What China did to control the coronavirus

As talk increases of states relaxing the restrictions on physical distancing, on a recent episode of the radio show Fresh Air, Donald G. McNeil Jr., science and health reporter for the New York Times, says that the US is nowhere near ready to do that. He says that the remarkable success of the Chinese government in shutting down the spread of the virus was due to its willingness to put in place highly restrictive measures for as long as was necessary and only after the number of new cases were tiny enough to ensure that contact tracing could be done effectively did they begin to loosen the restrictions.
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Compatibilism versus biologicalism on the free will question

The question of what constitutes free will and how to describe the various arguments for and against its existence is tricky and requires careful articulation. I have been thinking about how to more carefully elucidate the issue since the interesting discussion the comments on my recent post on a debate by two philosophers on this issue, so here goes.

Let’s start with how we define free will. What I mean by having free will is that I could have decided to do something different from what I just did, which was to take a sip from a cup of coffee. This can be called contracausal free will. There are those who believe in such a contracausal free will because they think that our decisions are driven by a soul or by a ‘ghost in the machine’, (a term coined by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle to connote some kind of homunculus that exists inside our head and controls our actions) that is somehow either disconnected from our body or can act independently of it and can control it. I am going to dismiss such ideas without further discussion, because those seem to invoke religious or spiritual elements that do not have any empirical basis and seem to deny the reality that we are biological machines whose behavior is driven by the way our bodies have been shaped by evolution and personal experience, and that our behavior is driven by physiological processes obeying natural laws.
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The competition for lithium-ion battery technology

As most people must be aware, the element lithium plays a major role in battery technology, powering many of our technology devices and electric vehicles. But it also plays a key role in medical devices and Lydia DePillis writes that the US has been losing the global competition for lithium-ion battery manufacture to China, and that is part of the reason that it has not been able to adequately meet the demands due to the pandemic.
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The Onion predicted Trump’s disinfectant insanity

The White House has not held a full coronavirus press briefing since last Thursday, which was the occasion when Trump made the widely ridiculed and condemned suggestion that injecting bleach and other disinfectants might be a cure for Covid-19. The next day, he and Pence held a 20-minute session and walked off without taking questions. The weekend went by without any briefings and today they announced that there would also be no briefing. It looks like they may be gone for good. Trump, like the coward he is, does not want to face challenging questions and, like Brave Sir Robin, “When danger reared it’s ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled.”
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Uh-oh, I am on Trump’s mailing list

All of a sudden, I am getting daily emails from Donald Trump. Clearly someone has sold his campaign a list of emails addresses that include mine. My first instinct was to block them but then I thought I’d not, just to see what they think appeals to his supporters. For several days he would urge me to add my name to a ‘surprise’ birthday card for his wife Melania, something that was apparently done last year too and the goal this year seems to be to exceed the numbers who signed last year. Given that this is a repeat of last year, she must be someone who forgets things quickly or is easily surprised.
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The utter garbage going around social media

I do not follow social media so am not directly aware of all the garbage that is spread through it. I do see examples when credulous people ask for my opinion on various stories they read. I have written about one highly credulous person from Sri Lanka who seems to spend his life on social media and gets alarmed by the rubbish that circulates there. He sent me yet another item and asked me if it was true. It was such a doozy, that I thought worth sharing. Here it is.
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Donald Trump is America’s first African president

Reporter’s were stunned when at Friday’s White House coronavirus Task Force briefing, where Trump usually rambles on for a couple of hours spewing lies and dangerous nonsense, he and Pence left after making a few comments without taking any questions. The briefing was over in less than 30 minutes. One report says Trump had been told by his advisors that his popularity is going down and that these briefings may be the cause.
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The danger of being too much of a yes man

Josh Marshall writes how Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp was rebuked by Donald Trump for licking his boots too vigorously, something I would not have thought possible. Trump has been saying that the country should start re-opening soon and no doubt Kemp thought that he could curry favor with trump by being the first to do so. But it backfired.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been outstripping the sizable competition in the race to become President Donald Trump’s biggest, and most thoroughly rejected, flunky.
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On Monday he mounted his flashiest maneuver yet, announcing that he would fling wide the doors of the state’s gyms, nail salons, barbershops, bowling alleys — bowling alleys — by the end of the week, about three laps ahead of even the cadre of his fellow Trumpy governors.
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But Kemp was left alone on the front porch, clutching his boutonniere, as Trump slammed the front door in his face.

“Would I do that? No. I’d keep them a little longer,” the President said of the social distancing guidelines at his Wednesday press briefing. “I want to protect people’s lives.”

“I’m going to let him make his decision,” he added, of Kemp. “But I told him I totally disagree.”

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The idiot president floats more dangerous ideas

Donald Trump is a menace to people’s health. There is no other way to describe his ridiculous suggestions about treating the coronavirus at yesterday’s White House briefing where he floated the kinds of crazy rumors that float around the internet as worth testing, such as injecting oneself with bleach or disinfectant or somehow ‘hit’ the body with light inside it, no doubt because he heard somewhere that bleach kills bacteria and viruses and that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

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