We Blow and Suck (and not in a good way)

I have from day one never understood the response and the way the Covid pandemic was handled. From massive closures to testing and vaccine requirements we really fucked this up but good. True you could say I am not a Scientist nor expert in any field related to this; however, no one was. And yes I include Fauci in this as his conflicts of interest, his mishandling of AIDS and his constant fluid responses that veered on hilarious and fueled the distrust on the part of the right that leads to today is all part of the problem. Messaging was a true failure and yes we can blame Trump and company. I want to point out that Kushner and Pence were utterly in over their heads and were heads of said “task force.” Let me assure you living in a Kushner owned building tells me quite a bit about that family and their management practices.

As I finish the book, A Premonition, one of the best and earliest ways we could have controlled, studied and understood Covid was when we quarantined Americans in Oklahoma. They could have been tested, monitored and taken samples of the virus to compare to the ones taken in already diagnosed cases in the states, namely the patient in Seattle who had returned from Wuhan and contrast that with the teenager who had not and lived miles away. But nope we did nothing valid or even remotely essential in which to manage a pandemic and its origins. Again you can come to your own conclusions about all of this but folks a lot of this shit was random from the get go, including how the virus was transmitted and how long it sheds before it is no longer contagious to any and all of symptoms and other issues regarding Covid that might have enabled hospitals to better prepare. But nope. We fucked it big time.

I have posted below another excellent editorial about the failures of our Government, both federal and local, in which they handled and mismanaged the virus. Look locally to your own Mayors, your Governors and their Health Department Agents who seemed to contradict, misinform and of course outright lie when it came to facts and knowledge about the virus. See Andrew Cuomo on that one, but he is not alone. The federal agencies were not much better and yes the mainstream media seized on the click bait, the talking points and laid it on thick like cream cheese to a bagel in which to reiterate the lack facts and misinformation they peddled to somehow scoop the competition. Is a fucking pandemic a competition now? Well in ways it was as America endlessly compared itself to China, to Sweden to any other country and its pos rates, its death rates, its testing capabilities and of course vaccine rollouts. It fucked that up too. And the lack of ability to do math helped enable the fear to keep coming and the rage to keep rising.

The debate of origin is still ongoing and I must read day after day how a place found “Patient Zero” in their community who was the first to contract Covid. Believe it or not they are finally coming to terms with that in China, where they have bent over backwards like an Olympic gymnast to hide those facts. The confusion about the origin has led to interesting showdowns in Congress with Rand Paul challenging Fauci about the NIH and their funding of the Wuhan lab and their role in this outbreak, including what is called “gain of function” research in said lab. Read what that is and realize how insane that is. Wow, I agree with Rand Paul on something. But this again is about politics and not about transparency and ethics. Sadly that is the lost message in that debate.

Another is the lab leak theory which will never be resolved unless a Deep Throat comes forward. Scary thought there but in reality early on the supposed signed document by dozens of Scientists disclaiming that has since been amended. And the origin of that is from Zoologist, Peter Dasak, who has many a conflict of interest and competing interests in his role at EcoHealth. He has since amended many an accusation but questions remain and always will. I feel this article in Vanity Fair explains much of the challenges of the issue and Covid’s origin. The journal, Lancet, that it was first published in has its own issues as it was the same journal that published the now false study about how vaccines cause Autism. And we come full circle to that and again the role of politics and vaccines. Just ask Robert Kennedy Jr, a total idiot, on that one. (Bobby turns in grave going but the Ivy League is so great!!)

As I smash liberal icons and totems right and left I cannot stress enough that the GOP and their odd rhetoric is disturbing given that many of them also attended an Ivy League or prestigious institution in which to gain a degree or two and yet they espouse values and thoughts that seemingly contradict facts, knowledge about basic science and any logic or truth about well anything. This too has led to many a fight and more misinformation to dominate the social media landscape. Again, I utterly find social media a morass of morons but hey you be you and go for it. Every book, every journal and every newspaper that goes unread, a smart butterfly earns its wings and will fly away leaving less beauty in its place.

I will one day stress that despite it all somethings good came out of this pandemic and then in turn was lost thanks to the endless violence and guns that resulted washing away any good that may have finally led to real change when it comes to the Militarized Police and their own role in contributing to said violence. But there is the role of the worker, the push and pull of unionizing, raising wages and benefits and other issues surrounding health care and access to it. Even drawing attention to the role of public education and its overwhelming challenges has been something I am thrilled to see. Will it last? Fuck no. But hey you never know. I also think work will change, to perhaps the four day week, to less bullshit about hours and time spent in office and the role of Women, People of Color and the issues about diversity may change that dynamic. So yes some good things did come out of it. But as for a Renaissance no, I have seen little creativity or imagination that supports that. Really Taylor Swift remakes a decade old album and it is highly acclaimed and received? And Travis Scott a Kardashian baby daddy is a superstar? Have you listened to him? But I do think we are moving into a revitalization of an Industrial age where we return to manufacturing and building our own materials and goods. That supply chain block may do some good after all.

So read this essay and ask yourself, could we build back better? I fucking hope so as we really fucked up this pandemic.

After a Pandemic Failure, the U.S. Needs a New Public Spirit

Nov. 18, 2021 The New York Times

By Zeynep Tufekci

No one knows when the pandemic will end. But the worst of it may be over for the United States after this winter. For good reasons — growing vaccine eligibility, boosters and new antiviral treatments — and bad — high levels of prior infections — it’s possible the ongoing Delta surge could be the last major spike in hospitalizations and deaths for the United States.

That does not mean Covid-19 is going away. Cases will likely increase in the winter, when more people are gathered indoors, and persist wherever there are pockets of unvaccinated people who had not been exposed. While there will continue to be spikes and drops — cases are beginning to tick back up — the pandemic in the United States will eventually peter out, possibly in the spring or early summer, its long-term fate subject to viral evolution.

But right now, in the United States over 1,000 people continue to die each day, and over 750,000 American lives have been lost so far — one of the highest Covid death rates in the world.

Americans are sharply divided on how to act. There are highly vaccinated areas with few cases where some people remain unsure if they can let down their guard at all and other areas with low vaccination rates and high community transmission where people are living as if it were 2019.

The pandemic has proved to be a nearly two-year stress test that the United States flunked, with an already distrustful populace exposed to a level of institutional failure that added fuel to the angry battles over how to respond. Dr. Martin Cetron, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention veteran of battles against Ebola in Africa, described people’s losing confidence during an epidemic as a “bankruptcy of trust.” Right now, America is bankrupt.

It once seemed that if the United States ever faced a viral pandemic, it would be more than up to the challenge. Just weeks before the first Covid-19 cases were reported in China, the United States was ranked No. 1 out of 195 countries in pandemic preparedness by experts convened by Johns Hopkins University, The Economist and others. After all, the C.D.C. is one of the most respected public health institutions in the world, and the United States is home to many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies and academic research institutions.

The fact that the United States fared so poorly, despite all the seeming advantages that dazzled those experts, is a profound sign of how decayed our institutions and capacity have become. To understand how we fell so far short and to navigate a second full Covid winter and future pandemics and challenges requiring collective action, it’s important to review the outbreak’s early days to see why the United States — once considered the global leader in public health — is floundering in mistrust, paranoia and exhaustion.

One of the most dangerous things about Covid-19 is not necessarily what it does to any given person who is infected by the coronavirus but that someone can be contagious and not even know about it for days — if at all. The disease can spread before symptoms start and sometimes even without any ever appearing.

At the start of the pandemic, this meant that the number of people who needed to be tested would be far, far greater than the number of people who were visibly sick after suspecting that they came into contact with the virus. This was the first major test for the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C. — develop a test and deploy it at scale — and it was one they resoundingly failed.

Their delay in developing a sufficient number of reliable tests and in systematically collecting surveillance data meant that health responders didn’t have a clear sense of where the virus was spreading as it started to rip across the country. But even if they didn’t necessarily know where the virus was, there were simple precautions that officials could advise anyone to take, such as wearing masks. This was another critical test the United States failed. The C.D.C. didn’t advise people to wear masks until April 2020, when more than a thousand people a day were dying from Covid and many thousands more were infected.

Yet another failure is America’s approach to rapid at-home tests. Here, they are expensive, the supply is fickle, and the public remains confused about their use. The home tests can’t detect the minute levels of virus that the lab tests can find but do return positives when viral loads are high. That means they can alert people within minutes when they are likely to be most infectious. With frequent and widespread use, they can help dampen spread. While many countries have embraced at-home tests as a way to have a more normal daily life — in Britain you can get a pack of tests free, and other countries sell them in vending machines — the United States only recently started increasing their availability and working to reduce their costs.

For too long, F.D.A. officials authorized only a few tests and required a prescription for them. Experts argued tests that failed to detect all infections would give people a false sense of confidence. It was similar to the argument made by officials who initially said masks would make people ignore other public safety measures: The public wasn’t to be trusted. Instead, regulators denied people crucial, if imperfect, tools rather than educate and empower them.

That distrust of the public could not have enhanced the public’s trust in officials, which was so vital, and so lacking, when the government urged people to get vaccinated. This is true across the political spectrum. When it was reported in September 2020 that some vaccines might be available by early November, it was often Democrats and liberals who expressed great skepticism about the speed and suspected the Trump administration was pressuring regulatory agencies to take shortcuts with safety.

Nonetheless, the vaccines were approved in record time, produced on a significant scale and distributed via a sizable public-private effort that included everything from sprawling National Guard sites to the aisles of pharmacies.

But despite having one of the earliest and most abundant supplies of vaccines, the United States has a vaccination rate that isn’t in the top 50 in the world — lower than many, many other countries that started much later.

Some of the reasons for our relatively low vaccination coverage trace back to the dysfunctions of our medical system. The United States is the only developed nation without universal health coverage, and our medical system continues to disproportionately fail people from minority backgrounds; such shortcomings don’t help develop the necessary trust.

But there is another dynamic. Many Republican politicians and pundits have chosen to pump hostility to vaccines and public health institutions as a platform for their supporters to rally around. Some of their claims are outright false or wildly misleading, but as with such demagogy historically, sometimes they capitalize on existing failures.

All this finds a ready home on online platforms designed to optimize for how much time and effort we spend on them. Even before the pandemic, doctors were begging tech platforms like Facebook and YouTube to take action about the rampant vaccine misinformation on their sites that not only existed but thrived. Leaked internal documents show that Facebook’s own researchers were worried about how rampant vaccine misinformation was on the platform during the pandemic. The public has even less insight into YouTube, but it only recently pledged to ban all vaccine misinformation on its platform — a step taken almost two years into the pandemic. This information environment fuels tribalization and demagogy the way warm water intensifies a hurricane. This, in turn, further degrades the capacity for mending our dysfunctional governance.

Given all the missteps and whiplash, it’s no wonder so many Americans are frustrated and confused — even the ones who have been doing their best to follow official guidelines.

So what now?

In the absence of trust in their leaders and peers, people will likely continue to deal with the virus the way they have been, by keeping themselves bubbled or ignoring it altogether. Even within my social circle, which is fully vaccinated, some people’s dispositions toward the virus remain unchanged from the summer or even before, no matter their personal risk level or changing conditions. Some remain highly cautious, while others have practically tuned out the pandemic.

Such constancy despite changing circumstances is not necessarily a good sign. While certain precautions need to remain, especially when transmission is high, it’s reasonable for fully vaccinated Americans to stop living as if they were in a prevaccine era (but also be ready to adjust if the conditions change). But such flexibility requires deep trust in timely guidance.

Meanwhile, not even a rate of 1,000 deaths a day has been enough to motivate all eligible people in high transmission areas to get vaccinated and stop arguing over simple courtesies like wearing a mask indoors in public places. More should also be done to protect employees who cannot work from home; vaccine mandates have been effective, and measures such as free workplace testing, better ventilation standards and paid sick leave can help.

I’ve made peace with the idea of getting an eventual breakthrough infection myself — my risk for severe outcomes seems low and similar to other things I do in life — but I would hate to pass Covid-19 to someone else. I’ve been using rapid tests, especially before meeting people to spend time with them indoors, despite their outrageous price of around $12 or more a pop. I’ve urged everyone I know who is higher risk to get a booster. My workplace mandates vaccines for everyone working in the office without an exemption, and masks indoors where social distancing is not possible. I wear surgical masks in offices, stores and restaurants nowadays, but if I felt spooked about conditions somewhere, I’d put on my N95.

So Thanksgiving is on, and this year even the youngest at the table will have had a first shot, and the few higher risk people have had a booster. Yes, I’ll be breaking out the rapid tests, and I have an appropriate-size HEPA filter in my house.

But you can see how individualized this all is. It’s based on my working conditions, the tests I can afford, HEPA filters I know how to buy and can pay for and vaccines abundant in the country where I live.

My household may be the exception, not the norm.

When the pandemic is finally over, what will remain is not only 800,000 or more Americans dead but also a country too riven to appreciate our survival and a world where even the more privileged are surrounded by avoidable death and suffering.

In her book “March of Folly,” the historian Barbara Tuchman describes civilizations that collapsed not because of insurmountable challenges but because “wooden-headedness” took over: Those in charge were unable to muster the will and vision to make the necessary course corrections in the face of difficulties.

But that’s not the only possibility.

After the horrors of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression between them, there was rebuilding of democracies, including constructing a public sphere geared toward preventing the rise of fascism, an expanded safety net and great reductions in income inequality. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t what you’d guess would come next, looking at the smoldering ruins of 1945.

Arguably, it’s our successes that have lulled us. Few remember all that or what it was like to fear polio or smallpox. Covid-19 was a reminder that humanity’s upper hand on infectious diseases was an illusion.

Fixing all this requires an interconnected effort that unleashes a virtuous cycle. Rebuilding the public health infrastructure and creating a sane, sensible health care system in which we don’t keep spending more than any other developed nation for poorer results will help restore trust and improve our lives. Fair taxation policies would reduce income inequality and generate resources to execute these measures. We can investigate what went wrong, with an eye to actually fixing it instead of simply finding scapegoats. Regulation and oversight can better align the incentives of social media platforms with that of a healthier public sphere. We’ve done that before with transformative technologies.

There’s been significant underfunding of public health in the United States, along with other parts of our national infrastructure, but the problem is deeper than just lack of resources. Former officials frequently end up working for the very companies they oversaw, often helping them stave off regulation or acting as lobbyists writing laws to benefit their companies.

Many politicians from both parties are unwilling or incapable of reining in this process; it’s reasonable to assume that’s at least partly because they are cozy with powerful interests that help them get elected.

Beyond this bipartisan back-scratching, Republicans, who are particularly averse to regulatory oversight and strong government spending, currently wield power disproportionate to their share of voters. Cushioned from electoral accountability, some Republican politicians have taken an attitude toward the pandemic that borders on nihilism: whatever fuels or entrenches the tribal anger.

So necessary ambitions can likely be blocked by those in power who prioritize their short-term interests. Maybe they will think their wealth will let them live out their lives in compounds, isolated from the deterioration around them.

But they will soon realize that even a first-class ticket on the Titanic is still a ticket on the Titanic.

We need a new public spirit: more people willing to recognize things aren’t going to get better unless we fight for it. It’s not easy, but we have nothing to lose but a lot of wooden-headedness and the next catastrophic failure. If this path could be taken, we already have everything we need — wealth, science, technology, know-how. It might not mean the end of pandemics, but it could mean there’s not another one like this.

Lost Year

We all had a lost year and in that there were some major setbacks and for others major successes as they found new businesses, found new perspectives and thrived. For others there was the loss of employment, loss of a business, family members, illness and overall stress of coping through what has been like nothing we have ever experienced in living on earth and may never again.

I fall somewhere in the middle of how I feel about the year, there were times I thrived and others that the sensation of being trapped in my hamster cage has taken a toll. Of late it has been more about the endless weather, the cold the rain and it’s challenge on my willingness to look past it and do things that give me pleasure. But the sun is out, my second vaxx is done and in two weeks I will have 95% or so immunity. And yes folks we are going to need a booster as the Nurse I met yesterday believes that is the next step given what he knows about the longevity of the current one. With that he shared his story of working in Miami during the peak of the pandemic. Shocking or not, the hospital he was at disregarded much of the protocols in place, including masks and distancing, and a seeming amusement over the hyper-vigilence that was demanded over care. This of course contradicts what was read in the papers but also was illustrated by the behaviors in the street by residents and visitors alike, so I suspect that his experience was in fact true and again much of a reflection of the overall composition of life in Florida, pandemic or not. Florida, the State of Idiocy should be its tourism slogan. (Trump, Gaetz and others who live there says it all) And as we enter the era of vaccines we are seeing true problems in Michigan and there the Governor has elected to not change the move forward, and do you blame her as the last time she mandated a lockdown a group of Militia crackpots planned to kidnap her. California is also doing so, as Newsom is pending a recall and the reality is that across the country there is little support for going back to the quarantine mentality that frankly did nothing from changing the course of the virus. Everywhere across the globe has found themselves dancing that ever changing seesaw where numbers decline during a lockdown only to rise again once lifted. So in other words we are right where we are in the beginning only now we have vaccines. With a mass vaccination program the reality is then the virus can actually be studied, tracked and traced in real time environments instead of theoretical ones. I recall in the beginning so many absurd studies, beliefs and other theories that have been either rescinded or ignored as time passed. Whatever happened to the South Korea restaurant where a person sitting 27 feet away contracted the virus from a positive patron. Or the gyms that were studied in July with maskless trainers and clients in a high intensity classes? Has that been studied since now gyms have begun to increase capacity? Then the Covid Theater of package transmission that only just was retracted by the CDC. I recall Fauci endorsing that despite the man having the credentials he possesses advocating such idiocy. But then again I had long thought he and the CDC under the leadership team of Evangelicals are not ones to follow. I turned to many other sources of information and used them to guide and inform me with regards to my behavior and safety. But then again I have the time and the desire for knowledge and truth. Funny that Governors and Presidents seemed to not do so and often disregarded and ignored many public health professionals who may have found better ways to manage the way the disease was tested, tracked, traced and isolated. They chose to go their own way and in a haphazard chaos was the result. It shows itself again with vaccine distribution and opening of industry. We are still very fucked folks .

So the lost year is another phrase that is used to demonize, demoralize Teachers and Students as if any of the efforts made to work with kids online to educate and accommodate the demands of families to meet their expectations and hopes to further them along the ladder. Well like the public health issues we found that we are also drastically underfunded when it comes to public education. Supplies are non-existent, consistency in leadership and organization when it comes to moving quickly into a new manner of business is not lost. Like Hospitals overrun and ill prepared to handle a new virus from PPE to treatment, our schools quickly had to become online facilities and still provide the services that a physical entity provides – from food to books/computers. And with that open and close doors as if it was a revolving one to meet the arbitrary and ever changing metrics of what defines risk. Private schools never did and does that make them better or just different because families pay money in which to make sure that they have all they need. Just like private hospitals. You get what you pay for in America when it comes to health and education. And that lost year will also be one of debate for it will be as unequal as our economy is.

To understand how or why medical care was the true reason we were forced into lockdown versus the endless competing models of expected deaths should we not, read ProPublica’s article on these front line EMT workers and how broken that line is. You will see hospitals without oxygen, space and staff able to care for the numbers that came and keep coming despite lockdown. So did quarantine accomplish what we heard endlessly, “slowing the curve”. I it did only partially as we have come to realize that we are not being told the correct numbers and demographic breakdowns of the victims. We know Nursing Homes, Hospital workers, Meat processors, usually essential workers, and others trapped in poorly ventilated confined working spaces. Every story I hear of a wealthy person contracting Covid they seem to not know how they got it but they recovered. Access and availability to early care may be the reason. Again we don’t understand the virus but we know it is prolonged exposure usually low ventilation. So are you really going to enter a restaurant or a gym when we know that they are the lowest to fix that issue. I went repeatedly to Home Depot a large space, with fewer customers and well I am fine. Without contact tracking and tracing we cannot know if the workers and customers there were exposed there or from another family member who worked at the Grocery Store and they brought it home and passed it onto other workers/customers. So here is the plan we won’t test them every day/week and monitor them as a test/lab case and then just hope people do their own version of it. That is not working out. Hunting something invisible is impossible without a big team and commitment. So why not have staggered work times, better health care and paid leave when sick. Try that one.

Which also brings me to the lost year for women. It will undoubtedly affect women in ways we will see in decades to come. The career and education loss is already begun. Despite that it was a woman, Kari Kariko, behind the RNA use in vaccines, she spent years trying to fund and support her theories and without a “beard” to help get this work done we may be still in lockdown. So go figure it would be a woman, but she is like many Scientists of that same gender who will be further marginalized in their work despite it all. And that is crossing the lines of all professions, white, blue or pink.

And lastly to vaccines itself. The Johnson & Johnson pause is not in response to the six blood clots, no, it is because of the scandal at the lab contracted to manufacture their vaccine. Had the New York Times not exposed the endless errors of a facility known to be shoddy, the lack of training and clear oversight I am sure the vaccine side effects would have been passed over. The sheer number of percent of those with the side effect versus the number of vaccines given, again is a confusing thing with folks, like Covid, where there is less than 10% of cases making it to ICU’s. But that is a big number when there are 1000’s of cases and just 100 overwhelm a poorly equipped ER. Did I say we are still fucked?

With that we have the issue of race and class. I am done with my rounds of shots. I am pushy and aggressive and of course lied. I learned early on to do that with this bullshit. My neighbor who I talked into getting one called the City hotline was honest and was declined. Her co-worker shamed her, she called Walgreen’s and lied and was given one that afternoon. They cannot ask for medical records, did we not learn anything here people? This is an honor system and I have long lost my honor with this. I talked another friend into a shot and he got it the next day as I found the loophole that anyone working in “essential” services regardless of where they live gets one. He lives in New York but works here, was shot up the next day. And the last was the young Black man who was my Barista. I have spoken about him and walked out on that one. And I read this editorial in The New York Times and the reality is that this is America, where lies, conspiracy’s and cabals rule the thoughts of many regardless of color. We love our lies they make us feel superior or inferior.

Racism Makes Me Question Everything. I Got the Vaccine Anyway.

Surviving in an anti-Black society requires some personal negotiations. This was one of them.

By Damon Young

Mr. Young is a contributing opinion writer and the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays.”

April 9, 2021

Last summer, when Covid-19 vaccines were in development, friends on text threads and Zoom calls asked if I’d get one. My response was always the same: Sure, I’ll be right in line — after 100 million of y’all go first. I told them I’d seen too many zombie movies. But my hesitancy was actually grounded in a less cinematic reality: I just don’t trust America enough.

This mistrust comes from an awareness of the ubiquity of American anti-Blackness — a dynamic that can, um, modify your sense of reality. That’s what happened, for instance, with the persistent myth of Tommy Hilfiger’s racist comments.

In 1996, owning a Tommy Hilfiger shirt was everything to 17-year-old me. But a year later, I’d completely extracted Hilfiger fits from my rotation. Word had spread that Tommy Hilfiger, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, had complained about Black people wearing his clothes. The shirts, windbreakers and parka I owned were immediately relegated to the deepest parts of my closet.

Mr. Hilfiger never actually made those racist comments. In fact, he hadn’t even been a guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” when the rumors started. But the myth wouldn’t die because it felt so true that to question it felt like gaslighting your own Blackness. Of course this white man with aggressively preppy oxfords and an American flag aesthetic would believe that people like me sullied his brand. It just fit.

The same way, a story about Dorothy Dandridge and a pool just fits: As the urban legend goes, the movie star was visiting a hotel in Las Vegas in the 1950s, and she dipped a single toe into the all-white swimming pool. This so disgusted the hotel’s management that they drained the entire thing. This story, which was also depicted in the HBO biopic about her life, has never actually been confirmed. But to anyone familiar with the history of America’s relationship with its Black citizens, the anecdote is believable. Maybe it ain’t true, but it also ain’t exactly a lie.

To question whether this bottomless skepticism is justified is like asking whether a cow has cause to be wary of butchers. From redlining and gerrymandering to the Tuskegee experiment and Cointelpro, the proven conspiracies against Black Americans are so devious, so deep and so absurd that they blast open pathways for true-sounding non-truths to enter, too.

The terrible spoken word poems I wrote in college (“We’ll never get justice, because justice for just-us just-aint-for-us”) habitually referenced the so-called Willie Lynch letter — an instruction manual for controlling Black slaves that I, along with many others, believed was written by a slave owner in 1712 and contained deep insights into modern race relations. The truth: Willie Lynch never existed and the document was forged. I believed that the government conspired to track my thoughts and movements — as if my flaccid stanzas and banded collar Wilsons Leather biker jackets were a threat to the state. I even once allowed myself to entertain an argument that the natural color of milk is not white, but brown. (Don’t ask.)

The term “hotep” has become a catchall among Black people to describe other Black people who still believe some of these easily debunked stories — but the reality is that most of us have some hotep in us. And not because we don’t know how America really works, but because we know too much. The lack of trust in our nation’s systems and structures is a force field; a bulwark shielding us from the lie of the American dream. And nowhere is this skepticism more justified than with the institution of medicine.

I don’t trust doctors, nurses, physician assistants, hospitals, emergency rooms, waiting rooms, surgeries, prescriptions, X-rays, MRIs, medical bills, insurance companies or even the food from hospital cafeterias. My awareness of the pronounced racial disparities in our health care system strips me of any confidence I would have otherwise had in it. As critics of a recent Saturday Night Live skit suggesting that Black people are illogically set against getting vaccinated pointed out, the vaccine hesitancy isn’t due to some uniquely Black pathology. It’s a direct response to centuries of anecdote, experience and data. (Also, the demographic among the least likely to get a vaccine? White evangelicals.)

Despite all this, in March, I stood in a long line to receive my first dose of a vaccine to prevent me from becoming seriously ill from a virus that I had no idea even existed 14 months ago.

My journey from “I don’t even eat hospital pizza” to “voluntary Pfizer guinea pig” is complicated, but not singular. Existing in America while Black requires a ceaseless assemblage of negotiations and compromises. Even while recognizing the anti-Blackness embedded in society, participation is still necessary to survive.

For instance, I am dubious that American schools are able to sufficiently nurture and prepare Black children for 21st-century life. But my interest in home-schooling my kids is the same as my interest in letting them attend school on Neptune. So my compromise is to allow them to attend school, but then to also fortify them with as many academic, social, and political supplements as possible.

Sometimes the negotiation is just the choice to participate: My parents were two of the tens of thousands of Black victims in the subprime lending crisis. I watched them be evicted from their home after loan terms they just couldn’t meet kept multiplying. But when I was ready to buy a house, the gateway to homeownership was through those same banks.

The trust still isn’t there. Will never be there. But the negotiation that placed me in that vaccination line last month required me to weigh that distrust against all that I miss. I miss the year we just lost. I miss playing basketball. I miss watching it with my dad. I miss barbecues. Malls. Movie theaters. Restaurants. Cities other than Pittsburgh. I miss only needing to be hypervigilant about racism and gluten, and not whether the air inside of a Giant Eagle supermarket might kill me too. And I know other people miss their years and their hobbies and their dads and their homies. With the disproportionate havoc this plague has wreaked on Black and brown people, my desire to return to some semblance of normalcy and prevent more death is a force greater than my cynicism.

I’ve already begun to fantasize about the cookout I’ll host after I get my second shot, and each of my equally-suspicious-about-America family members and homies get their shots, and enough time has passed to feel safe gathering. Maybe we’ll laugh about how us seeing each other was only possible because we trusted an institution that has been pathologically untrustworthy. Or maybe we won’t. Because that’s not actually funny.

Covid Chronicles – The Holiday Edition

With about two weeks left to Christmas and the inevitable third wave or fourth depending on who is counting.. again we had Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Thanksgiving. We we warned repeatedly during each to stay long and distant and while Covid spiked in some places it declined in others and round and round we went bringing us all back to ground zero with the same hysterical warnings, the same threats, the increasing numbers of hospitalizations and deaths which have never stopped while all the world’s a stage and we are all players in this macabre scenario that reminds me of the Jerry Lewis telethon of my youth, with the never ending pleading, begging, and tears just to remember the ones being lost to a disease that could be cured. That is what we need America, a COVID telethon! Dolly Parton would be the perfect host as she is already a winner in the Covid Chronicles donating a cool Million to Vanderbilt one of the hospitals working with Big Pharma on the vaccine.

And that is where we are America the roll out of vaccine number one to hot spots in America. Undoubtedly Jared Kushner who really showed his talents and gifts for crisis management during the nascent days with the PPE and Ventilator distribution issues will perhaps hopefully take a backseat on this one and let professionals take over to distribute the drugs to those in need. Remember those days with naval ships arriving in ports, field hospitals being erected in convention centers and the charity tents in public parks? Good times folks as those numbers of cases handled and the outcomes are still in question and the costs have yet to be fully explained on how and why many hospitals remained under utilized while others were maxed out with portable tents in parking lots and refrigerator trucks for the dead left on side streets by dumpsters which became a rather significant marker to explain how we were handling Covid in Phase One.

We have had several months to improve and centralize communications, to figure out how to educate and operate schools, how to handle crowd control and compliance and yet we have done fuck all nothing other than posture and threaten. It is working out great, or not.

The issues of self responsibility continue as now violence has begun on the streets over the failed re-election of the Dr. Frankenstein who has no interest in the continuing crisis and once again Governors are assuming control, co-opting Igor for their own agenda and like the media whore he is he simply pipes in supportive yet cautious remarks which mean nothing except to remind everyone to mask up. I recall that same messaging from him back in the 80’s, no love without a glove or something like that. While I do respect Fauci I feel he is not who we need to reach a younger and more diverse audience especially faces of color and those who are not well into Science. This has been another of the more insidious issues using Fauci and Birx two white Seniors to somehow communicate to the Tik Tok age and find a voice in those larger at-risk groups that are not old folks. Fauci’s recent affirmation with Big Daddy Bully Cuomo to close restaurants with no data to back this up is again another issue across the country in California that evoked the same mandate. There is so little real contact tracing and tracking that few believe indoor dining is the cause and reason behind the uptick when the last stat mentioned by Cuomo was that 76% of the cases were tied to “small gatherings.” Okay so they were where? Homes or in a public place or again the big perp – Churches – where they can no longer mandate closures on thanks to the Supreme Court. Again, here is where religious leaders would be an effective messengers to talk to those about how one can still be a participant in a religious community without the need to congregate in a specific place. But nope, crickets.

So we can keep schools open despite the fact that few educators wish to keep open but the consultants and policy wonks and those parents who hate caring for their kids see otherwise. The constant citing of statements like “falling behind” or the “lost generation” have been used to somehow validate that opening schools and allowing full attendance is the key to something, that something again seems economic in value and not about health and safety of those who work inside said buildings, you know the Teachers and Admins as well as all the other back of the house players who keep schools operating. You know that village thing.

I have always thought it was odd that the only data we ever hear are the positive cases, the number of hospitalizations and deaths. We have no idea how many are tested a day, what the status of thier case was/is and the number of recovered. Europe does provide that but even ages, gender race are not given. If we had a robust contract tracking and tracing we would but we don’t. Jared get on that you must have time on your hands.

The overwhelming failure by our Government be it on the Federal or State level is quite clear and it is why there is little compliance and at times sheer confusion as to what the current protocol is to be on a daily basis with now the incoming Administration adding their two cents further confusing and infuriating the Trumptards.

As for the media they do their best to further lend a voice not needed to the din with their endless stating conflicting studies and data that have not been vetted and tested to the level that should be before reporting. Facts matter and the most bizarre story was one in The Washington Post about South Korea finding a patron who contracted Covid in a restaurant with limited exposure of a scant 5 minutes from another seated over 23 feet away. Really? Of course that story was a rewrite of an LA Times story. No mention in either about possible extenuating circumstances or full examination of the strain verifying it through DNA testing and complete tracking/tracing of all the participants movements, their exposures to others? Wow that South Korea is amazing that is K Pop level shit right there. Or not. The article had no South Korean sources other than a person NOT involved in the study.. okay then. As for the American scientists and doctors contacted had doubt, one saying this:

“The problem that you tend to have is one of missing information,” says Richard Martinello, an associate professor at Yale School of Medicine and a specialist in adult and pediatric infectious diseases.“They may know well what happened within that restaurant,” Martinello adds, “but they don’t know what happened on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. They don’t know what happened back in the kitchen at the restaurant. There are so many other aspects,” including the fact that one in five people infected with the coronavirus will experience no symptoms, but may still spread the virus. But then again there is a story there that will scare the shit out of everyone and in turn validate the latest round of closing just restaurants, but not anything else. I see said the reporter who upon examining his credentials I see his was one with regards to restaurant reviews not science or foreign reporting including failing to list the CDC’s findings on indoor dining. Good job, I like BimBap too!

And if you question any of this you are labeled “histrionic” as that is the man’s way of saying to a woman, “I don’t like what you have to say, it confuses me.” Ah yes my menses is the problem, shame I don’t have menses anymore. The lack of true effective communication is a bigger problem than Covid at this point and it contributes to why few are truly grasping the urgency. And that many rely upon “social” media for information, shame that social distancing can’t be applied to that as well.

I read this report in of all things USA Today about the failures of the U.S. Government from the very early stages of this disease and how the haphazard manner of coordination and control led to what we are now dealing with. There is no way of knowing if better management could of stopped or offset this entirely but there are valid issues surrounding the death toll that clearly is related to this issue.

This says it all:

The virus shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on the United States. The world’s most powerful nation, historically among the most successful at stymieing infectious illnesses, had ample lead time during which the deadly pandemic was rampaging through Asia, and then Europe.

But in an early vacuum of leadership at almost every government level, with the message from the White House that the virus was not anything to worry about, Americans unwittingly spread the lethal virus to loved ones and strangers alike.

The U.S. squandered its early advantage. Roughly one year after the virus first came into existence, the country has suffered a loss of life far worse than any other.

I have written much about Covid and kept up with many studies, theories and stories about the virus, its transmission and the issues about vaccines and efficacy. I am over Fauci but I have been for a long time frankly and would like to see new faces (not celebrities there Cuomo but actual medical professionals) who could message more effectively than another aging white man, second wave fast approaching, January 20th. I also would like real information, better and more comprehensive data in which to understand the who/what/where/when/why. Shouting out numbers like I am in Vegas is not working for me and it is not improving my histrionics in the least. There is no cure for that apparently either.

The Bullshit Factor

The endless screed of media and politicians have done a great job of burying facts with bullshit over the last few months.  Again this is a blood borne sort of kind of disease. Meaning you will have to come into close contact with someone to contract the Covid virus and that could be on a plane, touching the same surfaces, interacting with a sick person via numerous locations such as a hospital, work or public transport.  That one catches varying illnesses way.. that said this passes from 1 to 2 to 3 versus the convention flu 1 to 1.   And the long term health issues are more serious.

This week the highlight reel is on the serology tests of those who have antibodies present in their blood meaning that they ‘had’ Covid.  Again I to my recollection have had nothing so let me go into a test and see what is what.  And again we sill do not know what the rate for those testing pos with no symptoms or even those testing negative are in fact reverse and the margin of error on those.

I am exhausted about the subject and for the reality there is no blanket on how to handle this issue as rural less populated areas versus high density urban areas do no need to follow the same protocol lockdown, shelter in place that is being done in New York City. Now they are not exempt and they have their own issues with lack of hospitals, medical care available that can make situations worse but we are comparing apples to oranges.  So when you have a rural community in Georgia opening is one thing versus Atlanta with a major hub in the backyard.   And that also goes for bedroom communities outside major cities that have their own needs and often are communities of non-secular nature that do not follow any mainstream political orders as we have learned here from the Orthodox community but they do work, commute into the city.  Again its complicated and no Scientist can take into account each and every variable when coming up with a model.  Nate Silver has been quite clear on that so you are responsible for ultimately yourself.

Science works on the unknown and Politicians work on the known and they don’t work well together at all.  So again the nightly lottery numbers come in and like the roulette wheel bet on black when all the dealer spins is red.  You will never win.

‘There is no absolute truth’: an infectious disease expert on Covid-19, misinformation and ‘bullshit’

Carl Bergstrom’s two disparate areas of expertise merged as reports of a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in January

Julia Carrie Wong in Oakland
The Guardian
Tue 28 Apr 2020

Carl Bergstrom is uniquely suited to understanding the current moment. A professor of biology at the University of Washington, he has spent his career studying two seemingly disparate topics: emerging infectious diseases and networked misinformation. They merged into one the moment reports of a mysterious respiratory illness emerged from China in January.

The coronavirus touched off both a pandemic and an “infodemic” of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, honest misunderstandings and politicized scientific debates. Bergstrom has jumped into the fray, helping the public and the press navigate the world of epidemiological models, statistical uncertainty and the topic of his forthcoming book: bullshit.

You’ve been teaching a course and have co-written a book about the concept of bullshit. Explain what you mean by bullshit?

The formal definition that we use is “language, statistical figures, data, graphics and other forms of presentation that are intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener with a blatant disregard for truth or logical coherence”.

The idea with bullshit is that it’s trying to appear authoritative and definitive in a way that’s not about communicating accurately and informing a reader, but rather by overwhelming them, persuading them, impressing them. If that’s done without any allegiance to truth, or accuracy, that becomes bullshit.

The idea with bullshit is that it’s trying to appear authoritative and definitive in a way that’s not about communicating accurately and informing a reader

We’re all used to verbal bullshit. We’re all used to campaign promises and weasel words, and we’re pretty good at seeing through that because we’ve had a lot of practice. But as the world has become increasingly quantified and the currency of arguments has become statistics, facts and figures and models and such, we’re increasingly confronted, even in the popular press, with numerical and statistical arguments. And this area’s really ripe for bullshit, because people don’t feel qualified to question information that’s given to them in quantitative form.

Are there bullshit narratives about the coronavirus that you are concerned about right now?

What’s happened with this pandemic that we’re not accustomed to in the epidemiology community is that it’s been really heavily politicized. Even when scientists are very well-intentioned and not trying to support any side of the narrative, when they do work and release a paper it gets picked up by actors with political agendas.

Whether it’s talking about seroprevalence or estimating the chance that this is even going to come to the United States at all each study gets picked up and placed into this little political box and sort of used as a cudgel to beat the other side with.

So even when the material isn’t being produced as bullshit, it’s being picked up and used in the service of that by overstating its claims, by cherry-picking the information that’s out there and so on. And I think that’s kind of the biggest problem that we’re facing.

One example [of intentional bullshit] might be this insistence for a while on graphing the number of cases on a per-capita basis, so that people could say the US response is so much better than the rest of the world because we have a slower rate of growth per capita. That was basically graphical malfeasance or bullshit. When a wildfire starts spreading, you’re interested in how it’s spreading now, not whether it’s spreading in a 100-acre wood or millions of square miles of national forest.

Is there one big lesson that you think that the media should keep in mind as we communicate science to the public? What mistakes are we making?

I think the media has been adjusting really fast and doing really well. When I’m talking about how to avoid misinformation around this I’m constantly telling people to trust the professional fact-based media. Rather than looking for the latest rumor that’s spreading across Facebook or Twitter so that you can have information up to the hour, recognize that it’s much better to have solidly sourced, well-vetted information from yesterday.

Hyper-partisan media are making a huge mess of this, but that’s on purpose. They’ve got a reason to promote hydroxychloroquine or whatever it is and just run with that. They’re not even trying to be responsible.

***But one of the biggest things that people [in the media] could do to improve would be to recognize that scientific studies, especially in a fast-moving situation like this, are provisional. That’s the nature of science. Anything can be corrected. There’s no absolute truth there. Each model, each finding is just adding to a weight of evidence in one direction or another.****

A lot of the reporting is focusing on models, and most of us probably don’t have any basic training in how to read them or what kind of credence to put in them. What should we know?

The key thing, and this goes for scientists as well as non-scientists, is that people are not doing a very good job thinking about what the purpose of different models are, how the purposes of different models vary, and then what the scope of their value is. When these models get treated as if they’re oracles, then people both over-rely on them and treat them too seriously – and then turn around and slam them too hard for not being perfect at everything.

Are there mistakes that are made by people in the scientific community when it comes to communicating with the public?

We’re trying to communicate as a scientific community in a new way, where people are posting their data in real time. But we weren’t ready for the degree to which that stuff would be picked up and assigned meaning in this highly politically polarized environment. Work that might be fairly easy for researchers to contextualize in the field can be portrayed as something very, very different in the popular press.

The first Imperial College model in March was predicting 1.1 million to 2.2 million American deaths if the pandemic were not controlled. That’s a really scary, dramatic story, and I still think that it’s not unrealistic. That got promoted by one side of the partisan divide. Then Imperial came back and modeled a completely different scenario, where the disease was actually brought under control and suppressed in the US, and they released a subsequent model that said, ‘If we do this, something like 50,000 deaths will occur.’ That was picked up by the other side and used to try to discredit the Imperial College team entirely by saying, ‘A couple of weeks ago they said a million now they’re saying 50,000; they can’t get anything right.’ And the answer , of course, is that they were modeling two different scenarios.

We’re also not doing enough of deliberately stressing the possible weaknesses of our interpretations. That varies enormously from researcher to researcher and team to team.

It requires a lot of discipline to argue really hard for something but also be scrupulously open about all of the weaknesses in your own argument.

But it’s more important than ever, right? A really good paper will lay out all the most persuasive evidence it can and then in the conclusion section or the discussion section say, ‘OK, here are all the reasons that this could be wrong and here are the weaknesses.’

When you have something that’s so directly policy relevant, and there’s a lot of lives at stake, we’re learning how to find the right balance.

It is a bit of a nightmare to put out data that is truthful, but also be aware that there are bad faith actors at the moment who might pounce on it and use it in a way you didn’t intend.

There’s a spectrum. You have outright bad faith actors – Russian propaganda picking up on things and bots spreading misinformation – and then you have someone like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp who I wouldn’t call a bad faith actor. He’s a misinformed actor.

There’s so much that goes unsaid in science in terms of context and what findings mean that we don’t usually write in papers. If someone does a mathematical forecasting model, you’re usually not going to have a half-page discussion on the limitations of forecasting. We’re used to writing for an audience of 50 people in the world, if we’re lucky, who have backgrounds that are very similar to our own and have a huge set of shared assumptions and shared knowledge. And it works really well when you’re writing on something that only 50 people in the world care about and all of them have comparable training, but it is a real mess when it becomes pressing, and I don’t think any of us have figured out exactly what to do about that because we’re also trying to work quickly and it’s important to get this information out.

One area that has already become contentious and in some ways politicized is the serology surveys, which are supposed to show what percentage of the population has antibodies to the virus. What are some of the big picture contextual caveats and limitations that we should keep in mind as these surveys come out?

The seroprevalence in the US is a political issue, and so the first thing is to recognize that when anyone is reporting on that stuff, there’s a political context to it. It may even be that some of the research is being done with an implicitly political context, depending on who the funders are or what the orientations and biases of some of the researchers.

It may even be that some of the research is being done with an implicitly political context, depending on who the funders are or what the orientations and biases of some of the researchers

On the scientific side, I think there’s really two things to think about. The first one is the issue of selection bias. You’re trying to draw a conclusion about one population by sampling from a subset of that population and you want to know how close to random your subset is with respect to the thing you’re trying to measure. The Santa Clara study recruited volunteers off of Facebook. The obvious source of sampling bias there is that people desperately want to get tested. The people that want it are, of course, people that think they’ve had it.

The other big piece is understanding the notion of positive predictive value and the way false positive and false negative error rates influence the estimate. And that depends on the incidence of infection in the population.

If you have a test that has a 3% error rate, and the incidence in the population is below 3%, then most of the positives that you get are going to be false positives. And so you’re not going to get a very tight estimate about how many people have it. This has been a real problem with the Santa Clara study. From my read of the paper, their data is actually consistent with nobody being infected. A New York City study on the other hand showed 21% seropositive, so even if there has a 3% error rate, the majority of those positives have to be true positives.

Now that we’ve all had a crash course in models and serosurveys, what are the other areas of science where it makes sense for the public to start getting educated on the terms of the debate?

One that I think will come along sooner or later is interpreting studies of treatments. We’ve dealt with that a little bit with the hydroxychloroquine business but not in any serious way because the hydroxychloroquine work has been pretty weak and the results have not been so positive.

But there are ongoing tests of a large range of existing drugs. And these studies are actually pretty hard to do. There’s a lot of subtle technical issues: what are you doing for controls? Is there a control arm at all? If not, how do you interpret the data? If there is a control arm, how is it structured? How do you control for the characteristics of the population on whom you’re using the drug or their selection biases in terms of who’s getting the drug?

Unfortunately, given what we’ve already seen with hydroxychloroquine, it’s fairly likely that this will be politicized as well. There’ll be a parallel set of issues that are going to come around with vaccination, but that’s more like a year off.

If you had the ability to arm every person with one tool – a statistical tool or scientific concept – to help them understand and contextualize scientific information as we look to the future of this pandemic, what would it be?

I would like people to understand that there are interactions between the models we make, the science we do and the way that we behave. The models that we make influence the decisions that we take individually and as a society, which then feed back into the models and the models often don’t treat that part explicitly.

Once you put a model out there that then creates changes in behavior that pull you out of the domain that the model was trying to model in the first place. We have to be very attuned to that as we try to use the models for guiding policy.

That’s very interesting, and not what I expected you to say.

What did you expect?

That correlation does not imply causation.

That’s another very good one. Seasonality is a great example there. We’re trying a whole bunch of things at the same time. We’re throwing all kinds of possible solutions at this and lots of things are changing. It’s remarkable to me actually, that so many US states are seeing the epidemic curve decrease. And so there’s a bunch of possibilities there. It could be because people’s behavior is changing. There could be some seasonality there. And there are other possible explanations as well.

But what is really important is that just because the trend that you see is consistent with a story that someone’s selling, there may be many other stories that are also consistent, so inferring causality is dangerous.

Big Daddy

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams play, that character ran the home of the Pollit family with a hot temper whose ideas of being a man was his ability to procreate. Yes that is it the spilling of seed and establishing progeny whom to abuse but maintain the tribe. And with that Alpha male type there is no wrong, they are never wrong and everyone else is.  This is our current political climate we have Big Daddies pulling out their dicks to see whose biggest.  It is exhausting just have a circle jerk and be done with it.

And right now in the dark of night these same daddies are closing schools, day cares, trying to stop abortions and access to “non essential” health care meaning birth control and other sexually related care such as transmission of sexually transmitted disease.  I suspect many unplanned pregnancies will result add to that non consensual sex.  Add to this the calls about Domestic Violence have declined but that is because there is no message nor safe space to actually do as such. Then we have child abuse as children are locked in spaces with no outlet for energy and of course endless other warnings and scolds to ensure compliance against the unknown.  Its working out great!

Doubt is essential for science – but for politicians, it’s a sign of weakness
Jim Al-Khalili

People are searching for certainty about coronavirus, and that’s the opposite of what leads to scientific breakthroughs

Guardian
Tue 21 Apr 2020

As a regular Twitter user, I choose the people and organisations I follow online carefully. And therein lies my problem. On social media, we are more likely to engage with and trust content that aligns with our views, and thus become saturated by opinions we already agree with. Some of these views are based on political or religious ideologies, others on the flimsiest of evidence or the most superficial and unreliable of information. Against this backdrop of conflicting ideas and polarised worldviews, we’re now being asked to trust in science – and scientists – like never before.

During the coronavirus crisis, everyone online seems to have a “scientific” opinion. We are all discussing modelling, exponential curves, infection rates and antibody tests; suddenly, we’re all experts on epidemiology, immunology and virology. When the public hears that new scientific evidence has informed a sudden change in government policy, the tendency is to conclude that the scientists don’t know what they’re doing, and therefore can’t be trusted. It doesn’t help that politicians are remarkably bad at communicating scientific information clearly and transparently, while journalists are often more adept at asking questions of politicians than they are of scientists.

It has never been more important to communicate the way science works. In politics, admitting a mistake is seen as a form of weakness. It’s quite the opposite in science, where making mistakes is a cornerstone of knowledge. Replacing old theories and hypotheses with newer, more accurate ones allows us to gain a deeper understanding of a subject. In the meantime, we develop mathematical models and make predictions based on data and available evidence. With something as new as this coronavirus, we started with a low baseline of knowledge. As we accumulate new data, our models and predictions will continue to evolve and improve.

A second important feature of the scientific method is valuing doubt over certainty. The notion of doubt is one worth exploring. We can trace its origins to a medieval intellectual movement, and to two individuals in particular, the Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) and the Persian scholar Razi (Rhazes). The movement was called al-shukuk in Arabic (meaning simply “the doubts”), and it refuted the wisdom inherited from Ancient Greek scholars more than 1,000 years earlier in subjects such as astronomy and medicine. Al-Haytham, an early advocate of the scientific method, cast doubts on the writing of the Hellenic astronomer Ptolemy, and suggested that one should question not only existing knowledge but also one’s own ideas – and be prepared to modify or overturn them in light of contradictory evidence. He overthrew the millennium-old idea that we can see things because our eyes shine light on objects, and gave the first correct explanation of the way vision works.

This approach still informs how we do science today. Indeed, this is how the scientific method differs from the stance of conspiracy theorists. Conspiracists will argue that, like scientists, they too are sceptics who question everything and value the importance of evidence. But in science, while we can be confident that our theories and descriptions of the world are correct, we can never be completely certain. After all, if an observation or new experimental result comes along and conflicts with an existing theory, we have to abandon our old presuppositions. In a very real sense, conspiracy theorists are the polar opposite of scientists; they assimilate evidence that contradicts their core beliefs, and interpret this evidence in a way that confirms, rather than repudiates, these beliefs.

Often, in the case of such ideological beliefs, we hear the term “cognitive dissonance”, whereby someone feels genuine mental discomfort when confronted with evidence that contradicts a view they hold. This can work to reinforce pre-existing beliefs. Ask a conspiracy theorist this: what would it take for them to change their minds? Their answer, because they are so utterly committed to their view, is likely to be that nothing would. In science, however, we learn to admit our mistakes and to change our minds to account for new evidence about the world.

This is crucial in the current pandemic. Clearly, the world cannot wait to learn everything about the virus before taking action; at the same time, stubborn adherence to a particular strategy despite new evidence to the contrary can be catastrophic. We must be prepared to shift our approach as more data is accumulated and our model predictions become more reliable. That is a strength, not a weakness of the scientific method.

I have spent my career stressing the importance of having a scientifically literate society. I don’t mean that everyone should be well-versed in cosmology or quantum physics, or understand the difference between RNA and DNA. But we should certainly all know the difference between bacteria and viruses. Even more importantly, if we are to get through this crisis, we must all have a basic understanding of how science works – and an acknowledgement that during a crisis like this, admitting doubt, rather than pretending certainty, can be a source of strength.

In Poker its called the Bluff

In the card game of poker, a bluff is a bet or raise made with a hand which is not thought to be the best hand. To bluff is to make such a bet. The objective of a bluff is to induce a fold by at least one opponent who holds a better hand. The size and frequency of a bluff determines its profitability to the bluffer

The winners in this hand will be the Tech sector as they were the targets until the virus hit and now these data miners that have deep recesses of info, have stepped up to provide “essential” services will now be the winners who take all in the next wave of whatever comes up on shore the next time.

America showed its soft underbelly of bleeding mass, it gave the world a glimpse into our weaknesses and paranoia, and in turn confirmed to Russia that we are just really bad at bluffing and game is over so turn your cards.   Thanks to Crazy Grandpa in Chief he has just turned his rallies into nightly propaganda speeches that have odd other professionals face palming, eye rolling and zieg heiling behind him to spare his wrath. What that fuck is that all about in a supposed Democracy that allows dissension.  Well no it doesn’t as we have curfews, house arrests and other tenets of martial law in place to ensure conformity and cooperation.   Ah yes wartime powers.

The reality is that we have no fucking clue what is happening and they are turning stadiums, conference centers and floating death ships into whatever they are turning into.  For a little info the country of Iceland tested a large percent of the population and found everyone is about 50% POS. Well they bathe naked together there, I should know and the food sucks, so this is not that exciting. What it means is that of that only a few were symptomatic and actually exhibited the full capabilities of the virus. WHAT you say!

Again we have no way of knowing how fast and furious this virus will travel, whom it will just crash for awhile and some who it will crash literally into.  We assume it was the old fucks and then again we are still alive so that moral panic button was pushed and now we are apparently the collateral damage in which to restart the economy.  Those death panels the Republicans feared are now the ones leading us into the showers.  Thanks I prefer a bath!

Again we are fucking leaderless, clueless and utterly abjectly alone here and well this whole personal responsibility thing takes on a whole new meaning as well Tennessee just coming out of the Tornado zone is now buying more guns which when the legislature returns can finish up that open carry law they were working on.  God I may be at ground zero but I am safer here.  There is no cure for crazy.

So I am again exhausted as I also wonder what will happen when the economy has to come back to those non-essential businesses, you know the Yoga Studios, Hair/Nail Salons, Dentists and of course the decimated restaurant industry.  Well this one should be fascinating as that will need a reset in ways that the SBA and the Chamber of Commerce’s will have to face and those faces will be a lot of colors and sexualities that normally don’t come to the meetings.

But America’s hand in the game has been played, no irony that Kenny Rogers folded his cards and left the table as you can only bluff so long. The Emperor wears no clothes.

The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff

Like Japan in the mid-1800s, the United States now faces a crisis that disproves everything the country believes about itself.

March 15, 2020
Anne Applebaum
Staff writer at The Atlantic

On July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy sailed into Tokyo Bay with two steamships and two sailing vessels under his command. He landed a squadron of heavily armed sailors and marines; he moved one of the ships ostentatiously up the harbor, so that more people could see it. He delivered a letter from President Millard Fillmore demanding that the Japanese open up their ports to American trade. As they left, Perry’s fleets fired their guns into the ether. In the port, people were terrified: “It sounded like distant thunder,” a contemporary diarist wrote at the time, “and the mountains echoed back the noise of the shots. This was so formidable that the people in Edo [modern Tokyo] were fearful.”

But the noise was not the only thing that frightened the Japanese. The Perry expedition famously convinced them that their political system was incapable of coping with new kinds of threats. Secure in their island homeland, the rulers of Japan had been convinced for decades of their cultural superiority. Japan was unique, special, the homeland of the gods. “Japan’s position, at the vertex of the earth, makes it the standard for the nations of the world,” the nationalist thinker Aizawa Seishisai wrote nearly three decades before Perry’s arrival. But the steamships and the guns changed all that. Suddenly, the Japanese realized that their culture, their political system, and their technology were out of date. Their samurai-warrior leaders and honor culture were not able to compete in a world dominated by science.

The coronavirus pandemic is in its early days. But the scale and force of the economic and medical crisis that is about to hit the United States may turn out to be as formidable as Perry’s famous voyage was. Two weeks ago—it already seems like an infinity—I was in Italy, writing about the first signs of the virus. Epidemics, I wrote, “have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.” This one has already done so, and with terrifying speed. What it reveals about the United States—not just this administration, but also our health-care system, our bureaucracy, our political system itself—should make Americans as fearful as the Japanese who heard the “distant thunder” of Perry’s guns.

Not everybody has yet realized this, and indeed, it will take some time, just as it has taken time for the nature of the virus to sink in. At the moment, many Americans are still convinced that, even in this crisis, our society is more capable than others. Quite a lot was written about the terrifying and reckless behavior of the authorities in Wuhan, China, who initially threatened doctors who began posting information about the new virus, forcing them into silence.

On the very day that one of those doctors, Li Wenliang, contracted the virus, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a statement declaring,“So far no infection [has been] found among medical staff, no proof of human-to-human transmission.” Only three weeks after the initial reports were posted did authorities begin to take the spread of the disease seriously, confirming that human-to-human transmission had in fact occurred. And only three days later did the lockdown of the city, and eventually the entire province, actually begin.

This story has been told repeatedly—and correctly—as an illustration of what’s wrong with the Chinese system: The secrecy and mania for control inside the Communist Party lost the government many days during which it could have put a better plan into place. But many of those recounting China’s missteps have become just a little bit too smug.

The United States also had an early warning of the new virus—but it, too, suppressed that information. In late January, just as instances of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, began to appear in the United States, an infectious-disease specialist in Seattle, Helen Y. Chu, realized that she had a way to monitor its presence. She had been collecting nasal swabs from people in and around Seattle as part of a flu study, and proposed checking them for the new virus. State and federal officials rejected that idea, citing privacy concerns and throwing up bureaucratic obstacles related to lab licenses.

Finally, at the end of February, Chu could stand the intransigence no longer. Her lab performed some tests and found the coronavirus in a local teenager who had not traveled overseas. That meant the disease was already spreading in the Seattle region among people who had never been abroad. If Chu had found this information a month earlier, lives might have been saved and the spread of the disease might have slowed—but even after the urgency of her work became evident, her lab was told to stop testing.

Chu was not threatened by the government, like Li had been in Wuhan. But she was just as effectively silenced by a rule-bound bureaucracy that was insufficiently worried about the pandemic—and by officials at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who may even have felt political pressure not to take this disease as seriously as they should.

For Chu was not alone. We all now know that COVID-19 diagnostic tests are in scarce supply. South Korea, which has had exactly the same amount of time as the U.S. to prepare, is capable of administering 10,000 tests every day. The United States, with a population more than six times larger, had only tested about 10,000 people in total as of Friday. Vietnam, a poor country, has tested more people than the United States. During congressional testimony on Thursday, Anthony Fauci, the most distinguished infectious-disease doctor in the nation, described the American testing system as “failing.” “The idea of anybody getting [tested] easily the way people in other countries are doing it? We’re not set up for that,” he said. “Do I think we should be? Yes, but we’re not.”

And why not? Once again, no officials from the Chinese Communist Party instructed anyone in the United States not to carry out testing. Nobody prevented American public officials from ordering the immediate production of a massive number of tests. Nevertheless, they did not. We don’t know all the details yet, but one element of the situation cannot be denied: The president himself did not want the disease talked of too widely, did not want knowledge of it to spread, and, above all, did not want the numbers of those infected to appear too high. He said so himself, while explaining why he didn’t want a cruise ship full of infected Americans to dock in California. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Donald Trump, just like the officials in Wuhan, was concerned about the numbers—the optics of how a pandemic looks. And everybody around him knew it. There are some indications that Alex Azar, the former pharmaceutical-industry executive and lobbyist who heads the Department of Health and Human Services, was not keen on telling the president things he did not want to hear. Here is how Dan Diamond, a Politico reporter who writes about health policy, delicately described the problem in a radio interview: “My understanding is [that Azar] did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear—the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.”

Without the threats and violence of the Chinese system, in other words, we have the same results: scientists not allowed to do their job; public-health officials not pushing for aggressive testing; preparedness delayed, all because too many people feared that it might damage the political prospects of the leader. I am not writing this in order to praise Chinese communism—far from it. I am writing this so that Americans understand that our government is producing some of the same outcomes as Chinese communism. This means that our political system is in far, far worse shape than we have hitherto understood.

What if it turns out, as it almost certainly will, that other nations are far better than we are at coping with this kind of catastrophe? Look at Singapore, which immediately created an app that could physically track everyone who was quarantined, and that energetically tracked down all the contacts of everyone identified to have the disease. Look at South Korea, with its proven testing ability. Look at Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel managed to speak honestly and openly about the disease—she predicted that 70 percent of Germans would get it—and yet did not crash the markets.

The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor. When human life is in peril, we are not as good as Singapore, as South Korea, as Germany. And the problem is not that we are behind technologically, as the Japanese were in 1853. The problem is that American bureaucracies, and the antiquated, hidebound, unloved federal government of which they are part, are no longer up to the job of coping with the kinds of challenges that face us in the 21st century. Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare—these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.

The failures of the moment can be partly ascribed to the loyalty culture that Trump himself has spent three years building in Washington. Only two weeks ago, he named his 29-year-old former bodyguard, a man who was previously fired from the White House for financial shenanigans, to head up a new personnel-vetting team. Its role is to ensure that only people certifiably loyal are allowed to work for the president. Trump also fired, ostentatiously, the officials who testified honestly during the impeachment hearings, an action that sends a signal to others about the danger of truth-telling.

These are only the most recent manifestations of an autocratic style that has been described, over and over again, by many people. And now we see why, exactly, that style is so dangerous, and why previous American presidents, of both political parties, have operated much differently. Within a loyalty cult, no one will tell the president that starting widespread emergency testing would be prudent, because anyone who does is at risk of losing the president’s favor, even of being fired. Not that it matters, because Trump has very few truth-tellers around him anymore. The kinds of people who would dare make the president angry have left the upper ranks of the Cabinet and the bureaucracy already.

But some of what we are seeing is unrelated to Trump. American dysfunction is also the result of our bifurcated health-care system, which is both the best in the world and the worst in the world, and is simply not geared up for any kind of collective national response. The present crisis is the result of decades of underinvestment in civil service, of undervaluing bureaucracy in public health and other areas, and, above all, of underrating the value of long-term planning.

Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness—issues that were at the top of everyone’s agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research. We will now benefit from them. But in recent years, the subjects fell out of the news. Senators, among them the vaunted Republican moderate Susan Collins of Maine, knocked “pandemic preparedness” out of spending bills. New flu epidemics didn’t scare people enough. More recently, Trump eliminated the officials responsible for international health from the National Security Council because this kind of subject didn’t interest him—or very many other people in Washington, really.

As a nation, we are not good at long-term planning, and no wonder: Our political system insists that every president be allowed to appoint thousands of new officials, including the kinds of officials who think about pandemics. Why is that necessary? Why can’t expertise be allowed to accumulate at the highest levels of agencies such as the CDC? I’ve written before about the problem of discontinuity in foreign policy: New presidents arrive and think they can have a “reset” with other nations, as if other nations are going to forget everything that happened before their arrival—as if we can cheerfully start all relationships from scratch. But the same is true on health, the environment, and other policy issues. Of course there should be new Cabinet members every four or eight years. But should all their deputies change? And their deputies’ deputies? And their deputies’ deputies’ deputies? Because that’s often how it works right now.

All of this happens on top of all the other familiar pathologies: the profound polarization; the merger of politics and entertainment; the loss of faith in democratic institutions; the blind eyes turned to corruption, white-collar crime, and money laundering; the growth of inequality; the conversion of social media and a part of the news media into for-profit vectors of disinformation. These are all part of the deep background to this crisis too.

The question, of course, is whether this crisis will shock us enough to change our ways. The Japanese did eventually react to Commodore Perry’s squadron of ships with something more than fear. They stopped talking about themselves as the vertex of the Earth. They overhauled their education system. They adopted Western scientific methods, reorganized their state, and created a modern bureaucracy. This massive change, known as the Meiji Restoration, is what brought Japan, for better or for worse, into the modern world. Naturally, the old samurai-warrior class fought back against it, bitterly and angrily.

But by then the new threat was so obvious that enough people got it, enough people understood that a national mobilization was necessary, enough people understood that things could not go on that way indefinitely. Could it happen here, too?

Weird Science

I have written a great deal about the junk science that dominates the criminal justice system but there are a great many scientific issues that I have also written about that make you go “hmmm” and in turn explain why some are utterly dismissive of science when they choose to.  Science is like breakfast food you can have it any way you want it and that explains why I rarely jump on any bandwagon now when it comes to the latest and greatest study.

Recently a study was released that said hugging dogs may be actually stressing them out. I suspect Garfield was behind this one. 

The the editorial in the New York Times yesterday about possibly not owning pets anymore as they are lonely and bored.   And yet repeatedly we are told about the long term health care benefits of owning a pet.   So either way one of us loses.

But the reality is that a lot of science and studies have come under fire for the very reasons Oliver mentions in this clip below.  And what it does to the real science is put it under a microscope and not in a good way. 

John Oliver explains why so much ‘science’ you read about is bogus

By Rachel Feltman The Washington Post May 9 2016

We at Speaking of Science do our best to deliver you solid, sound science reporting. And that means that we spend a lot of time telling you not to believe what you read about “science.” But just in case you haven’t been paying attention, comedian John Oliver — host of “Last Week Tonight” — is here to school you.

And if you don’t feel like laughing your butt off for the next 20 minutes, here’s a rundown:

1. A single study means basically nothing.

You may notice that we use a lot of phrases like “more research is needed to confirm” and “it’s hard to know for sure whether the researchers are right about” (and so on and so on). That’s because science isn’t some ironclad body of facts; it’s a method for testing hypotheses and coming to conclusions about them.

When scientists design an experiment, carry it out, have it reviewed by their peers and accepted for publication in a reputable journal, all we know is that they probably didn’t make their results up out of thin air. A lot of factors can influence the outcome of a study. The bigger the claim, the more skeptical you should be until other scientists — ones uninvolved in the first study — repeat the experiment and come back with the same results. Once we hit a critical mass of result reproduction, we might say that science has reached a consensus on something — the existence of human-driven climate change, for example.

(giphy)

 

This becomes especially dangerous when individual (read: meaningless) studies contradict the scientific consensus and get gobbled up by folks trying to confirm what they already believe to be true — that climate change isn’t real or that vaccines cause autism, for instance.
Look for phrases like “adds to a growing body of research” if you want to know that sweet, sweet science is for real.
2. Statistics can lie.

There’s this thing called a p-value that measures the strength of the evidence against the null hypothesis. In other words, it tests the significance of your data.

Let’s say you have a study testing a connection between eating chocolate and sleeping more than eight hours a night. When you take your group of test subjects and compare their chocolate eating habits to their sleep habits, you have to crunch some numbers to make sure that champion sleepers are actually more common in the chocolate scarfing group than they’d be in any random population sample. You also have to “control” for different variables to make sure those things aren’t controlling sleep (maybe kids eat more chocolate, and kids tend to sleep more), and all that statistical crunching gives you a measure of the significance of your results.

[Errors riddled 2015 study showing replication crisis in psychology research, scientists say]

But scientists can manipulate their sample sizes and analysis to get good p-values when they shouldn’t be getting them. That’s another reason why it’s so important to reproduce research ad-nauseam — to catch statistical trickery, intentional or otherwise.

3. The system isn’t set up to support good science.

(giphy)

 

All apologies to good scientists doing good science, but the fact of the matter is that scientists have to support their research funding and their own employment — and a lot of times, doing good science isn’t the best way to do that. Reproducing someone else’s work, while incredibly important, isn’t splashy or exciting. And these days, scientists know that making a splash in the media is almost as important as getting studies published in the first place. That means that reproduction falls by the wayside in favor of novel ideas. We love novel ideas, but they’re not particularly useful until other scientists copy them.

4. The media is bad and we should all feel bad.

Once upon a time when I was a wee science-writing babe, I actually wrote an academic thesis on how the media handles science. My big takeaway was that it’s like some hellish game of “telephone,” where results get more and more garbled as they trickle through the media. I can’t explain this any better than PhD Comics can, to be perfectly honest.

Now that I’ve been covering science for a few years, I have to amend my senior thesis a little bit: I used to think that bad, incorrect science reporting started with an outlet getting it a little wrong and everyone else following suit, building on that initial inaccuracy. But now I can confirm that even when you cross all your t’s, dot all your i’s and suck all of the wonder out of a scientific result by being really really clear on how little a study actually “proves,” someone somewhere will still publish a story saying drinking wine is as good as going to the gym and link to your article as a source.

And the truth is that anyone, myself included, is capable of getting too excited about a particular study, or not really understanding it, or using a headline that sets off a string of bad coverage and misunderstanding from those who didn’t read the whole article.

5. So what do we do?

Maybe stop getting your science news from outlets that keep saying “x causes z” — that should be a major red flag, because studies do not prove things like that or actually anything at all. But a lot of this comes down to common sense: Does something sound kind of crazy? If it does, you probably want to find out what experts outside of the study have to say about it. And if the coverage you’re reading or watching doesn’t provide it, take your business elsewhere.
In other news, I’ll be giving my first TODD Talk this July.

DNA What?

 This is a juicy case in that it is about forensic science and the close proximity of junk science in the collection and processing of evidence. Then we have age discrimination and I am adding here another layer of feminism and of course the idea of a bitch fight between women.

 Largely it has been women at the forefront of criminal lab scandals, there have been men but one wonders why in most criminal labs it seems to be the provenance of women and their fondness of junk science, duplicity and fraud when it comes to evidence tampering.  Just a thought.

Ex-Official Says Medical Examiner Forced Her Out Over DNA Technique
  By BENJAMIN WEISER and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
 FEB. 18, 2016

Marina Stajic, 66, served for nearly three decades as director of the Forensic Toxicology Laboratory of the medical examiner’s office. Credit Ramsay de Give for The New York Times

A former official of the New York City medical examiner’s office sued the city on Thursday, claiming that she had been forced from her job, in part, for raising questions about the office’s use of a novel form of DNA testing whose reliability had come under question.

The lawsuit is likely to add to a growing debate over the medical examiner’s aggressive use of new techniques to analyze trace samples of DNA, a practice that other public crime laboratories have shied away from because of concerns over reliability.   ** my note that this is similar to the debate in the infamous Making a Murderer case**

The former employee, Marina Stajic, 66, served for nearly three decades as director of the office’s Forensic Toxicology Laboratory, which conducts post-mortem examinations to determine the absence or presence of drugs, and what role they may have had in causing someone’s death.

But Dr. Stajic claimed in the lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, that she fell out of favor with her superiors because she had sought more transparency about the office’s research into the 

Dr. Barbara Sampson, the chief medical examiner. In the lawsuit, Dr. Stajic accuses Dr. Sampson and her deputies of engaging “in a pattern of firing, demoting and forcing the resignation” of senior managers in their 50s and older. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

The medical examiner’s office said on Thursday that it was “committed to fairness and providing the highest standards of service for the people of New York City.” It added that courts in all five boroughs had “recognized that our DNA techniques are reliable and generally accepted by the scientific community.”

The Law Department said “all the claims will be reviewed.”

The medical examiner’s office, which performs about 5,500 autopsies each year, has long been hailed for being at the forefront in forensic techniques, notably for its role in identifying human remains in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and for its efforts to go back and identify some of the anonymous dead in the city’s potter’s field.

The office has also developed novel techniques and procedures for analyzing trace quantities of DNA left on touched objects, such as a handgun passed among several people. While the office has said it can reliably discern DNA profiles from such samples, often referred to as low copy number DNA, other scientists have said they are doubtful that the results should ever be introduced in the courtroom.

Such critics say that while DNA profiles analyzed from a drop of blood or a semen stain are the gold standard of forensic evidence, the low copy number method involves too much subjectivity and even guessing, and could lead to wrongful convictions.

The city medical examiner’s office is the only public DNA laboratory in the country that uses the method in criminal cases, the lawsuit says.

The debate over the technique has played out in courtrooms in New York and also on a state forensic science commission, which regulates crime laboratories and has a broad mandate of quality control.

Dr. Stajic served as a member of the commission from 2004 until last December, the lawsuit says.

It was in her role on the commission in 2014, the lawsuit says, that she became one of only a few members who voted to require the medical examiner’s office to make public an internal study regarding the validity of the testing technique, a vote that did not pass.

Her position aligned her with the few criminal defense lawyers who were also on the commission, but it put her at odds with her bosses at the medical examiner’s office, the lawsuit says.

It says that Dr. Barbara Sampson, the chief medical examiner, was unhappy with her vote. In April 2015, the lawsuit says, Dr. Stajic was told that she would be dismissed unless she resigned. She submitted her retirement papers that month, the suit says.

Her lawyers, Kevin Mintzer and Daniel L. Alterman, said in a statement that their client “was forced out of her job because of principled positions she took” on the commission.

In a brief phone interview this week, Dr. Stajic said: “I think it’s a dangerous precedent when people are expressing their honest opinion and they are compelled to resign or retire because of that.”

The lawsuit also charges that age was a factor in the decision to dismiss her. In the lawsuit, Dr. Stajic accuses Dr. Sampson and her deputies of engaging “in a pattern of firing, demoting and forcing the resignation” of senior managers in their 50s and older.

Dr. Stajic, who has a Ph.D. in forensic toxicology, has long been prominent in her field, the lawsuit says. A past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, it notes, she was also the author or co-author of more than 50 scientific articles.

Follow Your Path

Today is Christmas and you may be Christian or Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, et al. And regardless of your religion and belief it is a holiday and to me Merry Christmas is just that, a greeting associated with a day designated as a holiday. What one does with that holiday is of personal preference and a matter of choice or maybe obligation.

I have been alone now a decade over the holidays and there are times when I am fine with it and times when I wish I had someone to share an eggnog with. And no that does not mean romance it means just camraderie, frienship or simply a connection other than genetic obligations.  I have no family so the DNA lines are well drawn.  As an only child of much older parents I know of my mother’s relatives in Australia, a very tangential relationship as I am unsure how we are related frankly and it has been over 25 years since I have seen or spoken to them.  A fraternal cousin may exist but again not one to whom I have spoken in years.  I saw her at a voters line in 2008 and I went out of my way to avoid contact, so saying I am family oriented would be a misnomer. 

Having been married, the emphasis on been, I tried to appreciate family and the traditions that it brings but I am a loner.  Once you realize that you know that being alone is a state of choice and you learn to accept it.  But at times, yes you do get lonely, but trusting people is no longer part of my retinue, as I learned the hard way in 2008, to say I loathe and distrust most would be insufficient. 

But I still embrace faith and tradition. I no longer attend Church as again that puts me into the obligation of community and I truly can say with meaning that I hate living in this community with deep seated passion and my reasons are valid, as mentioned above.  So as I wait for the clock to tick toward moving day I still do what I find part of holidays and traditions – such as the Nutrcracker ballet, the Christmas movie premiere (this year it was Carol) and a dinner that I plan for 3 days and enjoy as it it was a family buffet.  I have gone back to listening to the Pope’s address as the new Pope is not the same as the old Pope and to that I can say thank God!   

Wether you be a person of faith or one who calls yourself spiritual or simply just alive and human there needs to be more than one day to remind oneself as to why or what the idea behind Christmas was intended.  I read this editorial today in the New York Times and thought it made some salient points and then I read this article below about who was Jesus and the idea of his birth.  I laughed, as right before spring break Easter was approaching, and in a science class I deviated from the lesson to discuss the advent of spring and what that meant.

 In that discussion I mentioned the history behind Easter, its pagan and German roots that gave us Christmas, St. Nick and their own Krampus as all part of what comprises traditions.   And in turn when Christianity appropriated both Christmas and Easter, we have no way of actually knowing what is fact or fiction as there were some lack of data needed to ensure that these dates are accurate and given that the calendar of the time was not the same as ours, highly unlikely but it doesn’t change that we still follow traditions  So it should not matter when or if you choose to honor or not the dates that is entirely a choice and again the idea that science is often as imperfect but is the one reliance on which we do use to make decisions – both good, bad or indifferent.  For even science is not perfect but it does offer ways to validate and test theories of all kinds and which we can choose to in the same way accept and believe or not.  That is what it means to have freedom of choice.  

This is sort of a circular lesson but we can teach about religion in public schools and that is a good way to introduce some of the notions of civics and even science as it has a place in faith.  It also allows the opportunity to talk about others and we have to respect that we have many who don’t believe in the same things, the same ideas and that doesn’t make the person or the ideas wrong or right, they are just beliefs as we have and that is what leads us to science to test those beliefs and sometimes we just have to go on faith.    And on that I still have faith in a God and in Mankind despite what has been done to me by the hand of one, the other lifted me up from that and so on that I believe.  

Follow your path and make your own journey. But realize we are all on this path together so we need to make room for all those who crowd along us. 

Merry Christmas.

Why is Christmas on Dec. 25? A brief history lesson that may surprise you.
By Valerie Strauss
The Washington Post
 December 25 2015

I published this last year, but, given that it’s Christmas, it seems like a good day to do it again:

Christmas is on Dec. 25, but it wasn’t always.

Dec. 25 is not the date mentioned in the Bible as the day of Jesus’s birth; the Bible is actually silent on the day or the time of year when Mary was said to have given birth to him in Bethlehem. The earliest Christians did not celebrate his birth.

As a result, there are a number of different accounts as to how and when Dec. 25 became known as Jesus’s birthday.

By most accounts, the birth was first thought — in around 200 A.D. — to have taken place on Jan. 6. Why? Nobody knows, but it may have been the result of “a calculation based on an assumed date of crucifixion of April 6 coupled with the ancient belief that prophets died on the same day as their conception,” according to religionfacts.com. By the mid-fourth century, the birthday celebration had been moved to Dec. 25. Who made the decision? Some accounts say it was the pope; others say it wasn’t.

One of the prevalent theories on why Christmas is celebrated on Dec. 25 was spelled out in “The Golden Bough,” a highly influential 19th-century comparative study of religion and mythology written by the anthropologist James George Frazer and originally published in 1890. (The first edition was titled “The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion”; the second edition was called “The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.” By the third printing, in the early 20th century, it was published in 12 volumes, though there are abridged one-volume versions.)

Frazer approached the topic of religion from a cultural — not theological — perspective, and he linked the dating of Christmas to earlier pagan rituals. Here’s what the 1922 edition of the “The Golden Bough” says about the origins of Christmas, as published on Bartleby.com:

An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!” The Egyptians even represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess; in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of December. The Gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ’s birth, and accordingly the early Church did not celebrate it. In time, however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of January as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of commemorating the birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the fourth century it was universally established in the East. But at the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century the Western Church, which had never recognised the sixth of January as the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of December as the true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern Church. At Antioch the change was not introduced till about the year 375 A.D.

What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to institute the festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation are stated with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. “The reason,” he tells us, “why the fathers transferred the celebration of the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has prevailed of kindling fires till the sixth.” The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of the nativity of Christ.

Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order to transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was called the Sun of Righteousness….

Yet an account titled “How December 25 Became Christmas” on the Biblical Archaeology Society’s Web site takes some issue with this theory:

Despite its popularity today, this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writings, for one thing. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

Furthermore, it says, the first mentions of a date for Christmas, around 200 A.D., were made at a time when “Christians were not borrowing heavily from pagan traditions of such an obvious character.” It was in the 12th century, it says, that the first link between the date of Jesus’s birth and pagan feasts was made.

It says in part:

Clearly there was great uncertainty, but also a considerable amount of interest, in dating Jesus’ birth in the late second century. By the fourth century, however, we find references to two dates that were widely recognized — and now also celebrated — as Jesus’ birthday: December 25 in the western Roman Empire and January 6 in the East (especially in Egypt and Asia Minor). The modern Armenian church continues to celebrate Christmas on January 6; for most Christians, however, December 25 would prevail, while January 6 eventually came to be known as the Feast of the Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem. The period between became the holiday season later known as the 12 days of Christmas.

The earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus’ birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea … ” So, almost 300 years after Jesus was born, we finally find people observing his birth in mid-winter.”

Bottom line: Nobody knows for sure why Dec. 25 is celebrated as Christmas.

—-

Here’s a little more history, this on the non-religious figure of Santa Claus. According to the St. Nicholas Center (whose Web site has a subtitle: “Discovering the Truth About Santa Claus”), the character known today as Santa originated with a man named Nicholas said to have been born in the third century A.D. in the village of Patara, then Greek and now Turkish. It is said his parents died when he was young and that the religious Nicholas, who was raised by his uncle, was left a fortune. Ordained as a priest, he used his money to help others and become a protector of children, performing miracles to help them. He was, the center says, persecuted by Roman Emperor Diocletian and buried in 343 A.D. in a church, where a substance with healing powers, called manna, formed in his grave. The day of his death, Dec. 6, became a day of celebration.

How did this man seen as a saint become Santa Claus, the one with the red suit and white beard? The St. Nicholas Center says Europeans honored him as a saint over the centuries, while St. Nicholas was brought to the New World by Columbus, who named a Haitian port for him in 1492. According to the center:

After the American Revolution, New Yorkers remembered with pride their colony’s nearly-forgotten Dutch roots. John Pintard, the influential patriot and antiquarian who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that same year, he published the satirical fiction, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with numerous references to a jolly St. Nicholas character. This was not the saintly bishop, rather an elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe. These delightful flights of imagination are the source of the New Amsterdam St. Nicholas legends: that the first Dutch emigrant ship had a figurehead of St. Nicholas; that St. Nicholas Day was observed in the colony; that the first church was dedicated to him; and that St. Nicholas comes down chimneys to bring gifts. Irving’s work was regarded as the “first notable work of imagination in the New World.”

The New York Historical Society held its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner on December 6, 1810. John Pintard commissioned artist Alexander Anderson to create the first American image of Nicholas for the occasion. Nicholas was shown in a gift-giving role with children’s treats in stockings hanging at a fireplace. The accompanying poem ends, “Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend! To serve you ever was my end, If you will, now, me something give, I’ll serve you ever while I live.”

….1821 brought some new elements with publication of the first lithographed book in America, the Children’s Friend. This “Sante Claus” arrived from the North in a sleigh with a flying reindeer. The anonymous poem and illustrations proved pivotal in shifting imagery away from a saintly bishop. Sante Claus fit a didactic mode, rewarding good behavior and punishing bad, leaving a “long, black birchen rod . . . directs a Parent’s hand to use when virtue’s path his sons refuse.” Gifts were safe toys, “pretty doll . . . peg-top, or a ball; no crackers, cannons, squibs, or rockets to blow their eyes up, or their pockets. No drums to stun their Mother’s ear, nor swords to make their sisters fear; but pretty books to store their mind with knowledge of each various kind.” The sleigh itself even sported a bookshelf for the “pretty books.” The book also notably marked S. Claus’ first appearance on Christmas Eve, rather than December 6th.

Then, in 1823, the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” later known as “The Night Before Christmas,” became popular, and the modern version of the plump Santa started to become established, what his sleigh led by reindeer and the chimney as his delivery system. By the 1920s, a jolly red-suited Santa was depicted in drawings of Norman Rockwell and other illustrators, and by the 1950s, he was portrayed as a gentle gift-giving character. That Santa became the one kids in the United States and other parts of the world know today, though in many other countries, St. Nicholas — not Santa — is still celebrated, as well.

Was Nicholas real? The bottom line from the Web site on Santa:

Some say St. Nicholas existed only in legend, without any reliable historical record. Legends usually do grow out of real, actual events, though they may be embellished to make more interesting stories. Many of the St. Nicholas stories seem to be truth interwoven with imagination. However, [certain] facts of the life of St. Nicholas could contain some part of historical truth. They provide a clear sense of his personal characteristics which are further elaborated in other narratives.

(You can read about those “facts” here in a piece titled “Was St. Nicholas a Real Person?”)

So there you have it. Some history of Christmas you may not have known before. If you made it this far, now you do.

TV Teaches You Stuff

Of course once again I had to read about a study done literally across the road, okay mountains with regards to what defines consent when applied to sexual assault.

And what did not surprise me was the role in fiction TV plays in how people learn and understand about crime. And this pits the popular SUV whoops I mean SVU against the equally superior and truly authentic CSI and NCIS. Those are the same people who later when they become prospective Jurors in criminal trials understand and know all the intricacies of forensic science, including flawed DNA testing, to my personal favorite,  junk sciences such as bite mark and lie detectors. They really need to let Jurors bring in Magic 8 Balls when they are debating a guilty verdict as it is about the equivalent of actual debate over an individuals guilt or innocence.

This is America where all we need to do to learn about science and the law is watch TV. Well I am watching Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson so I am pretty sure my physics credentials are secure.

Law & Order fans understand consent better than CSI and NCIS viewers – study

Washington State University research looked at how college freshmen processed sexual consent and rape myths based on popular crime drama story lines

Mahita Gajanan in New York
The Guardian
24 October 2015 08.

Viewers of Law & Order have a better understanding of sexual consent than viewers of other popular crime shows like CSI or NCIS, a new study has found.

Researchers at Washington State University published in the Journal of Health Communication the study, which showed a connection between how sexual violence is portrayed on crime dramas and how people view sexual consent.

Through surveys of 313 college freshmen, focused on the most popular crime drama franchises – Law & Order, CSI and NCIS – the study found that those who watched Law & Order were more likely to support their partner’s decision about whether to have sex, to say no to unwanted sexual activity, and were less likely to buy into rape myths.

Watching CSI decreased intentions to seek consent and to stick to expressions of consent. Exposure to NCIS produced a more neutral reaction.

The researchers surveyed college freshmen because sexual violence is a growing problem on college campuses, and freshmen are the most vulnerable grouping therein. The researchers hypothesized that the results came out as they did because of the story lines that crop up on each franchise, said Stacey Hust, the lead author.

Plots on series like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit focus on the issue of consent, the deconstruction of rape myths and show endings in which perpetrators are punished.

“You see the prosecutor trying the criminal in the courtroom,” Hust told the Guardian, referring to Law & Order: SVU. “Oftentimes, the criminal is found guilty.”

Through the application of social cognitive theory, the researchers concluded that individuals who watch a television program and see a punishment that fits a crime will then avoid criminal behavior, so as to avoid punishment.
Advertisement

On the other hand, story lines within the CSI franchise often do not show punishment. CSI is intended to focus on the investigators and crime scenes. The victim is usually deceased and the plot tends to depend on an elusive and smart villain.

“The viewer doesn’t see that the criminal is caught, and certainly doesn’t see that the criminal is punished,” Hust said.

Furthermore, the manner in which both franchises depict and deal with sexual assault are different. SVU portrays sexual violence but also talks specifically about consent and the gray areas surrounding it within its plot lines, without judgment of its characters.

Rape is a common trope on television, but only recently have studies focused on its effect on viewers’ perception of consent and assault. With SVU’s emphasis on the judicial process and plots of sexual assault centered on characters who are not drawn to be chaste, viewers gain an understanding of issues surrounding sexual violence.

“I think viewers get a greater chance to think about consent when they watch Law & Order,” Hust said. “It’s a part of the dialogue and plot, and it influences their thoughts about it.”

Hurst said CSI tends to portray sexual assault somewhat stereotypically, and in a way that ends up blaming the victim. As an example, she said an assault will occur in an episode after a woman leaves a window unlocked or a drink unattended.

While the researchers could not say watching Law & Order caused an increased awareness around consent, Hust said there was a definite association – and that association could be applied to teaching the processes of consent.

“It suggests that just talking about consent won’t result in positive outcomes,” Hust said. “Showing that people who make poor decisions related to concern receive punishment or conversely, rewarding those people who make healthy consent decisions – that can be applied to real-life interventions.”