In its final days, President Donald Trump’s State Department made a series of highly controversial claims about the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, and its possible connection to the covid-19 outbreak. Now, the Biden administration has reviewed those claims, and is confirming some of the facts within them — but not, a senior State Department official has told me, the Trump team’s theory of how the pandemic broke out. These facts suggest that more investigation is needed into the lab’s possible connection to the outbreak.
Ah! So it's not that you've determined that any of these claims are false. They're all either true or — you say — in need of further investigation.
The article ends with 2 paragraphs — a quote from an unnamed senior State Department official preceded by the assertion that credits the Biden administration with an effort to be politically neutral (though, I'd add, the effort to seem neutral is itself political):
The origin of the pandemic is not just about blame. If the source of the outbreak can’t be determined, its true path can’t be traced and crucial scientific information for preventing the next outbreak can’t be learned. The Biden administration is trying to take a neutral stance on the issue, even though the fact-finding process has become entangled in domestic politics, as well as U.S.-China relations.
“We certainly care a great deal about the origin of this virus, not only for reasons of accountability, but also for public health implications going forward,” the official said. “If we are going to prevent future outbreaks, epidemics or, God forbid, pandemics, we need to know how the last one started. . . . Whichever theory the facts bear out, that’s where we’ll go.”
"But I was so tired.... But as the months wore on I realized this wasn’t rest anymore. It was becoming my lifestyle. And it wasn’t making me feel better — I felt deeply, unsettlingly worse.... 'Can you have rigor mortis while still alive,' I typed into Google.... There are two kinds of fatigue.... One is when your mind and body are truly tired. The other is when that system tricks you into feeling tired because you are in a rut. When you’re tired, you need rest. But if you’re in a rut, you need to nudge yourself into action.... That’s why so many of us feel like we hit a pandemic wall — the fatigue we faced last spring, the natural reaction to shock and terror, has been replaced by inertia.... Pandemic ennui appears to be reorienting the economy overall, as we channel our angst into massage guns and candles and Fitbits. But the price of fitness is sneakers...."
"These playful visions have given way to a more sobering reality: The pandemic’s serious disruption of people’s lives is likely to cause 'missing births' — potentially a lot of them. Add these missing births to the country’s decade-long downward trend in annual births and we can expect consequential changes to our economy and society in the years to come.... Millions of parents are dealing with the stress of combining their work responsibilities with the need to supervise and teach their children who no longer attend school five days a week. This raises the 'cost' of rearing children and can be expected to lead to fewer siblings being conceived this year. Moreover, restrictions on social activities also mean some relationships that would have started in 2020 (and might have led to babies someday) never took root. We have no precedent to estimate changes in birthrates from these disruptions, but they will undoubtedly also contribute to a large reduction in overall births.... Some women and couples will have fewer children than they hoped, and some kids will grow up without the younger sibling they would have had otherwise. This could contribute to what some have referred to as America’s loneliness epidemic.... But the real societal challenge of a Covid baby bust will be a smaller work force.... In the absence of effective policies to meaningfully increase births, the most reliable and immediate way to shore up the U.S. population is through immigration, which brings its own political and social challenges...."
"At least until all this science starts to fog up our mental windshields and we, the people, start to wear out. Our irritability mounts; our attention wanes; the guide-rope in our mouth starts to chafe. It is then that the bawdy obstreperousness and its odd twin, the glory hallelujah, of democracy come into view — a single unit; maddening, infuriating, nevertheless fused. And Greg Abbott or someone else steps up to lead the beast forward, by instinct if not by Hoyle... The love of democratic citizens for experts shouldn’t be overestimated. The nature of democracy is preference for or deference to popular wisdom, however unwise that wisdom may prove in action. It’s been a long time since this pandemic started. People are tired. People want to see, and relate to, each other. That’s human nature. The human nature-affirmers like Greg Abbott, with a little luck and sense of timing, are likely to come out way ahead of their castigators and vilifiers, Robert Francis (Beto) O’Rourke conspicuously included."
The Spectator is British, but Murchison is American. He even went to the University of Texas. I had to look that up because the use of "glory hallelujah" hit my ear as a foreigner's mistake. To me, the phrase — which you see in the title and the text ("its odd twin, the glory hallelujah, of democracy") — is entirely evocative of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and Texas was in the Confederacy.
There's an episode of The Johnny Cash Show from 1969 where the man himself makes a little speech with a pretty big error. "Here's a song that was reportedly sung by both sides in the Civil War," Cash says, guitar in hand, to kick off a performance of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic.... which proves to me that a song can belong to all of us."
Cash was wrong, but in the years after the Civil War, the song came to be sung in church, at football games, and at labor union events. And on all sorts of political occasions:
Anita Bryant, the singer and conservative activist, used to perform the song at anti-gay rallies. During the 1964 presidential race, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater had to disown a campaign film that posed the election as a choice between two Americas — an "ideal" America, where the tune of the "Battle Hymn" scored images of the founders and the Constitution, and a "nightmare" America, featuring black people protesting and kids dancing to rock music.
On the flipside, the day before he was killed in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, which he ended by quoting the song's first line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." His home church, Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist, took up the song after his death as an anthem to him and the civil rights movement.
"How people relate to patriotism is kind of how they come into the 'Battle Hymn,' " says professor Brigitta Johnson, an ethnomusicologist at the University of South Carolina who teaches in the schools of Music and African-American Studies. "For example, your white nationalists digging deep into heavy patriotism messages — they bring up things like 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and the 'Battle Hymn' and it becomes their battle cry, just as easily as it could become the battle cry for Ebenezer in Atlanta."...
"The kumbaya moment will not be happening across the aisles because of this song," [Johnson] says, "because it's really about supporting whatever your perspective is — about freedom or liberation, and having God as the person who's ordaining what we're doing. And 'glory, hallelujah' about that."
As Johnny Cash said in 1969, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is an anthem that belongs to everybody. But what really matters is what they're singing it for.
That meshes well with Murchison's point about human nature and human nature-affirmers.
A good answer: "Does your state allow steak to be served medium rare? No Medicare for you!"
A terrible answer: "What Biden should do is make clear now: Do what Texas and Mississippi are doing, lose ALL your federal funding. With the threat of loss of highway funding, that's how the legal drinking age went from 19 to 21 in 1985...."
"He never talked about this. We would have those wonderful debates. He would never talk about this. We didn’t know what the hell he was talking about actually.His campaign was all lies. Talked about energy, I thought I said, 'This guy actually, he’s okay with energy' He wasn’t okay with energy. He wants to put you all out of business.... Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history.... The Biden administration is actually bragging about the classroom education they are providing to migrant children on the border. While at the same time, millions of American children are having their futures destroyed by Joe Biden’s anti-science school closures.... He is cruelly keeping our children locked in their homes, no reason for it whatsoever. They want to get out... Joe Biden is only implementing [a vaccine] plan that we put in place.... Yet Biden said just a few days ago that when he got here, meaning The White House, there was no vaccine. He said, there’s no vaccine. Oh, good. Say it again, Joe. Now I don’t think he said that, frankly, in a malicious way. I really don’t. I actually believe he said that because he didn’t really know what the hell was happening."
That's a clear demonstration of an approach to attacking Biden: He's not malicious. He just doesn't know what the hell he's talking about or what the hell is happening. That gives room for people who think Joe's a likeable good guy to feel okay about the criticism. Joe's not malicious. He's just very confused. When you get to the confusion part of the attack, be sure to include the words "what the hell."
Oh! That reminds me. It's March 1st. You know what that means. I lost my big bet. I told you back on January 27th about the bet I have here at Meadhouse: "Biden will oust himself from the presidency by March 1st." When did I make the bet? I'm not sure but I alluded to this bet on December 15th, when Biden gave an overlong speech: "There was no reason to make him go this long... not unless the idea was to make us get comfortable with the idea of phasing him out and swapping in Kamala at the earliest possible moment — say, around March 1st."
"Conservatives have argued for years that liberals don't actually care about science and only pretend to when it's convenient for the advancement of their political agenda. It appears that they had a point."
"... but I can’t remember seeing it for a while now. (And I deliberately say 'see' it instead of 'hear' it because I’ve only ever seen it written, never heard it out loud.) Could it be that the word started to seem out of touch because we’ve been realizing how fragile we all are?"
Writes my son John on Facebook, and I think he's suggesting something about our heightened awareness of death and illness during the pandemic.
I responded over there:
Based on my search for "white fragility" in the NYT, with the results ordered newest first, I'd say it was very common up through October. Since October, there's only one appearance, in a little thing in December about what books New Yorkers read in the past year: "As nationwide discussions erupted over the summer around race and racism, demand for books on the subjects surged across the country, a trend reflected in the city’s libraries. Titles like 'White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism' by Robin DiAngelo were among the most popular in some boroughs." What changed after October? To ask the question is to make the answer obvious.
Before that December item, there were articles containing the term "white fragility" on October 29, October 22, October 6, September 27, September 17, September 6, September 1, August 31, August 11... You get the picture.
But "fragility" was a vogue word before last year's obsession with Robin DiAngelo's book. Even if the election — the answer I thought was obvious — explains the disappearance of "white fragility," we might also be seeing a disappearance of interest in "fragility" as used in the book "Antifragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If so, I'm inclined to guess that the over-prominence of DiAngelo's concept tired us all out.
And that's the irony of being fragile about fragility that John was musing about.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Friday ruled that President Trump’s upcoming rally in Tulsa can go ahead as planned despite concerns about coronavirus -- just as Trump announced that a curfew in the city had been lifted for the rally.
“I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the #MAGA Rally. Enjoy yourselves - thank you to Mayor Bynum!” the president tweeted.
I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the #MAGA Rally. Enjoy yourselves - thank you to Mayor Bynum! @gtbynum
Bynum on Friday issued a statement and said he was "told the curfew is no longer necessary."
"Last night, I enacted a curfew at the request of Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin, following consultation with the United States Secret Service based on intelligence they had received,” he said in a news release, the Tulsa World reported. “Today, we were told the curfew is no longer necessary so I am rescinding it.”
Bynum, a Republican, had declared a civil emergency and announced a curfew near the arena where Trump plans to hold a campaign rally on Saturday.
Bynum, in his order, said “in the interest of national security” he would establish a “federal exclusion zone” in the vicinity of the rally. He cited “crowds in excess of 100,000” and opposition protests as well as recent “civil unrest” -- referring to protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd that in the early days escalated into looting and violence in some cities. Additionally, he had warned that he had information that organized groups known for violence were traveling to the city “for the purposes of causing unrest in and around the rally.”
A WaPo headline, quoted along with substantial text from the article by my son John at Facebook, where I expressed surprise that the factor was so low and asked:
Did they count obesity as a "condition" when they did that calculation?
Then:
I looked at the CDC report, and I see it only counted "severe obesity (body mass index ≥40 kg/m2)" as a condition. I'm a 5'5" woman, and I would need to weigh more than 240 pounds — more than 100 pounds over normal weight — to enter that BMI range.
Obesity begins at a 30 BMI, which would be 180 pounds for my height. That's 60 pounds less than the weight the CDC counted as a "condition" when it did its calculation. It wouldn't be 12 times as likely but what? — 100 times? — if they'd included the merely obese. And what if they'd counted the overweight but not obese? That would go all the way down to 150 for my height. It would be useful to know, because we have some power over our own weight!
ADDED: My son questions my observation. The factor should be lower if they included less severe conditions. I agree with him. I'm thinking in terms of being less likely to die. When you're trying to figure out how dangerous the illness is to you, you consider how likely it is for a person in your condition to die if they get the disease. Perhaps it's the case that 99.9% of those who died of the disease were obese. Of course, that's not the same as saying if you get the disease and you're obese, you have a 99.9% chance of dying. But if the overall percentage of those who get the disease and die is 0.1%, then I'd like to know what's the percentage for those who get the disease but are not obese? Is it 0.01%? That would be extremely useful information! For one thing, it would give people something to do to protect themselves: lose weight. But also, it would show us who should continue the more extreme form of social distancing and who should feel free to get out and about.
Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet these same weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!
"Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments.... How is it remotely within the scope of the expertise of epidemiologists to pick and choose which political protests should be permitted and/or encouraged and which ones banned and/or denounced? Those are plainly political judgments, not scientific ones, and the shoddy, glaring conflation of them is nothing less than a manipulation, an abuse, of public health credentials. For scientists to purport to dictate which citizens can and cannot safely choose to leave their house — based not on health judgments but on their political ideology — is repressive, and certain to erode the credibility of their profession. Yet this is exactly what they are doing: explicitly and shamelessly.... At the very least, it is vital that we have the same health and legal standards apply to all citizens and all political ideologies when it comes to the right to leave one’s home, protest or engage in other legal activities. And at least as importantly, we need to understand whether public health experts were too restrictive in their advocated measures at the start of the pandemic, are being too lax now, or somehow can reconcile the radical shift in their posture on scientific rather than political grounds."
"... over how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic the day after the state Supreme Court struck down the state's stay-at-home order. The recording and the reaction to it all but ensures a permanently broken relationship between Evers and Republicans who control the Legislature.... Evers' spokeswoman, Melissa Baldauff, said... 'This was not intended for release to the media or anyone else, however, we were obligated to comply with the open records law to release these records once they were requested.'... Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said recording a conversation without alerting the other parties isn't illegal in this state, but is in bad form — and that the nature of the meeting should have pushed the three to talk publicly instead of privately.... Evers at one stage said he was frustrated the state wasn't able to open up in a uniform, phased way.... Fitzgerald repeatedly told Evers the reopening of the state's businesses was now behind them and urged him to develop plans for dealing with large crowds at Brewers games and the eventual resumption of schools. Evers asked Vos and Fitzgerald what they wanted to do if there was a catastrophic increase in cases, expressing frustration with their hands-off approach. 'Do we just say the hell with it?' Evers asked. 'No. Someone should call Barry Alvarez and say is there going to be football in Camp Randall in August,' Fitzgerald said, referring to the University of Wisconsin athletic director."
Someone is the admin must have tipped off the media to Evers’ Nixon tapes right? But why? He comes across as clueless while the Speaker sounds reasonable and Fitz is in command of the meeting. How does this help him?
"... and when I saw they were announcing modeling a solution to our racial crisis, I was incredulous, angry, and overly emotional. Involving George Floyd's name in that effort was wrong."
The Institute had tweeted "Racism and discrimination are critical public health issues that demand an urgent response. #BlackLivesMatter." Glassman's response was, first, the disastrously curt: "It's FLOYD-19." A few hours later, he expanded his idea:
Your failed model quarantined us and now you're going to model a solution to racism? George Floyd's brutal murder sparked riots nationally. Quarantine alone is "accompanied in every age and under all political regimes by an undercurrent of suspicion, distrust, and riots." Thanks!
Glassman had also said some things behind the scenes that made his problem worse. BuzzFeed reports that — in a Zoom call with gym owners — Glassman was asked why Crossfit's website didn't have a statement addressing the death of George Floyd. Glassman was recorded saying: “We're not mourning for George Floyd — I don't think me or any of my staff are.... Can you tell me why I should mourn for him? Other than that it’s the white thing to do — other than that, give me another reason.”
It’s the white thing to do... Who talks like that? To my ear, it sounds like left-wing critique of of white people — that white people are making these pious statements of empathy and support, and it's not really enough, it's fake and shallow, and he's the one who wants a real revolution. But it could also be someone who wants to stay out of politics and resists pressure to do what everyone else is doing. He might be using "white" in the sarcastic sense of the phrase "That's mighty white of you." In that light, it might be a way to say: Putting up those statements is virtue signaling.
In any case, Glassman was hurting his business, which was a brand that other businesses needed to want to pay to adopt as their own. That leaves little room for adamant self-defense.
"For health officials who have been watching the virus with alarm as it began claiming a foothold in continent after continent, it is a dizzying moment.... While infection rates in the hardest-hit cities in United States and Europe may have slowed, the virus remains deeply woven into the fabric of the world. Indeed, the global peak of infection may still be months away.... Even some countries that moved against the virus head on are losing ground. Among them is India. 'There will be a total ban of coming out of your homes,' Prime Minister Narendra Modi told his citizens on March 24. 'Every state, every district, every lane, every village will be under lockdown.'... India is a country of 1.3 billion, and hundreds of millions of its citizens are destitute, with countless millions living in packed urban areas with poor sanitation and weak public health care. Despite the swift action, the country is now grappling with a sharp surge of infections.... But this week, Indians can once again dine out, shop and pray at religious sites."
"A tweet Saturday from CrossFit founder Greg Glassman that appeared to make light of both the death of George Floyd and the novel coronavirus pandemic resulted in a widespread backlash within the CrossFit community. On Sunday, Reebok announced it was ending its corporate partnership with the popular fitness company, and after some gyms said they were cutting ties to the CrossFit brand, and others said they’re considering doing so, Glassman issued an apology. Glassman was responding Saturday to a tweet posted by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), in which the research center declared, 'Racism is a public health issue.' 'It’s FLOYD-19,' replied Glassman, 63. That sparked outrage among some owners of CrossFit gyms, or 'boxes,' as they’re called, that pay fees of several thousands of dollars annually to license the brand."
If what you're selling is branding, you'd better maintain that product. You're asking other people to put your reputation on themselves! You're not a solo, roving comedian. Even if it had been a great joke — which it wasn't — Glassman was an idiot to tweet it.
... had asked me if I'd take a picture of them — the kind of request I've always happily agreed to. And here I was being stand-offish, in the manner of a person with OCD because they wanted to hand me their phone. It's covid19world, and we're all OCD now, so I couldn't go along with that, and I knew they'd understand. Actually, they'd probably have understood in pre-covid19world and simply regarded me as a person with a disability to be treated with empathy.
But in pre-covid19world, covid19world, and post-covid19world, there is a solution to the problem of not wanting to touch the other person's phone. You don't need to refuse the lovely social opportunity to take someone's picture for them. It's AirDrop. Take a photograph on your own iPhone and AirDrop it to their phone. You just have to remember, and fortunately I did.
It was nice to encounter some young people, up for a 5:40 sunrise, experiencing our strange time with optimism. Nothing more optimistic than a sunrise.
The walk back from the vantage point had the sun at our back and the fading Flower Moon up ahead. I always love when Meade sings. He began "When the moon...." but it wasn't the "When the moon" song that I thought it was. There are at least 3 well-known songs that begin "When the moon...." Which is the first one that you think of? Two are optimistic but they take entirely different paths of optimism. The other one is sad. I don't know why the sad one is the one I thought of, such a sad old Depression-Era song...
