How will Amy Coney Barrett rule on the big question for 2021?

by philg

Readers: How are the Amy Coney Barrett hearings going? Did she truly sit through five (5!) hours of opening statements on Monday? Why couldn’t she have been resting at the Trump Hotel while the politicians talked about themselves?

This video shows that Judge Barrett’s daily driver is a Honda Odyssey minivan. Have the senators therefore questioned her on the big question for 2021: should we loyal Honda owners jump ship to the new Sienna minivan?

If you can live with seven seats, the top-of-the-line Siennas feature these Gulfstream-style recliners:

An expensive option? The Court disagrees! The entire top trim Sienna costs less than a single FAA-certified seat for a business jet.

How about this grille?

For comparison, the 2021 Toyota Avalon:

And the Audi e-tron (electric!):

Who decided that we needed cars with huge grilles?

Circling back to the Supreme Court nominee, let’s check my Facebook feed… From a Democrat who fled Manhattan:

A woman who hates women for the Supreme Court; it’s great, she can join a black man who hates black people (tap dancers get the bad rap but Clarence Thomas IS the ultimate Uncle Tom) and sit with the white guy majority who hates everybody. Bye-bye civil rights, bye-bye civil behaviour. Voting T-rump is the greatest act of self-hatred (and planetary destruction) currently available. Unmasked rage disguised as pride; wear it well. My absentee ballot has been counted in Maine.

From a righteous computer programmer:

I don’t know what Barrett will do once she’s seated on the Supreme Court. But it’s perfectly clear to me what the man who nominated her expects her to do. And it’s perfectly clear to her, as well.

(i.e., even after she gets her lifetime job, her thoughts and actions will be determined by a man)

From Maskachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

#AmyConeyBarrett says she doesn’t have an agenda. But she does have a record—and it stands as an affront to women’s health and rights.

From a divorced mom, part of the most reliable Democrat voting bloc, over a YouTube of Senator Klobuchar’s opening statement:

Please Vote. We can’t just stand by. We have to turn out. #vote2020 #vote

(but her friends are mostly in coastal elite states that are already 100 percent guaranteed to vote for Presidents Biden and Harris!)

From a university employee who describes herself as a “cat person, voter”:

This is not a drill. If Barrett is named to the Supreme Court, I and millions of others will lose access to health care.

(she needs some tips from folks who arrive via caravan over the southern border! Show up at the hospital, don’t give an address, and say “I’m undocumented”!)

Related:

  • NYT headline: “Barrett, Declining to Detail Legal Views, Says She Will Not Be ‘a Pawn’ of Trump” (i.e., the nominee talked about people who are and aren’t pawns of the evil mastermind Trump); NYT article body: “I would certainly hope that all members of this committee would have more confidence in my integrity than to think that I would allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people,” she said. (i.e., no mention of Trump specifically!)
Full post, including comments

Young slender Ukrainian blonde moves to Sweden to produce pornography

by philg

For the Church of Shutdown faithful, Sweden’s lower death rate from COVID-19 can be explained primarily by the Swedes being masked and mostly shut down. By continuing to run schools, offices, restaurants, and gyms, the Swedes are merely practicing a variant form of shutdown. Without evidence or knowledge, American Shutdowners will simply assert that everyone in Sweden is wearing a mask. Sometimes white American Shutdown Karens will says that Sweden is a special case because the Swedes are vastly more intelligent than Americans (this might be a swipe at our darker-skinned underclass, which they believe does not exist in the Land of Blondes (in fact, 25 percent of Swedes are immigrants or children of immigrants)).

Enter @SvitlanaNosul, publishing smartphone videos that can be described only as “pornography” (showing humans doing things that are shocking to our sensibilities, e.g., riding the subway without masks). Examples:

Her Twitter bio:

I was born in the USSR, grew up in independent* Ukraine, and now live in the kingdom* of Sweden I stand for the truth and the right to be a free human being

She is lucky that she didn’t emigrate to Maskachusetts!

Full post, including comments

Is watching sports less popular because we can’t watch other people watching sports?

by philg

“Why Are Pandemic Sports Ratings So Terrible?” (New York Magazine) describes a fall in TV viewership in a country where millions of people are more or less locked into their homes, unemployed, etc. How can Americans possibly have something better to do right now than turn on the TV and watch a game that they used to enjoy watching?

Here’s my theory: a big reason that people care about sports is that they see other people caring about sports. In the pre-coronapanic days you’d go into a restaurant and see people in the bar with their eyes glued to a professional sports game. This subconsciously communicated that the game was important. Maybe you’d go over to a friend’s house and the game would be on. Another hint that this game is important.

If you’re by yourself at home, on the other hand, there is nobody else to tell you that a particular sport is important enough to be worth watching.

Readers: What’s your theory? Americans are glued to screens more than ever, right? Why aren’t they watching sports on those screens?

Full post, including comments

Should I vote for ranked-choice voting?

by philg

The first of my five mail-in ballots has arrived. 3 out of 7 candidates are Democrats running unopposed. The remaining 4 races are 100 percent guaranteed to be won by Democrats. A potential contest: Question 2 is whether to adopt ranked choice voting.

As someone whose political beliefs are most aligned with the libertarians, a last-choice party in a nation where people want a planned economy (my 2012 document after watching both the Republican and Democrat candidates promise that government would create jobs, ensure fair wages, etc.), is this for me? I could vote for a libertarian candidate and then also pick a second choice from a party that has a chance in a country whose citizens want government to cater to their every need? Yet in a Massachusetts general election it is almost inconceivable for a non-Democrat to win. So how can this have any practical effect?

The “Independent Women’s Law Center” opposes this question. We don’t know what people identifying with the remaining 50+ genders say. Wikipedia says that Estonia had something like this, but abandoned it in 2001. As government in Estonia is radically more efficient than here in the U.S., that’s a strike against the idea.

Readers: What do you say about this proposal?

Update, 10/16: a friend highlighted “The Ancient Greeks Teach Us The Perils of Ranked Choice Voting”, by a political science professor:

As this list [of supporters] makes clear, RCV supporters fall overwhelmingly into two (mostly overlapping) categories: Democrats and groups whose members vote heavily for Democratic candidates; and groups that (Libertarians aside) have practically no chance of winning elections even under RCV, except at the local level. Given Massachusetts’s status as a heavily Democratic state (the state’s congressional delegation consists solely of Democrats, who also have long held a substantial supermajority in the legislature), Democrats have little to fear from losing elections to Republicans as a result of RCV. Rather, they need to court members of left-liberal fringe groups, as well as public-employee unions, to ensure that they turn out to vote — knowing that those groups’ supporters would almost surely make the Democratic candidate, at worst, their second-choice candidate, further guaranteeing the defeat of any Republican contender.

Full post, including comments

Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to network engineers and sysadmins?

by philg

Despite having engineered the first two Middle East peace agreements in the 21st century, Donald Trump has apparently failed to qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize (maybe if he advocated for the deportation of Muslims, he could join Aung San Suu Kyi in the ranks of the winners?).

Who got the award? Some highly paid bureaucrats at the United Nations who take money that other people worked hard to earn, spend the money on food, and then hand the food out (BBC). This is analogous to borrowing a neighbor’s car, giving it to non-profit org (I recommend Harvard or MIT!), and donning the mantle of pure Jesus-like charity.

Readers: Who should have gotten the award, if not these UN bureaucrats who were simply doing the job for which they were hired and paid? (or maybe you want to argue that they deserved it!)

My suggestion: The network engineers and sysadmins that enabled richer people all over the world to cower in place while enjoying streaming video entertainment, Zoom and similar video collaboration tools, and other services that we would have expected to fall over in the face of a sudden 10X boost in demand. How is it “peace”, though? Consider that people from different nations have been able to continue to work together despite travel bans, thus promoting international trade and cooperation. There would surely be a lot more domestic strife and violence if locked-down people couldn’t reach out electronically and/or zone out with Netflix. Why not recognize the people who built the Verizon and Comcast networks, Amazon Web Services, and similar?

Full post, including comments

Swedish scientist and expert on coronavirus endorses Joe Biden

by philg

A young Swedish scientist who predicted the worldwide shutdown of schools and universities as early as September 2019 and who has deep experience with the coronavirus has endorsed Joe Biden to be the head of state in a country in which she does not live:

“The upcoming US elections is above and beyond all that. From a climate perspective it’s very far from enough and many of you of course supported other candidates. But, I mean…you know…damn! Just get organized and get everyone to vote #Biden,” the [Swedish scientist] tweeted.

(source: New York Post)

Related:

  • the Great Barrington Declaration (Swedish science rewritten for an American and British audience)
  • April 2020 video from Johan Giesecke, a Swedish MD/PhD (former chief scientist of the European CDC) whose predictions seem to have been accurate for the U.S. (lockdown will yield a delay) and China (lockdown will squash the virus… until the next lockdown)
Full post, including comments

Now that teachers are trained to do online teaching, why won’t they teach when the school building is closed?

by philg

The World’s Greatest Infrastructure (TM) met a cold front on the evening of the Vice Presidential debate. (Did the candidates talk about underground power lines or self-healing “smart grids” that will route around a downed line? (the technology has been available for more than a decade, e.g., from Hitachi ABB))

Power came back around 1:00 am, but #AbundanceOfCaution dictated that our local public school be closed. Email at11 pm from the superintendent:

Dear Lincoln School Families and Staff,

The power outage on the Lincoln campus has not yet been resolved. In addition, there are multiple trees down and road closures. As a result, we must cancel school on Thursday, October 8, 2020. The Lincoln campus will be closed. All employees excluding facilities staff and IT staff should not report to work.

The teachers purportedly had three months of experience in the spring providing online education (one email on Monday morning with some assignments; hosting a couple of video chats during the week). The teachers union negotiated a multi-week delay to the start of the school year here in Maskachusetts so that teachers could receive training on how to deliver online education #EvenBetter.

So… when the school building is closed, as it would be on a snow day, education soldiers on via Internet, right? The teachers and students work together from their respective homes? The answer turns out to be… No!

(The morning after this email was received, Senior Management noted that my failure to take a plate from the table to the dishwasher. I responded that I was following the lead of our public employees and that I would work only if conditions were ideal, e.g., if the plate did not need to be scraped and the dishwasher door were already open. She then asked why she could not use the same criteria for her own domestic efforts. I responded that, in the U.S., only about half of the adults could work for the government and therefore she had to be one of the private sector workers exposed to COVID-19, working 70 hours/week, etc. She replied that soon the U.S. would transition to socialism and everyone would be a government employee and thus we had to share kitchen tasks equally.)

Related:

Full post, including comments

Schools are closed so that teachers don’t die, but nobody is worried about folks under 70 in the D.C. epidemic?

by philg

As some of you may have heard, an epidemic of coronavirus has finally reached the rich and powerful in Washington, D.C. One infected soul (or soul-less?) is Donald J. Trump, age 74. The progress of his COVID-19 encounter mesmerized Americans, but I never saw any coverage of people concerned about deaths or serious long-term health consequences for the under-70 politicians and staff. From this can we infer that Americans don’t think that COVID-19 is hazardous for those under-70? (Maskachusetts removed the age-related statistics from its dashboard in mid-August, but the memories may linger!)

On the other hand, we are informed that schools have to be kept closed to protect students. When science deniers object that no person under 20 has ever died from/with COVID-19 here in MA, for example, the School Shutdown Karen shifts gears to say that it is, in fact, teachers who have to be protected. But unionized public school teachers can retire with full inflation-adjusted pension benefits and unlimited health insurance when they’re in their 50s. So there shouldn’t actually be anyone over 70 in a school building.

How to explain the apparent logical discrepancy?

Some background from the Official Newspaper of the Shutdown Karens, “‘I Don’t Want to Go Back’: Many Teachers Are Fearful and Angry Over Pressure to Return” (NYT, July):

“I want to serve the students, but it’s hard to say you’re going to sacrifice all of the teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers and bus drivers,” said Hannah Wysong, a teacher at the Esperanza Community School in Tempe, Ariz., where virus cases are increasing.

On social media, teachers across the country promoted the hashtag #14daysnonewcases, with some pledging to refuse to enter classrooms until the coronavirus transmission rate in their counties falls, essentially, to zero.

From Mini Mike, “Teachers Sue to Keep Schools Shut as Parents Demand They Reopen” (Bloomberg, July):

The Florida Education Association, a group of teachers unions, filed suit Monday to block an emergency order to reopen schools next month despite a spike in coronavirus infections. Meanwhile, a lawsuit in New York is seeking to ensure that schools there aren’t closed for the fall term.

On the other end of the argument, a woman and her two children in Brooklyn last week filed suit against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is still deciding whether to allow schools to reopen this fall. The suit claims the state’s order to keep schools shut thus far and offer only online instruction is unconstitutional because it leads to disparate treatment for students with special needs.

From North Carolina, this month, “Wake teachers warn board that reopening schools will put people at risk of dying” (they don’t have “Woke teachers” like we do here in the Boston suburbs?):

“It’s heartbreaking for me as a teacher because I want to see my students so badly in person, and they’re really struggling,” said Ginny Clayton, a teacher at Cary High School. “But that’s not the criteria for coming back to school — it’s safety. We ultimately have to do what’s right by our kids by keeping them safe.”

“Every meeting should be about getting our kids back into school,” said Christine Hale, a Wake parent. “Nothing should be more important to the Board of Education than education.

The board’s decision to reopen schools has angered many teachers, especially because the majority of principals wanted to continue having online classes for students in fourth through eighth grades for the rest of the semester.

Readers: If teachers aged 22-57 have a significant risk of dying from COVID-19, as the teacher unions say, why didn’t we see a lot of stories about people concerned regarding the health of Melania Trump (age 50)? From the NYT:

Many of these political brothers/sisters/binary resisters appear to be roughly the same age (or beyond) as a senior school teacher. Why aren’t the people who want to keep schools shut concerned for their well-being in the face of the killer coronavirus?

Afternoon update, from a school in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, “Keep Our Learners Safe”:

The adults are altruistically keeping the children safe from a disease that has never killed anyone their age in their state (nor in Maskachusetts, through mid-August when the statistics began to be withheld).

Full post, including comments

States ranked by coronashutdown level

by philg

Where can Americans find what had been regarded as their traditional liberties? Never-shut, never-masked Sweden, of course, but somehow it is tough to imagine them welcoming 330 million undocumented migrants.

Wallethub has put together a ranking of states by how aggressive their governors have been in restricting residents’ activities. Maskachusetts, with more than 50 governor’s orders so far, is 49/51 in freedom. Only California and Hawaii rank lower. Where can Americans enjoy what had been their Constitutional rights?

Intersecting the above with states that have no state personal income tax… the standouts are South Dakota, Wyoming, Florida, and Alaska.

A few photos from a late September excursion to Pittsfield, MA… The state government effectively closed the Appalachian Trail. People who had spent years preparing to be alone in the woods for months were thus prohibited from spreading coronaplague to squirrels and chipmunks.

At the mostly-empty Hilton Garden Inn:

Just going to have water?

At a closer-to-Boston state park. When handwashing and superior hygiene in general are the keys to controlling a virus, one great strategy is to close most of the public restrooms. This sign directs patrons to bathrooms that are a 20-minute round-trip walk away.

How about California, one of the two states more restricted than Maskachusetts? A tweet from the governor:

The text says to do the opposite of what health care workers are trained to do. “Never touch your mask” becomes “Touch your mask to install/deinstall it between every bite of food.” The image, however, says to minimizing touching the mask. #ScienceIsComplex ?

Full post, including comments

American physicians: The healthiest people live in police states

by philg

The New England Journal of Medicine has endorsed Joe Biden (without mentioning him by name) in “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum”. Once we get over the shock that a group of physicians support the political party that made it illegal for Americans to refrain from purchasing insurance policies that make payments to physicians, what are these doctors/editors actually saying?

the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000.

We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay.

This is consistent with what the Swedish MD/PhDs said, i.e., that lockdowns could work in a police state. But how was Donald Trump supposed to arrogate police state powers to himself? Supposedly, only state governors had the ability to terminate Americans’ First Amendment rights to assemble, terminate children’s rights to go to school, etc.

(Why cite Vietnam? Laos and Cambodia have had zero deaths! See “Vietnam miracle escape from Covid may be down to ‘natural immunity'” (Telegraph) for a report on Oxford professors poking into this question)

The unkindest cut of all:

Yet our leaders have largely chosen to ignore and even denigrate experts.

(But Trump can just say that he wants to follow the 15,000ish doctors and MD/PhDs who say that shutdown is the wrong policy. Sunetra Gupta, Oxford professor, doesn’t qualify as an “expert”? Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard, is not an “expert”?)

To minimize COVID-19 deaths, therefore, what we really need is a police state that can take dramatic muscular action unfettered by a written constitution. This reminds me of Looking at Covid-19 death rate is like the old saying “An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”?

Is asking an epidemiologist whether to keep schools and playgrounds open like asking your accountant whether you should buy a dog? Yes, the expert can give you a bit of insight (“my other clients with dogs spend $4,000 per year on vet, food, and grooming”), but not a life-optimizing answer.

In this, the NEJM simply ignores its own content, e.g., “The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19” Shutting down every other part of society in order to focus on COVID-19 necessarily results in a lot of deaths. “The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life” (The Hill) takes a stab at calculating the cost.

Maybe this is a good window into what would have happened if technocrats had been allowed to run the White House!

(Separately, if you work at a hospital or medical school, one fun thing to do is listen for when a physician criticizes Donald Trump for trying to stem the tide of undocumented low-skill migrants. Most of these folks eventually end up on Medicaid and/or have children who are on Medicaid, thus becoming revenue sources for physicians. Then ask “Should a Swiss, German, French, English, or Taiwanese doctor who is fluent in English be able to come over here and practice?”)

Related:

Full post, including comments