Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.
My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.
Snyder quotes Hannah Arendt in this piece and I’m going share a quote of hers I’ve shared before:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie-a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days-but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
I think about her last line all the time: “And with such a people you can then do what you please.” Like make them assault Congress on behalf of yourself and your political party. This was not Snyder’s closing paragraph, but I’m going to end this post with it:
The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?
Details from the 1/6 terrorist attack on Congress continue to trickle out. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not in the Capitol during the event, but said in an hour-long Instagram Live video that she had a “very close encounter” that day and thought she was going to die. Here’s Ocasio-Cortez quoted by Emma Gray:
“Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated.”
She also felt unsafe around other members of Congress — From Buzzfeed News:
The Democrat said that she worried during the storming of the Capitol about other members of Congress knowing her location and did not feel safe going to the same secure location as her colleagues because of members who believe in the QAnon collective delusion and “frankly, white supremacist members of Congress … who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location,” saying she was concerned there were colleagues “who would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, etc.” She said that she “didn’t feel safe around other members of Congress.”
“Based on today’s briefing, we have grave concerns about ongoing and violent threats to our democracy,” that group of Democratic chairs said in a cryptic statement after the meeting on Tuesday. The briefing included the chairs and other top members of the House Oversight, Judiciary, Homeland Security, Armed Services and Intelligence panels.
“It is clear that more must be done to preempt, penetrate, and prevent deadly and seditious assaults by domestic violent extremists in the days ahead,” the statement said.
The lawmakers voiced their concerns moments after a public FBI and Justice Department briefing revealed their belief that the Jan. 6 violence could be part of a much graver, well-organized “seditious conspiracy.”
What an remarkable collection of statements & events. This is not going away. Any elected official who supported this coup effort must resign or be removed from office. How can you “secure Congress” when members of Congress are part of the effort to subvert it?
There is a lie some Americans tell themselves when America is on its worst behavior: “This isn’t America!” or “This isn’t who we are!” or “We’re better than this!”
You heard versions of this lie again this week after armed insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on urging from President Trump, attempting to undo the results of last November’s election.
Even in the halls of Congress, after the broken glass was cleared and U.S. senators and representatives were allowed back into their chambers from undisclosed locations, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska came back to this refrain: “Our kids need to know that this isn’t what America is.”
We are a country built on fabrication, nostalgia and euphemism. And every time America shows the worst of itself, all the contradictions collapse into the lie I’ve heard nonstop for the last several years: “This isn’t who we are.”
Until America fully reckons with, accepts, and makes amends for the two primary sins of its founding — the colonization and genocide of indigenous people and the system of heredity chattel slavery — the nation cannot truly move forward and be a democracy. From the standpoint of indigenous and Black people — as well as women, LGBTQ+ folx, people of color, and other historically marginalized groups — America has always been a fascist country. The sooner that the white ruling class and those of us who benefit from white supremacist-misogynist identity politics (as Rebecca Solnit put it recently) understand and own up to that fact, the sooner we can actually start coming together as a nation committed to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” of all its inhabitants.
Climate change is chaos by nature. It means more powerful storms, more intense wildfires, more extreme floods and droughts. It is an assault on the weakest among us, and decades of the right-wing mindset of small government have left the country with fewer resources to deal with the fallout. As the summer’s wildfires show, the far-right will be there to try to fill the power void. Those fires occurred in a predominantly white region.
There’s a strong strain of white nationalism and neo-Nazism that ran through Wednesday’s insurrection, and it’s easy to imagine what will happen when flames or storms hit places that are predominantly Black, brown, or Indigenous. In fact, we don’t need to imagine it at all. We’ve seen it in the gunman who showed up at a Walmart to kill immigrants whom he falsely blamed for putting strain on the environment. And we saw it in the white vigilante violence in the vacuum after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. We’ve seen it so frequently, it even has a name: ecofascism.
After Wednesday, the boundaries of permissible violence have now expanded to a distorting degree, at a time of increasing climate instability. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists literally took over the halls of power and got away with it. When climate change upends communities with far fewer defenses — communities that hate groups already scapegoat — the results will be catastrophic.
As we’ve seen with the pandemic, fascists will use climate chaos to assert dominance and snatch for power. Others will make vast sums of money — and inequality will continue to grow. Creating confusion with misinformation makes all of that easier to manage for these opportunists.
Ghosts of Segregation is a project by photographer Rich Frishman with the goal of documenting the “the vestiges of America’s racism evident in the built environment, hidden in plain sight: Schools for ‘colored’ children, theatre entrances and restrooms for ‘colored people,’ lynching sites, juke joints, jails, hotels and bus stations.” The top photo above is of a segregation wall in a restaurant in Texas photographed in 2017:
This partition was constructed in the early 20th Century to keep people of different races apart. It is decorated with an original pre-1929 Dr. Pepper logo. At the time of its construction (circa 1906) only Caucasian customers were allowed to sit in the front of the saloon. All Hispanic, Asian and African-American customers had to sit behind the wall. When the saloon was remodeled and re-opened in 2014 the wall, no longer used for its original purpose, was retained as a historical reminder. It has recently been demolished.
The bottom photo shows the “colored entrance” for a movie theater in Texas:
The enigmatic door atop the stairway on the south side of the Texan Theater, long locked and largely overlooked, is the “colored entrance,” a vestige of Jim Crow-era segregation. In Kilgore, Texas, the term “colored” extended to anyone not Caucasian, including Hispanics and the occasional Asian.
Also included in the project are photos of WWII internment camps (where persons of Japanese ancestry were held during WWII, many of them American citizens), the US/Mexico border wall, and the Stonewall Inn in NYC. You can view the photos here as well as a few more in the NY Times.
In remarks to the German parliament today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel advocated for tighter Covid-19 restrictions, as cases & deaths in Germany reach new peaks. The restrictions she’s referring to were recommended by “a national academy of scientists and academics” and are intended at reducing the spread of Covid-19 over the December holidays. The impassioned argument that she makes in this short video clip (full report here) is difficult for me to find fault with (even though conservative members of her parliament and Twitter commenters disagree). Here’s a partial transcript:
If the price we pay is 590 deaths per day, then that is unacceptable in my view. And when scientists are practically begging us to reduce our contacts for a week before we see Grandma and Grandpa, grandparents and older people at Christmas, then perhaps we really should think again about whether we can’t find a way to start the school holidays on the 16th instead of the 19th. What will we say when we look back on this once-in-a-century event if we weren’t able to find a solution for these three days? And it may be the case that sending children home is the wrong thing to do, if so then it will have to be digital lessons or something else. I don’t know, this is not my area of expertise and I don’t want to interfere. I only want to say: if we have too many contacts now, in the run-up to Christmas, and it ends up being the last Christmas with our grandparents, then we will have done something wrong. She should not let this happen.
I teared up watching her talk. In the US, we are dealing with many more cases (which will turn into eventual deaths) and deaths than Germany, both in absolute and per capita terms. It’s like 10 fully-loaded passenger planes a day are crashing with no survivors and there are small things that we all can do to keep many of those people alive and … many of us just don’t want to do those things!
Like Merkel says, we are going to look back on this and be completely ashamed that we didn’t do these things and that we elected people that won’t advocate for these things on our behalf and that we let 300-400,000 Americans die and countless others lose loved ones and go bankrupt and get evicted and lose their businesses and be chronically ill and be food insecure and and and. If we aren’t ashamed, if we don’t reckon with all of this someday, then maybe nothing can redeem us and we deserved it all.
These are the “what if” stories that ask us to imagine our world on a different path: what if a battle, election or assassination had gone the other way, or a pivotal person had never been born? Some of these stories involve time travel to make the change, but many alternate histories are simply imagined differences. What if the Nazis had not been beaten, as in the novel The Man in the High Castle, or what if the Soviets had landed a man on the Moon first, like in For All Mankind?
One of my favorite alternative history maps not covered by Arbesman is Melissa Gould’s Neu-York, a map of Manhattan after a hypothetical conquest of the United States by the Nazis in World War II (which I blogged about way back in 2003, when kottke.org had comments!)
This map of the lower 48 US states hand-drawn by XKCD’s Randall Munroe is super clever: 7 of the states are actually missing. Maybe the pandemic is starting continuing to rot my brain, but I stared at this for an embarrassingly long time before finding any of the absent states. Even now that I know which ones are gone, the map doesn’t look out of place at all. *claps*
In an incredible effort, science has provided the world with what looks like an incredibly effective vaccine for Covid-19. For Stat, Helen Braswell writes about the challenges of turning that vaccine into vaccinations. In the US, despite heroic work from individuals and individual groups, our public health system has proved unequal to the challenge of addressing the pandemic, and we’re now turning, in part, to that system to distribute and administer the vaccines, as well as to educate the public and drum up support for vaccination. The people that we’re counting on are public officials and healthcare workers worn out from what is essentially one 9-month-long wave of illness, hospitalizations, and death across the country. Misinformation and skepticism of science and government has sowed “justified distrust” about vaccines in many people:
Concern about the vaccines, however, cuts across ethnic and socioeconomic groups. President Trump’s overt efforts to pressure the FDA to issue EUAs before the Nov. 3 election — before the vaccine trials were finished — has deepened the sense of unease. The CDC’s early pandemic testing fiasco, coupled with its sidelining by the Trump administration, has eroded its standing as a trusted source of information.
Alison Buttenheim, an associate professor of nursing and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, refers to the current situation as a perfect storm of “justified distrust.”
“People who don’t think twice about vaccinating their kids totally on time, who get their flu shot every year, are in the sort of, ‘Hmmm. Might wait six months on this one,’” Buttenheim, who works on vaccine acceptance, told STAT. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I’ll get the European one,’” she said, adding other people have said they would get vaccinated after Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gets vaccinated.
And it’s not just the general public. A recent survey of 2,000 doctors and nurses in New Jersey found that 60% of doctors planned to take a Covid vaccine, but only 40% of nurses intended to, Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said in a recent “60 Minutes” segment about Operation Warp Speed.
Fauci, along with other respected public health officials and workers, should get vaccinated live on CNN. Stream it on YouTube and Twitch. It won’t convert the anti-vax, anti-mask, QAnon wingnuts (nothing will) but if you can at least get healthcare workers and at-risk folks on board, it would be time well spent.
But that’s only one small piece of the puzzle. Braswell’s piece is long and comprehensive look at the challenges regarding the Covid-19 vaccines and is worth reading all the way through.
Now that the preliminary results of various Covid-19 vaccine trials are coming out (and looking promising), attention is turning to the eventual distribution of the vaccines. The logistics of getting the doses out to hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices is one concern but so is the question of who should get vaccinated first. Supplies of the vaccines will be limited at first, so we’ll need to decide as a society what distribution method is most fair and is of the most benefit to the greatest number of people.
In addition several recommendations — including that the vaccine be distributed to everyone free of charge — a central feature of the report is a four-phase system of vaccine distribution, summarized in this graphic:
I’d like to stress that this graphic does not show all groups of people included in each phase — please consult the text of the report for that before you go sharing that graphic on social media without context. For example, here’s the full description for “high-risk health workers” in Phase 1a:
This group includes frontline health care workers (who are in hospitals, nursing homes, or providing home care) who either (1) work in situations where the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is higher, or (2) are at an elevated risk of transmitting the infection to patients at higher risk of mortality and severe morbidity. These individuals — who are themselves unable to avoid exposure to the virus — play a critical role in ensuring that the health system can care for COVID-19 patients.
These groups include not only clinicians (e.g., nurses, physicians, respiratory technicians, dentists and hygienists) but also other workers in health care settings who meet the Phase 1a risk criteria (e.g., nursing assistants, environmental services staff, assisted living facility staff, long-term care facility staff, group home staff, and home caregivers). The health care settings employing these workers who are at increased risk of exposure to the virus may also include ambulatory and urgent care clinics; dialysis centers; blood, organ, and tissue donation facilities; and other non-hospital health care facilities. Finally, there are community and family settings where care for infected patients occurs. Not all the workers in these settings are paid for their labor, but, while they are caring for infected people, they all need to be protected from the virus.
Situations associated with higher risk of transmission include caring for COVID-19 patients, cleaning areas where COVID-19 patients are admitted, treated, and housed, and performing procedures with higher risk of aerosolization such as endotracheal intubation, bronchoscopy, suctioning, turning the patient to the prone position, disconnecting the patient from the ventilator, invasive dental procedures and exams, invasive specimen collection, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In addition, there are other frontline health care workers who, if they have uncontrolled exposure to the patients or the public in the course of their work, should be in this initial phase. This group includes those individuals distributing or administering the vaccine — especially in areas of higher community transmission — such as pharmacists, plasma and blood donation workers, public health nurses, and other public health and emergency preparedness workers. The committee also includes morticians, funeral home workers, and other death care professionals involved in handling bodies as part of this high-risk group.
The report declines to list specific industries which would be covered in Phase 2’s “critical workers in high-risk settings” but generally says:
The industries in which these critical workers are employed are essential to keeping society and the economy functioning. Since the beginning of the pandemic, millions of people have been going to work and risking exposure to the virus to ensure that markets have food; drug stores have pharmaceutical products; public safety and order are maintained; mail and packages are delivered; and buses, trains, and planes are operating.
Note also the text at the bottom of the graphic: they recommend that within each phase, priority be given to geographic areas where folks are more socially vulnerable in situations like these (e.g. as represented in the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index).
In developing this phased approach, the committee focused on those who are at the most risk of exposure, severe illness or death, and passing along the virus to others as well as critical workers:
Risk of acquiring infection: Individuals have higher priority to the extent that they have a greater probability of being in settings where SARS-CoV-2 is circulating and of being exposed to a sufficient dose of the virus.
Risk of severe morbidity and mortality: Individuals have higher priority to the extent that they have a greater probability of severe disease or death if they acquire infection.
Risk of negative societal impact: Individuals have higher priority to the extent that societal function and other individuals’ lives and livelihood depend on them directly and would be imperiled if they fell ill.
Risk of transmitting infection to others: Individuals have higher priority to the extent that there is a higher probability of their transmitting the infection to others.
You should read (or at least skim) the full report for more information about the plan and the rationale behind it.
On a personal parting note, as someone who is squarely in the 5-15% of Americans covered in Phase 4 — more specifically: as a 40-something straight white man who non-essentially works from home, isn’t low-income, doesn’t socialize widely even under normal circumstances, and should probably be the very last person on this whole Earth scheduled to be vaccinated under an equitable framework — I am content to wait my turn should the US adopt this framework or something like it.1 Distributing vaccines to those who need them most is absolutely the right thing to do, both ethically and from the standpoint of getting society “back to normal” as quickly as possible and with as little additional death and suffering as possible.
Being that equity often isn’t America’s thing, especially during the pandemic, I could see this going either way. And even if this framework is adopted, those who can afford it will undoubtably be able to procure themselves a dose right alongside those medical workers in Phase 1a.↩
Two years ago, I lived through a coup in Sri Lanka. It was stupid. The minority party threw chili powder at everyone in Parliament and took over by farce. Math, however, requires a majority and the courts kicked them out. They gave in. We’d been on the streets for weeks but yay, we won.
No.
I didn’t know it at the time, but we had already lost. No one knew — but oh my God, what we lost. The legitimate government came back but it was divided and weak. We were divided and weak. We were vulnerable.
Four months later, on Easter Sunday, some assholes attacked multiple churches and hotels, killing 269 of us. My wife and kids were at church, I had to frantically call them back. Our nation was shattered. Mobs began attacking innocent Muslims. It was out of control. The coup broke our government, and four months later, that broke us.
The coup was a farce at the time but how soon it turned to tragedy. They called it a constitutional crisis, but how soon it became a real one. Right now, the same thing is happening to you. I’m trying to warn you America. It seems stupid now, but the consequences are not.
There’s a fatal flaw embedded in the basic Covid-19 test, trace, and isolate trifecta used around the world: It doesn’t account for the fact that the coronavirus is not an equal-opportunity pathogen. The people who are most likely to be tested, and to have the easiest time quarantining or isolating, are also the least likely to get sick and die from the virus.
From the United Kingdom to Sweden to Canada, we have evidence that the virus preys on people employed in “essential service” jobs (bus drivers, nurses, factory workers), which don’t allow for telecommuting or paid sick leave; people in low-income neighborhoods; and people in “congregate housing” like shelters, prisons, and retirement homes.
People of color tend to be overrepresented in these groups — but there’s no biological reason they’re more likely to get sick and die from the virus. Simply put: They tend to work jobs that bring them outside the home and into close contact with other people, live in crowded environments ideal for coronavirus contagion, or both.
The state then directed efforts, resources, and money to nursing homes, the unhoused, prisons, and essential workers to make it easier for those folks to stay safe.
I also thought this bit was really interesting:
There’s a simple adage in public health: “Never do a test without offering something in exchange,” said Johns Hopkins’s Stefan Baral. So when a patient gets tested for HIV, for example, they’re offered treatment, support, or contact tracing. “We’re not just doing the testing to get information but also providing a clear service,” Baral added, and potentially preventing that person from spreading the virus any further. “This is basic public health.”
With Covid-19, the US has failed at basic public health. Across the country, people have been asked to get tested without anything offered in exchange.
“If we are asking people to stay home and not work, we have to make sure society is supporting them,” Baral said. “An equitable program would support people to do the right thing.”
“Never do a test without offering something in exchange.” To the extent that federal and state governments have been asking to people to stay home, get tested, and wear a mask, many of those same governments have been unwilling or unable to provide people with much in return for doing so. And so, here we are months into this, paying for that inaction with 250,000 lives.
You can access a free hotel room to safely isolate from your family, which include meals, Rx delivery, free wi-fi, medical staff on site, and transportation to and from hotel and medical appointments.
This video interview with two former inmates (Five Mualimm-Ak and Terrence Slater) about their experiences in solitary confinement is, well, I was going to says “sobering” but it’s not sobering. It’s fucking infuriating and upsetting. Just to pick one moment, here’s Mualimm-Ak’s answer to “How do you maintain a sense of who you are?”:
You don’t. You live off of your memories because you have nothing else to accumulate to move forward. And then you end up having this short-term memory disorder which is a part of you the consequences of being in solitary where you can’t keep one train of thought for too long. And then you’re dropped off in 42nd Street-Times Square, the biggest tourist spot in the world, with 20 million commuters. It’s a sensory overload.
Being confined in a 6x9-foot cell for almost 30 years, with very limited contact with other humans or physical exercise, surely has consequences on one’s overall health, including the brain. King knew that solitary confinement was changing the way his brain worked. When he finally left his cell, he realized he had trouble recognizing faces and had to retrain his eyes to learn what a face was like. His sense of direction was also messed up, and he was unable to follow a simple route in the city by himself. It is as if his brain had erased all those capabilities that were no longer necessary for survival in a cell no bigger than the back of a pick-up truck.
A couple of things from the video that merit your attention. The first is Hell Is a Very Small Place, a book of stories by people who are now or have been in solitary confinement. And second, Mualimm-Ak started an organization called Incarcerated Nation Network “an abolition alliance network dedicated to transforming the prison industrial complex & ending torture” — join me in sending a donation to them? (via open culture)
Zeynep Tufekci says that a devastating third pandemic surge is upon us and that It’s Time to Hunker Down. She leads with the good news (vaccines, treatments, knowledge, testing capacity & quickness) but notes that with winter coming and a high baseline of cases from a summer not spent in preparation, now is the time to really knuckle down so that we can get to the finish line.
Whatever the causes, public-health experts knew a fall and winter wave was a high likelihood, and urged us to get ready.
But we did not.
The best way to prepare would have been to enter this phase with as few cases as possible. In exponential processes like epidemics, the baseline matters a great deal. Once the numbers are this large, it’s very easy for them to get much larger, very quickly — and they will. When we start with half a million confirmed cases a week, as we had in mid-October, it’s like a runaway train. Only a few weeks later, we are already at about 1 million cases a week, with no sign of slowing down.
Americans are reporting higher numbers of contacts compared with the spring, probably because of quarantine fatigue and confusing guidance. It’s hard to keep up a restricted life. But what we’re facing now isn’t forever.
It’s time to buckle up and lock ourselves down again, and to do so with fresh vigilance. Remember: We are barely nine or 10 months into this pandemic, and we have not experienced a full-blown fall or winter season. Everything that we may have done somewhat cautiously — and gotten away with — in summer may carry a higher risk now, because the conditions are different and the case baseline is much higher.
On Friday, November 13, 170,792 new cases of Covid-19 were reported in the United States. About 3000 of those people will die from their disease on Dec 6 — one day of Covid deaths equal to the number of people who died on 9/11. It’s already baked in, it’s already happened. Here’s how we know.
The case fatality rate (or ratio) for a disease is the number of confirmed deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. For Covid-19 in the United States, the overall case fatality rate (CFR) is 2.3%. That is, since the beginning of the pandemic, 2.3% of those who have tested positive for Covid-19 in the US have died. In India, it’s 1.5%, Germany is at 1.6%, Iran 5.5%, and in Mexico it’s a terrifying 9.8%.
1. Reported deaths from Covid-19 lag behind reported cases by 22 days. Some deaths are reported sooner and some later, but in general it’s a 22-day lag.1
2. The overall CFR in the US is 2.3% but if you use the 22-day lag to calculate what Bedford calls “a lag-adjusted case fatality rate”, it’s a pretty steady average of 1.8% since August. Here’s a graph:
As you can see, in the early days of the pandemic, 4-6% of the cases ended in death and now that’s down to ~1.8%. That’s good news! The less good news is that the current case rate is high and rising quickly. Because of the lag in reported deaths, the rise in cases might not seem that alarming to some, even though those deaths will eventually happen. What Bedford’s analysis provides is a quick way to estimate the number of deaths that will occur in the future based on the number of cases today: just multiply the number of a day’s cases by 1.8% and you get an estimated number of people who will die 22 days later.2
For instance, as I said above, 170,792 cases were reported on Nov 13 — 1.8% is 3074 deaths to be reported on December 6. Cases have been over 100,000 per day for 11 days now: here are the estimated deaths from that time period:
Date
Cases
Est. deaths (on date)
2020-11-15
145,670
2622 (2020-12-08)
2020-11-14
163,473
2943 (2020-12-07)
2020-11-13
170,792
3074 (2020-12-06)
2020-11-12
150,526
2709 (2020-12-05)
2020-11-11
144,499
2601 (2020-12-04)
2020-11-10
130,989
2358 (2020-12-03)
2020-11-09
118,708
2137 (2020-12-02)
2020-11-08
110,838
1995 (2020-12-01)
2020-11-07
129,191
2325 (2020-11-30)
2020-11-06
125,252
2255 (2020-11-29)
2020-11-05
116,153
2091 (2020-11-28)
2020-11-04
103,067
1855 (2020-11-27)
Totals
1,609,158
28,965
Starting the day after Thanksgiving, a day traditionally called Black Friday, the 1.6 million positive cases reported in the past 12 days will result in 2-3000 deaths per day from then into the first week of December. Statistically speaking, these deaths have already occurred — as Bedford says, they are “baked in”. Assuming the lagged CFR stays at ~1.8% (it could increase due to an overtaxed medical system) and if the number of cases keeps rising, the daily death toll would get even worse. As daily case totals are reported, you can just do the math yourself:
number of cases × 0.018
200,000 cases in a day would be ~3600 deaths. 300,000 daily cases, a number that would have been inconceivable to imagine in May but is now within the realm of possibility, would result in 5400 deaths in a single day. Vaccines are coming, there is hope on the horizon. But make no mistake: this is an absolute unmitigated catastrophe for the United States.
Tibshirani’s first finding was that the lag time between states was quite variable-and that the median lag time was 16 days, a lot shorter than the mean. Looking state by state, Tibshirani concluded, it seemed difficult to land on an exact number of days as the “right” lag “with any amount of confidence,” he told us. Because cases are rising quickly, a shorter lag time would mean a larger denominator of cases for recent days — and a lower current case-fatality rate, something like 1.4 percent. This could mean fewer overall people are dying.
But this approach does not change the most important prediction. The country will still cross the threshold of 2,000 deaths a day, and even more quickly than Bedford originally predicted. Cases were significantly higher 16 days ago than 22 days ago, so a shorter lag time means that those higher case numbers show up in the deaths data sooner. Even with a lower case-fatality rate, deaths climb quickly. Estimating this way, the country would hit an average of 2,000 deaths a day on November 30.
The other major finding in Tibshirani’s analysis is that the individual assumptions and parameters in a Bedford-style model don’t matter too much. You can swap in different CFRs and lag-time parameters, and the outputs are more consistent than you might expect. They are all bad news. And, looking retrospectively, Tibshirani found that a reasonable, Bedford-style lagged-CFR model would have generated more accurate national-death-count predictions than the CDC’s ensemble model since July.
Courtesy of Ed Yong, the lag between cases and hospitalizations is about 11 days. So the full ICUs and packed ERs were hearing about now are going to get so much worse in the next two weeks. And just think about the potential situation a month from now if cases keep rising at the rate they are now for two more weeks…↩
Just to stress again: this is only an estimate. The real reported deaths from a single day’s reported cases will be spread out over several days or weeks. And case reporting is much lower on Sundays and Mondays than on other days (fewer reports on weekends). Bedford accounted for this in his analysis by using 7-day averages.↩
The Electoral College and especially the Senate are anti-majoritarian institutions, and they can be combined with other efforts to subvert majority rule. Leaders and parties can engage in voter suppression and break norms with some degree of bipartisan cooperation across the government. In combination, these features allow for players to engage in a hardball kind of minority rule: Remember that no Republican president has won the popular vote since 2004, and that the Senate is structurally prone to domination by a minority. Yet Republicans have tremendous power. This dynamic occurs at the local level, too, where gerrymandering allows Republicans to inflate their representation in state legislatures.
The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn’t already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn’t on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state’s voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.
You should also read Tufekci’s related thread, where she responds to some comments and criticism of the piece.
This isn’t some rare thing that just happened because of weird circumstances. This is a playbook that works. This is a global playbook on the rise. This is a playbook found in America’s past, too. Realism is the true basis for hope.
We have to keep pushing to make sure no populist authoritarians ever get their hands on the Presidency again.
The list includes Rick Bright, the former head of the vaccine-development agency BARDA ousted by the Trump administration in April; Atul Gawande, the surgeon, writer, and recently departed CEO of Haven, the joint JP Morgan Chase-Berkshire Hathaway-Amazon health care venture; and Luciana Borio, a former Food and Drug Administration official and biodefense specialist.
Biden has cast the escalating Covid-19 crisis as a priority for his incoming administration. The task force, he said, would quickly consult with state and local health officials on how to best prevent coronavirus spread, reopen schools and businesses, and address the racial disparities that have left communities of color harder hit than others by the pandemic.
Ensure all Americans have access to regular, reliable, and free testing.
Fix personal protective equipment (PPE) problems for good.
Provide clear, consistent, evidence-based guidance for how communities should navigate the pandemic — and the resources for schools, small businesses, and families to make it through.
Plan for the effective, equitable distribution of treatments and vaccines - because development isn’t enough if they aren’t effectively distributed.
Protect older Americans and others at high risk.
Rebuild and expand defenses to predict, prevent, and mitigate pandemic threats, including those coming from China.
Implement mask mandates nationwide by working with governors and mayors and by asking the American people to do what they do best: step up in a time of crisis.
This looks like what the plan should have been from the beginning. Of particular note, under the point about testing:
Stand up a Pandemic Testing Board like Roosevelt’s War Production Board. It’s how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time, and it’s how we will produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.
Establish a U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps to mobilize at least 100,000 Americans across the country with support from trusted local organizations in communities most at risk to perform culturally competent approaches to contact tracing and protecting at-risk populations.
Over the past week, as Americans voted and then held their breath for the results of the election, over 750,000 Americans tested positive for Covid-19. Based on the current case fatality rate of 2.4%, over 18,000 of those people will die in the days and weeks ahead. Many more will suffer long-term health effects because of the disease and struggle emotionally, financially, and spiritually in the months ahead. I really really hope there’s enough of a spirit of togetherness and cooperation left in America for a science-based plan like this to work in controlling a disease that’s killed almost 230,000 people. We — all Americans — need this so so much.
In his 1944 State of the Union address, President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged Congress to turn its attention to what he called “a second Bill of Rights”, legislation that would ensure all American citizens “equality in the pursuit of happiness”. Roosevelt argued that the United States had grown large enough and economically powerful enough to support this effort.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
- The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
- The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
- The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
- The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
- The right of every family to a decent home;
- The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
- The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
- The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
After WWII, many countries in Europe came to similar conclusions and enacted reforms to offer these rights to their citizens. In America, aside from the significant efforts of the Johnson administration in the 60s, we went in different direction, doubling down on inequality in the pursuit of happiness.
Media correspondents from all over the world spend months and years in the United States, reporting on our current events, politics, and culture. In this illuminating video from the New Yorker, several of them talk about what they think of our country. As outsiders, they’re able to see things that Americans don’t and can talk to people who may not otherwise feel comfortable talking to (what they perceive as) biased or corrupt American media. They’ve also observed an unprecedented level of division and are aware of the disconnect between America’s rhetoric about freedom and the sense that they’re reporting from a failed state.
Despite much reporting of a spike in murder this year, the long-term trend still shows the murder rate hovering roughly in the same place it was in the 1960s, half of what it was in 1980. And while procedurals may paint a picture of cops chasing serial killers weekly, the actual face of police is more mundane. In June, the New York Times culled available data and estimated that police spend roughly 4 percent of their time addressing “violent crime.” Most of their time is spent dealing with noncriminal matters. And yet no matter the call — the loud party next door, the permit for a parade, the expired car tags, the escort for a funeral procession, the elderly welfare check, the frolickers barbecuing in the park, the schoolyard fight, the opioid overdose, the homeless person outside in the cold, the stray dog — the state’s answer is to respond with armed agents blessed with the near unimpeachable right to kill.
The “nuclear sponge” is a colorfully named Cold War-era concept whereby stationing a massive collection of ICBMs in sparsely populated areas of the United States would serve to “soak up” a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, drawing fire away from populated targets like NYC, Chicago, and Seattle.
Before the development of nuclear-armed submarines that can hide their locations at sea, ICBMs were the crux of American nuclear strategy. Today, however, their only purpose is to draw fire away from other targets (like New York and San Francisco) in the (suicidal and thus highly unlikely) event of a first strike by Russia. The Air Force does not plan to launch the missiles in a war, but to have them draw a nuclear attack to the Upper Midwest.
We’re not making this up — that’s what former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Congress.
Here’s what the nuclear sponge looks like, courtesy of the National Park Service (areas in black have been decommissioned):
The amazing/crazy thing is that the sponge is not only still an active strategy, but the Pentagon is planning on replacing the sponge arsenal with new missiles at a cost of $95.8 billion.
Thanks to an anonymous donation, the US National Archives has digitized and put online their collection of 374 treaties between indigenous peoples and the United States (and its predecessor colonies). You can also explore maps and see which tribes are associated with which treaties. I am sure the meaning of the words on these pages is different depending on who you ask but being able access them freely is a benefit to everyone. (via @CharlesCMann)
We’re all so goddamned tired of this fucking pandemic and so people are looking at the development and distribution of a vaccine as the thing that’s going to get us out of this (and quick). But realistically, that’s not what’s going to happen. Carl Zimmer wrote about some of the challenges with Covid-19 vaccines.
The first vaccines may provide only moderate protection, low enough to make it prudent to keep wearing a mask. By next spring or summer, there may be several of these so-so vaccines, without a clear sense of how to choose from among them. Because of this array of options, makers of a superior vaccine in early stages of development may struggle to finish clinical testing. And some vaccines may be abruptly withdrawn from the market because they turn out not to be safe.
“It has not yet dawned on hardly anybody the amount of complexity and chaos and confusion that will happen in a few short months,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, the director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic.
See also Dr. Fauci’s belief that our best case scenario for returning to something close to normal life in the US is late 2021.
On Twitter, Zimmer also commented on something that I hadn’t really thought about: that all of these vaccines in development in the US are only for adults:
I wrote last month that no trials for kids had started. Update: still no US trials for kids. The goal of having shots ready for them by fall 2021 may be slipping further away.
Only if researchers discovered no serious side effects would they start testing them in children, often beginning with teenagers, then working their way down to younger ages. Vaccine developers are keenly aware that children are not simply miniature adults. Their biology is different in ways that may affect the way vaccines work. Because their airways are smaller, for example, they can be vulnerable to low levels of inflammation that might be harmless to an adult.
These trials allow vaccine developers to adjust the dose to achieve the best immune protection with the lowest risk of side effects. The doses that adults and children need are sometimes different — children get smaller doses of hepatitis B vaccines, for example, but bigger doses for pertussis.
You probably hate reading these kinds of articles; I know I do. But facing up to the reality of our situation, particularly here in the US where our political leadership has utterly failed in protecting us from this virus, is much better than burying our heads in the sand — that’s just not mentally healthy.
With a very effective vaccine ready in Nov/Dec, distributed widely, and if lots of people take it (i.e. the best case scenario), the earliest we could return to “normal life” in the world is the end of 2021.
At the New Yorker Festival earlier in the week, Michael Specter asked him about a return to normalcy and Fauci elaborated a bit more on this timeline (starts ~10:22 in the video).
When are we gonna get back to something that closely resembles, or is in fact, normal as we knew it?
We’re already making doses, tens and hundreds of millions of doses to be ready, first at least, in graded numbers at the end of the year in November/December. By the time we get to April, we likely will have doses to be able to vaccinate anybody who needs to be vaccinated. But logistically by the time you get everybody vaccinated, it likely will not be until the third or even the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2021.
So let’s say we get a 70% effective vaccine, which I hope we will get, but only 60% of the people get vaccinated. There are going to be a lot of vulnerable people out there, which means that the vaccine will greatly help us to pull back a bit on the restrictions that we have now to maintain good public health, but it’s not going to eliminate things like mask wearing and avoiding crowds and things like that.
So I think we can approach normality, but I don’t think we’re going to be back to normal until the end of 2021. We may do better than that; I hope so but I don’t think so.
Leaving aside what “normal” might mean and who it actually applies to,1 there’s some good news and bad news in there. The good news is, they’re already producing doses of the vaccine to be ready if and when the phase 3 trials are successful. Ramping up production before the trials conclude isn’t usually done because it’s a waste of money if the trials fail, but these vaccines are so critical to saving lives that they’re spending that money to save time. That’s great news.
The bad news is that we’re not even halfway through the pandemic in the best case scenario. We’re going to be wearing masks in public for at least another year (and probably longer than that). Large gatherings of people (especially indoors) will continue to be problematic — you know: movie theaters, concerts, clubs, bars, restaurants, schools, and churches — and folks staying within small pods of trusted folks will likely be the safest course of action.
A change in national leadership in both the executive branch and Senate could change the outlook for the better. We could get some normalcy back even without a vaccine through measures like a national mask mandate/distribution, a real national testing & tracing effort, taking aerosol transmission seriously, and easing the economic pressure to “open back up” prematurely. We’re never going to do as well as Vietnam or Taiwan, but I’d settle for Greece or Norway.
Topol: When do you think we’ll see pre-COVID life restored?
Rivers: I wish I knew. I’m thinking toward the end of 2021. It’s really hard to say with any certainty. We should all be mentally prepared to have quite a bit ahead of us.
It’s America. If we know anything by now about this country, it’s that access to healthcare and economic opportunity is going to apply unevenly to the people who live here. For instance, it’s likely that Black & brown communities, which have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, may face difficulty in getting access to vaccines compared to wealthier, predominantly white communities.↩
From Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Chenjerai Kumanyika, a quick tour of the history of policing in America and how that history should shape our discussions around police reform, defunding, and abolition.
The story of policing in the United States is the story of systems meant to protect and serve only a fraction of Americans.
As Kumanyika says in closing, the police in America are fulfilling their purpose very well. But the public has other demands that are not being met.
I lived through the end of a civil war. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.
This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner.
If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.
Hannah Beech reports on how the United States1 is perceived by the outside world these days due to our poor response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the continuing failure of our political system.
Myanmar is a poor country struggling with open ethnic warfare and a coronavirus outbreak that could overload its broken hospitals. That hasn’t stopped its politicians from commiserating with a country they think has lost its way.
“I feel sorry for Americans,” said U Myint Oo, a member of parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.”
The same sentiment prevails in Canada, one of the most developed countries. Two out of three Canadians live within about 60 miles of the American border.
“Personally, it’s like watching the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, an industrial city on the border with Michigan, where locals used to venture for lunch.
And I had to chuckle at this part:
“The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar.
I made a similar observation after a trip to Asia in January: “America is a rich country that feels like a poor country.” I got a bunch of pushback on that statement but after the past eight months, the pandemic has laid America’s deficiencies bare for the whole world to see clearly.
Even the name of the damn country seems like a hilarious anachronism these days. States, sure. But united? Lol.↩
Likewise, scholar Edward Baptist (Cornell) has provided new terms with which to speak about slavery. In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), he rejects “plantations” (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of “labor camps”; instead of “slave-owners” (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses “enslavers.” Small changes with big implications. These far more accurate and appropriate terms serve his argument well, as he re-examines the role of unfree labor in the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse and its place in the global economy. In order to tear down old myths, he eschews the old language.
@absurdistwords had a great thread on this recently, urging us to “stop obscuring the horror with detached, antiquated, euphemistic terms”.
“Was an active and willing participant in a vast conspiracy to kidnap children from their families in order to force them into industrial and sexual servitude”
It becomes harder to write slave owning off as just a blot on one’s record.
For instance:
George Washington was our first President and was an active and willing participant in a vast conspiracy to kidnap children from their families in order to force them into industrial and sexual servitude
They continue:
America treats slavery like an oopsie rather than a centuries-long campaign of nightmarish, brutal terrorism.
America sees the systemic and sadistic destruction of Black families as an etiquette violation.
Which is why it will excuse slave owners so readily.
This is an excellent piece in The Atlantic by Barton Gellman on The Election That Could Break America. Excellent and hair-raising. It outlines several of the ways that Donald Trump & the Republicans could disrupt the election process to produce an ambiguous outcome and use the chaos to retain the presidency.
The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un-certainty to hold on to power.
Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.
Read on for the details about how that could happen (voter suppression, mail-in voting, the “blue-shift”, the expired consent decree governing “ballot security” operations at polls, deploying the military to “Democrat-run cities” to “protect ballots”, hand-picked electors in Republican-controlled swing states). But Gellman is clear: some or all of this is going to happen.
Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.
Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.
I’m not a political scientist nor a therapist, but as someone who has been writing for years that Trump will never willingly leave office, I urge those of you who don’t want America to slide further into autocracy to acclimate yourself to the worst case scenario here so that you’re not completely devastated and immobilized when Election Day and then Inauguration Day comes and this shit happens. Don’t ignore this, optimistically rationalize it away, or stuff it deep down inside you; face it now, directly, and be prepared to assist in the fight for democracy and justice that’s coming.
Update:Here’s a thread by lawyer & author Teri Kanefield responding to The Atlantic piece that’s gotten some attention on Twitter.
First, remember that each state has rules that govern the certifying of their elections.
Yes, laws still matter.
The Trump legal advisor wants you to think they don’t.
Why? Because when enough people lose confidence in democracy, democracy will fail.
That’s why…a goal of active measures is to get you to lose confidence in democratic processes.
Trump is trying his best to get you to lose confidence in democratic processes.
He is trying to make you think he can pull this off.
New polls came out today showing that Trump is ten points behind nationally.
The Strongman needs you to think he’s strong. He doesn’t want you talking about the polls.
If he was winning, he’d want you talking about the polls.
There are some good details in there, but ultimately she’s really only talking about one aspect of the piece (the election certification) and it remains to be seen whether national polling during a pandemic and more than a month before the election will have anything to with reality when it comes to actual counted votes in a selection of swing states. As the 2016 election showed, all you really need is to bend things your way a little bit in a few states and you’ve got yourself an election or crisis or whatever. (via @heathr)
A coalition of organizations led by Project South (which was founded as the Institute to Eliminate Poverty & Genocide — more on that last word in a minute) has filed a complaint based on a whistleblower about an ICE concentration camp in Georgia where, the complaint alleges, detained immigrants are not being properly treated for Covid-19, important medications are being withheld, conditions are appalling, and women are being given unnecessary hysterectomies. From a piece about the complaint:
Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies — a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.
“Recently, a detained immigrant told Project South that she talked to five different women detained at ICDC between October and December 2019 who had a hysterectomy done,” the complaint stated. “When she talked to them about the surgery, the women ‘reacted confused when explaining why they had one done.’ The woman told Project South that it was as though the women were ‘trying to tell themselves it’s going to be OK.’”
“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” the detainee said.
According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist — outside the facility — who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy — just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
According to the UN’s Genocide Convention of 1948, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is genocide. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented:
The fact of the matter is the United States has engaged in a program of mass human rights violations targeting immigrants.
I’ll remind you, as I have with increasing frequency lately about the activities of our country’s increasingly authoritarian government, that forced sterilization in detention camps is literally what the literal Nazis did (inspired by, you guessed it, America’s treatment of “undesirable” populations).
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