Literary Corner: The Weave

 

Socially distanced Biden campaign rally at UAW Region 1 headquarters, Warren, Michigan, September 9 2020. Photo by Patrick Semansky, AP, via USA Today.

Eight Circles and He Couldn't Fill Tbem Up

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I mean you can do whatever you want. I said
I don't like that. Lo and behold I see
they went and then built a plant and now
they do their business with India. They probably
do it outside India, too. They built
a very big plant. Many countries do that.
All of a sudden you hear they're leaving Milwaukee
or leaving wherever they may be located.
It's very sad to see. And it's so simple,
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships
that land within 12 inches on the moon
where they want it to land or he gets the engines back.
That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’
I saw engines about three or four years ago.
These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings,
no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly,
landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean,
someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me
of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?
He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up.
But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.
I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles.
I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful.
That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person
that did them, that was the best thing about his —
the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t
get people, so they used to have the press
stand in those circles because they couldn’t get
the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’
No, we’re never going to let that happen again.
But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been
abused by our own politicians, really, more than
other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been
abused by people that represent us in this country,
some of them stupid, some of them naive,
and some of them crooked, frankly.

From Trump's remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, October 10 2024. The opening bit is from a story Trump has been telling for years, about the injustice of India having a 100% tariff on motorcycles, which was meant, I think he believed, to harm the US motorcycle industry, as Washington Post's Annie Gowen wrote in 2018:

Much Worse Than Bloodbaths

 Something from the Republicans on ci-devant Twitter:

Folks, I think President Biden is merely trying to take the Ex-Guy seriously but not literally, as the very serious journalist Salena Zito advised us back in the day, and the very serious billionaire investor Peter Thiel, cheerfully plagiarizing her (he has nothing to fear from Christopher Rufo) in a talk at the National Press Club:

I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. ... I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

So Trump never told people to inject themselves with bleach as a COVID cure, not literally; he merely said he thought it might be a good idea, injecting it or using it for "almost a cleaning", that or light, or UV, that was the bit that got me, the idea of injecting people with light, or sticking it in you "some other way", which he believed William Bryan, head of science and technology at the DHS, had just told the press conference about, while Trump complacently "clasped his hands in front of his stomach", as Politico later wrote, before offering his own remarks:

The Souring of America

 

I can't get over this chart, from early September in The Economist, which I saw somewhere on Substack—sadly can't reconstruct where exactly.

The light blue line is the University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment, which has been going on since 1946 and is regarded as a very reliable indicator of how Americans feel about the economy and predictor of how much money they're going to feel like spending. The dark blue line is an index constructed by the magazine (after an initial idea by a Twitter user called @quantian1) to predict what consumer sentiment ought to be, based on a bundle of 13 economic indicators like inflation, unemployment, and gas prices, and as you can see it does a really good job for the first 40 years to which they applied it, tracking the actual U of M consumer sentiment very closely (the real consumer feelings are more emotional, more depressed during the lows and more excited in the highs)—it accounts for 86% of the movement in the traditional number.

And then it goes wacky, immediately after the first financial crisis of COVID in 2020. It continues to show the same shape as the actual consumer sentiment, low when it's low and high when it's high, but at a distance of some 30 points.

For the Record: Lab Leak

Philippine pangolin pup curled up with its mom, via Wikipedia. 

Matt Taibbi, pushing a report by his "Twitter Files" coconspirator Michael Shellenberger (best known for his work in the crusade on behalf of the despised plastic straw in his 2020 book Apocalypse Never)

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

Well, engineered or not engineered, according to the same story, since it also suggests (with pix!) Hu didn't use enough protective gear when he was working with naturally occurring bat and pangolin viruses, so he could just as easily have gotten sick, if he did, from a virus his colleagues brought to the lab from the wild.

Pandemic lies

 Nate Silver, on venues where he's frightened of catching COVID-19:

LOL the Louvre's only crowded in the one spot pic.twitter.com/tGfkE9tRcP

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

While just across the room... pic.twitter.com/UuYQCm7AOx

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

I don't know how commonplace this knowledge is, but in my younger years, when I had a number of opportunities to visit the Louvre, I learned that you shouldn't bother to try to look at the Mona Lisa, because you won't be able to. There are too many bourgeois there with their checklists of things you have to do in Paris, and looking at the Mona Lisa, the all-time no. 1 greatest painting ever, is the thing they need to do, and be photographed doing, when they go to the Louvre, and they've always got it surrounded, whenever you can get into the museum. The biggest and most ironical thing being that right there in the same space was a spectacularly complicated and gorgeous Leonardo that nobody was looking at, depicting a Virgin sitting on her mother's lap as the baby Jesus plays with a baby lamb, and these fantastical landscape configurations, that you can stare at forever.

And Moar Yellow Peril

 

Via Wikipedia.

The other thing I wanted to say about the lab leak hypothesis goes more or less like this: 

We don't know anything with "high confidence" about whether the SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory or not, but we do know with a good deal of certainty that if it did, it's the first pandemic virus to have originated that way.

While there is quite a long history of pandemics and epidemics that got started with what's called a zoonotic transfer of some infectious agent, virus or bacteria or fungus or parasite, to a human population: Ebola and HIV, bird flu and swine flu, measles and smallpox, hantoviruses and cold-causing coronaviruses, not to mention SARS-CoV-1 and MERS and RSV, and of course bubonic plague, the king of them all. 

Of course it's also true that the kind of research the lab leak partisans are most interested in hinting at, in which scientists might have, say, taken some coronavirus found in bats and purposely made it more capable of jumping to humans, has only been possible in the last ten or twelve years in the advent of the CRISPR technique, so it wouldn't have happened very often, at least not yet. On the other hand, however, the other scenario, of a virus or other pathogen leaping from its normal animal host to a human, happens literally all the time. Most pathogens new to the human race are the results of such a spillover. While scientists believed for a long time that the spillover event is pretty rare, I learned from a recent NPR report that it actually isn't rare at all; it just usually isn't possible to say how it happened:

Yellow Peril Redux

 

Udo J. Keppler, "The Yellow Peril", Puck, 1905. Via Wikipedia.

Here we go again with the "lab leak" story attempting to convey the idea that the Communist Party of China was somehow responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed almost 7 million people around the world in its four years and infected close to 700 million, because the virus that causes the disease might have started out by infecting workers at a research facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, instead of as it's generally believed to have done, by leaping from an animal (maybe one bought at a market where exotic meats like bat are sold) to a human, and the lab is thought to be more under the control of the Communist Party of China than the markets are, which is probably true in a sense, as far as the way the funding works.

The actual current news story is about the US Department of Energy, which has belatedly responded to a call from the Biden administration in May 2021 to the intelligence community to resolve this question in the next 90 days. All the other agencies involved had finished work on it in somewhat more than 90 days, by that October, concluding "with low confidence" that the virus had a natural origin (there was a lot of disagreement inside the community, though, with the FBI in particular assessing with "moderate confidence" that it had originated in the lab. Now, 15 months later, DOE has shown up with its own conclusion with "low confidence".that it happened in the lab, making the final score Community Spread 5, Laboratory 2 and Undecided 1.

Or, as Michael Gordon (remember him? Judith Miller's partner in a large number of NYTimes stories denouncing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to not exist?) and Warren Strobel reported in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday,

For the Record: Miller Bringing Back the "China Virus"

 

Trump sold foreign policy to the PRC for less than $20K. https://t.co/hBnMdg0KZR pic.twitter.com/jtvEr4MclF

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Because he didn't think it was going to be that serious, except sometimes. pic.twitter.com/d4DLPsc0qX

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Republicans Want to Kill You department

 

Age-adjusted morality rates over five presidential terms show rates declining twice as fast in counties that vote Democratic. Via British Medical Journal.

Per Kaiser Health News:

A study published June 7 by the BMJ examined mortality rates and voting patterns in the past five presidential elections, and found that people who lived in jurisdictions that consistently voted Democratic fared better than those that voted Republican.

“We all aspire to live in and exist in a sort of system where politics and health don’t intersect,” said Dr. Haider Warraich, the study’s lead author. “But what this paper actually shows is that politics and health, especially in the United States, are deeply intertwined.”

The patterns held broadly across age, sex, rural vs. urban residence, and race/ethnicity, except that there's very little gap among Latinos/Hispanics (who had the overall lowest mortality rates), and the gap is largest among white people, particularly white people in rural areas:

For the Record: Gunga Dinesh Holds Forth on the Demonstrations in Ottawa

 

Video screenshot via CTV News.

Oh, you're a Marxist now are you? That wasn't on my bingo card! Welcome to the Left, but there are a few things you need to get straight before you start speaking on our behalf.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

"Workers" revolting against vaccine mandates aren't doing anything to help workers. Low-income inviduals end up in hospital and dying of COVID-19 at horrifyingly higher rates than upper-income. https://t.co/8KJUIfz3Cc pic.twitter.com/6zoqrlemQG

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

But rich amateur pissants like yourself and Tucker Carlson get a big share of responsibility for all this suffering and death, as you work to churn up vaccine hesitancy and refusal because you think it will gain votes for your political party.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

So if you want to join a mighty workers' revolt, just remember that the class enemy isn't Justin Trudeau, it's you.

/fin

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Lumpenproletarier living in a false consciousness promoted by the pet intellectuals of the bourgeoisie is something Marx waa pretty familiar with, though I don't know if he would have identified it with white nationalism (arising among white trash told they could at least be proud of not being Black in the Old South) as easily as we can today.

Plague notes

Miniature by Pierart dou Tielt illustrating the Tractatus quartus by Gilles li Muisit (Tournai, c. 1353). The people of Tournai bury victims of the Black Death. Wikimedia Commons.

That obnoxious David Leonhardt bothsidesery in The New York Times

Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives, even as their skepticism of vaccines means that the virus is killing many more Republicans than Democrats.

Millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives, even as pandemic isolation and disruption are fueling mental-health problems, drug overdoses, violent crime, rising blood pressure, and growing educational inequality. As David Hogg, a gun-control activist, tweeted last year, “The inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative.”

is pretty obnoxious indeed. 

Insisting that everybody in the car wear a seatbelt, even in the back seat, even when you're only driving a mile to the mall and seatbelts are uncomfortable, may be irrational, though I don't think it is, but it is not the same kind of irrationality as refusing to wear one and attempting to make seat belt requirements illegal. Overstating the danger of falling victim to a pandemic disease that has actually killed close to a million fellow citizens and is currently killing 2,500 Americans per day (it hit almost 4,000 day before yesterday), if anybody is overstating it, is not the same as denying that there's any danger at all worth worrying about and working to outlaw public health measures designed to slow it down. 

Killers

 

Re the recent document dumps from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis:

Remember 26 March 2020, when coronavirus task force coordinator and full-time Hermès model Deborah Birx gave an interview to the Christian Broadcasting Network featuring a surprising evaluation of President Trump's intellectual preparedness for dealing with the Covid crisis?

“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data,” Birx said. “I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.” (via Aaron Rupar/Vox)

You might be surprised to hear it, but it turns out that she eventually changed her mind about that, if it's really what she actually thought at the time [Narrator Voiceover: "It's not exactly what she thought at the time"]. Healthcare advisor Andy Slavitt, talking to her that August, said she was chafing at having been dropped from Trump's circle of trusted advisers, where she'd been largely replaced by radiologist and Hoover Institution fellow Scott Atlas, who knew nothing whatsoever about epidemiology and had been busy on Fox News advocating a "herd immunity" strategy in which healthy young people would voluntarily expose themselves to Covid-19, especially kids:

Was Covid Everywhere Before It Was in Wuhan?

 

Image via Loyal Companions.

So sometime in the spring of 2017 doctors in Malaysia discovered a new coronavirus that didn't seem like a big problem, infecting a bunch of kids in a hospital but not dangerously. The interesting thing about it was that the kids had apparently caught it from dogs, and not from each other; genomic analysis showed that it was a canine virus (apparently there are a lot of canine coronaviruses).

At the same time, members of a team of American medical volunteers in Haiti, 11,000 miles away, were also getting infected by something: when they got home to Florida, some of them felt "a bit under the weather". Not exactly sick, but they had slight fevers and they weren't at their best. Because the zika virus was circulating in Haiti at the time, they got themselves tested, but they didn't have zika. The virologist who tested them, though, John Lednicky of the University of Florida, was curious enough to want to see if there might be some other virus in their urine samples, and there was: the exact canine coronavirus that was infecting kids on the other side of the planet, as it turned out, four years later, last May.

"The virus probably circulates widely, but no one has paid attention to it," Lednicky says. He suspects it's all over the world. And if you've been around dogs frequently, you might have been infected with this virus — or developed an immunity to it by exposure to similar virus. "We'll know when scientists start looking for antibodies inside older blood samples taken from patients with respiratory disease. How many of them were misdiagnosed all along?" 

The good news, says NPR's science correspondent Michaleen Doucleff, is that virologists are now really starting to work on identifying and tracing all kinds of viruses that aren't problems—at least not yet. But the thing that really struck me was the likelihood that SARS-2 CoV was probably circulating all over the world too, before December 2019:

"Almost certainly, SARS-CoV-2 was circulating for quite some time and making people either a tiny bit sick or not sick enough to be noticed," she says. If scientists had detected it at this stage, perhaps the world would have had time to develop a test for it, some promising treatments and even a preliminary vaccine. Perhaps the pandemic would have taken a much different — perhaps less deadly course.

It doesn't occur to NPR to say so, but the whole story looks to me like strong evidence that the science-fiction "lab leak" story of the Covid-19 pandemic is just wrong—the story that came out of Italy a year or so ago, and caused a lot of pushback in the Covid community, in which Italian scientists claimed to have found antibody evidence of the novel coronavirus in Lombardy two months earlier than the Chinese identified the virus itself in Wuhan, implying that whatever happened to the virus in Wuhan that made it transmissible among humans happened in Milan too, around the same time, becomes really plausible. 

Public Health is Public

North Western Fever and Smallpox Hopsital, Hampstead, 1871, via UK National Archives. 

 Piece at The Atlantic by the extraordinary Ed Yong putting the concept of "public health" in its US historical context in the Progressive era, with the realization that poverty, inequity, and exploitation were literally making people sick:

A mixed group of physicians, scientists, industrialists, and social activists all saw themselves “as part of this giant social-reform effort that was going to transform the health of the nation,” David Rosner, a public-health historian at Columbia University, told me. They were united by a simple yet radical notion: that some people were more susceptible to disease because of social problems. And they worked to address those foundational ills—dilapidated neighborhoods, crowded housing, unsafe working conditions, poor sanitation—with a “moral certainty regarding the need to act,” Rosner and his colleagues wrote in a 2010 paper.

Providing the slumdwellers with fresh air, clean water, and light protects everybody from tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid, even us upstanding citizens on the right side of the railroad tracks. 

This is such a nice communitarian picture, of something that really existed in our country at one time, through it existed, of course, at the same time as the rapacity and cruelty of the Gilded Age, and the real power was generally wielded by the robber barons who were responsible for the poverty and inequity and exploitation—government being largely their obedient servant, the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" as Marx called it. 

Joe Did What? Rent

 

Party of the working class! https://t.co/vFiNYYQ5qg

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) August 3, 2021

Charles "Careless Whispers" Cooke of the National Review got prematurely excited when he was celebrating the end of the CDC's Covid emergency eviction ban scheduled for 31 July, and the joyous anticipation of seeing tens of thousands of people unable to pay their rent put out on the street, because it didn't happen, at least not yet. Whether exclusively because of the homelessness demonstration of Rep. Cori Bush camping on the Capitol steps or not just that, President Biden reversed his decision to let the ban lapse if Congress failed to renew it, and the CDC has issued a two-month extension on the order.

It's a bit of a mystery what Biden was intending to do on this in the first place, as Ed Kilgore said, or why it took him so long to act, except that it had to do with a Supreme Court decision—

Vaccine Skeptics

Pyrrho of Elis, founder of the Skeptical School, holds rigorously to principle. Existential Comics.

 

Predictably, it turns out that liberals are to blame for vaccine hesitancy—Murc's Law again—because we're "condescending" and that hurts the feelings of people who might otherwise go for it. We're treating them as mulish when they're in fact skeptical, Michael Brendan Dougherty opines at National Review:

Proponents of the vaccine are unwilling or unable to understand the thinking of vaccine skeptics — or even admit that skeptics may be thinking at all. Their attempts to answer skepticism or understand it end up poisoned by condescension, and end up reinforcing it.

Skeptics! So we should be persuading them with sweet reason, not treating them as idiots, as, according to Michael Brendan Doughterty, we are all doing, as when Senator Cornyn says the doubts are "based on conspiracy theories" or Senator Romney calls it "moronic":

Boys From Brazil, Now From China and More Obnoxious Than Ever

New York Post, December 2020, denouncing teh way "The Middle Kingdom is launching 'unethical' military experiments that sound fit for the superhero flick 'Captain America,' John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed." And FRANCE TOO! which "gave the go-ahead for augmented soldiers, and some fear the super troopers could be the new norm in the recent future", with "drugs to keep troops awake for long periods of time and combat stress, and even surgery to improve hearing." “There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power,” Ratcliffe proclaims, citing US intelligence. “People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today.”

I could understand, conceivably even subscribe to efforts to set up a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 over human rights issues, but the General Jack D. Ripper batshittery of Senator Tom Cotton's issue is another matter:

The senator wrote that "the CCP... considers DNA collection a vital intelligence-gathering objective" and that the Chinese government "has reportedly conducted tests to develop biologically-enhanced soldiers and intends to use DNA data to catapult Chinese biotechnology companies to global market dominance."

"In 2022, thousands of world-class athletes will gather to compete in China. Their DNA will present an irresistible target for the CCP," he warned. "Thus, we should expect that the Chinese government will attempt to collect genetic samples of Olympians at the Games, perhaps disguised as testing for illegal drugs or COVID-19."

There are actually a couple of facts embedded in there. One is that a Chinese company, the Beijing Genomics Institute, now just called BGI, is the world's the biggest genome sequence provider, after the US-based Illumina. Like others in the business, they grew up in basic research with the Human Genome Project, doing bulk sequencing and the construction of a representative genome for everybody, but sequencing individual human genomes has become more significant in recent years in a number of different ways, for medical research, patient diagnosis and care, and now also consumer use, as the price goes radically lower, with companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA, which don't do the sequencing themselves but send saliva samples to companies like Illumina and BGI for processing.

For the Record: The Lab Leak Theory

 

Wait, Andromeda strain was a coronavirus? Why weren't we informed?!

Shorter Monsignor Douthat: The real reason it's important to find out if Covid leaked from a lab is I really want it to be true. https://t.co/artuHtCc5I

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2021

That's really about the size of it:

Yes, if we never figure out the truth of Covid’s origins, the dangers of media groupthink will be the only lesson we can draw for absolutely certain. But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.

Distrust Doom Loop

Doom Loop: Richmond Mural Project 2014, by Onur and Wes21, photo by Brandon Bartoszek, 2019.

Breaking: On further consideration, Brooks ("Our Pathetic Herd Immunity Failure") thinks the New Deal may have been OK:

The New Deal was an act of social solidarity that created the national cohesion we needed to win World War II. I am not in the habit of supporting massive federal spending proposals. But in this specific context — in the midst of a distrust doom loop — this is our best shot of reversing the decline.

Not, to be sure, because it rescued millions of Americans from hunger, homelessness, and despair, but because it created "cohesion". Which prepared us for the Second World War. And probably would have prepared us for the Covid-19 pandemic too, if we'd only had a good Great Depression beforehand for an excuse. You don't want a New Deal every day, because that's awfully expensive, but it's just the thing to get you out of a Distrust Doom Loop  (the phrase sounds like Tom Friedman having a panic attack, but is Brooks's own, premiered in an article in The Atlantic last October).

Maybe if Trump had offered people a little New Deal in 2019, he'd have saved us from the Distrust Doom Loop of 2020.

And if something had given David Brooks more of a social cohesion feeling he would have handled it better himself, almost exactly a year ago, as our friend reminds us:

Capitalists Gonna

 

Red Herring via Black Label Logic.

But he's a philanthropist! https://t.co/ANU9c5sjoA

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) April 26, 2021

This is pretty disquieting, as reported by Jon Queally for Common Dreams (via Salon):

Asked to explain why not, Gates — whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth — said: "Well, there's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it's novel — it's only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all."