Demographics and Demagogues

                       Demographics and Demagogues

When you hear people talking about the notion that America is not a democracy, as if they had never read the first page of any American civics book, they are not talking about rights or social justice. They are talking about this:

By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the 15 largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only 30 senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by 70 senators.

The pamphleteers at the New York Times say: When Democrats compete for the Senate, they are forced to appeal to an electorate that is far more conservative than the country as a whole. Similarly, gerrymandering and geography means that Democrats need to win a substantial majority in the House popular vote to take the gavel. And a recent study by Michael Geruso, Dean Spears and Ishaana Talesara calculates that the Republican Party’s Electoral College advantage means “Republicans should be expected to win 65 percent of presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.”

When these people talk about remaking the country they are talking about restructuring the country away from the basic compromise the majority made with the minority that allowed for the creation of it, i.e. the country's very essence. While the slaveowners were a part of this compromise, that does not invalidate the argument; the main concern was the protection of the minority from the demagoguery of the majority.

This may not be for everybody. But that's what we are.

The Art of the Possible

                                  The Art of the Possible

Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, tweeted Wednesday during the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump: “Overheard convo between two Republican Senators who only watch Fox News. ‘is this stuff real? I haven’t heard any of this before. I thought it was all about a server. If half the stuff Schiff is saying is true, we’re up [expletive] creek. Hope the White House has exculpatory evidence.’”

The tweet remained active on Mr. Lockhart’s account and had been shared nearly 10,000 times and favorited nearly 40,000 times and counting.

About 10 minutes and a couple of tweets after making the claim, Mr. Lockhart admitted to making up the story.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., kicked off Democrats’ historically momentous impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump by opening with an abject lie, which he later claimed was a “parody.”

Schiff later said he had evidence of Trump colluding with Russia. The findings of the Mueller report did not proved him wrong; when you have a fantasy, you cannot be proven wrong.  He simply had no evidence for anything.

We have come to a new time in the world. These people do not see themselves as liars, they see themselves as artists. And, indeed, art is the creation of an extra-reality that bears witness to reality. Which apparently allows anyone to mimic his own view of reality. And arrogantly try to deceive everyone with it.

The difference is, of course, how it is presented. Reality and unreality are two separate realms. One does not get to lie and then claim when the lie is discovered that, indeed, your information was misplaced; it should actually have been placed on the fiction shelf. 

Nor can one hold up a bank and, when caught, claim you were rehearsing.

Plague

                                Plague

In 1918, the influenza pandemic took the lives of more people than died in World War I. World War I. It was the most devastating epidemic recorded in world history. It infected 500 million people around the world, including people on remote Pacific islands and in the Arctic, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million. You could not hide.

In two years, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40, unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy. A half. An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby).

Compare this to the Black Death. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population. In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century. It took 200 years for the world population to recover to its previous level. The plague recurred as outbreaks in Europe until the 19th century.

The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran and Syria, during this time, is for a death rate of about a third. The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population. Half of Paris's population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, the population of Florence was reduced from 110,000–120,000 inhabitants in 1338 down to 50,000 in 1351. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished, and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well. In London approximately 62,000 people died between the years between 1346 and 1353. Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450. In 1348, the plague spread so rapidly that before any physicians or government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins, about a third of the European population had already died. In crowded cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die. The disease bypassed some areas, and the most isolated areas were less vulnerable to contagion. Monks and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for victims of the Black Death.
Caregivers always die first.

(couple of sources, incl wiki)

Viral Particles

                                              Viral Particles

Some tidbits--talked about but not proven--about the virus:

China’s National Health Commission Minister Ma Xiaowei said the incubation period for the virus can range from one to 14 days, during which infection can occur, which was not the case with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Ma Xiaowei made a startling statement Sunday about the Wuhan coronavirus: He said people can spread it before they become symptomatic. “This is a game-changer,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This has tremendous implications as you get no signal as to who to quarantine. This allows the virus to hide and spread from asymptomatic--but infected--people. This is very dangerous. The healthy guy beside you might be a carrier.

Experts at Lancaster University estimated there may already be 11,000 people infected in Wuhan – and that only one in 20 infections has come to medical attention. The experts calculated the number could grow to 190,000 by February 4.

About 5 million residents had already left Wuhan before the lockdown

So far, there are 2,886 confirmed total cases of the coronavirus. All but 61 of them are in mainland China. The death toll so far is 81. If you can believe what is said by any government.

But cases have also been found in France, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. That list includes the world’s three largest economies (the U.S., China and Japan).

And now the topper: The word “coronavirus” is an anagram of “carnivorous.”

The Virus

                                        The Virus

A 53-year-old fitness trainer died on Wednesday after checking into a hospital in Wuhan a little more than a week earlier, said his niece. His family had expected the death certificate to reflect the deadly coronavirus because as his condition deteriorated, his doctors told his family he was suffering from an untreatable virus in his lungs.

Instead, it recorded “severe pneumonia” as the cause of death, she said. The relatives of two other people who died in separate hospitals in Wuhan this week also described similar situations, saying the causes of death had been given as “viral pneumonia.”

The relatives of all three said the deceased hadn’t been included in China’s official count of 41 deaths attributed to coronavirus.

The Beijing News, a newspaper, reported this week that many patients weren’t officially labeled as carrying the new virus, even though their doctors and nurses said they were.

So, it is going to be hard to get objective information here. That said....

                                          *********

Dr. Dena Grayson is an M.D. and researcher who has years of training developing Ebola treatments. Unfortunately, she is also a politician. In 2016, she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the United States House of Representatives for Florida's 9th congressional district. With that caveat, here are some of her tweets about this coronavirus:

a. Having YEARS of experience developing an Ebola treatment, I was concerned about this Coronavirus Outbreak from the outset, because this coronavirus strain is very contagious, causes severe illness, and NO treatments or vaccines are available.

b. Unlike H5N1 "bird flu" (which does not spread easily between people) or SARS (which was spread by only a handful of "super spreaders"), this coronavirus DOES appear to spread easily between people, even after making the jump from an animal (this is not common).

c. In addition to being highly contagious, this novel coronavirus can cause a SEVERE infection that can kill even healthy people. It's rare to see BOTH of these (bad) attributes in the same novel virus. Usually, it's one or the other.

d. Per @CDCgov, "Early on, many of the patients in the outbreak in Wuhan, China reportedly had some link to a large seafood/animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread." Now, many newly diagnosed patients have NO connection to the market, supporting human-human spread = BAD

e. Ominous signs. Forbidden City (major tourist attraction) is now closed, and tours in #Beijing are now canceled. I fear that #Beijing soon may be locked down, joining at least 11 of cities in #China with a collective 50+ million people

Sunday/Video Replay

                                    Sunday/Video Replay

Is dogma fluid? Is the unflinching believer in a universal truth a man of determined integrity imposing a certain reality on a volatile world or an inhuman automaton applying laws to a world whose very nature is compromise?

There is a new book by Caldwell, a book with a truly terrifying thesis. The book deals with the conflicts in American political thinking, its origins, evolution and his appalling conclusion. Park MacDougald's review is pieced together here, in and out with me. Hair-raising.

Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, himself one of the most learned individuals on the planet, praised Caldwell’s “cultural range” as “perhaps without equal” among American journalists and noted, respectfully, that his “columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.”

He develops the idea that America, filled with guilt and desperate to reverse previous errors, put theory and philosophy on hold and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In doing so, it set up an inherent conflict between it and the original constitution.

Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “de facto constitution” incompatible with the original one? In a strict legal sense, Caldwell argues, it is that the Civil Rights Act and associated Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, conflicted with or modified what had traditionally been understood as Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed rights. Court- or legislatively-mandated integration, for instance, curtailed freedom of association, in the same way that legal prohibitions on discrimination in hiring or renting out a room curtailed the property rights of a business or hotel owner.

Near the end of the book, he mentions in passing that Republicans have failed to see that “the only way back to the free country of their ideals [is] through the repeal of the civil rights laws.” It’s a shocking notion, and it is hard to believe that even Caldwell believes it is a viable way to proceed. In another late passage, he writes:

"As they moved inland in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Americans had obliterated whole cultures with a clean conscience, as if the continent were unpeopled. In the half-century after the mid-1960s, America’s leaders, still dreaming their big dreams, obliterated their own cultural institutions in a similar spirit."

Years ago Robert Coover wrote a fantasy novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., about a fantasy baseball league--before any existed. It is an unsettling book with purposeful religious implications. In the book's pivotal moment the inventor and manager of the game rolls the dice and, by a freak chance, his favorite player is hit by a pitch and killed. So Mr. Waugh changes the rules and raises him from the dead.

The Mother of All Graphs

                       The Mother of All Graphs

This graph looks more interesting the more you look at it. It is almost a micro- course in economics. Costs of domestic origin are rising, those of importation are falling. So, globalization is protecting us from inflation--or allowing us to tolerate new inflationary sources like medical care and education. And diversions are becoming more and more affordable while necessities are less so. Tradable commodities are sensitive, non-tradables are not. The greater the degree of government involvement in the provision of a good or service the greater the price increases over time. And what does it say about the "demand" component?

A few other observations/speculations:

We can expect future declines in the prices of college textbooks, as the traditional textbook market faces increasingly tough competition from alternative options including hundreds of “open textbooks” that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Open Education maintains an “Open Textbook Library” website that lists hundreds of textbooks in more than 20 academic subjects that are available for free online or as a PDF file, or as a print copy at a low-cost ($33.50 for print copies from OpenStax). Just in the field of economics, there are more than 20 free open textbooks for Economics courses including Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, International Economics, Money and Banking, Economic Analysis and Principles of Political Economy.

The annual increase in college tuition and fees of only 1.7% through December of last year was the smallest yearly increase in the history of the CPI for college tuition and fees for any month going all the way back to 1978. And the year-over-increase of 1.7% for college tuition through December was less than annual CPI inflation of 2.3% over that same period, indicating the real cost of college tuition and fees actually decreased in 2019. So perhaps the “higher education bubble” is finally starting to show signs of deflating?