Where does former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani go?

by philg

“Russia says Afghan president fled with cars and helicopter full of cash – RIA” (Reuters):

Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency reported.

“As for the collapse of the (outgoing) regime, it is most eloquently characterised by the way Ghani fled Afghanistan,” Nikita Ishchenko, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Kabul, was quoted as saying by RIA.

“Four cars were full of money, they tried to stuff another part of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,” he was quoted as saying.

Where does Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai go to spend this cash? (And should Andrew Cuomo join him? Presumably any place that welcomes Ghani isn’t going to be too concerned about the things Cuomo is accused of.)

My guess: Belarus. The EU and the US already hate the government of Belarus. Immigrants enrich us culturally and economically, and no human being is illegal, but it is “warfare” when Belarus allows low-skill migrants from Iraq into the EU (see “Latvia and Lithuania act to counter migrants crossing Belarus border” (Guardian))

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Nostalgia for the old neighborhood

by philg

Discovered in the entryway of our old condo building in Cambridge:

I.e., one of the local righteous had taken the trouble to write “Please do not lock bike on tree — damages the bark” and then the additional trouble to place the note in a Ziploc bag (or maybe the recipient decided to preserve the note via Ziploc?).

I do not expect anyone in Florida to go to these lengths!

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Annals of Government Computer Programming

by philg

On August 4, 2021, the Web site for renewing a Global Entry card tells me that I can’t start the renewal process until September 28, 2020:

One for the textbook chapters on the merits of the IF statement…

The site did not get better. On nearly every page, before I started answering questions, I would be greeted with a banner at the top:

The plus side of coronapanic:

And the renewal might involve a “remote virtual interview”.

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What do we think of the American defeat in Afghanistan?

by philg

Our puppet government has folded and we now have to recognize that we achieved nothing after spending 20 years, 100,000+ Afghan lives, 3,000 American and European lives, and unknown $trillions (the spending will continue as U.S. soldiers sign up for disability benefits and Afghans immigrate to the U.S. and sign up for multiple generations of means-tested public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.).

What will change going forward? Will we still be just as enthusiastic about wars we can’t win?

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Karenhood in Massachusetts measured quantitatively

by philg

After 40+ years of sitting at a computer and typing, my back is in no shape for packing and moving to the Florida Free State. A friend’s 16-year-old soccer star and some of his teammates have been essential to our sorting/discarding/packing process. The muscle turned out to have a quantitative measurement of Karenhood in Massachusetts. Neighbors in his suburban town called the police on 19 separate occasions after observing the high school soccer team practicing (outdoors) without strict mask discipline. (There were more than 19 individual calls to the police. In fact, during one practice 5 different Mask Samaritans called the police.)

The most dramatic COVID-19 team response was five town officials converging on the soccer field. Two coaches, two people from the public health department, and a police officer.

Very loosely related, from Coronavirus Rescue Team (May 13, 2020):

(I told the above story to a woman who lives in Concord, Maskachusetts, center of the BLM movement, at least to judge by the prevalence of lawn signs. “I was walking with my sister in a wide-open field with nobody around,” she said. “A car stopped and the driver yelled at us for not wearing masks.”)

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Where did India end up in the COVID Olympics?

by philg

Four months ago, India was the subject of media attention due to a wave of coronavirus infection. Nearly all of the journalists whipped up hysteria by citing absolute numbers of infections and/or deaths in India, not adjusting for the population size. From Coronaplague in India proves Dr. Jeff Goldblum’s theories? (April 14):

In other words, India has suffered more from COVID-19 than a country in which 100 percent of the population died of COVID-19, just as long as that country had only 13 million people.

How bad are things in what TIME and the Guardian say is the worst-plagued country on Earth? The country has suffered 125 COVID-19-tagged deaths per million inhabitants (ranking). That compares to 2,530 per million here in Massachusetts (states ranked; note that this is per 100,000 so multiply by 10). Maybe they will be getting worse, though. If things get 20X as bad as they’ve been in India, the situation will be about as bad as it is right now in Massachusetts.

Readers: What’s your best guess as to how events unfold in India? My guess is based on regression to the mean. India was an outlier (125 deaths per million). When the dust settles, India will be somewhere in the middle (right now the worldwide average is about 375 deaths per million; 3 million deaths in a population of 8 billion). Perhaps we’d have to adjust for the fact that the median age in India is roughly 27, slightly younger than the world median (around 30).

It has been four months. We know that the science is settled. Is it fair to say that “the dust has settled” right now in India? (i.e., that they’re at least between waves of coronavirus infection) If so, how accurate was my prediction of “slightly less than the worldwide average because of India’s slightly younger-than-average population”? We can use Statista’s COVID-19 deaths by country (the most thoroughly masked and shut nations at the top, #BecauseScience) as an authoritative source for India’s death rate (about 314/million). We can take the total deaths on the WHO dashboard (4.33 million) and divide by the number on the Census Bureau’s population clock (7.78 billion) to get the worldwide death rate: 556/million. In other words, after all of the media hysteria it turns out that India has a lower death rate from/with COVID-19 than the world average. What if we compare to the U.S. states? Maskachusetts is at 2,630 per million (a lot of U.S. stats are per 100,000 so we need to multiply by 10), a rate that is 8X higher than India’s.

Let’s also look at predictions from readers…

disevad, who lives in India, said “My intuition is that its going to subside in next 3 weeks or so”.

[i.e., that the peak of “cases” would be roughly May 6, 2021. When was the peak? Our World In Data says… May 6, 2021 (414,118 cases). How about deaths? The peak was around May 17; see Google data below]

RS said, “I wonder if after the panic dies down and wearing masks continues to be something that people in CA and MA do for the rest of their lives it will take on a similar flavor. Wearing a mask during flu season (which will be renamed Corona season as you note) is a sign that they are making healthy choices, and a much easier choice than losing the 20-30 pounds that they gained during lockdown.” To see if this prediction is correct we have to wait until the winter to see if the masks sprout, but we can check right now to see if our neighbors are still fat.

Viking said, “By the time it is obvious India is past the peak, say daily deaths are down to 650/day, I expect 200 to 300 cumulative deaths per million. So 8 to 12% of Maskachusetts rate.” [The above numbers work out to 12%!]

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Reverse underground railroad journey complete

by philg

Our journey on the modern underground railroad (Maskachusetts to the Florida Free State) is complete as of yesterday!

Billboards on I-95 were interesting. Excluding those for travel-related services (hotels, restaurants, etc.), approximately 1/3rd were from employers begging people to work (curiously, however, the begging stopped at the Florida border; maybe people in Florida are more eager to work? Or the economy in Florida is not as strong as in NC, SC, GA?). The remaining billboards were dominated by personal injury and divorce litigators and by the healthcare industry. I couldn’t get any photos because it was just me and Mindy the Crippler in the Honda Odyssey (jammed with all the stuff that we forgot to pack or that the movers forgot to load).

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How can city vaccination requirements be enforced without RFID chips in residents’ necks?

by philg

Cities are casting out heretics (i.e., those who haven’t accepted a non-FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine). See “San Francisco to require vaccine proof at indoor venues” (AP):

Worried that the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus could derail San Francisco’s economic rebound, Mayor London Breed announced Thursday that the city will require proof of full vaccination at indoor restaurants, bars, gyms and entertainment venues to help keep businesses open.

“This is to protect kids, is to protect those who can’t get vaccinated, is to make sure that we don’t go backwards, is to make sure that I never have to get up in front of you and say, ‘I’m sorry, I know we just reopened and now the city is closed again because we are seeing too many people die,’ ” Breed said.

The mandate will be more stringent than the one announced by New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio last week. San Francisco will require proof of full COVID-19 vaccination for all customers and staff, while New York mandated proof of at least one dose for indoor activities.

Loyal readers will recall that, earlier in coronapanic, I advocated for RFID chips in the necks of anyone who lives in or visits the U.S. This would enable quarantine-enforcement and contact-tracing via door frame scanners. See RFID chips in the necks of college students and #Science proves that I was right (about the need for RFID chips in humans for COVID-19 surveillance), for example. Combined with a central health care database, as in the UK or Israel, it would be possible to confine heretics and infidels to their homes via simple computer programming.

The government has had 1.5 years to plan, but apparently that wasn’t sufficient to develop a durable proof of vaccination card that would fit in a wallet. And, in any case, if an event has thousands of people coming through the doors, how would checking all of these cards be practical? Consider that someone who got injected in a foreign country might be coming through and will be presenting a card in a language that the people at the door can’t read. Also, shouldn’t those checking for heretics be sure to match the name of the vaccination record and the name on a photo ID? How does that work given that (1) IDs are not required for vaccination, and (2) the undocumented may not have ID documents, but are still entitled to full participation in U.S. civic life.

Separately, woudn’t it be fun to build the door scanner that would check the RFID chip, look up vaccine status in the national database, and light up a huge red blinking “HERETIC” sign while sounding submarine movie buzzers and alarms?

[The above should not be read as an opinion on the vaccine requirement policies. I mean only to question how the requirements can be enforced, as a practical matter, without automation and, therefore, some quick way to scan a human and determine vaccine status.]

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  • On the subject of adult politicians, such as Mayor Breed, saying that they’re acting to protect children… “Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children” (Nature, July 2021): A comprehensive analysis of hospital admissions and reported deaths across England suggests that COVID-19 carries a lower risk of dying or requiring intensive care among children and young people than was previously thought. In a series of preprints published on medRxiv, a team of researchers picked through all hospital admissions and deaths reported for people younger than 18 in England. The studies found that COVID-19 caused 25 deaths in that age group between March 2020 and February 2021. About half of those deaths were in individuals with an underlying complex disability with high health-care needs, such as tube feeding or assistance with breathing. [For comparison, about 50 children, 16 and under, die annually from traffic accidents in the UK (source) because the nation has not adopted my speed limit idea.]
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Now that we have real leadership from the White House, are Americans better at fighting the COVID War?

by philg

We were informed by the media that a principal reason the U.S. was unequal to the task of fighting the COVID War was poor leadership from the White House. Donald Trump was anti-science and refused to believe that shutdowns and masks for the general public would have a significant impact on the coronavirus. See “Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus” (NYT, July 2020), for example.

The roots of the nation’s current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House embraced overly rosy projections to proclaim victory and move on.

Donald Trump has been gone for 7 months now. President Biden is providing fantastic science-guided leadership from the White House. Are Americans responding to this improvement by behaving better? The CDC recommends indoor masking, for example. Have you seen more people wearing masks indoors this month compared to in early January 2021? More people washing hands and using sanitizer? Fewer gatherings? In your direct experience, are more people or fewer people traveling (and therefore spreading variant COVID!) compared to when the hated dictator was in power? (data point: our hotel in Niagara Falls said that they’d been 100 percent full for months)

One place that was following the science, in our recent travels, was the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Masks are required in an outdoor garden/zoo, in order to protect the animals from contracting plague. Masks are, of course, required indoors, so that child visitors are protected.

The scientists at the museum want to remind you that when non-natives move into a country, the natives will have a tough time affording “food or other resources”, that the non-natives may bring disease, and that, once the non-natives arrive, the natives may stop reproducing.

What about at the art museum next door, where the median age of a visitor is probably 40 years older than at the natural history museum? Masks are optional, indoors and out.

Overall, our experience has been that, despite great leadership from the White House, Americans are not #FollowingTheLeader. Unless the vaccination rate is near 100 percent, mask usage indoors doesn’t match the old CDC’s recommendation that only the vaccinated can shed the hijab. Signs and practices certainly do not line up with the CDC’s latest guidance that everyone, including the vaccinated, should wear a mask indoors. From a McDonald’s near the Syracuse, NY airport, August 3:

The sign regarding the “newly released” science was already out of date and none of the customers inside was wearing a mask.

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German Emperor (BMW) has no clothes?

by philg

Our recent trip through the charred American economic landscape involved three rental cars and five Uber/Lyft rides. Nobody in Detroit wants to work, apparently, so it was tough to get rides. We ended up having to pay over $100 for a 20-minute trip in a “luxury SUV” because nobody was available at 5 pm in any of the other options. One out of five Uber/Lyft drivers wore a mask correctly and consistently.

Our National Ford Fusion in Cleveland smelled like it had been owned and driven for all of its previous 50,000 miles by a chain smoker. Hertz in Niagara Falls didn’t deliver the car to the airport as promised (“we don’t have enough staff”), but then “upgraded” us to a BMW X3. The ride was harsh, the electronics were confusing, and the kids gave the prestige SUV a thumbs down. As an example of how bad the user interface on the car is, here’s the key fob. Unlock is an unlock symbol. To lock the car, press the BMW logo:

Note that they still had to put a subtle lock symbol next to the logo, as a guide for the bewildered. That the interface had to be patched like this did not prompt any second thoughts!

In Oshkosh (Appleton, actually, since we wimped out on the KOSH VFR arrival), Enterprise gave us a new BMW 530i, offering some dual instruction on how to change gears “because nobody can ever figure it out.” I was prepared to love this expensive machine, but the suspension interacted horribly with slight waves in the Interstate 41 pavement. The BMW bucked for every highway mile and let us feel every pothole. Maybe it was the suspension configuration? We found a “Comfort setting” next to the gear selector, which didn’t seem to help, but led to a fun exchange with the kids. “Put in on Comfort” they shouted when we entered the highway. “I don’t have any comfort!” said the 7-year-old after a minute or two. Thumbs down on this one too!

Maybe the answer is that BMWs offer race car-like performance and therefore we shouldn’t expect the suspension to be compliant? The 530i didn’t seem to corner especially well or handle nimbly. The thing weighs as much as our Honda Odyssey minivan and seemed to have almost as much body roll in corners, a poor showing considering that it is 2X the price and 1/2 the interior volume.

Can someone explain why BMWs are good?

Bonus: Niagara Falls…

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