Which Law Fits This Issue Best?

 Scenario:  YouTube demonitizes a channel because they don't like the political position of the channel "owner"

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

OR 

Under this Act, the Commission is empowered, among other things, to (a) prevent unfair methods of competition, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce; (b) seek monetary redress and other relief for conduct injurious to consumers; (c) prescribe trade regulation rules defining with specificity acts or practices that are unfair or deceptive, and establishing requirements designed to prevent such acts or practices; (d) conduct investigations relating to the organization, business, practices, and management of entities engaged in commerce; and (e) make reports and legislative recommendations to Congress. 

This Raises A (Kind-of) Philosophical Question

 

Seattle pays ex-pimp $150,000 to offer ‘alternatives to policing’

1. Has Seattle made an ex-pimp into its bitch?

2. Has an ex-pimp so moved up in the world that now he is making emotionally troubled cities into his bitch rather than doing it to emotionally troubled women?

Four Words

I'm not in the mood for a lot of math, but I think there are only 12 combinations of these three words in which kid is always used twice and the other two words are used once.  I don't really care about that since this is a linguistics post.

The arrangements can be categorized into a few different meanings:

1.  An immature goat which is nice to children.

2. An immature goat which is friendly in a general way.

Goat kid, kid friendly 1

Kid goat, kid friendly 1

Goat kid, friendly kid 2

Kid goat, friendly kid 2

Friendly kid, kid goat 2

Friendly kid, goat kid 2

Kid friendly, kid goat 1

Kid friendly, goat kid 1

Kid, kid friendly goat 1

Kid, kid goat, friendly 1

Friendly goat kid, kid 1

Goat, friendly kid, kid --this one may be unintelligible even with helpful commas

Two notes on this data

 1. The top image is a count of all deaths, the bottom is specific counts for Covid related deaths.

2. Please note the shape of the bottom curve and the right hand side of the top curve.  They cover the same period of time.  These curves look really similar to me, which makes me think they are both good data since they are using completely different data sources.

3. Since excess deaths are now normal, this crisis is over.  I suspect it will take several more months before everyone starts acting like things are normal, but that is because of psychology, not data.

I Dropped A 1,000 Kiloton Device On Hanscom

And you will never believe what happened!

The inner yellow circle is the fireball, the next area is the widespread blast damage ring, then thermal damage (3rd degree burns if you are in the line of sight, which could be very possible given that this is a 10,000 ft air burst)  finally, low blast damage--think windows broken.

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but this is only about 10 miles away, 50 times as powerful as what was dropped on Nagasaki and we would almost certainly live through it.  The deaths are predicted to be over 50 thousand, which sounds low to me.  The site for this is here if you want to check it out.

    

Jonathan Turley Doesn't Say It So I Will

Remind me of which side is acting more like fascists? 

How “Silence is Violence” Can Became Compelled Speech

Infection Rate

Back when case rates were setting records, but death rates were flat, the news was wall to wall, "Case Rates Set New Records!"

Now that they've fallen for a month straight, radio silence.  Their motto must be "All the Bad-News that Fits (our agenda)." 

Unemployment rate

Flash, Fireball, Shockwave

I took screenshots from the below video:

Flash

Fireball

Shockwave

 

And I can understand why conspiracy minded people think this was an atomic bomb attack!  Supposedly there were 2,700 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate in the burning warehouse and that is in the range of a tactical nuke, or what would be on an air-to-air missile like the AIR-2_Genie

 We've all seen film of the distinctive blast from an atomic device, but what makes it distinct?  Is it that it is atomic or is it just the amount of energy released?  I honestly don't know, but there was sufficient potential energy stored in that quantity of Ammonium Nitrate.

Finally, why bomb an already burning building?  Whatever is in there is already being destroyed and there will be many eyes on it, so any action would be noticed and filmed.           

Another view of the massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon pic.twitter.com/UM00Ea3qDs

— Ali aljanabi (@Alawaayy) August 4, 2020

The Physics of Masks and Moral Suasion

There is a war of ideas out there which often seems to boil down to "wear a mask" v. "masks are worthless" For the record, I think both of these positions are utterly stupid.

On the "wear a mask" side: Should I wear one at home, when I'm sleeping, out jogging on otherwise deserted roads, while driving? On the "worthless" side: It is intuitively obvious that as long as there is some retention, there is some protection. Two additional points here: 1. What is being filtered is not just a virion by itself but tiny droplets of saliva or mucous containing viruses. 2. The size of the infectious load (infectious particles) is a large determinant of whether you will get an infection.

What about the idea that if you don't care about yourself, you need to protect those around you: This is really stupid too: Masks mostly protect the person wearing it*. Regardless of how retentive the filter, when you inhale you force the mask to tighten around your face, when you exhale, you push it away from your face. There is bound to be more bypass around the filter material when you exhale than when you inhale. The second reason is distance: You are exposed to all the air you inhale, but the air you exhale does not go directly into the lungs of anyone else (unless you are giving mouth-to-mouth). The air you exhale becomes rapidly mixed with other air and this dilutes any infectious particles. Finally, the chances that you are infectious is very low, which means that the chances that your mask is doing anything useful is also, very low.

*Here is where it gets tricky: If you get infected, you increase the chances of infecting people you live with and some of them may be old or otherwise vulnerable. So it makes sense to protect yourself to protect them. No. Not all the time. If you are in crowded places where you can't socially distance it makes sense to wear a mask.

Common sense, not glib slogans.

A couple of comments

Blogger dbp said...

Early on a 6-mile jog yesterday, I noticed a new Black Lives Matter sign, which are pretty common here in a distant suburb of Boston. What attracted my attention was a small epigraph at the bottom. Silence = Violence.

The more I thought about it (I had 5 miles to to go and I'm not fast) the more I thought, "This is the moment BLM has jumped the shark".

First we are informed that speech (of the wrong kind) is violence. Then we are preached that violence is speech. And now, complete passivity is violence. My head ached more in thinking how to unknot the logical contradictions, than my legs did in running in 90 degrees.

I will resist speaking on some things but if I'm forced to opine, I will say: BLM and ANTIFA sound nice In practice, the first will result in more black lives lost (mostly black men at the hands of other black men) and the second are (despite their name) fascist street thugs.

6/24/20, 9:14 AM Delete
Blogger dbp said...

Elie Wiesel had something to say about silence:

"...Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe."

Right now, it is obvious who is the oppressor. The people commanding me to speak are the oppressors.

6/24/20, 9:24 AM

Stages Of Decay

It happens pretty often, I go to the basement for something, (we have a fridge and pantry down there, so the something is usually food) and when I get to the bottom of the stairs I have no memory of what I came down for.  Naturally, the memory comes back to me once I have made it back up.  

On the other hand, I am able to look at data and see a trend, make a note of my prediction and track how well I've done.  I wonder if there are important people who got where they were because they used to be really sharp, but are now really dim but still considered trusted advisors.

Two cases in point:

Andy Slavitt has a wiki page and it is all very impressive.

And yet, on May 3rd, he made the below prediction:  Sites like this had shown case rates falling since anywhere from early to late April.  He predicts new cases of 50,000/day outside of NY.  What were they on Memorial Day?  Just under 20,000.  My searches show no correction or mea culpa.   Maybe he is in worse shape than me and just doesn't remember his very bad predictions.

If you look at the country minus NY, from April 25 to May 1, cases have GROWN from 24322 to 28437. So outside of NY, positive cases are increasing by 17%/week.
EVEN IF CASE GROWTH DOESN’T GO UP, that would put us over 50,000 new cases every day outside of NY by Memorial Day. 13/

— Andy Slavitt @ 🏡 (@ASlavitt) May 3, 2020

Next:  Famous lawyer and wiki page owing smart man:  Ted Frank

He was so certain of his prediction that there would be more than 50,000 deaths in May from Covid-19 that he offered to bet up to $100,000 on it.  I was fairly certain that I would "win".  You can look at the data from the earlier link above and it is pretty obvious the number would be below 50k.  The reasons I didn't take the bet were that I figured that if I won, he would never admit it and I would not get paid, but that if I was wrong, he (as a skilled lawyer) would sue me for the money if I refused to pay.  So, a no-win, but can still lose type bet.  Anyway, the actual number who died in May from Covid-19, 42,339  Not only was his prediction wrong, while I maintained reasonable courtesy, he lobbed personal insults at me and then ended up blocking me. Added: The total deaths for June are 21,271. About half as many as may and still dropping.   It seemed a little deranged and reinforced my decision not to take his bet.

50,000 per month? You mean like the number who die each month from cancer and the even larger number who die from heart disease every month? It is already receding, there won't be 50k in May.

— David Pecchia (@dpecchia) May 4, 2020

How much do you want to bet? I’ll put up up to $100,000 that the number will be higher than 50,000 in May.

— tedfrank 😷 (@tedfrank) May 4, 2020

Land Of Coincidence and It Was Staring Us All In The Face The Whole Time.

Somehow an idea popped into my head last night and I tried to play it cool.  My wife does not like the long-form joke which ends up with a clever pun and she can sense when I am guiding the conversation in that way.

Me:  You know how they have these delivery services for food.
She:  Like Grubhub?
Me: Yes, exactly.  My idea is for one that delivers alcohol.
She:  I heard about such a thing, I can't remember what they are called...
Me: I have come up with the perfect name.
She:  What?
Me:  The Liquor Picker-Upper.

Later, I thought of another one:  Liquorty-Split, also later I saw an add on Facebook for quick alcohol delivery but I don't remember the name and since it is Facebook, I will never find it again.

Next:  My wife has a new hobby of making masks.  She has made a few for each of our kids and has branched out to their boyfriends and roommates.  I am normally the last one to come up to bed at night and so it falls to me to turn-off all the lights.  See that lamp over by the wall?  Once I turn that off, it is pitch black and I have to evade all the cords and other trip hazards, in pitch dark!  I was reminded of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (whatever a shirtwaist is).  And yes, I could turn on another light first and use that to negotiate the maze.  But, I am usually pretty groggy and can be depended upon to never think of this.  So what is the coincidence?  First thing the next morning, I am reading Lileks, The Bleat and he pretty randomly mentions the same event:

"That's where we went on Memorial Day. All those paddlewheel boats, docked for the Duration. The pestilence would rip through that thing like fire through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory."

Finally, the coincidence we all heard today:  The Central Park imbroglio in which two unrelated people up the ante on a dog being leashed in a place where it is the rule.  They both have the same last name, Cooper.  Of course, if this was a movie, they would meet again and be stranded someplace, or have to work together and yes, they would fall in love and it would be a romantic comedy. I think Damon Wayans and Katherine Heigl would work as the leads.

Covid-19 Venn's Diagram

Also, a nice guide to science writing.

Messy Data

When you are looking at data and trying to find a trend, you can be stymied by smaller trends within the longer trend and they can dwarf the trend you are looking for.

Case in point is a long term trend in global temperature. The variation one sees every day is larger that what one might see in thousands of years, same for seasons. And added to that is the need to take readings all over the planet.

When it comes to looking for trends in the US Covid pandemic, we have unique sorts of problems in data messiness. There are weekly anomalies--the weekend changes people's schedules and so death reporting may lag by different rates on different days. Here, I spotted a very clear-cut Sun, Mon, Tue pattern from the Worldmeter site:

You see hints of this throughout the month or so, but this week and last week are especially clear. Another great example is Sweden.

Smart People Ignoring Debatable Issues as if they don't exist

I replied to this meme, which I've seen all over the internet for about a week, as follows: Some people think this is brilliant and others think it is idiotic and obtuse. Clearly there are two underlying views of reality which are different from each other:

The idea that we can “open the country back up because the curve has flattened” is like saying “the parachute has slowed our rate of descent, so we can take it off now.”

— Granite (@oneminutecall) April 17, 2020

I think the obvious two are:

1. Social distancing is working--the flattening of the curve is due to our efforts.

2. The economic costs are either being completely ignored as if they don't exist at all, or it is assumed that they are outweighed by the life saving benefits of the economic shutdown.

Added: Duh! The original purpose was to flatten the curve and keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. The peak is happening in places like NYC and Boston and the hospitals are coping. So, mission accomplished. Phase 2 is to get out enough to continue with building herd immunity, but at a controlled rate so that hospitals remain able to cope.

I think both of these are debatable and it is obtuse to pretend they're not.

Useful and relevant links:

https://rt.live/
https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v1.full.pdf
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/lockdown-socialism-will-collapse/

I case it wasn't obvious from the start--the complete abandonment, sometimes with hilariously idiotic justifications has really proven the point that it the "experts" are total BS vendors.

Let's Take Some Modest Risks

Given the certain economic disruptions we are going through, as well as the certain continuing loss of Human life, if this is not the time to try something risky, when would be the time?

We could be out of this fairly quickly if we took some reasonable risks and got out of the mind-set of normal drug approvals.

Why do vaccines take so long to develop? Ideally, you want to stimulate a strong immune response but also not kill or sicken people who take the vaccine. This takes time. Once you find the right answer (what exactly are you giving and at what concentration) you need to scale-up production. This is fine for diseases that have been constant problems and maybe Covid will fall into this category. What is likely is that Covid will burn itself out long before any vaccine is available, if we follow the normal template.

What I suggest is a kind of variolation, but with much more control and far less risk and which could provide almost immediate (modest) benefits.

Viruses can be made in cell culture by transfecting with plasmids which contain the viral genome. Lately this has been done and modified by taking out some piece of the viral genome such that any viral particle made in this process can not replicate but can still enter a target cell. This is the basis of viral gene therapy.

What I suggest is to use the same technology to make Covid-19 virus but leave-out some essential function, I think the reverse transcriptase gene makes sense. We could widely administer dilute dosages at pilot scale. The risk would be low and while there would likely be low immunity, it would increase the viral load needed to cause illness and would allow for higher dosages to be safe once production ramps up to the point where they are available.

A crash program could be providing low dosages in a month and higher ones in three.

Useful and relevant links:

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/lockdown-socialism-will-collapse/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v1.full.pdf
https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/

Field Notes From An Outing To The Grocery Store

Some things were weird and surrealistic:

--The store was more empty than normal for a Wednesday (I have Wednesdays off and often shop on this day).

--Other than a few things (I am looking at you, pasta and paper isles) the store was well stocked with the usual items.

--People dressed normally and people with full regalia of protective gear shopped harmoniously. Neither type seemed alarmed by the presence of the other type. I found it really creepy: Are we in a zombie apocalypse and some oblivious people haven't noticed or is everything normal and some people are overcome by paranoia?


Some things never change: A shopper who was putting away his cart at the same time as me, left his cart where his poor aim had left it; stuck on the corral railing. Lackadaisical! And then just to prove the point, he was ahead of me in the lane exiting the parking lot. It widens into two lanes, one for a left turn that gets backed up since they have to wait for a light and the right turn, which is normally empty since you can take a right without waiting for a light. He stopped about 15 feet behind the car ahead of him in line. I had room, barely, to get by since that was where the lanes widened. But the next car behind Mr. Oblivious will block the right lane. It reinforces my general rule: If somebody does a thing half-assed, they do everything half-assed.

Italian residents hug Chinese people to encourage them in coronavirus fight

Great example of a liberal rich country in which virtue signaling has backfired on them in a major way.



Now they are paying the butcher's bill with the lives of their grandparents.

The Tree of Liberty

And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

Biden: "Those who say 'the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots' -- a great line, well, guess what: The fact is, if you’re going to take on the government you need an F-15 with Hellfire Missiles. There is no way an AK-47 is going to take care of you." pic.twitter.com/npmW40DHS2

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 9, 2020

Joe Biden is exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind. The only kind of politician who envisions the US Military opening fire on civilians, is the kind who is a tyrant.

Added: In true Biden fashion, the F-15 does not carry the Hellfire. What do you want to bet that if Trump made such a gaffe, it would have gone un-fact-checked?