Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Find the Cost of Freedom by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young



Find the Cost of Freedom
by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Find the cost of freedom
Buried in the ground
Mother Earth will swallow you
Lay your body down

Find the cost of freedom
Buried in the ground
Mother Earth will swallow you
Lay your body down

 

at No comments:

History

 

at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor

at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Mediterranean Coast by Jean Piersen

Mediterranean Coast by Jean Piersen




















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Monday, August 30, 2021

History

 

at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor













Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Wet Roof Tops by Steven Scholes (Northern British 1952-)

Wet Roof Tops by Steven Scholes (Northern British 1952-) 




















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Sunday, August 29, 2021

History

at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor

 

at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Lone Sail by Anne Packard

Lone Sail by Anne Packard




















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Saturday, August 28, 2021

History

 

at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor

 

at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Farmhouse near St Ives by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

Farmhouse near St Ives by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson


















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Friday, August 27, 2021

History

 

at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

A proud American

May have posted this before but I love it.


at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor

 












Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Cape Cod Afternoon, 1936 by Edward Hopper

 Cape Cod Afternoon, 1936 by Edward Hopper













Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Thursday, August 26, 2021

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

To His Coy Mistress 
by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
       But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
       Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

at No comments:

Heart of Gold by Neil Young

Double click to enlarge.



Heart Of Gold
by David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Neil Young

I want to live
I want to give
I've been a miner
For a heart of gold
It's these expressions
I never give
That keep me searching
For a heart of gold
And I'm getting old
Keep me searching
For a heart of gold
And I'm getting old

I've been to Hollywood
I've been to Redwood
I crossed the ocean
For a heart of gold
I've been in my mind
It's such a fine line
That keeps me searching
For a heart of gold
And I'm getting old
Keeps me searching
For a heart of gold
And I'm getting old

Keep me searching
For a heart of gold
You keep me searching
And I'm growing old
Keep me searching
For a heart of gold
I've been a miner
For a heart of gold

at No comments:

History

 

at No comments:

Astonishing delusions

From "The mainstream media certainly gave Trump harsh and even overtly hostile coverage. But..." by Ann Althouse.  

. . . Writes Jonathan Chait in support of the hard-to-believe thesis "Why the Media Is Worse for Biden Than Trump" (NY Magazine).

Chait's piece seems delusional.  He is not talking about a reality anyone else can recognize.   Althouse recognizes he is making a (bad) argument and suggests a better approach.

If it were my job to write a column supporting that proposition ["Why the Media Is Worse for Biden Than Trump"], I'd take an entirely different tack. I'd say the media always opposed Trump, and he built his political success fighting against his opponents. He was a great counterpuncher, and he got energy from these attacks. Whatever they did to him "proved" they were "fake news," and he used whatever was thrown his way to his advantage. Thus, the media was never bad for him. 

But Biden has been boosted all along by the media, spared criticism, spared even any serious questioning. Coddled for so long, he's now exposed as utterly vulnerable. The media have been so good to him that when there's anything bad, it is very bad for him. So, clearly, the media are worse for Biden than for Trump. Key word: for. 

If the media had treated Biden and Trump equally badly all along, Biden would never have been the Democratic Party candidate in the first place. 

I agree that she has the better argument. 


at No comments:

Empirical effectiveness research prior to politicization of public health

I have alluded a number of times to the fact that pre-Covid-19 hysteria, the de facto protocols for dealing with respiratory disease spread did not include masking, general lockdowns, prolonged school closures, etc.  Each of these can be pertinent for short durations under very particular circumstances but are not recommended as a general response.

What I have not done is to go and find some of those research examples.  So here is one which just floated across my virtual desk.  Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza by Thomas V. Inglesby, Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Tara O'Toole and D.a. Henderson.  It is from 2006.

The threat of an influenza pandemic has alarmed countries around the globe and given rise to an intense interest in disease mitigation measures. This article reviews what is known about the effectiveness and practical feasibility of a range of actions that might be taken in attempts to lessen the number of cases and deaths resulting from an influenza pandemic. The article also discusses potential adverse second- and third-order effects of mitigation actions that decision makers must take into account. Finally, the article summarizes the authors’ judgments of the likely effectiveness and likely adverse consequences of the range of disease mitigation measures and suggests priorities and practical actions to be taken.

So what does their research reveal in terms of effective and ineffective approaches.

There is no question but that another influenza pandemic will occur and that every community needs to be prepared for that eventuality. Influenza is unlike any other disease epidemic in the rapidity with which it spreads and, as it emerges, the number of illnesses that it can cause over a period of a few months. It is unpredictable as to when a pandemic might begin. It could be next autumn or it may not be for a number of years. The world has weathered three pandemics during the past century and will certainly surmount the next one. How much damage the pandemic will cause depends to a large extent on the state of readiness of each community and each metropolitan region and the efficacy and reasonableness of its response. The following is a synopsis of the authors’ judgments regarding possible disease mitigation measures.

Vaccination. Vaccination is, by far, the most important preventive measure, but pandemic strain vaccine will not be available for at least the next season. Meanwhile, communitywide use of the seasonal influenza vaccine is desirable, as it is likely that outbreaks of seasonal flu will occur even if there is pandemic influenza.

Provision for isolation and medical care of influenza patients. A Regional Health Care Operations Committee is a priority need to assure collaboration and cooperation across the community (hospitals, medical care providers, Red Cross, law enforcement, media, and others), both for advanced planning and during the epidemic to assure that the large numbers of flu-infected patients can be cared for in hospital, at home, or in special facilities. Special arrangements are needed for expanding surge capacity in hospitals, for support to permit home care of patients, and for the provision of additional volunteer healthcare staff.

A communication strategy and plans. Open and frequent communications with the public are essential. This involves regular press conferences, hot lines, and provision of information through civic leaders, churches, schools, and businesses. An important message is to request that all who are ill remain isolated at home or in the hospital but to encourage others to continue to come to work so that essential services can be sustained.

Closure of schools. It has been the practice in many communities to close the schools for 10–14 days at the beginning of an epidemic of seasonal flu, primarily because of the number of both teachers and pupils who are absent. This is a reasonable initiative, often expected in many communities, that also serves to demonstrate action on the part of officials. Closing schools for longer periods in hopes of mitigating the epidemic by decreasing contacts among students is not warranted unless all other likely points of assembly are closed (e.g., malls, fast-food restaurants, churches, recreation centers, etc.).  Such widespread closures, sustained throughout the pandemic, would almost certainly have serious adverse social and economic effects. 

Hand-washing and respiratory hygiene. Everyone should be encouraged to wash their hands after coming in contact with people who are ill and to cover their mouths when coughing or sneezing.

Cancelling or postponing meetings or events involving large numbers of people. Intuitively, this would appear to be a helpful adjunct to reduce contacts among people and so mitigate the effects of the epidemic. However, individuals normally have a great many contacts throughout the community on a daily basis: shopping in stores, attending church, traveling on public transport, and so on.  Recognizing that the spread of influenza is primarily by person-to-person contact, any one individual, even in a large gathering, would have only a limited number of such close encounters with infected people. Thus, cancelling or postponing large meetings would not be likely to have any significant effect on the development of the epidemic. While local concerns may result in the closure of particular events for logical reasons, a policy directing communitywide closure of public events seems inadvisable.

Quarantine. As experience shows, there is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences, such as loss of public trust in government and stigmatization of quarantined people and groups, are likely to be considerable.

Screening passengers at borders or closing air or rail hubs. Experience has shown that these actions are not effective and could have serious adverse consequences; thus, they are not recommended.

An overriding principle. Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe. 

They do not include it in the summary but with regards to masking:

Use of Masks and Personal Protective Equipment

Masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) are essential for controlling transmission of influenza in hospitals. For people who work in hospitals, current CDC guidelines for influenza infection control recommend droplet precautions, including the use of surgical masks.  But HHS planning guidelines also rightly acknowledge that the uncertainties regarding the potential of virus transmission at the start of a new pandemic would recommend that airborne precautions be used in hospitals—that is, N95 masks (already in short supply) or powered air purifying respirators (PAPRs).  Patients would be advised to wear surgical masks to diminish the number of infectious respiratory particles being dispersed into the air, thereby diminishing the likelihood of further spread.

In Asia during the SARS period, many people in the affected communities wore surgical masks when in public. But studies have shown that the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets bearing influenza virus.  The pores in the mask become blocked by moisture from breathing, and the air stream simply diverts around the mask. There are few data available to support the efficacy of N95 or surgical masks outside a healthcare setting. N95 masks need to be fit-tested to be efficacious and are uncomfortable to wear for more than an hour or two.  More important, the supplies of such masks are too limited to even ensure that hospitals will have necessary reserves. 

No to general lockdowns, to cancellation of events, to forced masking, to anything other than short duration school closures.  Answers known on 2006.  All of these conclusions are much more robustly demonstrated from the emerging data today when we walked away from known effective strategies and instead did performance public health, putting the importance of being seen to do something ahead of actually do things with some empirical grounding.

There was much other research, this study a mere drop in the bucket.  


at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

An uncomfortable confusion

This is an uncomfortable confusion.  Are we talking about western government's mask mandates which have no proven effectiveness or are we talking about the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban?

Our institutions, government agencies, and academies also fell without a fight.  Bring back the Age of Enlightenment.


at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor


 

















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Summer Days by Campbell Archibald Mellon

Summer Days by Campbell Archibald Mellon 

















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

History

 

at No comments:

Follow the science and trust the "experts" can be reasonable heuristics but only when there is a good basis for them

From Are We Much Too Timid in the Way We Fight Covid-19? by Ezra Klein.  

Here’s a question I’ve been mulling in recent months: Is Alex Tabarrok right? Are people dying because our coronavirus response is far too conservative?

I don’t mean conservative in the politicized, left-right sense. Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University and a blogger at Marginal Revolution, is a libertarian, and I am very much not. But over the past year, he has emerged as a relentless critic of America’s coronavirus response, in ways that left me feeling like a Burkean in our conversations.

He called for vastly more spending to build vaccine manufacturing capacity, for giving half-doses of Moderna’s vaccine and delaying second doses of Pfizer’s, for using the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, for the Food and Drug Administration to authorize rapid at-home tests and for accelerating research through human challenge trials. The through line of Tabarrok’s critique is that regulators and politicians have been too cautious, too reluctant to upend old institutions and protocols, so fearful of the consequences of change that they’ve permitted calamities through inaction.

All the received institutional "experts" have been headed in a direction conducive to coercive statists.  You have to receive a vaccination.  You have to mask up all the time, inside and out.  You have to vaccinate children.  You have to socially distance and lockdown.  

None of these are inherently wrong strategies though past experience speaks against them and, indeed, pre-covid pandemic plans rejected all four.  But in their desperation for relevance and their desire to be seen to be doing something, institutions and "experts" have fallen all over themselves to endorse these previously discredited approaches.

And as time has proceeded, the failures are racking up.  Masks are pretty clearly inconsequential in stopping the spread of Covid-19 and serve no function in protecting one from coming down with the virus.  Lockdown policies have exacted a very high health and economic well-being cost with no clear benefit in terms of effectiveness of slowing infections.

Vaccinations have been somewhat effective but for much shorter durations than was anticipated.  And we are still just discovering the consequence of vaccines to the ill, the very young, the pregnant, the co-morbid, etc. and we certainly have little understanding of the long term impacts.  They may still turn out to have been net beneficial but we do not know yet.

Much of our problem is due to a mismatch and asymmetry in trust.  Government does not trust its citizens and citizens no longer trust the government.  Citizen distrust of government is well founded.  Pay attention and government (really, government agencies) routinely get policy wrong, implement good policy badly, or pursue policy goals not endorsed by the public.  It would not be an outlandish claim that virtually all government action suffers from one or more of these defects. 

Regardless of efficiency and effectiveness, we also know from past experience that all citizens should always view government with at least some modicum of skepticism, even if it is apparently pursuing some policy with which you agree.  

Klein is essentially a statist, a proto-socialist.  He is not, and has not ever been, particularly well grounded in the history of the Age of Enlightenment, Constitutional law, oddly detached from natural rights as enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and in general far more focused on perceived efficiency (and primacy) of government actions rather than the system of government and overarching constraints such as law, rights, authority, etc.  For him, the ends usually justify the means.  

Despite this, he finds common cause with libertarian Tabarrok.

But as best as I can tell, Tabarrok has repeatedly been proved right, and ideas that sounded radical when he first argued for them command broader support now. What I’ve come to think of as the Tabarrok agenda has come closest to being adopted in Britain, which delayed second doses, approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine despite its data issues, is pushing at-home testing and permitted human challenge trials, in which volunteers are exposed to the coronavirus to speed the testing of treatments. And for now it’s working: Britain has vaccinated a larger percentage of its population than the rest of Europe and the United States have and is seeing lower daily case rates and deaths.

But in this instance, Tabarrok has foresaken his commitment to libertarian principles as he acknowledges.

If all of this sounds as if it’ll require a lot of government action, well, it will. “Ninety-nine years out of 100, I’m a libertarian,” Tabarrok said with a laugh. “But then there’s that one year out of 100.”

Which is striking to me.  I have a strong disposition towards constrained libertarianism but find some of Tabarrok's more extreme positions, such as open borders, impractical and destructive.  But in this instance, when Tabarrok abandons his more extreme libertarian positions, now is the time when statist Klein is most disposed to side with him.   

Klein seems to be stuck within a partisan mindset, merely thinking within the guidelines of the establishment and the Democratic party.  He is not looking at the evidence and arriving at a reasoned and empirical conclusion.  

This debilitating blindness shows up in the following two paragraphs.

Daniel Carpenter is a professor of government at Harvard and an expert on the F.D.A., and he thinks its critics underestimate the costs of a mistake. “Effective therapies depend upon credible regulation,” he told me. Mass vaccination campaigns work only if the masses take the vaccines. “In this way, it’s a deeply social technology, and so the credibility is everything.”

To Carpenter, the F.D.A.’s critics miss the consequences of regulators losing public trust. President Donald Trump publicly pressured the agency to authorize unproven drugs, like hydroxychloroquine, that proved useless and tweeted that the “deep state” in the agency was trying to delay a vaccine to hurt him politically. Stephen Hahn, then the F.D.A. commissioner, joined Trump at a briefing to tout an emergency-use authorization for convalescent plasma — and Hahn then had to apologize, and fire two staff members, after misstating the evidence. It looked to many as though the F.D.A.’s process was collapsing under Trump’s attacks.

A result was that from August to September, the share of Americans who told Gallup they were willing to take a vaccine fell to 50 percent from 62 percent, and among Democrats it fell even further, to 53 percent from 79 percent. Further polling showed that fears of a rushed, unsafe vaccine were driving the drop. It took months, and a series of stringent process announcements by the F.D.A. making clear that it would not be bullied into an early authorization by Trump, for confidence to recover. This, for Carpenter, is what the F.D.A.’s critics don’t understand. “Therapeutic credibility is the entire ballgame here,” he said. 

Klein is endorsing the idea that loss of trust in FDA (and by extension, CDC) was completely due to Trumps' behaviors.  Entirely missing from this indictment by Klein are the campaign statements from Biden and Harris that any vaccine developed under Trump was not to be trusted and that they would not consent to taking a Trump developed vaccine.  Was trust lost because of FDA missteps, between the debates between the FDA and Trump, or from our current President and Vice President's loud and repeated denunciation of the "Trump" vaccines before they became available?  Clearly Klein has lapsed into a partisan dreamworld, undermining his own credibility.

Which is strange since Klein includes information indicating that the loss of trust supersedes partisanship.  

The share of Americans who told Gallup they were willing to take a vaccine fell to 50 percent from 62 percent, and among Democrats it fell even further, to 53 percent from 79 percent. Further polling showed that fears of a rushed, unsafe vaccine were driving the drop.

Democrats, Republicans and Independents have all lost trust in FDA and CDC.  Earned trust is the issue, not behaviors on the part of Trump.  

Klein additionally acknowledges that the low level of apparent competence on the part of the FDA in terms of testing likely also contributed to lost trust.  He puts the best spin on it possible but at least acknowledges that FDA has been a significant contributor to its own difficult position.

Klein also highlights what I think is perhaps among the most important issues.  Covid-19 is a novel virus.  In many ways there are some things we can accurately forecast simply because it is a virus and we have a lot of knowledge of viruses.  On the other hand, it is novel.  We have done an abysmal job measuring the most salient points about its progress and impact, we have done an abysmal job communicating the limits of our knowledge, and we have substituted emotional conviction for clear evidence because there is not yet clear evidence.

And much what is emerging supports the critics rather than the establishment "experts."

Biden said he will “follow the science,” but that often means following the existing evidence, which is not the same thing. It’s wrong to assume that the dosing protocols that pharmaceutical companies proposed in their rush for authorization are optimal for society’s goals. “They wanted to get this going as soon as possible, so they didn’t explore other doses, and it’s very likely they overdosed the vaccine,” Topol said. There is, of course, a risk in attempting a dosing protocol that didn’t go through Phase 3 trials; perhaps immunity will fade faster, for instance. But holding to the current dosing schedules means a slower vaccination program and more deaths.

Follow the science is well and good when there is solid, widely shared, and well established consensus among a wide diversity of scientists, policy experts, and the public.  Such a consensus, when it comes to Covid-19, does not exist and likely will not exist for some good time.

Statists, such as Klein, in the absence of consensus, have been very happy to advocate for coercive actions which strip citizens of inalienable rights.  The intense, and continuing effort to 

Force vaccinations despite citizen opposition.

Implement vaccine passports for population control. 

Force mask wearing despite no evidence or disputed evidence regarding its efficacy.

Force cessation of free travel, employment, and other business and communal activities without constitutional authority.

Suppress religion by closing churches.

Coordinate with technology oligopolies in order to constrain free speech under the auspices of eliminating false or misleading information.

All speak to a complete disregard and cavalier attitude about civil rights such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, body autonomy, freedom of individuals, etc.  

Klein apparently still seems to believe that we can achieve herd immunity.  A belief against which the tides of evidence and policy support are turning.  Some of his coercive inclinations have at least an imprimatur of logic if you believe herd immunity is achievable.  If, as many are coming to believe, Covid-19 cannot be defeated but will become endemic, then treatment and possibly natural immunity (from prior exposure) become more the focus than do vaccination and lockdowns.  

The ultimate challenge, that which calls for the confidence and leadership which has been so lacking from our agencies and leaders is the tension between knowing too little and knowing enough.  

Not doing something is a choice,” said Emily Oster, a health economist at Brown. “It’s not a safe harbor.”

But nobody knows where that line is.  Something needs to be done, or we need to consciously choose to do nothing but no one can know when we know enough to choose.

Too many leaders and institutions have been shooting from the hip with little evidence that they are shooting at the right things.  There will be loss of life and economic damage if you are too aggressive (rapid deployment of novel vaccines and coercive lockdowns) and possibly if you are too permissive (open environments, respect for civil rights, etc.)

Sweden is the only country of which I am aware which has systematically sought to bridge the gap between knowing and unknowing.  They have made evidence available to the public as it is available and broadly held back from mandates and lockdowns.  Putting decision-making in the hand of citizens has been widely condemned by institutions, "experts", pundits, government agencies, and the media.  

Interestingly, despite that freedom to choose, Sweden has not been free from lockdowns, etc.  At different times of the pandemic, differing volumes of the population have chosen to lock themselves down and/or wear masks.  If you look at miles driven and stats on mask wearing, Sweden has often looked like many other countries with high compliance.  The difference has been that Swedes made their own decisions rather than had decision forced upon them by distrusted "experts." 

The result has been ambiguous.  Sweden has had a higher death rate than Norway and Denmark (adjacent and culturally similar nations) but Sweden also has a much higher rate of refugee populations which seem to have also suffered disproportionately from Covid-19.  On the other hand, compared to most other OECD countries, Sweden has now had several weeks with zero Covid-19 deaths.  Is Sweden simply between cycles or has their policy of informing citizens of the best available knowledge and allowing them to decide for themselves worked better?  We don't know but Sweden is an uncomfortable case study for the coercive statists wanting to coercively impose policies.

We still don't know what is going on with Covid-19 and the efficiency and effectiveness of all the different policy responses.  I think the coercive statist approach is going to end up being discredited but we'll have to wait and see.  

With what we know now, how can we better prepare for future surprises?

Focus on institutional and agency credibility.  

Do what needs to be done to restore trust. 

Avoid wherever possible resorting to blind coercion and punishment of citizens. 

Focus on being transparent about decision-making and outcomes.

Focus on developing appropriate measures of diagnosis and performance.  Relying solely on cases (which are substantially a function of degree of testing) and not focusing on deaths or excess deaths inclines one to suspect fear mongering rather than real intent to solve a problem.

Always incorporate cost-benefit analysis regardless of how uncomfortable that is.

Always acknowledge trade-off decisions regardless of how uncomfortable that is.

Acknowledge that there will always be a limit in verifiable knowledge when dealing with something novel.  I.e. Be Humble. 

Communicate more consistently and effectively.

Avoid authoritarian behaviors like limiting free speech.

Avoid mixing scientific debate, policy debate, and political debate.  

Focus on points of consensus between "experts", academia, agencies, foundations, political leaders and the public and build on those points of consensus.

Follow the science and trust the "experts" can be reasonable heuristics but only when there is a well-founded consensus on the science (which can still be wrong), and when the "experts" have a track record warranting that trust.

at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor

 

at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Cloudy Summer by Valerius de Saedeleer (1867 - 1941)

Cloudy Summer by Valerius de Saedeleer (1867 - 1941)


















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Unknown title by Toshio Ebine

 Unknown title by Toshio Ebine














Click to enlarge. 

at No comments:

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

History

 

at No comments:

An Insight

 

at No comments:

I see wonderful things

 

at No comments:

Offbeat Humor

 

at No comments:

Sail Away (Sail Away)

Sail Away (Sail Away)
Song by Noël Coward

When a sailor goes to sea
Though he leaves his love behind
Time and tide will set him free
From the grief inside him
Sea and sky will ease his heart
Regulate his troubled mind
Every sailor has a chart
And a star to guide him home

When the storm clouds are riding through a winter sky
Sail away, sail away
When the love light is fading in your sweetheart's eye
Sail away, sail away
When you feel your song
Is orchestrated wrong
Why should you prolong your stay?
When the wind and the weather blow your dreams sky high
Sail away, sail away, sail away

Love is meat to make us glad
Love can make the world go round
Love can drive you raving mad
Torment and upset you
Love can give your heart a jolt
But philosophers have found
That it's wise to do a bolt
When it starts to get you down

When your life seems too difficult to rise above
Sail away, sail away
When your heart feels as dreary as a worn-out glove
Sail away, sail away
But when soon or late
You recognize your fate
That will be your great, great day
On the wings of the morning with your own true love
Sail away, sail away, sail away


at No comments:

Data Talks

 

at No comments:

Old Dutch Building, Fishkill, New York, 1916 by Childe Hassam

Old Dutch Building, Fishkill, New York, 1916 by Childe Hassam















Click to enlarge.

at No comments:

Monday, August 23, 2021

Masks, effective transmission reduction strategy or performance theater?

One of the challenges of an environment in which there is a discrepancy between what government institutions want the evidence to be versus what independent researchers find the evidence to be is simply keeping track of the evidence over time as studies come out in dribs and drabs.

Inevitably, unless the issue is central to your existence or to your business, you end up with a running total in your mind, subject to faulty memory and confusion as the mainstream media often end up describing the results from the same study in dramatically different ways.

My impression of the effectiveness of mask wearing as prophylactic to disease spread was that it had low to negligible effect, much depending on the mask, the circumstances and the fashion of wear.  This impression was reflected in the standard protocols pre-Covid-19 which dismissed ordinary masks as ineffective.  The impression was further bolstered at the beginning of the pandemic when various health authorities sought actively to discourage people from mask wearing as an ineffective measure.

Then the mask bandwagon began to build and some, but not all, health authorities began encouraging mask wearing despite standard epidemic protocols, despite their own earlier recommendations against mask wearing and despite the absence of any rigorous studies supporting the effectiveness of mask wearing.

From the outside, it felt as if health authorities simply wanted to be seen to be doing something in the face of an unknown and frustratingly mysterious novel virus.  

As time went by, I began seeing more and more studies emerge from researchers around the world, some indicating support for the effectiveness of mask wearing and others indicating non-effectiveness.  I began keeping a running mental sum of the outcomes.

A further challenge was that the quality of the studies varied enormously, ranging from worthless to occasionally very rigorous.  Ideally what you are looking for are large population sample sizes adhering to randomly controlled trials, preferably with pre-registration of methodology and with open access to resulting data.  These were few and far between.  

My sense was that the stronger and more rigorous the study, the more likely it was to find that masks had little or no effect.

This is consistent with many of the case studies in Scientific Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Some exciting finding is claimed (often in the field of sociology or psychology), there is tremendous media attention and pundit jabbering, essays are written, interviews given.  Over months and then years, efforts are made to replicate the exciting finding.  Eventually it is discovered that the findings fails to replicate and that the more rigorous the replication effort, the less likely it is to find the original results.  And despite all that, the original, un-replicated paper ends up keeping being cited in a positive fashion.  Think of the Implicit Attitude test, or claims about micro-aggressions or similar such nonsense.

The twitter account https://twitter.com/ianmSC, IM routinely posts charts showing the time of mask implementations and the case volumes over time.  Visually it is a striking argument against the effectiveness of masks even though RCTs are the better evidence.  See below:

So masks, effective transmission reduction strategy or performance theater?

My conclusion for several months, on the balance of evidence, has been that it is performance theater.  It will still be some time before we really know, but Do Masks Work?  A review of the evidence by Jeffrey H. Anderson is a useful and reassuring confirmation that my running tally was broadly correct.  He discusses the issues around study design, RCTs as the gold standard for causal research, the cherry picking of weak studies which seems to have been a public health authority habit, and the results from the fourteen strongest designed studies conducted so far.

In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.

It is a  still hotly debated field, many further research efforts of increasing strength may overturn these findings, but I suspect we are getting onto firmer ground.  As a population strategy for reducing transmission, ordinary cloth masks (single or double masked) do not work.  


at No comments:

After five months of dragnet arrests nationwide, a few reporters have noted that no one was actually charged with insurrection or sedition.

This is a very good piece.  From The FBI comes up empty-handed in its search for a Jan. 6 plot by Jonathan Turley.  It echoes the observations I made in a post a few days ago but his argument is clearer and more robust than mine.  

This was a demonstration, not an insurrection.  The insistence on calling it an insurrection is a legal and political power play with no empirical merit.  Politicians are distorting the law by applying different standards for the same actions.  

More than 570 people have been arrested, but only 40 face conspiracy charges. Those charges are often based on prior discussions about trying to enter Congress or bringing material to use in the riot; some clearly came prepared for rioting with ropes, chemical irritants and other materials. Those cases, however, are a small group among the hundreds charged and an even smaller percentage among the tens of thousands of protesters on that day.

After five months of dragnet arrests nationwide, a few reporters have noted that no one was actually charged with insurrection or sedition. The vast majority of people face charges such as simple trespass. For example, the latest guilty plea is from San Francisco real estate broker Jennifer Leigh Ryan, who posted an account on social media of how "we're gonna go down and storm the capitol." She pleaded guilty this week to "parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building" and faces a maximum sentence of six months in prison and a fine of $5,000.

Yet the characterization of the “insurrection” has continued as a virtual article of faith for those reporting on or writing about Jan. 6. Moreover, the treatment of many has remained severe, if not draconian by design. Justice official Michael Sherwin proudly declared in a television interview that “our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe. ... It worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re like, ‘If we go there, we're gonna get charged.’ ... We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.”

That “shock and awe” included holding people without bail and imposing “restrictive housing” for no obvious reason. That includes some of the most notable figures from that day, such as Jacob Chansley (aka Jake Angeli), better known as “Chewbacca man” or the “QAnon shaman” for the distinctive horned headdress he wore during the riot. Angeli, 33, is not accused of attacking anyone while parading around the Senate floor in his bear skin. He always insisted he was not trying to overthrow the nation with his decorative outfit and spear-topped flagpole. While the government did not find that he engaged in sedition, it did learn that he has an array of mental illnesses, including transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. Yet he has been held since the riot and is charged with six crimes, including violent entry, trespass and parading, which collectively could yield up to 28 years in prison.

The rebuilding of citizen trust in government depends on members of government demonstrating greater philosophical consistency and trustworthiness than they appear willing to do. 


at No comments:

History

 

at No comments:

An Insight

From T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party from 1949.   

Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. 
Or they do not see it, or they justify it 
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle 
To think well of themselves.

 Think, Social Justice Theory devotees and Critical Race Theory hustlers.


at No comments:

What is it with Rachel?

Spam calls are the social gnat of modern society.  An annoying nuisance about which all complain but in the scheme of things trivial.  An annoyance, not a wound.

One of the minimal blessings of the Covid-19 shutdown was a seeming hiatus in spam calls.  I don't know if it happened to everyone but certainly my experience has been pleasant.  Days and even weeks at a stretch without the mindless and fruitless interruption of spam calls.

And now they seem back.  As is Rachel.

Rachel was the unfortunate eponym of one such common spam call.

Hello.  This is Rachel from cardholder services . . . 

I don't remember whether she was selling credit ratings or scamming.  It was a call which after you received two or three, you forever after ignored and hung up immediately.

I just received a spam call and Rachel has been repurposed.

Hello.  This is Rachel.  Your car registration just crossed my desk and . . . 

Did she change jobs?  Take on a new assignment?  Get moved into a different product division?

Is she perhaps suffering some sort of existential dread.  After so many years as Rachel from cardholder services, it can't be easy to now be the same cheery Rachel of car registrations.  

All questions to which we probably can't know an answer.  Poor old Rachel.


at No comments:

Turning from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing—but, first, of denouncing—the conduct of others.

Fascinating.  From God in the Dock, a collection of C.S. Lewis essays collected and published in 1970.  In it, there is an essay, Dangers of National Repentance, which neatly encapsulates the misplaced moral fervor of today's adherents to Critical Race Theory and Social Justice Theory.  The essay was first published in 1940, somewhat more than a year into World War II.  There was a stirring among young Christians in Britain to blame the war on the sins of Britain rather than the abominations of Germany's Hitler, Italy's Mussolini or Japan's military Junta. 

In other words, it was the same childish logical inversion of responsibility, initially for shock value and later from stubborn intransigence, which we see today among CRT/SJT adherents.  An inversion despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  

CRT/SJT adherents wish us to condemn the very history, values and philosophies which ended slavery, emancipated the poor and women, and granted full rights to everyone to be equally protected under the law.  The values which established the systems of self-actualization which have yielded our historically unprecedented wealth, prosperity, and freedoms so widely shared today.  

Instead, CRT/SJT adherents wish to ignore those achievements and instead hold everyone today, save themselves, accountable not so much for past failures (though those were present) but rather condemn the past for not bringing the astonishing present to fruition sooner.  It is childishness without the innocence of a child.  

The invocation of White Guilt and charge of accountability for the actions of others in the past is merely a modern form of racism married to the desire for painless penitence described by Lewis.  It is also a form of very real class oppression as those desiring national repentance (CRT/SJT) are overwhelmingly among the most financially privileged in the nation.  They have attended the best schools and inherited the best money and now indulge themselves in a belief system which allows them not only to condemn others but to condemn those classes whom they consider lower and less enlightened.  Classes who are really merely less privileged.  And a condemnation which is closely married to destructive hatred and real social punishments from which the national repentance (CRT/SJT) adherents are held safe.  

From the essay, emphasis added.  

The idea of national repentance seems at first sight to provide such an edifying contrast to that national self-righteousness of which England is so often accused and with which she entered (or is said to have entered) the last war, that a Christian naturally turns to it with hope.  Young Christians especially—last-year undergraduates and first-year curates—are turning to it in large numbers.  They are ready to believe that England bears part of the guilt for the present war, and ready to admit their own share in the guilt of England.  What that share is, I do not find it easy to determine.  Most of these young men were children, and none of them had a vote or the experience which would enable them to use a vote wisely, when England made many of those decisions to which the present disorders could plausibly be traced.  Are they, perhaps, repenting what they have in no sense done?

If they are, it might be supposed that their error is very harmless: men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable.  But what actually happens (I have watched it happening) to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that.  England is not a natural agent, but a civil society.  When we speak of England’s actions we mean the actions of the British Government.  The young man “who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbour; for a Foreign Secretary or a Cabinet Minister is certainly a neighbour.  And repentance presupposes condemnation.  The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing—but, first, of denouncing—the conduct of others.  If it were clear to the young that this is what he is doing, no doubt he would remember the law of charity.   Unfortunately the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature.  By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the Government not ‘they’ but ‘we’.  And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government “which is called ‘we’ is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice.  You can say anything you please about it.  You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practising contrition.  A group of such young penitents will say, ‘Let us repent our national sins’; what they mean is, ‘Let us attribute to our neighbour (even our Christian neighbour) in the Cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.’

Such an escape from personal repentance into that tempting region

Where passions have the privilege to work
And never hear the sound of their own names,1

would be welcome to the moral cowardice of anyone.  But it is doubly attractive to the young intellectual.  When a man over forty tries to repent the sins of England and to love her enemies, he is attempting something costly; for he was brought up to certain patriotic sentiments which cannot be mortified without a struggle.  But an educated man who is now in his twenties usually has no such sentiment to mortify.  In art, in literature, in politics, he has been, ever since he can remember, one of an angry and restless minority; he has drunk in almost with his mother’s milk a distrust of English statesmen and a contempt for the manners, pleasures, and enthusiasms of his less-educated fellow countrymen.  All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies.  But ‘my enemy’ primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate and traduce.  If you listen to young Christian intellectuals talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is.  He seems to have two names—Colonel Blimp and ‘the business-man’.  I suspect that the latter usually means the speaker’s father, but that is speculation.  What is certain is that in asking such people to forgive the Germans and Russians and to open their eyes to the sins of England, you are asking them, not to mortify, but to indulge, their ruling passion.  I do not mean that what you are asking them is not right and necessary in itself; we must forgive all our enemies or be damned.  But it is emphatically not the exhortation which your audience needs.  The communal sins which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class—its contempt for the uneducated, its readiness to suspect evil, its self-righteous provocations of public obloquy, its breaches of the Fifth Commandment.2  Of these sins I have heard nothing among them.  Till I do, I must think their candour towards the national enemy a rather inexpensive virtue.  If a man cannot forgive the Colonel Blimp next door whom he has seen, how shall he forgive the Dictators whom he hath not seen?

Is it not, then, the duty of the Church to preach national repentance?  I think it is.  But the office—like many others—can be profitably discharged only by those who discharge it with reluctance.  We know that a man may have to ‘hate’ his mother for the Lord’s sake.3  The sight of a Christian rebuking his mother, though tragic, may be edifying; but only if we are quite sure that he has been a good son and that, in his rebuke, spiritual zeal is triumphing, not without agony, over strong natural affection.  The moment there is reason to suspect that he enjoys rebuking her—that he believes himself to be rising above the natural level while he is still, in reality, grovelling below it in the unnatural—the spectacle becomes merely disgusting.  The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.  There is a terrible chapter in M. Mauriac’s Vie de Jésus.  When the Lord spoke of brother and child against parent, the other disciples were horrified.  Not so Judas.  He took to it as a duck takes to water: ‘Pourquoi cetter stupeur?, se demande Judas. . . . Il aime dans le Christ cette vue simple, ce regard de Dieu sur l’horreur humaine.’4  For there are two states of mind which face the Dominical paradoxes without flinching.  God guard us from one of them.

 _____________________________________

1 Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. XI, Line 230.
2 ‘Honour thy father and thy mother; that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’ Exodus xx. 12.
3 Luke xiv. 26: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’
4 François Mauriac, Vie de Jésus (Paris, 1936), ch. ix. ‘ “Why this stupefaction?” asked Judas . . . He loved in Christ his simple view of things, his divine glance at human depravity.'

 

at No comments: