Covid-19 trends for the US and UK are not encouraging

I have been keeping tabs on this excellent site that tells you the growth over time of confirmed covid-19 cases in each country. You can pick which countries you want to display using the menu at the bottom right. It is plotted so that the x-axis gives the total cumulative number of cases while the y-axis gives the number of new cases over the previous seven days. (You can also choose to plot deaths.) The graph is log-log so that a straight upward line means the growth of cases is exponential, with the steepness of the slope intercept indicating the doubling time for the number of cases. It is obviously not good to be lying on that straight line or on a line that curves upward. What you want to see is the curve turning down sharply. (You can also choose to have the data displayed on a linear scale but that is not so helpful when one is dealing with a huge variation in numbers country by country.)
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Trump is desperately trying to hide his failures

Rick Bright, a government scientist who was director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, had warned early on that trying to prevent the coronavirus from coming here was futile and that instead the country needed to quickly start taking steps to meet the inevitable challenge by ordering the necessary supplies to test for and treat the disease. The administration did not like what he was saying and he was reassigned to a different area that did not require his expertise. So he became a whistleblower and his lawyer Debra Katz describes what happened.
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The dark side of coffee

I wrote recently about an interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his latest book on how coffee works on the body and produces the addiction that so many of us have that makes need to have a cup first thing in the morning and for some of us to drink it throughout the day. In the April 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker Adam Gopnik reviews several books that paint a somewhat darker picture of coffee as a tool of global capitalism.
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Anti-China rhetoric escalates

The Trump administration has done a remarkable about face in its attitude towards China during the current pandemic. After initially praising that nation and its president fulsomely for the way they handled the crisis, it is now harshly criticizing them, starting with insisting on calling covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’ and accusing them of covering up the emergence of the virus. The motivation for this shift is quite transparent. As it became increasingly clear how badly Trump has bungled this issue, he very likely seeks to distract people from the administration’s woefully incompetent response .
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Fox News and Trump’s love affair with hydroxychloroquine seems to have ended

You may have noticed that Trump is no longer touting the virtues of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for Covid-19. While not in the same class of insanity as suggesting the injecting of disinfectants, this was still dangerous and has resulted in there being a run for this unproven treatment, resulting in those patients who need it to treat their lupus and rheumatoid arthritis not getting it. In a preliminary study conducted by the Veterans Administration with 368 patients that has not been peer-reviewed, no benefits were observed and there seemed to be extra deaths.
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Falling collections by religious institutions

I wrote earlier that the heads of some evangelical churches are urging their worshippers to attend church services even at the risk of spreading the virus among their parishioners, giving the spurious argument that their god would stop the disease from affecting the faithful. I said that I suspected that part of the reason may be that they are feeling the loss of revenue that is collected by passing the plate during the services.
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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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