Norwegian TV series for the Age of Corona: Occupied

by philg

A (tenured professor) friend recommended Occupied, a 2015 Norwegian TV show on Netflix that is surprisingly timely. In the first episode, the prime minister has to decide whether it is better to die on one’s feet or live on one’s knees. Citing the priceless nature of even a single human life, he decides that Norwegians must accept subjugation by the EU and Russia.

(The initial plot premise doesn’t make obvious sense. Norway shuts down its oil and gas production in a noble effort to save Spaceship Earth from climate destruction. The EU wants Norwegian oil and gas and brings in the Russians to force Norway to turn it all back on. But since the Russians compete with Norway in oil and gas production, why would the Russians want to pressure Norway? Wouldn’t the Russians be better off just selling EU its own production at a higher price? This is never explained, but if you can suspend your disbelief on this one point, the rest of the series makes sense.)

As the episodes unfold, Norwegians gradually surrender what had been their rights. Just like Americans facing the threat of coronaplague, about half of the people simply assert that their rights have not been eliminated, just slightly adjusted (e.g., children who get a weekly email from a teacher and two hours/week of Google Classroom hangout are still receiving their right to an education) while a clandestine resistance emerges of people who want their former constitutional rights as they were previously understood.

I’ll be interested to hear what readers think about whether this movie captures the mindset of government leaders around the world today when it comes to dealing with the threat of coronaplague!

(My Dutch friend: “All of the rights that Americans fought and died in multiple wars to defend, they gave up in one governor’s press conference.” The screenwriters thought it would take a war for people in a Democracy to lose their rights, but a respiratory virus turned out to be sufficient to erase liberty!)

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Swedes are too polite to call us stupid…

by philg

… instead they call us crazy.

The leader of the Swedish government’s epidemiology team is interviewed in “Sweden’s Covid Expert Says ‘World Went Mad’ With Lockdowns” (Bloomberg):

The man behind Sweden’s controversial Covid-19 strategy has characterized lockdowns imposed across much of the globe as a form of “madness” that flies in the face of what is known about handling viral outbreaks.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, said he advised against such restrictions on movement because of the detrimental side effects they often entail.

“It was as if the world had gone mad, and everything we had discussed was forgotten,” Tegnell said in a podcast with Swedish Radio on Wednesday. “The cases became too many and the political pressure got too strong. And then Sweden stood there rather alone.”

Tegnell admits he misjudged the deadly potential of the coronavirus in its early stages, but has refused to consider abandoning his strategy. He says restricting movement to the radical extent seen across much of the globe can create other problems, including increased domestic abuse, loneliness and mass unemployment.

“In the same way that all drugs have side effects, measures against a pandemic also have negative effects,” he said. “At an authority like ours, which works with a broad spectrum of public health issues, it is natural to take these aspects into account.”

What would he think of Maskachusetts? Our kids might not have learned anything for the past three months and maybe won’t get to return to school in September, either, and they may have gained weight and lost muscle tone as they go into Month 4 of shutdown, but at least they are masked!

Tegnell also advised against using face masks, arguing there’s little scientific evidence they work. And he says it’s clear that closing down schools was an unnecessary response to the pandemic, a notion that’s actually supported in a recent French study.

Have you enjoyed being shut down and throwing rocks at the reckless Swedes? Dr. Tegnell says you’ll probably get to do it every year for the next few decades:

Tegnell’s underlying argument is that Covid-19 isn’t going away any time soon, meaning sudden, severe lockdowns will ultimately prove ineffective in addressing the longer-term threat. Meanwhile, the virus has recently resurfaced in a number of places where authorities thought they’d brought it under control, including Beijing.

The article is a good illustration of American journalism. Because Tegnell is a infidel relative to the Church of Shutdown, his credentials are left out. He is just some guy who works for the Swedish government, not a Scientist (Wikipedia by contrast: “Tegnell obtained a PhD in Medicine from Linköping University in 2003 and a MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2004”).

The section in which the article appears is “Sweden’s Coronavirus Experiment”. In other words, it is not the U.S. that is conducting an “experiment” by trying something that has never been tried before (i.e., shutting down a modern society/economy and health care system). It is Sweden that is engaging in a wild “experiment” by doing what humans have always done when confronting a new virus.

From my Sweden pictures:

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New hate speech phrase: “Thank You ALL Workers”

by philg

Like righteous Lexington, Massachusetts, our white heterosexual suburb loves to hang banners celebrating Black Lives Matter and a rainbow of LGBTQIA+ victimhood (see “Our faith calls us to affirm Black Lives Matter…”).

To these, neighbors have recently added “Thank you essential workers,” “Thank you frontline workers,” and “Thank you first responders” signs.

Driving west on Rt. 117 to some suburbs that contain at least a few authentic working-class people, if not a significant number of black or LGBTQIA+ people, there is a glaring exception: a house sporting a “Thank You All Workers” sign.

Is this sloppiness? Or hate speech along the lines of “All Lives Matter”?

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Biden, Warren, and Sanders are Beardstown Ladies?

by philg

Today was supposed to be the last Democratic Presidential primary. We’ve heard primarily from three candidates: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren (though this article says that all of them are essentially just repeating things that Bernie Sanders said in 2016).

All of these Democrats have said that, through the magic of higher tax rates on the rich, the Federal government will be showered in tax revenue, breaking out of Hauser’s Law that found revenue to be limited to about 20 percent of GDP, independent of the headline rates (1945-2015). In the page pandering to Catholic voters, for example, Biden promises to “get rid of the capital gains loophole for multi-millionaires.” So a multi-millionaire would have to pay a 50% ordinary income tax rate, federal plus state, on capital gains but wouldn’t be able to move to Puerto Rico for 183 days/year and pay 4% instead under Act 22 (and that would be to Puerto Rico, so the Federal Government would get 0%).

I wonder if this kind of magical thinking about the possibilities of a high return on an investment of tax rates is partly due to the politicians’ age. They’re all senior citizens and senior citizens can be prone to mistaken estimates. One of the most famous examples of this is an investment group of women in their 70s known as the Beardstown Ladies, They believed that they’d achieved a 23 percent annual return on investment, beating the S&P 500. When younger people analyzed their returns, the conclusion was that the return had been 9 percent annually, underperforming the S&P 500.

[Some more fun stuff… All of the Democrats told us that immigration will make existing residents of the U.S. better off. It doesn’t matter how low the skill level of the immigrant nor how much in the way of government-provided services the immigrant needs. A 75-year-old migrant who does not speak English and who needs $2 million in health care will make every existing American slightly richer. Admitting several million elderly disabled non-English-speaking immigrants would make us crazy rich.

Joe Biden will deny that there is anything special about having been born with a physician-identified biological female sex at birth (“LGBTQ+ Equality”; what about LGBTQIA+?), but the rest of his policy pages refer to “women” as though it were a persistent well-defined category of humans.]

Readers: What do you think? Are the leading Democrats examples of the elderly being bad at arithmetic? Should we all make sure that we have a durable power of attorney set up for the day that we turn 70 and can’t trust ourselves to make a stock trade?

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Father’s Day reflections: How not to get a job at Hallmark

by philg

Some epic tweets regarding yesterday’s Hallmark Holiday of Father’s Day:

The author is “Feminist, socialist, part of the 99% and proud.” Can we agree that she would have a tough time getting a job at Hallmark, makers of cards for the 100%?

Separately, circulating in some (apparently deplorable) aviation groups: “Your dad’s not a pilot? Well, Happy Mother’s Day to your dad.”

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How can ordinary people buy the statues that are being pulled down?

by philg

“Roosevelt Statue to Be Removed From Museum of Natural History” (NYT): “The equestrian memorial to Theodore Roosevelt has long prompted objections as a symbol of colonialism and racism.”

I celebrate this decision because I would love to see this statue replaced with one of Donald Trump on a golf cart (and also to see Donald Trump’s image carved into Mt. Rushmore, either to join Teddy Roosevelt or to replace him; photo I took from a friend’s Mooney in 2002 shows that there is plenty of room; the lower photo shows that there is already a venue there architecturally suitable for a fascist rally).

As a practical matter, though, where can people buy these discarded works of art? Our neighbors, for example, all have enough room for such a statue, thanks to our two-acre zoning minimum (ensures that none of the low-income black Americans whose lives matter to us (judging by the hundreds of Black Lives Matter signs in our town) can afford to move in). But will they be on eBay or what?

(What did TR actually say about Black Lives Matter? “Teddy Roosevelt discusses America’s race problem” describes a 1905 speech:

In his argument for racial equality, Roosevelt used the rising tide raises all ships metaphor, stating that if morality and thrift among the colored men can be raised then those same virtues among whites, already assumed to be more advanced, would rise to an even higher degree. At the same time, he warned that the debasement of the blacks will in the end carry with it [the] debasement of the whites.

Roosevelt’s solution to the race problem in 1905 was to proceed slowly toward social and economic equality. He cautioned against imposing radical changes in government policy and instead suggested a gradual adjustment in the attitudes of whites toward ethnic minorities. He referred to white Americans as the forward race, whose responsibility it was to raise the status of minorities through training the backward race[s] in industrial efficiency, political capacity and domestic morality. Thus, he claimed whites bore the burden of preserving the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.

I wonder what he would say if he could see the “forward race” of white Americans consuming millions of taxpayer-funded opioid pills!)

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How is Sweden doing with coronaplague?

by philg

I like to check in on forecasts versus reality at three-week intervals. Maybe prophets are getting better!

Previous posts:

From the first of those…

What’s the latest from the prophets at IHME? As of a May 20 update to the forecast, Sweden will have a gradually declining daily number of deaths, in more or less the same shape as still-shut-down Massachusetts. A total of 5,129 Swedes will die from/with Covid-19 (roughly one third the previous forecast). The virus will simply burn itself out, apparently, despite Sweden’s lack of shutdown. (But in other countries, the same shape decline will be attributed to a multi-month shutdown?)

That forecast for Swedish death was down from the 13,529 number in the early April forecast. As of June 5, 2020, the IHME model forecast 8,534 deaths for Sweden and the deaths will come in a Bactrian camel shape:

The forecast from June 5 predicts 60-70 deaths per day right around now. What are we seeing? Europeans refuse to work on weekends, so the reported deaths are zero for Saturday and Sunday. Even today’s report shows 0 deaths (so maybe tomorrow’s report will actually reflect three days of deaths?). The Friday report shows 12 new deaths reported in Sweden.

[Update: The Tuesday report included 69 new deaths. So that’s 81 new deaths spread over 5 days of reports (12+0+0+0+69) or 16 deaths per day compared to the forecast 60-70. In other words, the forecast was wrong by 4X.]

(Also from the Tuesday reports: Sweden has suffered 5,122 deaths from its population of 10 million. Massachusetts has lost 7,890 from its population of 7 million. In Month 4 of Shutdown, the Massachusetts rate is 2.2X Sweden’s.)

What about the former chief scientist of the European CDC who, when put on the spot, tossed out that coronaplague wouldn’t be worse than a bad flu season in terms of death? (note that assumptions regarding population fatality rate were not important for the Swedish plan; assumptions regarding the practicality of a non-Chinese country significantly changing the trajectory of infections were)

A bad season indeed was 1957-8, in which up to 116,000 Americans died out of a population of 172 million (compare to 330 million today). Applying that rate to Sweden’s 10 million people, 6,744 Swedes would succumb to Covid-19.

I don’t think economic arguments are highly relevant in a world where people seemingly care only about clinging to life. Nonetheless, since poverty often determines health outcomes: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-16/one-economy-stands-out-as-crisis-reveals-striking-differences? (see “Most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted, coronaconomy edition”)

Readers: What’s your best guess on Sweden? How will the death rate from/with Covid-19 compare to the U.S. rate by early 2021? (right now the U.S. has roughly 71 percent of the death rate compared to Sweden, so the U.S. is better if we measure only by this one number)

[Update 6/24: the IHME prophets have released a new projection.

Instead of the Bactrian camel, Sweden is now on the dromedary shape. There is a new “what if?” capability in this model. For example, if only 10 million Swedes would put on masks, 2 lives would be saved on September 1. (but how many would be killed in car-pedestrian accidents due to fogged-up eyeglasses from the masks?). 5,754 Swedes will meet their end due to Covid-19 through October 1, 2020, a population fatality rate of nearly 0.06 percent.]

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Most U.S. states are now on the Swedish plan?

by philg

My Facebook feed is alive with righteous expressions of outrage at growing coronaplague in reopened Sun Belt states. A typical story posted, underneath some complaints about the unmasked, Donald Trump, etc., would be “Florida shows signs as next coronavirus epicenter as cases spike across the country” (CNN, June 18) or “Coronavirus Cases Spike Across Sun Belt as Economy Lurches into Motion” (NYT, June 14).

I wonder if the majority of U.S. states inadvertently adopted the Swedish approach to managing COVID-19.

Consider that the shutdown happened in a lot of states at a time when there was, in fact, hardly any virus at all. The shutdowns were therefore months too early to have any effect, even if one were to accept that shutdown accomplishes anything, because the virus does not spread in the U.S. suburbs the way that it spread in Wuhan, New York City, or Italy.

So essentially the shutdown never happened from the perspective of the virus. The typical U.S. state now has the general population running around and mingling more or less as in 2019, while retirement homes and nursing homes are “locked down” as best they can be (temperature checks, etc. for the staff; restrictions on visitors). The immunocompromised, otherwise vulnerable, and healthy-but-fearful are hiding in individual bunkers (apartments/homes). Mass gatherings are canceled. How is that different from the Swedish policy?

Stockholm, 2016:

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From which file sharing service will people pull videos out of the memory hole?

by philg

“BBC remove Fawlty Towers’ iconic ‘Don’t Mention The War’ episode from UKTV streaming site” (The Sun):

The streaming service which is owned by the Corporation, have decided to take down the episode that also features racial terms.

This is the latest “classic” British TV show to be removed from a streaming service owned by the BBC, as broadcasters continue to re-assess old British television content.

This Fawlty Towers episode in question was first broadcast in 1975, also features Cleese’s bigoted character who was in hospital and was shocked when he was treated by a black doctor.

Where will people find the content that their morally superior overlords have decided needs to be stuffed into a memory hole? Is BitTorrent sustainable or can it be shut down easily by governments and ISPs under the rubric of protecting copyright (i.e., the right of the owner to block anyone from ever seeing something again)?

People are pirating copies of movies already, right? How are they doing it? Will the mechanisms of today still work in 20 or 30 years?

John Cleese in 2019, from the Daily Mail:

'Finally got it right': John Cleese revealed he 'finally got it right' with his fourth wife after a string of failed marriages - and admitted he still only feels 43 despite his 80th birthday fast approaching

Related:

  • “Gone with the Wind removed from HBO Max” (BBC)
  • “John Cleese’s Alimony Payments Are No Laughing Matter” (HuffPost): In a new interview with the Sunday Morning Herald, the 74-year-old funnyman opens up about his 2008 divorce, touring, and the perception that he’s financially set thanks to his success with “Monty Python.” … “I will have paid my ex-wife, I think it is $23 or $24 million. That’s an awful lot of money. And when you have to pay it over a period of seven years, even if you sell a lot of properties — like I had five and I now have one — there’s still a lot of simple, hard work to be done just to earn the rest of it.” … The former couple has no children. [see Real World Divorce on England]
  • “Berkeley Will Delete Online Content” (20,000 lectures withdrawn from the public due to “receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues.”)

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Facebook helps manufacture consent around the idea of white privilege

by philg

Want to write on Facebook about “white privilege” and how “It’s for sure a white man’s world in America. … All you got to be is white in America to get whatever you want”? (see Being There) Go for it!

What about disagreeing with this, however obliquely? A Facebook friend wrote the following:

There are tens of millions of racists in america but most are white trash who don’t make any decisions that matter.

His account was suspended.

A friend’s post, quoting “Jeff Jarvis: ‘As an old, white American man, I must confess it’s people like me who got us here'”:

Soon, by 2050, the white majority in America faces the reality that it will become the white minority and that scares them. The most frightened are the uneducated, old, white men who hold privilege and power and realise how tenuous that hold is because it is based on what they had in the past — who they are — rather than what they contribute to the future — what they can do.

I responded with the following:

If they’re uneducated and old, how are they privileged? If they’re over 40, they wouldn’t even be able to get a job absent government coercion (see https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination ).

My friend:

Because things would be even harder for them if they were uneducated, old, and not white. I think Jeff does a good job of defining privilege: when you get things others don’t because of who you are, rather than because of what you can do.

Me:

Let that uneducated unemployed old white guy go out on Tinder and see how far his privilege takes him….

(if he is successful on Tinder and his partner chooses not to abort the resulting child, see Real World Divorce to calculate the cash flow in various states)

His friends piled on about how wrong I was. Me:

Only a few years ago, these same men were being featured as victims by our media. Now they are “privileged” and “powerful”? From 2016, CNN: “Nearly one-quarter of white men with only a high school diploma aren’t working.”

As of 2017, they were dying even if the police didn’t have enough energy to kill them. ‘The Collapse of the White Working Class’ (Atlantic)

Readers: Why is the idea that all whites, however poor, uneducated, and old, are privileged suddenly so important that Facebook needs to censor dissenting points of view?

(Another Facebook friend was blocked for 30 days due to his attempt to make a point via sarcasm:

White men are the only rapists in the world. How can I disagree with the consensus view of the Ivy League elites?

See also “The Question of Race in Campus Sexual-Assault Cases” (Atlantic). Regarding the Obama-mandated on-campus sexual assault tribunals: “Black men make up only about 6 percent of college undergraduates. They are vastly overrepresented in the cases I’ve tracked.”)

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