Pot, meet kettle

It is pretty much indisputable that New Zealand has done much, much better at containing the coronavirus than the US. The leadership shown by the NZ government stands in stark contrast to the utter shambles that we have seen in the US. That country has had just 1,569 cases and 22 deaths so far, compared to over five million cases and 163,000 deaths in the US. Life in that country seems to have pretty much gone back to normal, though the government stands ready to take quick action if there is any sign of the virus coming back.
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The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and its aftermath

The current pandemic has rekindled a lot of interest in the 1918 pandemic where the misleadingly labeled Spanish flu killed anywhere between 50 and 100 million people.

As the pandemic reached epic proportions in the fall of 1918, it became commonly known as the “Spanish Flu” or the “Spanish Lady” in the United States and Europe. Many assumed this was because the sickness had originated on the Iberian Peninsula, but the nickname was actually the result of a widespread misunderstanding.

Spain was one of only a few major European countries to remain neutral during World War I. Unlike in the Allied and Central Powers nations, where wartime censors suppressed news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail. News of the sickness first made headlines in Madrid in late-May 1918, and coverage only increased after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case a week later. Since nations undergoing a media blackout could only read in depth accounts from Spanish news sources, they naturally assumed that the country was the pandemic’s ground zero. The Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus had spread to them from France, so they took to calling it the “French Flu.”

While it’s unlikely that the “Spanish Flu” originated in Spain, scientists are still unsure of its source. France, China and Britain have all been suggested as the potential birthplace of the virus, as has the United States, where the first known case was reported at a military base in Kansas on March 11, 1918. Researchers have also conducted extensive studies on the remains of victims of the pandemic, but they have yet to discover why the strain that ravaged the world in 1918 was so lethal.

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Lasers and eye damage

The US attorney general Bill Barr has defended the massive and violent federal response to the demonstration in Portland by arguing that the protestors were the ones who were being violent and that the security forces were just defending themselves and government property.

Barr said federal authorities had a duty to defend against violent attacks and rioters, and said protesters have attempted to burn down the building, shot commercial fireworks, and used pellet guns and slingshots to shoot projectiles that have injured federal officers “to the bone” as well as lasers that have damaged officers’ eyesight.

Are these claims true? Barr is a loyal follower of Donald Trump and hence one must assume that, like Trump, he is lying unless he can prove otherwise. I have not seen a detailed fact-check of those claims of injuries, such as medical reports or independent third party observations.
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The US should follow New Zealand’s lead for dealing with the pandemic

Yesterday brought some encouraging news of a survey that shows that most Americans do not believe Trump’s assertions that the US is doing a better job of dealing with the pandemic than other countries, and they are looking for the government to issue aggressive national plan to fight the epidemic and are willing to wear masks and accept other restrictions.
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Trump flounders badly yet again

In an interview conducted by Jonathan Swan of Axios and broadcast on HBO (which I do not have a subscription to), Trump tried once again to lie and bluff away his poor handling of the pandemic crisis but ended up looking foolish yet again.

Claiming that the pandemic was unique, Trump said: “This has never happened before. Nineteen seventeen, but it was totally different, it was a flu in that case. If you watch the fake news on television, they don’t even talk about it, but there are 188 other countries right now that are suffering. Some, proportionately, far greater than we are.”
…

Swan pressed the president on which countries were doing worse. Trump brandished several pieces of paper with graphs and charts on them that he referred to as he attempted to suggest the US figures compared well internationally.

“Right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world. Lower than Europe.”

“In what?” asks Swan. As it becomes apparent that Trump is talking about the number of deaths as a proportion of cases, Swan says said: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than Germany, South Korea.”

Trump then says: “You can’t do that.”

It is just pathetic and even worse when you watch him.


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Another attempt to rescue free will

George Ellis is professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and he has written an essay in defense of the idea of free will. It is a long essay but his argument is really against classical determinism of the Laplacian kind, as can be seen by this statement.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose I’m wrong. Let’s ignore all these issues and take the deterministic view seriously. It implies that the words of every book ever written – the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Das Kapital, the Harry Potter series – were encoded into the initial state of the Universe, whatever that was. No logical thinking by a human played a causal role in the specific words of these books: they were determined by physics alone.

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Another case of life imitating art

I have recently been watching the British TV series The Indian Doctor. It is a fish-out-of-water story similar to the other British show Doc Martin. The latter featured a brilliant but irascible surgeon with zero social skills and no tolerance for stupidity or even small talk who becomes a general practitioner in a small fishing village in the southwest of England where he has to deal with nosy and gossipy villagers. The Indian Doctor deals with another skilled doctor Prem Sharma who arrives in a small Welsh coal mining town in 1963 as its sole doctor after being recruited from India by the British government to staff its expanding National Health Service.

Whereas Martin is rude and impatient with everyone, Sharma is genial and polite. Sharma’s wife Kamini, however, comes from a very wealthy upper-class family in India and had hoped that her husband would be a Harley Street specialist so that they could live in London and enjoy its cultural life. She is dismayed at being stuck in a backwater, living in a grungy apartment over the equally grungy doctor’s office and where she has to do all the chores that servants did for her back home. She also has to deal with the suspicions and prejudices that small tightly knit communities have about any outsider. The town’s people even think of the English as foreigners, so people from as exotic a place as India are viewed as almost an alien species.
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Why there is no national plan in the US for dealing with the pandemic

What has been obvious from the start is that the US has had no national plan for dealing with the pandemic, leaving the whole thing up to a patchwork system of actions by local authorities. The basic elements of safety protocols, widespread testing, and contact tracing were not widely promoted and implemented. Katherine Eban, writing in Vanity Fair, explains what happened and says that part of the blame lies with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was assigned the task of creating and implementing a policy.
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The Gohmert stupidity never ends

Louie Gohmert is a congressperson from Texas who, in the face of stiff competition from his colleagues in the Republican party, is clearly one of the most stupid and obnoxious people in Congress. I will not bother to list all the stupid things he has said and done because they are easily looked up. Someone should create a Stupidity Index and name it after him. In fact, we should start calling someone whom we think is incorrigibly stupid a ‘Gohmert’. It could also be used as a descriptive term, such as saying, “That was a real Gohmert thing to do”.

He is, of course, anti-mask and since the halls of Congress do not require people to wear them at all times, has been going around without them. Well, he has now tested positive for the coronavirus.
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