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 In a preliminary study conducted by the Veterans Administration with 368 patients that has not been peer-reviewed, no benefits were observed and there seemed to be extra deaths.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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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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