Category Archives: Science

Are You As Mentally Acute As the Leader of the Free World?

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President Txxxx has been bragging about how well he did on a test that measures cognitive decline.

The president of the United States, has insisted that a cognitive test he took recently was “difficult”, using the example of a question in which the patient is asked to remember and repeat five words. . . .

Txxxx went on to explain the test, saying that after several questions, the doctor returned to the list of words, asking Trump to repeat them. “And you [remember them and] they say, “That’s amazing. How did you do that?”.

Txxxx has repeatedly referred to the cognitive test in recent interviews. Speaking to Fox news host Chris Wallace on Sunday he insisted the last five questions of the test were hard.

“I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t, they get very hard, the last five questions,” he said. “I guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.”

Here’s a version of the test:

Untitled

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We shouldn’t make light of people who suffer from dementia or other forms of cognitive decline.

On the other hand, it’s fair to make light of people who (1) exaggerate the test’s difficulty, (2) repeatedly brag about passing it and (3) lie about how the doctor reacted when they answered a question, especially (4) when they occupy a position formerly known as “leader of the free world”.

Other Lives Matter

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Charles Pierce of Esquire starts with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964:

The great modern conservative project, launched by the Goldwater campaign . . . and perverting itself and the Republic by tiny degrees ever since, has finally reached its inevitable end-point in the kind of president* that project had, by those same tiny degrees, made inevitable. This is the moment transcendent, this is the moment revealed. The great modern conservative project turned itself, by those same tiny degrees, into an authoritarian opposition to a democratic republic and all its institutions. Steadily, it abandoned decency, civility, science, reason, and simple humanity. And here we are . . .

A crippled nation, literally a sick nation, watching a feckless (or worse) administration* taking actions that actively make the public health situation worse, watching Pinochet tactics in the streets, and promising to bring those tactics to a number of American cities in advance of a national election, with all that implies and entails. And doing so by relying on policies drafted and implemented by a previous Republican administration [George W. Bush’s] back in the days when this president* merely was a guy presiding over a televised freak show, and not creating one out of the country he was elected to lead. It took long, hard, relentless work by hundreds of conservative politicians, judges, journalists, consultants, billionaires, think-tanks, and foundations to bring the country to this miserable pass.

Akim Reinhardt, writing for Three Quarks Daily, starts with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980:

Reagan’s advanced age and patriotic message rang true with older voters, while his bold (and ultimately false) promise of a quick yet fiscally responsible cure to stagflation attracted worried and struggling Americans. His electoral hammering of incumbent Jimmy Carter signaled the return of ideals that had not held sway since the 1920s: an unregulated free market economy, and the exaltation of individualism . . .

The Reagan Revolution resuscitated pre-Depression American conservativism . . .  . Under Reagan’s leadership it emerged as a right wing coalition of low tax free marketeers; small government individualists; white racists . . . resentful about civil rights; Cold War hawks; and fundamentalist Christian evangelicals.

The Reagan Revolution deeply affected American politics, economics, and culture. Americans are still living in the world it remade. Newly committed to free market economics, fetishizing individualism while demonizing government, and slowly absorbing the disaffected whites in the aftermath of civil rights, the Republican Party immediately began winnowing its moderate wing and completely eliminating its liberal wing, eventually transforming itself from a center-right party to an increasingly far-right party. . . .

American society has always celebrated individualism, arguably more so than any other nation. But that vaunted individualism was usually tempered by grand historical epochs that limited untrammeled self-interest through means both good and bad.

That is no longer the case.

Victorian culture’s dubious emphasis on personal restraint has long since withered. The generation of adults who survived the Great Depression and WWII are almost entirely gone. The Cold War ended nearly 30 years ago, its coercive demands for unity and conformity now a distant memory. Today’s senior political leadership is drawn from a cohort that, even as far back as the 1970s, was derided as the Me Generation.

Healthy democratic institutions and shared governance need citizens and politicians to maintain at least a modest concern for and deference to the greater good. Unfettered self-interest has the potential to spawn no-holds-barred competitions that supplant the public interest with a single-minded focus on acquiring power and wealth. And the delicate balance between collective and personal self-interests, with its sloshing equilibrium, had tilted to one end long before Dxxxx Txxxx took power.

Now the Vice Lord rages from his gilded bully pulpit as his crooked, broken regime reaches a lurid nadir of unfettered self-interest. He and his have willfully ignored, discredited, attacked, and destroyed longstanding norms of common interest. Through blase cronyism and nepotism, naked corruption, and the profound incompetence that inevitably accompanies such crimes, they have widened the cracks in an imperfect and vulnerable political cultural that was already struggling to bind us together.

Dxxxx Txxxx is not a shocking aberration. Rather, he is the banal culmination of four decades of runaway self-interest. . . . Forty years in the making, his corrupt presidency symbolizes the heights of unchecked self-interest and shamelessness, made acute by his own mental deficiencies and psychiatric disorders. Txxxx needed a perfect storm to get elected, and then unleashed a storm of runaway self-interest on the White House. He is the extreme, and hopefully also a turning point. The final, loudest wailing of American immaturity and selfishness.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times starts with last week:

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida said something remarkably stupid the other day. . . .

Florida has, of course, become a Covid-19 epicenter, with soaring case totals and a daily death toll now consistently exceeding that of the whole European Union, which has 20 times its population. But DeSantis won’t contemplate any rollback of the state’s obviously premature reopening; he even refuses to close venues that are perfect coronavirus incubators.

In particular, he insists on letting gyms — closed spaces full of people huffing and puffing — stay open. Why? Because “if you are in good shape you have a very low likelihood of ending up in a significant condition.”

Actually, this isn’t true. . . . But [that] is beside the point. The reason we need to close gyms isn’t to protect the people working out, it’s to protect the other people they might infect. Even gym rats have families, friends, and co-workers . . .

Prof. Krugman could have cited a remarkably stupid statement from another Republican governor, Mike Parson of Missouri:

“These kids have got to get back to school,” Parson said in an interview Friday. . . .“They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.” 

Will their teachers, parents, grandparents, babysitters too?

Back to Krugman:

Five months and almost 140,000 deaths into this pandemic, many Republicans still can’t or won’t grasp the point that choices have consequences beyond those to the individual who makes them [or for whom we make them, like children].

Many things should be left up to the individual. I may not share your taste in music or want to do the same things you do with consenting adults, but such matters aren’t legitimately my business.

Other things, however, aren’t just about you. The question of whether or not to dump raw sewage into a public lake isn’t something that should be left up to individual choice. And going to a gym or refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic is exactly like dumping sewage into a lake: it’s behavior that may be convenient for the people who engage in it, but it puts others at risk.

Again, this should be obvious. It’s common sense; it is also, as it happens, basic economics. Econ 101 has lots of good things to say about free markets (probably too many good things, but that’s a discussion for another time), but no rational discussion of economics says that free markets, left to themselves, can solve the problem of “externalities” — costs that individuals or businesses impose on others who have no say in the matter. Pollution is the classic example of an externality that requires government intervention, but spreading a dangerous virus poses exactly the same issues.

Yet many conservatives seem unable or unwilling to grasp this simple point. And they seem equally unwilling to grasp a related point — that there are some things that must be supplied through public policy rather than individual initiative. And the most important of these “public goods” is probably scientific knowledge.

Some readers may be aware that Senator Rand Paul — who proclaims himself a libertarian — has been doing a lot of sniping at Dr. Anthony Fauci….. What struck me, however, was the way Paul justified his attacks on epidemiologists’ recommendations: by invoking the free-market doctrines of Friedrich Hayek. “Hayek had it right: Only decentralized power and decision-making, based on millions of individualized situations, can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose.”

Whatever you think of Hayek. . . ., this is bizarre. Decentralized decision-making can do lots of things, but establishing scientific truth isn’t one of those things. And even conservatives used to understand both that expertise matters and that promoting scientific research is a legitimate and necessary role of government.

But conservatives, and Republicans, have changed. The modern American right is all about denying that people have any responsibility for each other, and muzzling experts who try to tell people in power things they don’t want to hear.

And the fact that selfishness and willful ignorance are now guiding principles for much of our political establishment is a large part of the reason America is failing the Covid-19 test so spectacularly.

“Mild” Is Sometimes Damn Bad

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Mildness is relative. From The Guardian:

Conventional wisdom suggests that when a sickness is mild, it’s not too much to worry about. But if you’re taking comfort in World Health Organization reports that over 80% of global Covid-19 cases are mild or asymptomatic, think again. As virologists race to understand the biomechanics of Sars-CoV-2, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: even “mild” cases can be more complicated, dangerous and harder to shake than many first thought.

Throughout the pandemic, a notion has persevered that people who have “mild” cases of Covid-19 and do not require an ICU stay or the use of a ventilator are spared from serious health repercussions. Just last week, . . . the US vice-president claimed it’s “a good thing” that nearly half of the new Covid-19 cases surging in 16 states are young Americans, who are at less risk of becoming severely ill than their older counterparts. This kind of rhetoric would lead you to believe that the ordeal of “mildly infected” patients ends within two weeks of becoming ill, at which point they recover and everything goes back to normal.

While that may be the case for some people who get Covid-19, emerging medical research as well as anecdotal evidence from recovery support groups suggest that many survivors of “mild” Covid-19 are not so lucky. They experience lasting side-effects, and doctors are still trying to understand the ramifications.

Some of these side effects can be fatal. Otherwise healthy people who thought they had recovered from coronavirus are reporting persistent and strange symptoms – including strokes.

According to Dr Christopher Kellner, a professor of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, “mild” cases of Covid-19 in which the patient was not hospitalized for the virus have been linked to blood clotting and severe strokes in people as young as 30. In May, Kellner told Healthline that Mount Sinai had implemented a plan to give anticoagulant drugs to people with Covid-19 to prevent the strokes they were seeing in “younger patients with no or mild symptoms”.

Doctors now know that Covid-19 not only affects the lungs and blood, but kidneys, liver and brain – the last potentially resulting in chronic fatigue and depression, among other symptoms. Although the virus is not yet old enough for long-term effects on those organs to be well understood, they may manifest regardless of whether a patient ever required hospitalization, hindering their recovery process.

Another troubling phenomenon now coming into focus is that of “long-haul” Covid-19 sufferers – people whose experience of the illness has lasted months. For a Dutch report published earlier this month (an excerpt is translated here) researchers surveyed 1,622 Covid-19 patients with an average age of 53, who reported a number of enduring symptoms, including intense fatigue (88%) persistent shortness of breath (75%) and chest pressure (45%). Ninety-one per cent of the patients weren’t hospitalized, suggesting they suffered these side-effects despite their cases of Covid-19 qualifying as “mild”. While 85% of the surveyed patients considered themselves generally healthy before having Covid-19, only 6% still did so one month or more after getting the virus. . . .

“To me, and I think most people, the definition of ‘mild’, passed down from the WHO and other authorities, meant any case that didn’t require hospitalization at all, that anyone who wasn’t hospitalized was just going to have a small cold and could take care of it at home,” [said ] Hannah Davis, the author of a patient-led survey. “From my point of view, this has been a really harmful narrative and absolutely has misinformed the public. . . .

At this stage, when medical professionals and the public alike are learning about Covid-19 as the pandemic unfolds, it’s important to keep in mind how little we truly know about this vastly complicated [and highly contagious] disease . . . .

Unquote.

Broadway actor Nick Cordero, 41, died yesterday after 90 days in the hospital. According to The Guardian, “Cordero entered the emergency room on 30 March and had a succession of health setbacks including mini-strokes, blood clots, sepsis infections, a tracheostomy and a temporary pacemaker implant. He had been on a ventilator and unconscious and had his right leg amputated. A double lung transplant was being explored”.

But remember, he said we’re getting it under control.

America the Extraordinary

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“Reddit shut down its popular but controversial forum devoted to supporting President Txxxx on Monday, following years in which the social media company tried but often failed to control the racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, glorification of violence and conspiracy theories that flourished there” (The Washington Post).

“The US is ‘unlikely’ to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus even with a vaccine, according to the country’s leading public health expert, who warned that a ‘general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling’ is likely to thwart vaccination efforts. In an interview with CNN, Dr Anthony Fauci also said people not wearing masks was ‘a recipe for disaster’”… (The Guardian).

“The videos are now showing up in your social media feed every hour or two, each one more over-the-top than the one before — viral missives from a world that seems to have gone mad and yet somehow exists right in our backyard. These ‘forgotten Americans’ are at the lectern at your county commission meeting if they’re not yelling at you in the produce aisle — screaming that the elected officials and their so-called scientific experts demanding they wear a mask to prevent the spread of coronavirus are really part of a vast conspiracy to take away their freedoms” (Will Bunch for The Philadelphia Inquirer).

Mr. Bunch continues:

It was another great day for liberty — and yet a horrible one for tens of thousands of Americans who now may die needlessly because so many cling to a warped idea of freedom that apparently means not caring whether others in your community get sick.

The reality is that those devil-worshiping elected officials and their mad scientists are trying to mandate masks in public for the same reasons they don’t let 12-year-olds drive and they close bars at 2 a.m.: They actually want to keep their constituents alive.

There’s a plethora of reasons why countries across Europe — even Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom, for God’s sake — crushed their coronavirus curve while the United States didn’t. Their shutdowns were somewhat longer, their reopenings came with better testing and contact tracing, their leaders set good examples, and their people showed common sense about social distancing and masks. But especially masks.

The most comprehensive study published in the journal Lancet found mask-wearing could reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission from 17% to 3%. No wonder the University of Washington says universal mask-wearing in the United States would reduce the coronavirus death toll between now and October by a whopping 33,000 human beings.

Just think of all the restrictions on freedom and liberty — from the government seeing what you checked out at the library to invasive searches at the airport — to prevent another attack like 9/11 that killed 3,000 people, or less than one-tenth the toll from not wearing masks. But for millions of Americans — not a majority, mind you, but enough to cause a public-health hazard in a pandemic — the idea of masks has been launched into a different orbit where freedom talk is injected with the uniquely American viruses of free-market capitalism and media manipulation, maybe with a dollop of white supremacy….

But … too much of the warped notion of freedom promoted by the aggressively not-mask-wearing President Txxxx and his No. 2, Mike Pence, and their prophets like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity won’t just get you high — to continue with the Sweet analogy — but could also kill you by an overdose. What the radio hucksters, and the wannabe dictators they installed, won’t tell you is that freedom without any social responsibility or empathy for others is ultimately hollow.

But let’s remember that American people — even the damaged souls that you’re laughing at on Twitter today — didn’t pervert the meaning of freedom on their own. The warped modern version of liberty was sold to them, first by right-wing public intellectuals like Ayn Rand, who killed thousands of trees to wrap unbridled selfishness in her endless tomes about freedom, and later by the salesmen of Big Capitalism.

Protecting your freedom became the ideal branding for what these pitchmen really wanted, which was political cover to dramatically lower taxes on millionaires (who, thanks to that, would become billionaires) and to crush unions and their demands for higher pay, freeing up profits to now pay CEOs 350 times what the average worker makes. Talk about finding the cost of freedom! With the help of academics like the Nobel economist James McGill Buchanan, backed by billionaires like the Koch brothers, warped freedom capitalism got a fancy name — free-market libertarianism…..

Confronted with scientific realities like man-made climate change, the forces of conservative libertarianism turned their guns toward expertise, with the goals of thwarting environmentalism and keeping corporate profits high. The bills for global warming are starting to come due, but that has been superseded for the time being by the COVID-19 crisis; the lack of trust for medical expertise from Main Street all the way to an ignorant president whom 62 million Main Streeters installed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has proved lethal.

No other nation has botched its coronavirus response so badly because no other nation holds science in such low esteem. “Who made you perpetrators over my life?” the self-proclaimed Txxxx Girl demanded of the experts at the Palm Beach County meeting. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Stanford psychiatry prof Keith Humphreys noted that the United States simply can’t impose a coronavirus testing regimen like South Korea or Singapore because we don’t trust the government on public health. “Clusters of gun-toting protesters opposing public health measures are a real — and uniquely American — problem,” he wrote, “but it’s the much more prevalent distrust in government’s role in public health that would curtail the success of any test, trace and isolate program.”

In a functioning society, freedom can flourish when it’s part of a broader social compact, when liberty is not abused because its practitioners also see themselves as part of a community, where they care about others — even, or especially, when it comes to wearing a mask and not spreading germs to your neighbor. But has there ever been a branding campaign as successful as America repackaging selfishness, self-interest, and extreme inequality as personal freedom?

That’s even true of the freedom that’s so central to my work life: the free press that exists under the First Amendment. I’ve seen how that only works well when publishers fuel their press freedom with common sense and an understanding of responsibility to the readers. In the internet age, the promise of an even greater media freedom has been polluted by billionaires from Fox’s Rupert Murdoch to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who made bigger profits off lies and unchecked conspiracy theories than off fact-checking in the public interest. The filth of Zuckerberg’s Facebook is what’s spewing, unmasked, from the self-styled “patriots” of Palm Beach County….

As the global pandemic advanced and as evidence mounted that COVID-19 is most lethal not just for the elderly but also for Black and brown Americans, it seems clear that for some white people, not wearing a mask isn’t just a freedom song but a defiant proclamation of their superiority. That’s validated every day by America’s white-supremacist-in-chief, whose refusal to wear a mask in public is in fact a different kind of mask, one of his deep insecurity. This toxic blend of narcissism and white privilege is Dxxxx Txxxx’s idea of leadership — even as he leads some of his voters to an early grave.

The flip side is that the millions who’ve marched in America’s streets after George Floyd’s murder — many, although not all, from the under-35 generation — are making the case that a better world, built around empathy and compassion for people who don’t look like ourselves, is coming. They are using their freedom of speech and assembly to forge a more perfect union, and I fervently wish that the 33,000 Americans who may be doomed by a lethal injection of phony liberty can somehow live to see it.

Data Analysis, Surprising and Not

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Surprising news from The New York Times:

— Actual Coronavirus Infections Vastly Undercounted, C.D.C. Data Shows —

The prevalence of infections is more than 10 times higher than the counted number of cases in six regions of the United States.

The analysis is part of a wide-ranging set of surveys started by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate how widely the virus has spread. Similar studies, sponsored by universities, national governments and the World Health Organization, are continuing all over the world….

“This study underscores that there are probably a lot of people infected without knowing it, likely because they have mild or asymptomatic infection,” said Dr. Fiona Havers, who led the C.D.C. study. “But those people could still spread it to others.”

She emphasized the importance of hand-washing, wearing cloth masks and social distancing to stop the spread of the virus from people without symptoms. [Getting tested is an excellent idea too, even if you have no symptoms.]

The numbers indicate that even in areas hit hard by the virus, an overwhelming majority of people have not yet been infected, said Scott Hensley, a viral immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania….

“Many of us are sitting ducks who are still susceptible …,” he said.

Not surprising news (not surprising at all) from The Washington Post:

Three serious research efforts have put numerical weight — yes, data-driven evidence — behind what many suspected all along: Americans who relied on Fox News, or similar right-wing sources, were duped as the coronavirus began its deadly spread.

Dangerously duped.

The studies “paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others,” wrote [The Post’s] Christopher Ingraham in an analysis last week.

Here’s the reality, now backed by numbers:

Those who relied on mainstream sources — the network evening newscasts or national newspapers that President Txxxx constantly blasts as “fake news” — got an accurate assessment of the pandemic’s risks. Those were the news consumers who were more likely to respond accordingly, protecting themselves and others against the disease that has now killed more than 123,000 in the United States with no end in sight.

Those who [like the “Leader of the Free World”] relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Txxxx politically, a survey showed….

“That’s the real evil of this type of programming,” Arthur West of the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics, … told the Times of San Diego. “We believe it delayed and interfered with a prompt and adequate response to this coronavirus pandemic.”

Unquote.

Mass manslaughter, anyone?