along ideological lines." - It is as if the reporters wrote this May 25th article two or three weeks ago and failed to update it. Several states began an aggressive opening up about four weeks ago. It is true that there were "experts" and plenty of media criticism of those state openings and expert forecasts of killing fields in those states as Covid-19 came crashing back without the lockdowns. And none of it happened. Death rates have been dropping or holding steady.
Bubble Effect/Excessive Deference to Experts
There seems an effort by the reporters to convey that right leaning areas are irrational in their response to Covid-19 even though the reporters are affirming that right leaning critics are correct in their assumptions. We have already discussed that the left claimed an epidemiological disaster if states opened and are confounded that that has not happened.
The right leaning critics also appear to have been correct to distrust the motivated forecasts of the "experts."
"Public opinion polls do show widespread support for stay-at-home orders, but also indicate that Republicans are less likely to see the virus as a significant threat to their health." - Which is not surprising given the thesis that the reporters are validating in their own reporting. They are reporting that Republicans are less likely to see the virus as a significant threat to their health because it is in fact, depending on where they live, not much of a threat to their health, particularly given the absence of prior comorbidities.
Similarly:
"Some skepticism around the impact of the pandemic can be traced to a distrust of the government that has grown among conservatives in the last decade" - And indeed, though the reporters do not allude to it, the Covid-19 has stripped away much of the veneer of competence which we hope and expect to be there when needed. The global experts of WHO failed to declare a pandemic long past the point when it was obvious there was a pandemic. Equally, the experts of WHO, along with many others in the US, recommended for the first few months of the pandemic that personal masking was not effective and indeed counterproductive. Until they changed their minds.
CDC, who has all along supposed to be focused on epidemic diseases, stumbled from disastrous decision to disastrous decision. No executable plan. Badly executed plans. Inadequacy of stockpiles. Focusing on the wrong problems (ventilators). Bad modeling. Unuseful of inaccurate forecasting. Failed testing. And on and on.
All the government experts were concerned about overwhelming the health system which never came close to being overwhelmed by caseloads. A handful of states governments insisted that those with Covid-19 infections should be warehoused in assisted living facilities - a position criticized at the time, done anyway, and now acknowledged to have been among the most grievous of failures.
You would have to be insensate to not acknowledge that both over the longer term and in regard to the near term of the pandemic, that many people, not just on the right, are now distrustful of government and for pretty obvious reasons. It might be more prevalent on the right but it is by no means limited to the right. Since the seventies, it is pretty rare that even 50% of Americans at large trust the government to deal with domestic problems. It has been below 40% since 2014.
The NYT reporters want to make the loss of trust in government a right leaning issue when it is clear that the loss of trust in government is common across the spectrum. Another instance of bubble bias influencing what they are reporting.
I won't belabor it past this point. An interesting article with some useful information but horribly twisted by prior assumptions, partly partisan, partly ideological, partly geographic, partly innumeracy, partly absence of editorial oversight, etc.
With a good editor and another day's worth of research and cleaning up, they could have had a great article rather than mush.
But their core focus - that some areas are living an entirely different pandemic is true. And it is also true, though unacknowledged in the article, that a disproportionate degree of the harm arising from Covid-19 is not in the nature of the disease but in the policies which were adopted to fight the disease.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
But they were Marines, combat Marines, forged in the same crucible of Marine training, and because of this bond they were brothers as close, or closer, than if they were born of the same woman.
One of the characteristics of Memorial Day, for me is the awe and inspiration of so many stories of courage and steadfastness and simultaneously the weeping for the human tragedy. The tears come when reading these stories.
The Last Six Seconds is a post by Bruce Kesler. Please read the whole thing which begins:
The Last Six Seconds is a post by Bruce Kesler. Please read the whole thing which begins:
One can hardly conceive of the enormous grief held quietly within General Kelly as he spoke.Read the whole thing.
On Nov 13, 2010, Lt. General John Kelly, USMC, gave a speech to the Semper Fi Society of St. Louis, MO. This was four days after his son, Lt Robert Kelly, USMC, was killed by an IED while on his 3rd Combat tour. During his speech, General Kelly spoke about the dedication and valor of our young men and women who step forward each and every day to protect us.
During the speech, he never mentioned the loss of his own son. He closed the speech with the moving account of the last six seconds in the lives of two young Marines who died with rifles blazing to protect their brother Marines.
"I will leave you with a story about the kind of people they are, about the quality of the steel in their backs, about the kind of dedication they bring to our country while they serve in uniform and forever after as veterans.
Two years ago when I was the Commander of all U.S. and Iraqi forces, in fact, the 22 ND of April 2008, two Marine infantry battalions, 1/9 "The Walking Dead," and 2/8 were switching out in Ramadi. One battalion in the closing days of their deployment going home very soon, the other just starting its seven-month combat tour.
Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale and Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter, 22 and 20 years old respectively, one from each battalion, were assuming the watch together at the entrance gate of an outpost that contained a makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines. The same broken down ramshackle building was also home to 100 Iraqi police, also my men and our allies in the fight against the terrorists in Ramadi, a city until recently the most dangerous city on earth and owned by Al Qaeda.
Yale was a dirt poor mixed-race kid from Virginia with a wife and daughter, and a mother and sister who lived with him and whom he supported as well. He did this on a yearly salary of less than $23,000.
Haerter, on the other hand, was a middle class white kid from Long Island. They were from two completely different worlds. Had they not joined the Marines they would never have met each other, or understood that multiple America's exist simultaneously depending on one's race, education level, economic status, and where you might have been born.
But they were Marines, combat Marines, forged in the same crucible of Marine training, and because of this bond they were brothers as close, or closer, than if they were born of the same woman.
The mission orders they received from the sergeant squad leader I am sure went something like, "Okay you two clowns, stand this post and let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass. You clear?"
Data Talks
Judging from Zoom's stock price, the prediction market known as the Nasdaq started to understand about the coronavirus at the beginning of February. pic.twitter.com/Wu2BKrjlhT
— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 22, 2020
I see wonderful things
Wow, very cool: 15, 25, and 50 years of erosion https://t.co/i67bKiF9XJ pic.twitter.com/NACbqdtEmA
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 21, 2020
An unremitting Jacksonian Democrat.
Following a reference in a comment to a post, I end up at a blog, USS Clueless, run by Steven Dean Beste. The Post is from August 11th 2002 and it is on Jacksonian Foreign Policy. It in turn is in part prompted by an essay by Walter Russell Meade in 1999, The Jacksonian Tradition.
From Beste's post.
But he is a Jacksonian Democrat. If you ask him gotcha questions, he'll taunt and mock. If you lead with ungrounded priors, he'll insult and reframe. If you attempt to pass an opinion as a fact, he'll insult you with Fake News.
Sometime in the first 18 months of his administration, I commented that there are three things about this pattern. 1) He reliably does it, 2) the MSM reliably makes a fool of itself reacting to it, and 3) the distractions usually end up harming his opponents more than himself. My question was, why does the MSM and Mandarin Class keep, like Charlie Brown, charging to kick the football when they know exactly what is going to happen to them?
I had no explanation then and I have no explanation now. Much as I dislike some of the Trumpian Twitter storms, on balance they seem frequently effective and almost always more damaging to his opponents than to him. A Jacksonian Democrat to the core.
From Beste's post.
Jacksonians do not think that international frameworks and international cooperation are impossible or unnecessary. But Jacksonians believe that such frameworks should be limited, concentrated, and closely monitored. Cooperation is possible without trust if it is backed with vigilance and the will to retaliate for cheating. (Retaliation can take many forms, of course; it's not exclusively military.)I had not thought of Trump as a Jacksonian Democrat masquerading as a Republican. At least on twitter, and against the Mandarin Class, the shoe seems to fit.
And to Jacksonians, trust is foolhardy. There are a lot of good people out there, but there are also a lot of bastards, and if you turn your back someone will stab you in it. "Trust, but verify" is a purely Jacksonian watchword. Those who act honorably will be treated honorably, but those who cheat will be crushed.
This is, however, totally opposite to the more utopian vision of Wilsonians and some Europeans, of a new international order based not on vigilance and retaliation but rather on good will and cooperation and friendship. Were that possible, the result would be wonderful. But Jacksonians think such ideas are delusional; there are just too many people out there waiting for an opportunity to cheat.
In fact, trust does work in some cases. There are people out there who are honorable. But it's better not to depend on it, and Jacksonians don't think that it's necessary to do so. Jacksonians are always prepared for betrayal, because it will happen, somewhere, by someone, eventually.
The structures we require to maintain international trade can be sustained without trust or any kind of world government. Such international frameworks work quite well as long as they are limited, monitored and enforced by a threat of war or other retaliation. What won't work is any kind of utopian world government where the people of the world band together in peace, harmony and brotherhood, and cooperate with each other just because they're such nice folks and all. They ain't. Probably a lot of them are, but there are always going to be bad apples, and there will always be some who will cheat if they think they can get away with it. Such people will react to scolding and other toothless diplomatic reactions to their cheating with contempt; the only solution for them is to nail them to the wall.
The rule of law works within our nation because it is enforced by police and the courts. The rule of international law works because we're willing to fight when others ignore it if we think the issues involved are sufficiently important.
By Jacksonian lights, no rule of law works without the threat of force, and if the threat of force is removed then lawbreakers will come out of the woodwork. And sometimes they'll appear anyway, which is why war will always be with us and why good Jacksonians make sure that their nation always remains militarily strong.
Having police and courts doesn't prevent crime, but it does give us the ability to deal with it. By the same token having a strong military doesn't prevent the need for war, but it does give us a better chance of winning when the time comes. Nobody wants a war, but if you have to fight one it's much better to win it than to lose it.
And the police do deter some crime, and having a strong military does prevent some threats of war. Jacksonians are deeply practical; perfect solutions aren't possible and this one is the best available to us.
While it's true that some degree of international regulation is required in order for trade and other international dealings to take place, Jacksonians are always suspicious of such regulations because they want to make sure that the regulators don't have an ulterior motive, and to make sure that everyone is playing by the same rules. The situation works because it is subject to constant scrutiny and because we don't go overboard relying on it.
Basically, Jacksonians believe that others will play fair, but some of them will only do so as long as they know they're being watched.
In its distrust/rejection of international government the Jacksonian party hurts itself. Jacksonian traditions and goals of free enterprise and self-reliance can spread globally via Global Free Trade, without it, their capacity to prosper within the US itself is constrained and ultimately doomed.Jacksonians don't have any interest in spreading their philosophy around the world. It isn't evangelistic; indeed, the entire concept of trying to actively spread that or any other philosophy around the world is deeply repugnant to pure Jacksonians. Jacksonians are anti-imperialistic.
The whole point of Jacksonianism is "You leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. You play fair with me and I'll play fair with you. But if you fuck with me, I'll kill you."
The whole point of Jacksonianism is "You leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. You play fair with me and I'll play fair with you. But if you fuck with me, I'll kill you."For those of us who think that on his core policies, he is headed 80% in the right direction, the distraction of his sometimes seemingly childish jibes, japes, and jabs can seem irritatingly pointless and distracting.
But he is a Jacksonian Democrat. If you ask him gotcha questions, he'll taunt and mock. If you lead with ungrounded priors, he'll insult and reframe. If you attempt to pass an opinion as a fact, he'll insult you with Fake News.
Sometime in the first 18 months of his administration, I commented that there are three things about this pattern. 1) He reliably does it, 2) the MSM reliably makes a fool of itself reacting to it, and 3) the distractions usually end up harming his opponents more than himself. My question was, why does the MSM and Mandarin Class keep, like Charlie Brown, charging to kick the football when they know exactly what is going to happen to them?
I had no explanation then and I have no explanation now. Much as I dislike some of the Trumpian Twitter storms, on balance they seem frequently effective and almost always more damaging to his opponents than to him. A Jacksonian Democrat to the core.
Snow geese with reflection of the sun over Buena Vista Lake, California, 1953 by William Garnett
Snow geese with reflection of the sun over Buena Vista Lake, California, 1953 by William Garnett
Click to enlarge.
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." With the IRS playing the lead role of Humpty Dumpty.
From An Empirical Study of Statutory Interpretation in Tax Law by Jonathan H. Choi. From the Abstract:
Remind you of someone? From Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.
A substantial academic literature considers how agencies should interpret statutes. But few studies have considered how agencies actually do interpret statutes, and none has empirically compared the methodologies of agencies and courts in practice. This Article conducts such a comparison, using a newly created dataset of all Internal Revenue Service (IRS) publications ever released, along with an existing dataset of court decisions. It applies natural language processing, machine learning, and regression analysis to map methodological trends and to test whether particular authorities have developed unique cultures of statutory interpretation.
It finds that, over time, the IRS has increasingly made rules on normative policy grounds (like fairness and efficiency) rather than merely producing rules based on the “best reading” of the relevant statute (under any interpretive theory, like purposivism or textualism). Moreover, when the IRS does focus on the statute, it has grown much more purposivist over time. In contrast, the Tax Court has not grown more normative and has followed the same trend toward textualism as most other courts. But although the Tax Court has become more broadly textualist, it prioritizes different interpretive tools than other courts, like Chevron deference and holistic-textual canons of interpretation. This suggests that each authority adopts its own flavor of textualism or purposivism.
Remind you of someone? From Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
Après nous le déluge
From Faculty Cuts Begin, With Warnings Of More To Come by Paul Caron. Caron is an interesting and valuable blogger, primarily focused on simply bringing to specialist or obscure material to the awareness of the general reader without much editorial add.
In instance:
44,368 employees at 162 institutions. Under 280 per institution.
There are nearly 4,500 colleges and universities in the US. About 3.8-4.5m are employed in the tertiary education sector. Definitions get in the way of consistent employment figures but when you include administrators and part time adjunct faculty, I suspect the total number is close to 4.5m.
The point being that 44,368 employees at 162 institutions is the very smallest tip of the iceberg.
In instance:
Thirty-one faculty members were laid off at Missouri Western State University, while 20 others will receive terminal one-year contracts, Inside Higher Ed reported. St. Edward’s University, in Texas, eliminated an unknown number of employee positions, including some faculty members on and off the tenure track, the Austin American-Statesman reported. City University of New York colleges have begun announcing plans to remove hundreds of adjunct positions, according to the CUNY faculty and staff union; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood in solidarity with the union, saying in a statement that “austerity is not the answer.” And rumors have swirled at Ohio University that instructor positions will be eliminated, speculation that was confirmed in a Friday-evening message to the campus from the president. ...See the original for the links.
Faculty leaders on various campuses are scrutinizing those decisions. They say they appreciate the need to be frugal but don’t understand why contingent faculty members, who are often the lowest paid and do the bulk of the teaching, are on the chopping block. ...
The Chronicle has identified 162 institutions associated with a layoff, a furlough, or a contract nonrenewal resulting from Covid-19. At least 44,368 employees in academe are known to have been affected by those actions.
44,368 employees at 162 institutions. Under 280 per institution.
There are nearly 4,500 colleges and universities in the US. About 3.8-4.5m are employed in the tertiary education sector. Definitions get in the way of consistent employment figures but when you include administrators and part time adjunct faculty, I suspect the total number is close to 4.5m.
The point being that 44,368 employees at 162 institutions is the very smallest tip of the iceberg.
The almanac of time
The almanac of time
by Dylan Thomas
The almanac of time, hangs in the brain;
The seasons numbered, by the inward sun,
The winter years, move in the pit of man;
His graph is measured as the page of pain
Shifts to the redwombed pen.
The calendar of age hangs in the heart,
A lover’s thought tears down the dated sheet,
The inch of time’s protracted to a foot
By youth and age, the mortal state and thought
Ageing both day and night.
The word of time lies on the chaptered bone,
The seed of time is sheltered in the loin:
The grains of life must seethe beneath the sun,
The syllables be said and said again:
Time shall belong to man.
They fail to be interesting as writers because actual truth is forbidden.
A number of years ago, I co-founded Through the Magic Door, a children's books business with the mission of helping families creating an environment and choosing the books which would most likely cultivate a life-long habit of enthusiastic reading among their children. Noble mission, wretched economics.
As part of that experience, I became acquainted with the wretchedness of the commercial young adult genre. Great young adult books are few and dar between but magnificent when they emerge.
The practical reality is that the modern young adult genre is mostly garbage. Shallow, uninformed, ideological screeds written by privileged women and read primarily by privileged women. Young adult readers were a tiny portion of the book buyers.
It was a fascinating perversion of language and ideology.
And the young adult listservs and social media sites? What a poisonous concentration of uncontested cognitive pollution. All participants were women 25-45, usually with MFA degrees, with a great novel in them, embittered by the lack of faith of commercial publishers, railing against the system and the man, while sustaining themselves via a high income husband or in a government or academic sinecure. Uninteresting small people with little life experience and no significant accomplishments demanding to be respected and listened. Or so it was easy to feel.
Oh, and a lazy acceptance of every postmodernist, social-justice, crypto-marxist, critical theory claptrap that came along. Beneficiaries of the age of enlightenment precepts of human universalism, human rights, personal freedom and economic freedom viciously preaching totalitarian Statism in the false belief that a rational, controlled, system governed by technocratic Philosopher Kings would increase their own personal status, rewards, and fame.
Ugh. Not every young adult author fits that mold obviously but an astonishing percentage do.
It was also an arena where I became aware of just how racist and sexist the modern left had become. An audience who would deplatform MLK and drown his I have a Dream Speech.
These creatures of privilege were all for judging people by the color of their skin or the nature of their genitalia rather than the content of their character or the patterns of their actions.
Which is apparently still the ethos. From Belittled Women: The Rise of White Guilt Chick Lit by Naomi Schaefer Riley.
As part of that experience, I became acquainted with the wretchedness of the commercial young adult genre. Great young adult books are few and dar between but magnificent when they emerge.
The practical reality is that the modern young adult genre is mostly garbage. Shallow, uninformed, ideological screeds written by privileged women and read primarily by privileged women. Young adult readers were a tiny portion of the book buyers.
It was a fascinating perversion of language and ideology.
And the young adult listservs and social media sites? What a poisonous concentration of uncontested cognitive pollution. All participants were women 25-45, usually with MFA degrees, with a great novel in them, embittered by the lack of faith of commercial publishers, railing against the system and the man, while sustaining themselves via a high income husband or in a government or academic sinecure. Uninteresting small people with little life experience and no significant accomplishments demanding to be respected and listened. Or so it was easy to feel.
Oh, and a lazy acceptance of every postmodernist, social-justice, crypto-marxist, critical theory claptrap that came along. Beneficiaries of the age of enlightenment precepts of human universalism, human rights, personal freedom and economic freedom viciously preaching totalitarian Statism in the false belief that a rational, controlled, system governed by technocratic Philosopher Kings would increase their own personal status, rewards, and fame.
Ugh. Not every young adult author fits that mold obviously but an astonishing percentage do.
It was also an arena where I became aware of just how racist and sexist the modern left had become. An audience who would deplatform MLK and drown his I have a Dream Speech.
These creatures of privilege were all for judging people by the color of their skin or the nature of their genitalia rather than the content of their character or the patterns of their actions.
Which is apparently still the ethos. From Belittled Women: The Rise of White Guilt Chick Lit by Naomi Schaefer Riley.
Saira Rao and Regina Jackson Turner are self-described women of color who make a good living catering to white women. Tickets for their Race 2 Dinner events, which their website describes as a chance for “white women” to participate in a “conversation about how the white women at the table are complicit in the continued injustices of our white supremacist society,” sell for $2,500 a pop.Who cares about unconscious racial bias when the privileged hard left are such enthusiastic practitioners of obvious and self-declared ideological racism.
While Rao and Turner have clearly found a niche for their ideas among the wealthy elite who want to luxuriate in evenings of fine wine and self-flagellation, executives at Penguin Random House believe there is much wider appetite for books that point the finger at readers. In April they signed the pair to write “White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Get Better.”
Their book joins a relatively new but growing genre of works – both fiction and nonfiction, by authors of all races – that aim to educate whites about the deep racism that supports their privileged lives. These woke beach reads infuse the best-selling template of white-bread chick lit with the consciousness of social justice warriors.
This spring brought “A Good Neighborhood” by New York Times best-selling author Therese Anne Fowler, which centers on Xavier, a polite, smart, classical guitar-playing black teenager in North Carolina, who starts dating a rich white neighbor and is falsely accused of raping her by her racist, sexist, pervert, tree-killing (yes, really) stepfather. The boy’s lawyer tells him: “You are a black man accused of raping an underage white girl. If you put yourself in front of a jury, you’ve got twelve strangers who’ll be literally sitting in judgment of you. … Some of those jurors will be women. Some of them will be white. White fathers of teenage girls if the prosecution can manage it.”
At various points, Fowler, who is white, pauses to have characters lecture readers about the racist criminal justice system and the “talk” that many black parents have to have with their children about how the police won’t give them the benefit of the doubt. The novel also adds class concerns to the racial mix. At Xavier’s bail hearing, his mother asks, “So if I happen to have a quarter mill laying around I lose nothing. But if I’m one of the ninety-nine percent who don’t, I forfeit twenty-five grand. That’s a fair system?”
Extended lectures about structural racism have become a regular feature of books that would be placed on a list of “beach reads.” In “Privilege,” the recently published campus novel by Mary Adkins, who is white, a biracial character named Bea recalls staying with the family of a white friend when a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown. “The conversation had left Bea frustrated – mostly with herself for not speaking up. … Was it really that hard for [her friend’s father] to understand that you’re treated differently based on race? Or did he just not want to know it? Was it that hard to know … that racial bias could be subconscious?”
Shelby Steele, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,” suggests that this current crop of novels are “what happens when someone writes out of an identity rather than out of their individual selves. They squeeze themselves into really bad ideas -- that white males commonly fetishize black women, etc. They seem to be satisfying the terms of a Black Lives Matter black identity rather than exploring their experience as individuals. And, as always, their characterizations and story lines arrive at black victimization as eternal truth. They fail to be interesting as writers because actual truth is forbidden.”
Best of the Bee
Governor Whitmer Orders Citizens To Barbecue Indoors https://t.co/M0TIxygmg2
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 25, 2020
Monday, May 25, 2020
Data Talks
The economic toll from the #coronavirusoutbreak is falling more heavily on lower-income Americans. https://t.co/UtJt21Kuqw pic.twitter.com/UE8r3xOXRK
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) April 21, 2020
I see wonderful things
African Matabele ants not only rescue their battle-wounded soldiers but also treat their injuries. This raises the survival rate for injured ants from 20% to 90% https://t.co/3UV0AgVdCF pic.twitter.com/AP3UMVbvS1
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 19, 2020
Black Water
Double click to enlarge.
Black Water
by The Doobie Brothers
Well, I built me a raft and she's ready for floatin'
Ol' Mississippi, she's callin' my name
Catfish are jumpin', that paddle wheel thumpin'
Black water keeps rollin' on past just the same
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
Yeah, keep on shinin' your light
Gonna make everything
Pretty mama, gonna make everything all right
And I ain't got no worries
'Cause I ain't in no hurry at all
Well, if it rains, I don't care
Don't make no difference to me
Just take that streetcar that's goin' uptown
Yeah, I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland and dance a honky-tonk
And I'll be buyin' ev'rybody drinks all 'roun'
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
Keep on shinin' your light
Gonna make everything, everything
Gonna make everything all right
And I ain't got no worries
'Cause I ain't in no hurry at all
I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland
Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand
(By the hand) hand (take me by the hand) pretty mama
Gonna dance with your daddy all night long
I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland
Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand
By the hand, take me by the hand, pretty mama (I wanna honky-tonk, honky-tonk)
Gonna dance with your daddy night long (honky-tonk with you all long)
I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland
Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand
By the hand, take me by the hand, pretty mama (I wanna honky-tonk, honky-tonk)
Gonna dance with you all night long (honky-tonk with you all long)
I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland
Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand
By the hand, take me by the hand, pretty mama (I wanna honky-tonk, honky-tonk)
Gonna dance with you all night long (honky-tonk with you all long)
I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland
Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand
By the hand, take me by the hand, pretty mama (I wanna honky-tonk, honky-tonk)
Gonna dance with you all night long (honky-tonk with you all long)
I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland
Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand
By the hand, take me by the hand, pretty mama (I wanna honky-tonk, honky-tonk)
Gonna dance with you all night long (honky-tonk with you all long)
