Deborah Birx’s reputation will never recover

Which is only fair, since her enabling of Trump is a catastrophe from which the nation will never recover. The NY Times has a piece on how Trump failed the pandemic test, and Birx plays a prominent role in it.

For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.

On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape. Boston and Chicago are two weeks away from the peak, she cautioned, but the numbers in Detroit and other hard-hit cities are heading down.

A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today as the virus surges anew.

In April. I remember April. Did anyone think we were on the right path in April? We’d shut down my university, but already I was seeing people refuse to accept it, clamoring to get back to bars and beaches.

Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.

Yeah, models built on assumptions, like that Americans wouldn’t be stupid, and that Trump wouldn’t encourage that stupidity. Just the fact that Donald Trump is president should tell you how wrong that is.

Inside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was fading.

Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior — to stay home, for example, or wear masks in public — sacrifices that required a sense of shared national responsibility.

Again, a responsible nation would not have elected Donald Trump.

Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.

The difference was critical. As communities across the United States raced to reopen, the daily number of daily cases barely dropped below 20,000 in early May. The virus was still circulating across the country.

Italy’s recovery curve, it turned out, looked nothing like the American one.

Nope. Because Italians were smarter than Americans…or rather, I should say, Italians didn’t have failed leaders who were modeling the worst possible behavior for containing the infection, and didn’t have scientists feeding their delusions.

Other nations had moved aggressively to employ an array of techniques that Mr. Trump never mobilized on a federal level, including national testing strategies and contact tracing to track down and isolate people who had interacted with newly diagnosed patients.

“These things were done in Germany, in Italy, in Greece, Vietnam, in Singapore, in New Zealand and in China,” said Andy Slavitt, a former federal health care official who had been advising the White House.

“They were not secret,” he said. “Not mysterious. And these were not all wealthy countries. They just took accountability for getting it done. But we did not do that here. There was zero chance here that we would ever have been in a situation where we would be dealing with ‘embers.’ ”

We could still take those actions that other nations did — in fact, we really ought to, despite the fact that it’s late and those measures will cost more and we’re still going to suffer the tragic consequences of our failures — but we won’t. Classes start in a month, and my university still plans on opening, and I’m going to have to teach in-person labs, and students will still be moving into the dorms, and will still be gathering in the cafeterias for meals as a group, and will probably still be heading out to the bar for quarter taps on Thursday nights. It’s madness. If the University of Minnesota had asked me, I would have told them to slam on the brakes right now, refuse to enable the massing of students in one place, and teach online classes only for a year. The summer of 2021 would be the time to discuss cautiously reopening fully, but only if the pandemic was under control.

Nobody asked me. I was only told to prepare a plan for a limited reopening, not asked whether we should open at all.

At least I’m not a Birx making happy-clappy PowerPoints to show how everything is going to be just fine. When I’m feeling optimistic, I put the chances of me being dead within a year at about 10%.

Exactly what I’d expect in Portland

In what seems to have been an effective tactic this time, a naked protester faced down the cops.

Everyone who has been to the Oregon Country Fair or the naked bike rides in Portland knows that there is a culture of casual nudity among a subset of the state. It seems to have been used to good effect in this case. I’ve seen the photos of what rubber bullets and those pepper guns can do to clothed flesh, so this was incredibly brave.

What if they made a protest, and nobody wore any clothes? What if the powerless embraced their vulnerability and threw themselves into actions that would inevitably lead to carnage? The thugs in power might be initially taken aback, but I don’t think they’d hesitate for long.

I’ve had about enough of 2020

John Lewis is dead. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being treated for liver cancer. Canadians had been building monuments to Nazis after WWII. And, well, Portland, Oregon.

If this were an epic fantasy novel, this is the part where all hope is lost, the cause of goodness is doomed, despair overwhelms our brave heroes…and then, a shining silver army crests the hill, eagles swoop in, the evil fortress collapses, and the bad guys fall into lava-filled crevasses. Huzzah! Except this isn’t a fantasy novel, dammit.

Portland is the test case. This is where fascism is practicing its tactics.

A block west of Chapman Square, Pettibone and O’Shea bumped into a group of people who warned them that people in camouflage were driving around the area in unmarked minivans grabbing people off the street.

“So that was terrifying to hear,” Pettibone said.

They had barely made it half a block when an unmarked minivan pulled up in front of them.

“I see guys in camo,” O’Shea said. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, ‘Oh shit. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.’”

Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.

The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.

Strange men in camo swooping in with unmarked civilian vehicles and hauling people away…where’s the transparency, due process, the goddamned justice? What’s to stop some Proud Boys or other paramilitary jagoffs doing the same thing? You know that they’re planning to spread this tactic to other cities next, and eventually, people getting picked up will be ‘disappeared’.

Perhaps you pin your hopes on the November elections. Just keep in mind that getting rid of Trump won’t instantly erase these people in power within the police and our terribly numerous federal offices that support monstrous thugs like those “police”. This is a new institution metastasizing and growing, and it won’t disappear even if you lop off the head.

No eagles. No shining elves. Get used to it.

Violent anarchists, where are your standards?

This list of dangerous activities committed by Portland anarchists is pitiful.

I do appreciate that every little bit of graffiti is tagged with the label “violent anarchist” (although I’m beginning to wonder if the Department of Homeland Security can actually define either of those two words, or if they just prefer to define them in ways that allow them to imprison citizens), but really, someone needs to look up the Haymarket Affair. Those were the days, when the violent committed violence, and the anarchists were anarchic, and policemen, rather than innocent bystanders, ended up dead or maimed.

I put up a “Black Lives Matter” sign in my yard, does that make me a “violent anarchist” now, or do I need to scribble those words on public property? Because I’ve got multiple sharpies in different colors, and I’m not afraid to use them.

By the way, we need a new slogan. I know ACAB, but we need something much more damning for officials of ICE and DHS, who have taken “bad” to incredible new levels.

Astroturfing education

Look at these poseurs.

The one person who looks to be of an age to be a student doesn’t look very happy to be out there. Those are terrible signs, too, wordy and hard to read and attempting to make scattershot points. “Teachers teach me best”, “e-learning is not for me”, “My kids need…in person learning 5 days a week”, yeah, the agenda is clear: get these damn kids out of my house every weekday. The real giveaway is that every sign insists on “masks optional” — why? It’s such a peculiar conservative shibboleth.

But here’s the deal. I agree with a lot of what they want. I’m not a fan of wearing a mask all day, and you probably aren’t, either. I think in-person teaching is best. Some students will thrive with remote teaching, the majority will have a less enlightening experience. I’m at a residential college, and I agree that immersion in the academic experience is valuable. I must also confess that remote teaching, even while I think it is less effective, requires twice as much work out of me. I’ve got 30 years worth of stuff all prepared and ready to go in a classroom and lab, and you’re telling me I have to start over from scratch? Yikes. I was miserable last spring, I expect to suffer some more this fall (but with a little more time to prepare and cushion the blow, I hope).

So here I am, already agreeing with the sentiments on their little, hard-to-read signs, and they’re not at all persuasive. They seem to have forgotten the whole reason we’re doing all this: it’s because we don’t want their kids to die or suffer life-long consequences of infection — the won’t be playing football with scarred lungs! — and we’re trying to find compromises to allow ongoing progress in their education while not increasing their risks of disease. The signs don’t mention any of that. They seem to be thinking that all of these changes in the schools are just to discomfit their conservative values, rather than protecting the kids.

What I also don’t understand is that, if my situation were different and I was the parent of school-aged kids again, I would be welcoming efforts to keep them out of the plague-pit. Just as every winter I’d make sure they had a warm coat and a scarf when they went out, I’d be nagging them to wear a mask. Just this week my wife and I made a trip to St Cloud to deliver a high-quality mask to our oldest boy. He’s a grown-ass man in his 30s, and we worry! On the flip side, my grown-ass daughter stitched up a mask and sent it to me last month. This bizarrely cavalier attitude about masks tells me one thing: they don’t believe in science and medicine. They probably believe in the two sticks lashed together behind them, and the American flag on their hat, but neither of those things will help them if their daughter gets COVID-19, or if she comes home from their “mask-optional” public school or church incubator and pass it on to them.

My sign would be a little pithier. “MY KIDS NEED TO BE HEALTHY.” I’d sacrifice everything to have that be true.

It was never about “state’s rights”

It’s always been about putting down those uppity Negroes and their race traitor friends. Just come out and admit it, Republicans.

As top federal law enforcement officials arrived in Oregon on Thursday, Gov. Kate Brown accused President Donald Trump of deploying federal officers to Portland to crack down on protesters as a way to boost his flailing reelection prospects.

In an uncharacteristically harsh statement, Brown responded to Trump’s deployment of federal officers to quell Portland’s protests against police violence. Those officers sent one demonstrator to the hospital July 11 with a munition to the face.

“This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety,” Brown said. “The president is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.”

Secret police roaming around in unmarked cars, shooting unarmed protesters in the face, with the state propaganda organ, Fox News, cheering them on. All those dystopian novels and video games sure failed to capture the flavor of the real thing, didn’t they?

Our educational system is detached from reality, I guess

The National Academies are recommending that the public schools open. I don’t know the details of their reasoning, since it would cost me $54 to order the publication, but there is a summary. I was boggled at their recommendations.

COVID-19 Precautions for Reopened Schools

The report also recommends schools and districts take the following precautions to protect staff and students:

  • Provide surgical masks for all teachers and staff. All students and staff should wear face masks. Younger children may have difficulty using face masks, but schools should encourage compliance.
  • Provide hand washing stations or hand sanitizer for all people who enter school buildings, minimize contact with shared surfaces, and increase regular surface cleaning.
  • Limit large gatherings of students, such as during assemblies, in the cafeteria, and overcrowding at school entrances, possibly by staggering arrival times.
  • Reorganize classrooms to enable physical distancing, such as by limiting class sizes or moving instruction to larger spaces. The report says cohorting, when a group of 10 students or less stay with the same staff as much as possible, is a promising strategy for physical distancing.
  • Prioritize cleaning, ventilation, and air filtration, while recognizing that these alone will not sufficiently lower the risk of COVID-19 transmission.
  • Create a culture of health and safety in every school, and enforce virus mitigation guidelines using positive approaches rather than by disciplining students.

The report says the cost of implementing these COVID-19 precautions will be very high, totaling approximately $1.8 million for a school district with eight school buildings and around 3,200 students. These costs are coming at a financially uncertain moment for many school districts, and could lead to funding shortfalls. While the size of the funding shortfall will depend on how well-resourced a school district is, many districts will be unable to afford implementing the entire suite of mitigation measures, potentially leaving students and staff in those districts at greater risk of infection.

Wow, let’s highlight the deep structural problems in the US educational system, shall we? They’re arguing that failure to open the schools would widen the inequities in our society, but $1.8 million for a typical school district, in a system stupidly funded by property taxes is going to fracture everything. The poor districts simply won’t be able to afford that, and the richer districts are often Republican suburbs where we can expect freak-outs over masks, among other things. This is a report straight out of fantasy-land. How “well-resourced” do they think our schools are?

Also, if they want to “create a culture of health and safety”, why are they opening schools at all? Everyone is just playing a grand game of chicken, careering towards catastrophe with a promise that they’ll swerve out of the way at the first sign of trouble. Playing chicken ain’t safety.

Rub it in, Canada, why don’t you?

A few hundred miles north makes all the difference.

How did this happen?

The Canadian people have been less divided and more disciplined. Some provinces and territories could have locked down sooner, analysts say, but once measures were announced, they were strict, broadly uniform and widely followed.

“It was completely unexpected,” said Gary Kobinger, director of the Research Center on Infectious Diseases at Quebec’s Laval University. “I thought that people would not accept to stay home. … This also helped.”

Michael Gardam, chief of staff at Toronto’s Humber River Hospital, said provinces have mostly been “appropriately cautious” when easing restrictions, in contrast to those states that never imposed closures or stay-at-home orders or loosened controls prematurely.

Researchers at the University of Toronto studying reopenings found that restrictions in Yukon, a northern territory that had 11 ooronavirus cases and no deaths, are more stringent than those in Texas, where hospitalizations are surging.

Gerald Evans, a professor of medicine at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, said Canada’s single-payer national health-care system also confers “distinct” advantages, allowing people to seek care for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, without fear of out-of-pocket costs.

Analysts also point to differences in political leadership.

That last line? That’s the big one. Having a functional health care system is also important.

Rush Limbaugh’s coronavirus advice

Lie back and do what you need to do to get through this pandemic. No, not wear your mask and maintain social distancing…think cannibalism.

You’ve heard of the Donner Party? Maybe some of you haven’t. The Donner Party, the Donner family and a bunch of travelers trying to get to California over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They made the mistake of trying to make the trip in the middle of winter. We’re talking the Lake Tahoe region. They get to the peak. It was so bad that they had to turn to cannibalism to survive. That’s what’s noteworthy about the Donner Party. If you read the diaries written by the leaders of the Donner Party, the only reference to how cold it was, was one sentence: “It was a particularly tough winter.”

It’s just what was. They didn’t complain about it, because there was nothing they could do. They had to adapt. This is what’s missing. There seems to be no concept of adaptation. There seems to be no understanding in the Millennial generation that we can adapt to this, and that we’re going to have to.

He even suggests that this should become one of the themes that the president adopts. The situation is so dire that we, the American public, should be contemplating cannibalism! Remember, you can’t eat your neighbor if you’re wearing a mask.

If we must, we must. Can we start with Rush cutlets?

The center will not hold

Jeez. I leave town for one day, and what happens? Both Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan up and resign. I’d say I ought to get away more, except also Ruth Bader Ginsburg got hospitalized for an infection.

Also, it looks like the right-wing, which has already long lost its collective mind, is busy scraping the last few neurons out of the bowl of its cranium and throwing them in the garbage disposal. Both of them are now ritual sacrifices to “Cancel Culture”, the new bogeyman, despite the fact that both are voluntarily quitting. It’s because Bari Weiss was getting criticized by the mean lefties, which apparently you’re never ever supposed to do. She just joined the staff at the ultra-liberal NY Times to bring some balance to the rag. You know, that terrible lefty bastion that publishes David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, and Ross Douthat.

Speaking of Douthat, he has also joined the freakout chorus. He hasn’t resigned, unfortunately, but he is complaining about “cancel culture” in a 10-point histrionic whine about what it is and how horrible it is. I lost it at point 8, though, where he reluctantly concedes that right-wingers “cancel”, too — it’s just that it was in the past, not now, and that right now the Right is too weak to cancel any one.

8. The right and the left both cancel; it’s just that today’s right is too weak to do it effectively.
Is it cancel culture when conservatives try to get college professors disciplined for anti-Americanism, or critics of Israel de-platformed for anti-Semitism? Sure, in a sense. Was it cancel culture when the Dixie Chicks — sorry, the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks — were dropped by radio stations and tour venues, or when Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” was literally canceled, for falling afoul of patriotic correctness? Absolutely.

But as the latter examples suggest, the last peak of right-wing cultural power was the patriotically correct climate after Sept. 11, a cultural eon in the past. Today the people with the most to fear from a right-wing cancel culture usually work inside Trump-era professional conservatism. (And even for them there’s often a new life awaiting as a professional NeverTrumper.) Attempted cancellations on the right are mostly battles for control over diminishing terrain, with occasional forays against red-state academics and anti-Trump celebrities. Meanwhile, the left’s cancel warriors imagine themselves conquering the entire non-Fox News map.

Dude. The right-wing controls the presidency, the senate, the Supreme Court, Fox News, and you are propped up by the NY Times! It’s also not ancient history — read Edroso’s response to Rod Dreher, another wingnut moaning about that deplorable “cancel culture” BS. The Right is the pre-eminent practitioner of vindictive action against any who defy their villainy, and they’ve got all the power. It’s just that it is so locked into the establishment that people take it for granted.

Things haven’t gotten any better. I’ve already written about Springfield, Mass. police detective Florissa Fuentes, who got fired this year for reposting her niece’s pro-Black Lives Matter Instagram photo. Fuentes is less like Donohue, the Chicks, and Mendenhall, though, and more like most of the people who get fired for speech in this country, in that she is not rich, and getting fired was for her a massive blow.

Speaking of Black Lives Matter, here’s one from 2019:

The controversy began after [Lisa] Durden’s appearance [on Tucker Carlson], during which she defended the Black Lives Matter movement’s decision to host a Memorial Day celebration in New York City to which only black people were invited. On the show, Durden’s comments included, “You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter’s all-black Memorial Day Celebration,” and “We want to celebrate today. We don’t want anybody going against us today.”

Durden was then an adjunct professor at Essex County College, but not for long because sure enough, they fired her for what she said on the show. (Bet Carlson, a racist piece of shit, was delighted!) The college president defended her decision, saying she’d received “feedback from students, faculty and prospective students and their families expressing frustration, concern and even fear that the views expressed by a college employee (with influence over students) would negatively impact their experience on the campus…”

I wish “Cancel Culture” were a real thing, rather than reasonable complaints about the status quo and how it’s enforced by by far-right thugs, so I could cancel a few people myself.