Mark Kaufman writing in Mashable:

‘The nation’s top infectious disease researchers have repeatedly warned, if not begged, Americans to practice social distancing as the contagious coronavirus spreads through the population. 

That’s because, due to a woeful lack of testing in the nation, no one knows how many Americans are infected — and the resulting respiratory disease (COVID-19) is 10 times more lethal than the flu. Sunday morning, Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard University, emphasized this point, noting that the true number of infections is certainly “much higher” than confirmed cases.

But, though some folks are social distancing, many still clearly aren’t. Some are even actively bragging about not doing it. This weekend, journalists and others reported that bars across the nation were packed in Boston, Chicago, Nashville, and New York City.

For those eager to ignore the recommendations of scientists who have squelched deadly virus epidemics in the past — like immunologist Mark Cameron who helped put SARS to rest — consider this: Between 20 to 60 percent of adults globally are expected to become infected, and some 15 percent of cases are severe or critical. It is people over 60 who are most vulnerable. So stopping the virus’ spread will help your older relatives or parents from falling extremely ill, or worse. 

“Social distancing is based on the principle of altruism,” Jason Farley, a nurse practitioner for the Division of Infectious Diseases AIDS Service at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told Mashable last week. “Treating everyone around you like it’s your 80-year-old grandmother is the circumstance we need to think about.”…’

Neuroskeptic writing in Discover Magazine:

‘Thirty-three brave volunteers took part in an experiment on the effects of psychedelic drugs on creativity. After passing rigorous medical screening, the volunteers were admitted to a specially prepared hospital room, where they were each given a 4 mg dose of a synthetic hallucinogen.

Within fifteen minutes or so, they began to feel the effects, including perceptual distortions mood changes, and sometimes anxiety. Several participants reported changes in experience stronger than those previously seen in people after moderate or high doses of LSD and other psychedelics.

Finally, after 3 and a half hours, the experiment was over and the effects had worn off. The lead experimenter gathered the volunteers together and announced that the whole thing had been an elaborate fake. The pills they had taken were only placebos.

This is the story reported in a lovely new paper published in Psychopharmacology from researchers Jay A. Olson of McGill university. It’s called Tripping on nothing: placebo psychedelics and contextual factors.

The paper describes how the researchers went to great lengths to create a believable appearance of a drug study, and thus facilitate the placebo effect….’

Biologist Liz Specht runs the numbers on Twitter:

Let’s conservatively assume that there are 2,000 current cases in the US today, March 6th. This is about 8x the number of confirmed (lab-diagnosed) cases. We know there is substantial under-Dx due to lack of test kits; I’ll address implications later of under-/over-estimate.

We can expect that we’ll continue to see a doubling of cases every 6 days (this is a typical doubling time across several epidemiological studies). Here I mean actual cases. Confirmed cases may appear to rise faster in the short term due to new test kit rollouts.

We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on. Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go.

As the healthcare system begins to saturate under this case load, it will become increasingly hard to detect, track, and contain new transmission chains. In absence of extreme interventions, this likely won’t slow significantly until hitting >>1% of susceptible population.

What does a case load of this size mean for healthcare system? We’ll examine just two factors — hospital beds and masks — among many, many other things that will be impacted.

The US has about 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. With a population of 330M, this is ~1M beds. At any given time, 65% of those beds are already occupied. That leaves about 330k beds available nationwide (perhaps a bit fewer this time of year with regular flu season, etc).

Let’s trust Italy’s numbers and assume that about 10% of cases are serious enough to require hospitalization. (Keep in mind that for many patients, hospitalization lasts for weeks — in other words, turnover will be very slow as beds fill with COVID19 patients).

By this estimate, by about May 8th, all open hospital beds in the US will be filled. (This says nothing, of course, about whether these beds are suitable for isolation of patients with a highly infectious virus.)

If we’re wrong by a factor of two regarding the fraction of severe cases, that only changes the timeline of bed saturation by 6 days in either direction. If 20% of cases require hospitalization, we run out of beds by ~May 2nd.

If only 5% of cases require it, we can make it until ~May 14th. 2.5% gets us to May 20th. This, of course, assumes that there is no uptick in demand for beds from other (non-COVID19) causes, which seems like a dubious assumption.

As healthcare system becomes increasingly burdened, Rx shortages, etc, people w/ chronic conditions that are normally well-managed may find themselves slipping into severe states of medical distress requiring intensive care & hospitalization. But let’s ignore that for now.

Alright, so that’s beds. Now masks. Feds say we have a national stockpile of 12M N95 masks and 30M surgical masks (which are not ideal, but better than nothing).

There are about 18M healthcare workers in the US. Let’s assume only 6M HCW are working on any given day. (This is likely an underestimate as most people work most days of the week, but again, I’m playing conservative at every turn.)

As COVID19 cases saturate virtually every state and county, which seems likely to happen any day now, it will soon be irresponsible for all HCWs to not wear a mask. These HCWs would burn through N95 stockpile in 2 days if each HCW only got ONE mask per day.

One per day would be neither sanitary nor pragmatic, though this is indeed what we saw in Wuhan, with HCWs collapsing on their shift from dehydration because they were trying to avoid changing their PPE suits as they cannot be reused.

How quickly could we ramp up production of new masks? Not very fast at all. The vast majority are manufactured overseas, almost all in China. Even when manufactured here in US, the raw materials are predominantly from overseas… again, predominantly from China.

Keep in mind that all countries globally will be going through the exact same crises and shortages simultaneously. We can’t force trade in our favor.

Now consider how these 2 factors – bed and mask shortages – compound each other’s severity. Full hospitals + few masks + HCWs running around between beds without proper PPE = very bad mix.

HCWs are already getting infected even w/ access to full PPE. In the face of PPE limitations this severe, it’s only a matter of time. HCWs will start dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time, leading to a shortage of HCWs that then further compounds both issues above.

We could go on and on about thousands of factors – # of ventilators, or even simple things like saline drip bags. You see where this is going.

Importantly, I cannot stress this enough: even if I’m wrong – even VERY wrong – about core assumptions like % of severe cases or current case #, it only changes the timeline by days or weeks. This is how exponential growth in an immunologically naïve population works.

Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed complacency. It’s wrong to assuage the public by saying “only 2% will die.” People aren’t adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden wrought by this swift-moving of a disease.

I’m an engineer. This is what my mind does all day: I run back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to estimate order-of-magnitude impacts. I’ve been on high alarm about this disease since ~Jan 19 after reading clinical indicators in the first papers emerging from Wuhan.

Nothing in the last 6 weeks has dampened my alarm in the slightest. To the contrary, we’re seeing abject refusal of many countries to adequately respond or prepare. Of course some of these estimates will be wrong, even substantially wrong.

But I have no reason to think they’ll be orders-of-magnitude wrong. Even if your personal risk of death is very, very low, don’t mock decisions like canceling events or closing workplaces as undue “panic”.

These measures are the bare minimum we should be doing to try to shift the peak – to slow the rise in cases so that healthcare systems are less overwhelmed. Each day that we can delay an extra case is a big win for the HC system.

And yes, you really should prepare to buckle down for a bit. All services and supply chains will be impacted. Why risk the stress of being ill-prepared?

Worst case, I’m massively wrong and you now have a huge bag of rice and black beans to burn through over the next few months and enough Robitussin to trip out.

One more thought: you’ve probably seen multiple respected epidemiologists have estimated that 20-70% of world will be infected within the next year. If you use 6-day doubling rate I mentioned above, we land at ~2-6 billion infected by sometime in July of this year.

Obviously I think the doubling time will start to slow once a sizeable fraction of the population has been infected, simply because of herd immunity and a smaller susceptible population.

But take the scenarios above (full beds, no PPE, etc, at just 1% of the US population infected) and stretch them out over just a couple extra months.

That timeline roughly fits with consensus end-game numbers from these highly esteemed epidemiologists. Again, we’re talking about discrepancies of mere days or weeks one direction or another, but not disagreements in the overall magnitude of the challenge.

This is not some hypothetical, fear-mongering, worst-case scenario. This is reality, as far as anyone can tell with the current available data.

Azby Brown and Sean Bonner writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

‘Since the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, Safecast—a volunteer-driven nonprofit organization that enables individuals to share radiation measurements and other data—has accumulated a lot of experience and insight about trust, crisis communication, public perception, and what happens when people feel threatened by a lack of reliable information. As our team at Safecast observes the global spread of the coronavirus and the poor responses to it, we can’t help but feel a strong sense of déjà vu….’

Charles Ornstein writing in ProPublica:

‘Longtime health reporter Charles Ornstein says that comparing the novel coronavirus to the flu is dangerously inaccurate. Not one public health expert he trusts has called that comparison valid. Here’s why….’

Via This Coronavirus Is Unlike Anything in Our Lifetime, and We Have to Stop Comparing It to the Flu — ProPublica

Via WIRED:

‘…the US is pretty much the only place that uses the middle-endian date format of month/day/year. If you go with the little-endian format of day/month/year, then today is 14/3—which is obviously not pi. (In that case I suggest July 22, since the fraction 7/22 is a fairly decent approximation for pi.)

Anyway, my traditional way of celebrating Pi Day is to find a new way each year of calculating a numerical value for pi. It’s just what I do. I’ve been at this for quite some time now, so here are some of my favorites:

Finding pi using random numbers (and Python)

Determining the value of pi using a mass oscillating on a spring

Actually measuring the circumference and diameter of real circles I have even more Pi Day posts here.

But now let’s try this a new way. Let’s see how close we can get to pi by drawing a circle.

Here’s how this will work. You draw a circle. From that circle, you can determine both the circumference and the radius. Then the value of pi would be the circumference divided by twice the radius. Simple, right?…’

Richard L. Hasen writing in Slate:

‘Most immediately, in light of the uncertain time frame for disruption of life and political activities due to the coronavirus, Congress should pass a law requiring states to offer no-excuse absentee balloting for the November elections. Congress has the power to do so, and it should fully fund the efforts. The bill has to be drafted carefully to protect all voters. But time is short. For this to happen, it must happen quickly….’

Mark Stern writing in Slate:

‘There’s a perfectly legal shortcut around a free and fair presidential election….’

Liz Specht writing in WIRED:

‘In addition to trying to round up the latest stampeding pandemic, we need to examine the circumstances that enable these zoonotic diseases to leap from another species to humans. Fortunately, we now know the circumstances that give rise to zoonotic outbreaks, and we have the technology to vastly reduce this risk by modernizing our food system….’

Via WIRED:

‘Some experts have emphasized the difficulty of calculating the fatality rate of an emerging pandemic, explaining that current estimates are biased by a deficit of testing and by the lag time between onset of illness and death. Despite this counsel, news coverage and social media discourse has obsessed over CFRs and how they compare across pandemics throughout history. A popular refrain is that the new coronavirus has a frighteningly high fatality rate of at least 2 percent, which is supposedly comparable to that of the 1918 influenza pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu—one of the deadliest viral outbreaks in history. The truth is that this comparison is severely flawed and that the numbers it relies on are almost certainly wrong….’

Via Covid–19 Is Nothing Like the Spanish Flu | WIRED

Neuroscience News:

‘For decades, the routine treatment for Lyme disease has been standard antibiotics, which usually kill off the infection. But for up to 20% of people with the tick-borne illness, the antibiotics don’t work, and lingering symptoms of muscle pain, fatigue and cognitive impairment can continue for years — sometimes indefinitely.

A new Stanford Medicine study in lab dishes and mice provides evidence that the drug azlocillin completely kills off the disease-causing bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi at the onset of the illness. The study suggests it could also be effective for treating patients infected with drug-tolerant bacteria that may cause lingering symptoms.

“This compound is just amazing,” said Jayakumar Rajadas, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Biomaterials and Advanced Drug Delivery Laboratory at the Stanford School of Medicine. “It clears the infection without a lot of side effects. We are hoping to repurpose it as an oral treatment for Lyme disease.” Rajadas is the senior author of the study, which was published online March 2 in Scientific Reports. The lead author is research associate Venkata Raveendra Pothineni, PhD….’

I’m not an infectious disease expert but I’m pretty sure this is a ridiculous puff piece. For one thing, any novel antibiotic to which an organism is sensitive will show spectacular results at the outset, until the bacteria develop resistance. The use-it-or-lose-it school of thought about new drugs contrasts dramatically with the need to avoid indiscriminate overuse of any agent to preserve it against breeding resistant strains.

Secondly, Pothineni and Rajadas have patented the compound and stand to profit from its success. If I were them, I would continue to quickly flood the media with claims about how freakin’ spectacular this medication is so they can sell the rights to Big Pharma for a killing before it stops working.

You have got to wonder about researchers would would patent an exciting new breakthrough for a rare disease causing great suffering, which would drastically inflate the cost either to the sufferer or her insurance company. 

Finally, buried in the piece is a crucial observation, which many medical thinkers find credible, that, after the initial infectious course, persistent symptoms when Lyme disease becomes chronic are due not to a continued infectious process from persistent bacterial presence in the body but from the body’s persisting autoimmune reaction to first exposure to the bacteria, causing persistent inflammation whether the bacteria have been eradicated from the body or not. Autoimmune inflammation vs. continued infection — antibiotics would be useless against the former. 

Jim Richardson writing in Instagram:

‘When the moonlight shines down on the Stones of Stenness, it’s no wonder people have been drawn to this place for 5,000 years. Five of the original 12 or so stones still stand, but the henge (surrounding ditch) is gone. This stone circle is thought to be the oldest in the British Isles. (This is possibly where the Stonehenge folk got the idea.) The Watchstone is only a couple hundred yards away, about the same distance as the Barnhouse Settlement to the north. One can imagine people bringing the bones of their ancestors here before taking them on to the Maeshowe tomb less than a mile away. Sit here for a while and the moon can conjure magic….’

Maureen O’Connor Photography:

PF Sloan-penned lyrics (1965):

'The eastern world it is explodin'
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war, what's that gun you're totin'
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin'
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?
Can't you see the fears that I'm feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there's no running away
There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction

Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'
I'm sittin' here, just contemplatin'
I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation
Handful of Senators don't pass legislation,
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin'
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction

Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama!
Ah, you may leave here, for four days in space
But when you return, it's the same old place
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace
Hate your next-door-neighbour, but don't forget to say grace
And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend
You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
No no you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction...'

Read more on Wikipedia

Beth Mole writing in Ars Technica:

‘WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced on March 11, 2020 that the new coronavirus outbreak can now be characterized as a pandemic. The disease and its spread are alarming—so is the level of inaction, WHO says….’

Via Pandemic declared as COVID–19 blazes across globe | Ars Technica

Chloe Hadavas writing in Slate:

‘Despite being just 81 miles off the coast of China, which has more than 80,000 documented cases of COVID-19, Taiwan has managed to contain the outbreak. While South Korea and Japan, its neighbors to the north, have 7,755 and 1,277 known cases of COVID-19, respectively, Taiwan has experienced just 48 cases and one virus-related death.

So how did an island of 24 million with considerable economic, geographic, and cultural ties to China—more than 850,000 Taiwanese citizens live in mainland China, and about 400,000 more work there—manage to defy expectations and contain the outbreak, and can other countries follow suit?…’

Via How Taiwan and Singapore have contained the coronavirus.

William Saletan writing in Slate:

‘What hurt him was that Biden increased his share of the vote, while Sanders didn’t. As other candidates dropped out, their voters went to Biden, not Sanders. And one reason for this pattern is Sanders’ constant message of antagonism. He has cultivated enemies instead of friends. Now he’s paying the price…..’

Related:

He’s still in the race… but the revolution is out, Jim Newell writes in Slate:

‘He was telling Joe Biden, and other leading Democratic Party figures who are getting anxious about Sanders’ continued presence in the race, that if Biden wants the support of Sanders and the majority of young Democratic voters in the near term, he has to show them something more on the policy areas he outlined, on which many younger voters feel an urgency that’s incommensurate with the proposals the Biden campaign has thus far offered. If the race is more or less over, now the onus is on Biden to determine what kind of olive branch he’s willing to extend….’

Ben Mathis-Lilley writing in Slate:

‘Choosing Biden was based entirely on a theory of necessity. His flaws are evident, which is why he finished fourth and fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s still capable of delivering inspiring rhetoric but talks over himself, makes errors, and even becomes agitated when required to get into details. He’s enthusiastic when talking about Obama’s accomplishments, but presents almost no vision of what his own administration’s achievements might look like. (During a recent rally in Detroit, the section of his speech about the tangible things he’d use the presidency to do, once you subtract the parts about restoring Obama initiatives like participation in the Paris climate accords, was about as long as the one about childhood bullying under Trump.) But voters and party leaders were unable to settle on any of the many available non-Biden, non–Bernie Sanders candidates—too young, too female, too not an actual Democrat—and have decided Sanders himself is too risky despite widespread sympathy for his goals. So it’s Uncle Joe by a nose, thanks in part to the goodwill he built up under Obama and in part to all the other horses having died….’

Zaria Gorvett writing in BBC Future:

‘Being bad-tempered and pessimistic helps you to earn more, live longer and enjoy a healthier marriage. It’s almost enough to put a smile on the dourest of faces…

The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earningsand longer lives – though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.

Good moods on the other hand come with substantial risks – sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex…’

Via BBC Future

Matthew J. Dolezal writing in Medium

Alex Thompson writing in POLITICO:

‘Elizabeth Warren’s campaign brass realized they had bungled her budget at the worst possible time.

Several weeks before the Iowa and New Hampshire elections, they discovered their fundraising projections for the fourth quarter of 2019 were far too rosy.

Strapped for cash, the campaign didn’t have enough money to run the TV and digital ads they had originally planned for early contests as they tried to stay afloat in Iowa. Even then, they were forced to obtain a $3 million line of credit at the end of January.

The crunch was exacerbated by the disaster of the Iowa caucuses, which dominated headlines and deprived Warren and the other top three campaigns of bragging rights and a potential fundraising boost.

That was just one of several mistakes campaign officials are grappling with now as they contemplate how Warren’s once-surging campaign ended without placing above third in any of the first 18 contests. The campaign’s collapse has led to finger-pointing and self-doubt among Warren staffers and outside allies, who believe that even with the headwinds of sexism and electability she faced, the nomination was within reach.

“They chose … Bailey over ‘blood and teeth,’” said one staffer, referring to Warren’s golden retriever that the campaign made into an omnipresent prop to soften her image. “Unforgivable.” “Blood and teeth” refers to a famous Warren quote from the legislative fight over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which transformed Warren from a respected Harvard academic into a national progressive star. “My first choice is a strong consumer agency,” Warren said then. “My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.”…’

Jim Holt writing in Lapham’s Quarterly:

‘Some philosophers—among them MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor—have insisted that if a narrative is to endow a human life with meaning, it must take the form of a quest for the good. But what makes such a quest an interesting story? There had better be some trouble in it, because that’s what drives a drama. If adversity doesn’t figure prominently in your autobiographical memories, your life narrative will be a bit insipid, and your sense of meaningfulness accordingly impaired.

The claim that big troubles are essential ingredients of a good narrative, and hence of a good life, is called by psychologists the “adversity hypothesis.” If true, this hypothesis “has profound implications for how we should live our lives,” observes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats.” It also means, Haidt adds, that we should expose our children to the same….’

Use it or lose it:

‘Airlines are running empty “ghost” flights during the coronavirus outbreak because of European rules forcing operators to run their allocated flights or risk losing their slots.
Some airlines have wasted thousands of gallons of fuel flying the empty planes into and out of Europe.
Demand for flights has collapsed worldwide, with one airline-industry group saying the outbreak could wipe out up to $113 billion in sales.
UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps wrote to flight regulators demanding that the “use it or lose it” rules be suspended to stop the ghost flights….’

Via Business Insider

Brian Resnick writing in ‘8 things to know about “springing forward” ‘:

‘It’s worth thinking about what would happen if Congress abolished daylight saving time (or kept it going all year long).

How might our patterns change? Blogger and cartographer Andy Woodruff decided to visualize this with a great series of maps.

The goal of these maps is to show how abolishing daylight saving time, extending it all year, or going with the status quo changes the number of days we have “reasonable” sunrise and sunset times.

Reasonable, as defined by Woodruff, is the sun rising at 7 am or earlier or setting after 5 pm (so one could, conceivably, spend some time in the sun before or after work).

This is what the map looks like under the status quo of twice-yearly clock shifts. A lot of people have unreasonable sunrise times (the dark spots) for much of the year:

 

Here’s how things would change if daylight saving were abolished (that is, if we just stuck to the time set in the winter all year). It’s better, particularly on the sunrise end:

And here’s what would happen if daylight saving were always in effect. The sunrise situation would actually be worse for most people. But many more people would enjoy after-work light — and there’s a strong argument to make that this after-work light is actually worth more. (More on that below.)

 (Note: The length of light we experience each day wouldn’t actually change; that’s determined by the tilt of Earth’s axis. But we would experience it in times more accommodating for our modern world. Be sure to check out the interactive version of these maps on Woodruff’s website.)

In 2015, Stromberg made the compelling case that the daylight saving time shift into the evening should be extended year-round. Having more light later could benefit us in a surprising number of ways:

• People engage in more leisure activities after work than beforehand, so we’d likely do more physical activity over sedentary leisure activities. Relatedly, studies show that kids get more exercise when the sun is out later in the evening.
• Stromberg also cites some evidence that robberies decrease when there’s more sun in the evening hours.
• There could be economic gains, since people “take short trips, and buy things after work — but not before — so a longer DST slightly increases sales,” he writes….’

Via Vox

‘If women can’t be elected president in America, it’s up to men to help prepare us for female leadership. Rather than obsess over who Warren will endorse, let’s see Biden and Sanders lift up her ideas and principles…’

Via Rolling Stone

This New York Times piece is not the kind of thing someone trying to court voters would be likely to appreciate very much,
especially when many are desperately looking to have someone they can like in the Oval Office for once.

‘We know it’s hard. Try these four tricks to help limit the number of times you touch your face each day to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus….’

Via New York Times

…Keep a box of tisues handy, identify triggers, keep your hands busy, and chill out in general!

Alexis Madrigal:

‘It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?

This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.

But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand…’

Via The Atlantic

Dana Milbank:

‘Do you have a nagging medical concern? A rash that won’t go away? Unexplained hearing loss? Are you currently bleeding out from a severed femoral artery?

Well, fret no more. America now has a leading medical expert — some say the best — who will dispense diagnoses and prognoses to all — for free! This bold new telemedicine initiative, “Ask Dr. Trump,” will be offered on an unpredictable but highly frequent basis to all Americans (whether they like it or not).

Dr. Donald J. Trump, of course, is the pioneering scientist who first determined that climate change is a hoax and, more recently, discovered that windmills cause cancer. In between, he proved that forest fires could be contained by “raking” and identified a previously unrecognized tropical cyclone pattern targeting Alabama.

Dr. Trump acquired what he calls “a natural instinct for science” not through formal education but because “my uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years.” Sadly, the elder Trump didn’t live to see his nephew’s greatest discoveries in the medical field: The flu shot is basically “injecting bad stuff into your body” and exercise can shorten your life. Dr. Trump used his instinctive grasp of medicine to become “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” with an innate life expectancy of 200 years.

To the relief of millions, this extremely stable genius has turned to the challenge of solving the novel coronavirus, or as Dr. Trump spells it in the Latin, “Caronavirus.” Early on in the outbreak, Dr. Trump was among the first to determine that the virus “miraculously goes away” in April. Dr. Trump’s pathbreaking epidemiology enabled him to determine that the World Health Organization’s report that 3.4 percent of “reported” cases of the virus have died is a “false number.” Trump’s research, based extensively on “my hunch,” puts the true figure at “way under 1 percent.”

Related research by Dr. Trump found spread of the virus is not “inevitable,” that cases in the United States are “going very substantially down” — and that they “are all getting better.” This informed Dr. Trump’s reclassification of the coronavirus as a “new hoax” by Democrats — though he later clarified that the illness itself was not the hoax, only Democrats’ attempts to blame him.

In fact, Dr. Trump’s DNA research has determined that neither he nor bats nor pangolins caused the virus’s spread but rather President Barack Obama. “The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing,” Trump disclosed, a finding that eluded experts.

Given the reduced virulence that Dr. Trump discovered, he concluded there could be “hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work” — though he “NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.” But even if they did, Dr. Trump’s pharmaceutical advances have put us “very close to a vaccine,” within “months” — about a year ahead of other experts’ forecasts.

This breakthrough is possible because while other medical authorities have classified coronavirus as “novel,” Dr. Trump has determined that “this is a flu” and he renamed it the “corona flu.” Therefore he suspects that “a solid flu vaccine” would have efficacy, and “we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this.”

Now that Dr. Trump has beaten the virus and sent the sick back to work, it would be a tragedy to waste his medical expertise. Hence, the demand for an “Ask Dr. Trump” column, which should go something like this:

A reader asks: Dr. Trump, the left side of my body has gone numb and immobile. What should I do?

Dr. Trump replies: If you are healthy, you will probably go through a process and you’ll be fine.

A reader asks: Dr. Trump, I am experiencing chest pains and shortness of breath. Should I call 911?

Dr. Trump replies: It’s very seasonal. It’s like a flu. And it is a little bit different, but in some ways it’s easier and in some ways it’s a little bit tougher. But we have it so well under control.

A reader asks: Dr. Trump, my mother is in a persistent vegetative state. Should I continue life support?

Dr. Trump replies: That’s a problem that’s going to go away. People get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work.

A reader asks: Dr. Trump, we’ve got a mass casualty situation at the ER. Can you advise us on triage?

Dr. Trump replies: When somebody sneezes — I mean, I try to bail out as much as possible. Hey — did you get a flu shot?…’

Via Washington Post

’Ansel Adams once said “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Incredible words by an incredible man. I could not agree more, which is why I use my photos to tell important stories. For me, the stories of climate change behind my photographs are anything but fuzzy. Although my fine art depicts remote beauty from some of the farthest corners of the world, it also tells a story of a planet in need of our love and protection.…’

— Paul Nicklen

As the climate crisis grows, I find no more heartbreaking images than Nicklen’s documents of polar bears on claustrophobic minuscule remnants of their habitats. These majestic innocents and so many others do not deserve what we fucking humans are doing to them. 

’Isolation plus quarantine certainly helped spare Poland from the worst of the epidemic. One more spurious explanation is that Poland had more cats than other parts of Europe, and thus less disease-carrying rats…

…So, what’s the lesson, if any? Isolation definitely helps against infectious diseases. But that’s about the only advantage of being isolated. Take this map of the spread of COVID–19 as of 11 am on 5 March. If you had to divide the world into ‘fun’ and ‘no fun’ halves, they would correspond quite well with the blue and grey zones on this map, respectively.

For example, one sure-fire way to limit your exposure to the outside world is to have a bloody civil war – see Yemen, Libya and Syria. Another is to be a destination as out of the way and unconnected as Paraguay, the Central African Republic or Mongolia.

If it’s the price of living in an interconnected world, then perhaps there are worse things than having to fight off a slightly deadlier iteration of the flu. Praise globalization and pass the hand sanitizer…’

Via Big Think

’Many are suggesting coronavirus is just flu-season business as usual. It’s not. No sensible comparison can be made anyway, for a few reasons. The one that’s less bad — whichever that is — can still kill you.…’

Via Big Think

Via Digg

’Although the public part of the worldwide experiment is coming to an end this month, the world’s greatest extraterrestrial hunt is far from finished.…’

Via WIRED

CNN political analyst Paul Begala says he will bring Nikki Haley onto his ticket:

’Trump set up Pence to fail as Coronavirus prayer-in-chief to give him reason to dump him and make Nikki Haley his VP to win the “suburban moms” vote, said CNN political analyst Paul Begala. Speaking at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, Begala said this declaration is “guaranteed” and “not a prediction.”

He even named an exact date: Thursday, July 16.

“That’s the date the Democrat gives her or his acceptance address,” Begala said on Monday. “On that day, to interrupt that narrative, Donald Trump will call a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.”

And that’s when Pence will be toast.

“He’s going to dump Mike Pence and put Nikki Haley on the ticket to try to get those suburban moms,” Begala said. “You watch. Guaranteed.”…’

Via Boing Boing

’A 2015 study found that we touch our face an average of two dozen times an hour, and 44 percent of that touching involves contact with eyes, nose or mouth.

Like all our habits, touching our face has been reinforced over time: It begins with an itch or an irritation, which feels better, temporarily, when scratched or rubbed. That reaction then becomes a tic, Sawyer said.
But passing unseen are the legions of germs living on your hands — picked up from your phone, keyboard, a doorknob or elsewhere — hitching a ride on the way to your throat, sinuses and lungs.

Not touching your facial mucous membranes, an area known as the “T-zone,” is perhaps the most important step you can take to prevent an infection, Sawyer said.

“It’s the one behavior that would be better than any vaccine ever created,” he said. “Just stop this simple behavior. Stop picking, licking, biting, rubbing — it’s the most effective way to prevent a pandemic…’

Via Washington Post

Of the lessons of the virus, some are epidemiological but many are political:

‘The highly repressive Chinese Communist Party, after arresting and intimidating whistleblowers early in the outbreak, has since won acclaim from the World Health Organization for imposing draconian quarantines on tens of millions of people. This weekend, South Korea went on high alert, preparing to take what may be similar measures. Italy—Italy!—has locked down 50,000 people, with more restrictions expected soon.

Short of war, it’s hard to imagine more unlimited license for autocracy than the kind of plague spreading around the world right now. …’

Via Daily Beast

‘Here is what I said to my distressed, dying child, as lovingly and reassuringly as possible: “You will not be alone. You will not feel pain. We will be okay.” He needed each of these phrases more than “I love you.”…’

Via Human Parts

Nicholas Bagley:

‘A couple of weeks ago, my wife (also a law professor) and I wrapped up the final session of a seminar that we co-taught called Contagion. We wanted to offer an introduction to the outbreaks of infectious disease that have reshaped American life and law.

…Really more of a book club than a formal class, we focused on a different disease each time we met: cholera, Spanish flu, polio, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola.

…The class …had a surprising coherence. Every disease provokes its own unique dread and its own complex public reaction, but themes recurred across outbreaks:

• Governments are typically unprepared,, and resistant to taking steps necessary to contain infectious diseases, especially in their early phases.
• Local, state, federal, and global governing bodies are apt to point fingers at one another over who’s responsible for taking action. Clear lines of authority are lacking.
• Calibrating the right governmental response is devilishly hard. Do too much and you squander public trust (Swine flu), do too little and people die unnecessarily (AIDS).
• Public officials are reluctant to publicize infections for fear of devastating the economy.
• Doctors rarely have good treatment options. Nursing care is often what’s needed most. Medical professionals of all kinds work themselves to the bone in the face of extraordinary danger.
• In the absence of an effective treatment, the public will reach for unscientific remedies.
• No matter what the route of transmission or the effectiveness of quarantine, there’s a desire to physically separate infected people.
• Victims of the disease are often thought to deserve the affliction, especially when those victims are mainly from marginalized groups.
• We plan, to the extent we plan at all, for the last pandemic. We don’t do enough to plan for the next one.
• Historical memory is short. When diseases fall from the headlines, the public forgets and preparation falters.

Not every one of those themes was present for every disease; the doughboys who died of the Spanish flu, for example, were not thought to deserve their fate. But the themes were persistent enough over time to establish a pattern.

The books we assigned were outstanding. If you want to learn about the intersection of infectious disease, history, and public health, you could do worse than to start with them:

• Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866.
• Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918.
• David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story.
• Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On.
• Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS.
• David Quammen, Ebola: A Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus.
• Laurie Garrett, Ebola’s Lessons: How the WHO Mishandled the Crisis….’

Via The Incidental Economist

’President Donald Trump lashed out on Friday at the network that normally covers him so favorably over a new national poll that shows him losing hypothetical head-to-head popular vote matchups against all six of the top Democratic presidential candidates.…’

Via Vox

’In China, the death rate has been reported as zero in children under 10 and very low, 0.2 percent, in healthy adults. Unfortunately, the rate is far higher, as high as 14.8 percent, in the sick and elderly (though as is always the case in outbreaks like this, it is hard to know how many of these older and often chronically ill hospitalized patients died with COVID–19, not of COVID–19). The reported overall death rate of 2 percent is essentially a weighted average of these numbers.

So what does the case of a young and otherwise healthy patient contracting the disease despite no obvious exposure to a contagious source patient imply? That there are likely many asymptomatic cases in our communities already.…’

Via Slate

’Wednesday’s briefing was arguably the most abnormal moment yet in a profoundly abnormal presidency.

But top news organizations, rather than accurately representing Trump’s alarming behavior, made it sound like nothing untoward happened at all.

They made it sound like some real news was made: That Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus; that the president urged calm.

But even the Pence “news” appears to be a sham, and a clusterfuck: In addition to being basically a fuck-you to the medical community — given Pence’s proud defiance of scientific truths — it was apparently a last-minute decision based on political optics that blindsided Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who at the same time insisted that he was still in charge.

This one really wasn’t hard. It was obvious to anyone listening to Trump’s rambling, often incoherent, self-centered, stream-of-consciousness ad-libbing – much of it straight out of his political rallies — that:

Trump had no real understanding of what he was talking about.
He had no sense of what was required of him as president.
He sees this as being all about him.
There are only so many things that can come out of his head.…’

Via Press Watch

’Is Trump a symptom or a disease? And if he’s a symptom, what’s the underlying sickness?…’

Via Vox

’Scholars once doubted that pre-literate peoples could ever have composed and recited poems as long as the Odyssey. Milman Parry changed that.…’

Via JSTOR Daily

‘Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work.

[Harvard epidemiologist Mark] Lipsitch predicts that, within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, around 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”…’

Via A Vaccine Won’t Stop the New Coronavirus – The Atlantic

Robin Varghese:

’IN JOKES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNCONSCIOUS (1905), his three-hundred page book on humor, Sigmund Freud shares his favorite yuks, none of which are funny to begin with, and then proceeds to slowly murder them by explaining their punchlines. The book is so turgid that modern interpreters sometimes argue that the whole enterprise is itself a kind of meta-joke, which may be true, but still doesn’t make it funny. Reading the book in the election year of 2020, however, one bit stands out. Freud describes it as “an American anecdote”:

Two not particularly scrupulous businessmen had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring judgment on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: “But where’s the Savior?”

Getting this joke, such as it is, presumes familiarity with an implied reference: depictions of the crucifixion, wherein the savior (i.e., Christ), famously hangs on the cross between two thieves. Even then, it’s not really laugh-out-loud funny. It is, however uncannily relevant. As we find ourselves in the quickening of our election season, we Americans are increasingly being asked to contemplate the prospect of voting for one of two unsavory businessmen. Redemption is nowhere to be found in this forced choice between two scoundrels; the savior isn’t even absent. The daylight between Mike Bloomberg and Donald Trump can be measured in the rays of sun that shine out of a billionaire’s ass.…’

Via n+1

Lucian Truscott IV:

’Trump is letting us know that he and his base don’t think of this as an election. It’s a civil war. They want to turn the clock back to the time that Negroes knew their place and women were happy making biscuits in the kitchen and employers could pay their workers anything they wanted and the question of who got to vote was decided by a few white men in a smoke-filled room. 

Look around you. With William Barr at the Justice Department and Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and Senate Republicans voting in lockstep with Mitch McConnell, living in Donald Trump’s America feels like the South won the Civil War. If we don’t get our shit together and drive him from office at the ballot box in November, we’ll lose this one, too.

Trump made use of an enemy foreign power, Russia, to win election in 2016, and if what the intelligence community told the Congress this week is correct, he’s in the process of doing it again. There won’t be any investigation of foreign interference this time…

The stunning thing is, Trump keeps getting caught and nothing happens…

Donald Trump is who he always was: a mobbed up grifter from New York who learned from his father that you can welch on debts, pay people off and game the system, and when you get caught, walk away. If you’re outrageous enough about it, people will be so stunned they are unwilling or unable to act. Trump’s old pal Roy Cohn was a past master at this. I covered him while I was on the staff of the Village Voice. He used to travel around the country giving speeches in smaller cities to Republican gatherings that were all impressed they could get Roy Cohn to come to Sheboygan or Zanesville and speak at their fundraisers. He would meet a local banker over rubber chicken and talk him into a signature loan for 50 or 100 grand, and he’d take the money and stiff them every time. He was sued over and over again by these little local banks, and he never paid a cent. 

Trump also learned from Roy Cohn that you can steal stuff in plain sight and get away with it if you just say “Fuck you” loudly and often enough. I think that’s what Trump is doing to the whole country. He’s saying, “Fuck you. I never believed in your democracy, I never believed in your capitalism, I never believed in your establishment, and look what I did! I got elected president! Fuck you! I’m going to take everything I want! I’m going to fly Air Force One anywhere I want, and I’m going to play golf more often than Arnie Palmer, and I’m going to bellow racism and lies at my rallies, and I’m going to jack up the Secret Service for rooms at my resorts, and I’m not going to pay a fucking cent and what are you going to do about it? I’m going to call Vladimir Putin on the phone and I’m going to get him to help me steal another election, and fuck you.”

That’s Trump’s philosophy in a nutshell: do whatever you want and say “Fuck you.” He’s getting away with it the same way he got away with stiffing contractors and welching on bank loans and going into bankruptcy and taking out more loans and when they come due saying “Fuck you.” 

I think we stand a chance to beat him, but we’ll have to dig ourselves out of a deep, deep hole when he’s gone. Some of us never will: The children ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border, the voters who will go to the polls and be turned away, the poor who will go hungry when their food stamps are cut, the land and water and air that will be despoiled, the species that will go extinct, the companies that will fail, the women whose health clinics will close, the hopes that will be dashed and gone away forever.

’

Via Salon.com

Barbara McQuade, Former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan:

’…

For nearly 250 years, presidents have respected the law. Even when electoral defeat has been unexpected and ignominious, presidents have passed the baton without acrimony. In a sense, perhaps this is the central achievement of the American system: to have transferred power peacefully from one leader to the next, without heredity to guide the way.

 

That a president would defy the results of an election has long been unthinkable; it is now, if not an actual possibility, at the very least something Trump’s supporters joke about. As the former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tweeted, President Trump “will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.” A good troll though it may have been, Huckabee is not the first person to suggest that Trump might not leave when his presidency ends.

…If Trump were inclined to overstay his term, the levers of power work in favor of removal. Because the president immediately and automatically loses his constitutional authority upon expiration of his term or after removal through impeachment, he would lack the power to direct the U.S. Secret Service or other federal agents to protect him. He would likewise lose his power, as the commander in chief of the armed forces, to order a military response to defend him. In fact, the newly minted president would possess those presidential powers. If necessary, the successor could direct federal agents to forcibly remove Trump from the White House. Now a private citizen, Trump would no longer be immune from criminal prosecution, and could be arrested and charged with trespassing in the White House. While even former presidents enjoy Secret Service protection, agents presumably would not follow an illegal order to protect one from removal from office. Although Trump’s remaining in office seems unlikely, a more frightening—and plausible—scenario would be if his defeat inspired extremist supporters to engage in violence. One could imagine a world in which Trump is defeated in the 2020 election, and he immediately begins tweeting that the election was rigged. Or consider the possibility, albeit remote, that a second-term Trump is removed from office through impeachment, and rails about his ouster as a coup. His message would be amplified by right-wing media. If his grievances hit home with even a few people inclined toward violence, deadly acts of violence, or even terrorist attacks against the new administration, could result.…’

Via The Atlantic

’Mount Shasta in California has become a nexus of conspiracy theories and unusual events. The latest viral sensation from the area has been a UFO-shaped object that appeared in the skies above the potentially active volcano peak of 14,179 feet on the morning of February 12th.

Upon closer look, this was not an alien spaceship but a beautiful lenticular cloud, the kind that is often shaped like lentils or UFOs, depending on your perspective. It was so convincing, however, that the U.S. Forest Service had to deny its extraterrestrial origins in a statement.

Mount Shasta… has seen its share of lenticular cloud sightings, leading to its status as a new focal point for alien hunters much like Roswell, New Mexico. The latest UFO cloud quickly became a social media sensation, as you can see in these posts of the enigmatic formations:

Mount Shasta has also seen other unusual happenings, with a mysterious side hole that appeared over 10 years ago becoming the subject of a documentary. Its sudden emergence connected with local legends about a lost continent of Lemuria supposedly hidden under the mountain. This mythical kingdom would be there along with its capital city Telos.…’

Via Big Think

’Research suggests the practice supplies a bevy of benefits, from improved mental performance to greater emotional control. Self-talk is most beneficial when it combines thought and action or reinforces an instructional framework.…’

Via Big Think

’…[I]t wasn’t until a few years ago that Dalla Ragione, an agronomist and Perugia native, realized that local works of art contained precious clues into Italy’s lost biodiversity. By combining clues from artwork, ancient manuscripts, and oral histories, she was able to identify hundreds of Renaissance-era fruits. She now grows many of them in a 20-acre farmstead as an outdoor museum of Italy’s past.…’

Via Gastro Obscura

Phil Christman: 

’We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer. Some of us use the term “bad movies” to mean, simply, films that emerge from a supposedly lowbrow genre, or films that are stylized in the manner we tend to label “camp.” (Road House from 1989 is this kind of bad movie, and is very good at being one.) Some of us prefer movies that are exploitative and tacky but, in a Nietzschean way, supposedly more alive than respectable ones. Renata Adler referred to the cult around such movies as “the angry trash claimers,”1 a term by which she probably intended to indict Pauline Kael, whose “Trash, Art, and the Movies” could serve as a manifesto for this sort of criticism.2 The rock critic Lester Bangs, in an endearing essay about Ray Dennis Steckler’s delirious 1963 horror film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, practices Angry Trash Reclamation, arguing that the film’s apparent innocence of good taste gives it a kind of “lunar purity.”3…’

Via The Hedgehog Review

A  New York Times opinion piece from a mathematician…

…points out that both the numerator and the denominator of the case fatality rate — the number of deaths and the total number of people infected — may be deceptive. Ascribing causes of death can be tricky, with both false positives and false negatives. And various factors make for inaccuracy in the total number of infected people. Some are treated without having been formally tested. Some may be infected but showing no symptoms, including those still in the lengthy incubation period of the virus.

Further distortions are created by the way these numbers are determined by medical officials and presented by the media. Definitions of infection have been changed on the fly, causing immediate and misleading statistical — but not real — shifts. Underreporting may be deliberate, for policy reasons, or more mundane, e.g. due to changes in the availability of test kits. A dramatic increase in daily deaths may seem ominous but, in context of an increase in the number of newly infected people over the same interval, may actually represent lower lethality than previously thought. 

These uncertainties point out the limitations of “constant on-the-nose” reporting of statistics, a “shortsighted approach that’s difficult to resist.” 

As of Tuesday, the case fatality rate of COVID-19 appeared to be about 2.5 percent. That’s in keeping with what it was, for example, from the beginning of the outbreak up to Jan. 28. By comparison, the case fatality rate for the seasonal flu in the United States ranges between 0.10 percent and 0.18 percent. For SARS, it’s about 10 percent and for MERS, about 35 percent. For Ebola, it has varied between 25 percent and 90 percent, depending on outbreaks, averaging approximately 50 percent.

And so based on what we know so far, COVID-19 seems to be much less fatal than other coronavirus infections and diseases that turned into major epidemics in recent decades. The operative words here are “based on what we know so far” — meaning, both no more and no less than that, and also that our take on the situation might need to change as more data come in.
 
Remember, too, that even if only a small percentage of the people infected with COVID-19 die in the end, the death toll in absolute numbers could still be dreadful if the total population of infected turns out to be very large.

’There are plenty of reasons for slow Wi-Fi. Here’s how to be sure an unethical internet service provider isn’t one of them.…’

Via CNET

‘I would tell them that I could look at myself in the mirror and have a full blown telepathic conversation with myself without opening my mouth and they responded as if I had schizophrenia. One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”…’

Via Inside My Mind

As a psychiatrist this fascinated me. Interestingly yesterday I saw a patient who presented having just gotten into some trouble for talking to himself. He said that the antipsychotic medication he was happy to take because it was otherwise helpful to him has prevented him from having an inner dialogue, so he had begun to need to speak his thoughts aloud to ponder things. I had never heard of such a medication effect and puzzled over what to make of it. Then today I read this!

‘Search lists of U.S. Catholic clergy that have been deemed credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct….’

Via ProPublica with thanks to Sean Bonner, who comments,

‘This info has been heavily guarded by the church so this is a really valuable resource. It’s light on details but it’s useful for confirmation and research.’

Jeffrey Toobin:

’CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin suggested “the real lesson” of President Donald Trump’s clemency blitz on Tuesday was “a story of creeping authoritarianism.”

“Authoritarianism is usually associated with a punitive spirit — a leader who prosecutes and incarcerates his enemies. But there is another side to this leadership style,” Toobin wrote in a comment piece for The New Yorker, where he is also a staff writer.

“Authoritarians also dispense largesse, but they do it by their own whims, rather than pursuant to any system or legal rule,” Toobin continued. “The point of authoritarianism is to concentrate power in the ruler, so the world knows that all actions, good and bad, harsh and generous, come from a single source.”…’

Via HuffPost

’The extraordinary claim was made at Westminster magistrates court before the opening next week of Assange’s legal battle to block attempts to extradite him to the US, where he faces charges for publishing hacked documents. The allegation was denied by the former Republican congressman named by the Assange legal team as a key witness.

Assange’s lawyers alleged that during a visit to London in August 2017, congressman Dana Rohrabacher told the WikiLeaks founder that “on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange … said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] leaks.”…’

Via The Guardian

’’The depth of solitude in these photographs makes me shudder,’ runs the afterword to Ravens, a little-known photobook by Japanese artist Masahisa Fukase. Full of darkness and foreboding, the British Journal of Photography (in 2010) nevertheless named it the best photobook of the past 25 years ……’

Via The Guardian

’Families are photographing death at home. These photos may feel jarring on Facebook, but the practice itself has a long history.…’

Via New York Times

’Do recent explanations solve the mysteries of aerodynamic lift?…’

Via Scientific American

These findings suggest that something about congenital blindness may protect a person from schizophrenia. This is especially surprising, since congenital blindness often results from infections, brain trauma, or genetic mutation—all factors that are independently associated with greater risk of psychotic disorders.

More strangely, vision loss at other periods of life is associated with higher risks of schizophrenia and psychotic symptoms. Even in healthy people, blocking vision for just a few days can bring about hallucinations. And the connections between vision abnormalities and schizophrenia have become more deeply established in recent years—visual abnormalities are being found before a person has any psychotic symptoms, sometimes predicting who will develop schizophrenia.

’A myriad of theories exist as to why—from the blind brain’s neuroplasticity to how vision plays an important role in building our model of the world (and what happens when that process goes wrong). Select researchers believe that the ties between vision and psychotic symptoms indicate there’s something new to learn here. Could it be that within this narrowly-defined phenomenon there are clues for what causes schizophrenia, how to predict who will develop it, and potentially how to treat it?…’

Via VICE

As a psychiatrist treating more than my fair share of patients with schizophrenia, I had never realized this but, no, I have never had a congenitally blind schizophrenic patient!

How taboo language turned the wolf into a monster:

’ “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”

So says Count Dracula to the hapless Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s novel. Dracula is talking about the wolves howling in the valley below his castle in the Carpathian mountains. This is the moment in the novel when Harker begins to feel the first twinges of fear.

The howl of the wolf, and the fear that accompanies it, sounds across millennia. Comparing the mythologies of cultures that descended from ancient European tribes, wolves loomed large in their minds. There are myths of heroes brought up by wolves, of great wolves who will devour the sun, of wolves guarding the underworld, and of warriors taken over by the spirit of wolves. Archaeological digs at Krasnosamarskoe, in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas, have given us clues that early peoples sacrificed, and even ate, dogs and wolves. Art and collected oral literature from across Asia and Europe hint of coming of age rituals where young men would wear wolf-skins, and live lawlessly on the land, almost becoming more terrifying than the wolves themselves.

When he used the phrase “the children of the night,” Dracula was following an ancient tradition. He was avoiding the word “wolf.” In many societies, words have power, the power to summon what they name. This idea probably emerges from rituals that took place in preparation for the hunt. It was a way of calling prey so the hunt would be successful. But if words can summon prey, they can also summon danger.

Speakers had to find ways of referring to wolves without naming them. The word for wolf becomes taboo: It shouldn’t be said. Instead, the magic of summoning through a name can be tricked. By changing the sound of the word, by using another word, perhaps borrowed from another language, or by using a descriptive phrase rather than the word itself, speakers could talk of wolves, but avoid the dangerous word itself.

We can see these strategies of avoiding taboo words in English. People change the sound of words like “Hell!” or “Christ!” into “Heck!” or “Crumbs!” We have borrowed the French word “toilet” to avoid naming the place where we defecate. When the denizens of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books use the phrase “You-Know-Who” for Voldemort, Rowling is appealing to the ancient magic of taboo.

Languages change. As people move across landscapes, their languages develop in different ways. They encounter new peoples, with different languages, and this can lead to a transformation in how people speak. But some words in languages change because the original term is avoided. Taboo, tightly tied to culture, has wrought radical changes in the original term for wolf in the languages of Europe. Like a werewolf changing its skin, the word for wolf has warped across the centuries, often in quite unexpected ways, as it traveled through the continent.…’

Via Nautilus

“PITY THE NATION” (After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!…’

Via Boing Boing

A 71-year-old Chinese woman infected with the new coronavirus tested negative for the virus 48 hours after Thai doctors administered a cocktail of anti-virals used to treat flu and HIV, Thailand’s health ministry said Sunday.

Via Daily Sabah

’Disney heiress Abigail Disney spoke out in two-dozen tweets Saturday about the late Kobe Bryant’s 2003 rape allegations. 

The allegations never made it to trial, and though Bryant said the sex was consensual, he eventually apologized to his accuser, The New York Times reported.

Disney said Bryant could be mourned but said people should not “deify him because he was not a god.”

…”OK, time to bite the bullet and say something,” Disney said when she began her Twitter thread early Saturday morning. “If you don’t like it, just stop following. First of all, yes, it IS my business because I’m a woman who has herself been assaulted and spent my life knowing, loving and feeling for women for whom it’s been so much worse.”…’

Via Yahoo! News

’The United States Senate was formerly the upper chamber of the United States Congress, which, along with the United States House of Representatives ― the lower chamber ― comprised the legislature of the United States. It died on January 31, 2020, when senators from the Republican Party refused to stand up to a corrupt autocrat calling himself the president of the United States, refusing to hear testimony that said individual blackmailed Ukraine in order to cheat in the 2020 presidential election.…’

Via HuffPost

’At Singapore’s ArtScience Museum, the 2219:Future Reimagined exhibition “ invites visitors to explore our world as it changes over the next 200 years.” The first room of the exhibition is titled “Mitigation of Shock, Singapore,” based on a previous installation in London by the design studio. 

“Mitigation of Shock, Singapore” shows a vision of domestic life 50 years out, when rising ocean levels have flooded cities, and people are forced to grow their own foods and turn to alternative sources of nutrition as global supply chains collapse. The creators noted that the installation, which is a prototype of a future apartment, isn’t necessarily what it thinks will happen, as much as it is one possible outcome based on evidence. 

The earlier London installation showed an apartment in a future London ravaged by climate change in 2050, only 30 years into the future. The two installations were similar, but they received very different reactions. Visitors to the London exhibit were angry and upset, while in Singapore, visitors thought the prediction was too optimistic…’

Via Business Insider

’Bruce Levine in Counterpunch:

Getting rid of Trump means taking seriously “shit-life syndrome”—and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities… Trump got the shit-life syndrome vote. Will Hutton in his 2018 Guardian piece, “The Bad News is We’re Dying Early in Britain – and It’s All Down to ‘Shit-Life Syndrome’” describes shit-life syndrome in both Britain and the United States: “Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security.” The Brookings Institution, in November 2019, reported: “53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as ‘low-wage.’ Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000.”

For most of these low-wage workers, Hutton notes: “Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.” Shit-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians—pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan. The Cincinnati Enquirer, in November 2019, ran the story: “Suicide Rate Up 45% in Ohio in Last 11 Years, With a Sharper Spike among the Young.” In Ohio between 2007 and 2018, the rate of suicide among people 10 to 24 has risen by 56%. The Ohio Department of Health reported that suicide is the leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 10‐14 and the second leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 15‐34, with the suicide rate higher in poorer, rural counties.…’

Via 3 Quarks Daily

’An unsolved mystery such as the Dyatlov Pass incident would no doubt rile up truthers in the United States, but the Russian obsession with the incident is above and beyond American internet-forum debates on Area 51 and the chupacabra. Whereas U.S. conspiracy theories often develop on the fringes of public life—a line that has admittedly been blurred in the Donald Trump era—conspiracy-mongering is mainstream in Russia, a country in which 57 percent of the population believes the Apollo moon landings were a hoax.…’

Via The Atlantic

’You’ve heard about all the microscopic plastic in our water supply. But did you know there are ways to limit how much you ingest?…’

Via JSTOR Daily

Being There:

Thanks to Kottke for pointing to Mark O’Connell’s take on the experience of the wilderness solo, spending 24 or more hours essentially doing nothing alone in the woods:

‘When you’re actually in it, the reality of the solo is, at least at first, one of total boredom. I cannot stress enough how little there is to do when you have confined yourself to the inside of a small circle of stones and sticks in a forest. But it is an instructive kind of boredom, insofar as boredom is the raw and unmediated experience of time. It is considered best practice not to have a watch, and to turn off your phone and keep it somewhere in the bottom of a bag so as to avoid the temptation to constantly check how long you’ve been out and how long you have left. And as you become untethered from your accustomed orientation in time — from always knowing what time it is, how long you have to do the thing you’re doing, when you have to stop doing it to do the next thing — you begin to glimpse a new perspective on the anxiety that arises from that orientation. Because this anxiety, which amounts to a sort of cost-benefit analysis of every passing moment, is a quintessentially modern predicament.…’

Via The Guardian

“It’s Orwellian, is what it is…”:

’“This trial,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), “may be seen as a vindication of those very dangerous ideas that foreign interference can be accepted… that the president can do anything as long as his motives are to re-elect himself, and he thinks it’s in the public interest.”…’

Via Daily Beast

Via Digg

’The World Health Organization met today and declared the coronavirus from Wuhan (2019-nCoV) a public health
emergency of international concern, or PHEIC.

This does not mean that we’re all going to die, or that the disease is out of control. Rather, it means that the virus is crossing international borders in a way that requires countries to work together to prevent the situation from getting any worse.…’

Via Lifehacker

The reality is that the woven-cloth surgical masks provide minimal protection from environmental viruses anyway. (Surgeons use them to protect patients from their mouth-borne germs, not the other way around.) But the masks’ actual prophylactic utility is, in a way, secondary to other reasons they’re being worn, which is why they’re likely to become more common in the future—even among non-Asians….

The bottom line is that in East Asia, the predilection toward using face-coverings to prevent exposure to bad air is something that predates the germ theory of disease, and extends into the very foundations of East Asian culture. In recent years, however, mask-wearing has become rooted in new and increasingly postmodern rationales…

Studies have found that among many young Japanese, masks have evolved into social firewalls; perfectly healthy teens now wear them, along with audio headsets, to signal a lack of desire to communicate with those around them. This is particularly true for young women seeking to avoid harassment on public transit, who also appreciate the relative anonymity the masks provide.

’Masks are even becoming an element of East Asian style: In Japan, surgical masks bearing chic designs or the images of cute licensed characters can be purchased in every corner drugstore, while last month at China Fashion Week, designer Yin Peng unveiled a line of “smog couture” clothese paired with a variety of masks, from Vader-esque ventilators to whole-head riot-gear rebreathers.…’

Via Quartz

From the chief political correspondent at Politico, a Twitter thread on why Trump has a stranglehold on Republican legislators’ loyalty.

’Like the infectious pneumonia that has killed at least 17 people, SARS was caused by a coronavirus that originated in China. But when one of the virologists who helped identify the SARS virus visited Wuhan, where this virus originated, he didn’t see nearly enough being done to fight it. People were out at markets without masks, “preparing to ring in the New Year in peace and had no sense about the epidemic,” Guan Yi of the University of Hong Kong’s State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases told Caixin. Airports were hardly being disinfected, Guan continued, saying the local government hasn’t “even been handing out quarantine guides to people who were leaving the city.”

The city did disinfect the market where the virus has been traced to, but Guan criticized Wuhan for that, saying it hurts researchers’ abilities to track down the virus’s source. “I’ve never felt scared,” Guan told Caixin. “This time I’m scared.”

A case involving the coronavirus was identified in Washington state on Wednesday, and cases have also been identified in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. A total of 639 cases were confirmed in China.…’

Via Yahoo! News

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2020 Doomsday Clock statement:

’Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.…’

Via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

’In the wake of the US assassination of Iran’s most important military leader, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, more than a quarter of Americans believe The Hague should bring war-crime charges against President Donald Trump, according to a new Insider poll. 

The Insider poll, which ran on Wednesday, found that roughly 27% of the 1,083 respondents said they agreed with Iran that Trump should face a war crime tribunal. The poll did not ask for respondents’ opinions on other aspects of Iran’s position, including Tehran’s desire to bring war-crime charges against the US military and federal government. 

The poll asked: “Iran announced it will pursue war-crime charges against President Donald Trump at the International Criminal Court in the Hague over the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Do you agree or disagree with such charges?” 

While 27.4% said they agreed that Trump should face war crime charges, a far greater proportion of respondents, 35.6%, disagreed. The most popular poll answer was that a respondent “neither agree[d] nor disagree[d]”.…’

Via Business Insider

Second Genesis?

’There are two kinds of extraterrestrial life with very different implications.…’

Via Nautilus

’Overharvesting and habitat loss endanger most of the world’s freshwater “megafauna.” But many species may yet be saved.…’

Via New York Times

’A new understanding of long-overlooked cells called microglia is challenging the assumption that body and brain function are completely independent.…’

Via WIRED

’Unfolding right now across swaths of Australia is an ecological catastrophe, as massive, turbo-charged fires reduce whole landscapes to nothingness. Tens of thousands of koalas had no way of escaping. Livestock lie dead in fields. Innumerable animals have perished, with many species likely pushed to extinction. The few survivors could well starve or fall victim to predators.

We’ll never know the true toll of this mass mortality event, or MME as scientists call it, but we know this: The cadavers that litter the Australian landscape are now rotting, kicking off a cascade of ecological consequences and potentially imperiling human health.…’

Via WIRED