Category: Politics and Government

Grown Up Temper Tantrums

Someone wants to wear a swastika bandana(?) flag(?) draped across their face? My complaint is that it’s not a very effective face covering (although they are covering their noses and mouths, so possibly better than people who have real masks below their nose and certainly better than the chin protector you-never-said-what-part-of-my-face-to-cover look). I said a week or two ago that I’d be happy enough if the pro-Confederacy anti-maskers would wear a confederate flag mask … gonna have to go with the same opinion for swastika masks. It’s a temper tantrum. But having a kid has taught me to pretty much ignore those — especially when the tantrum includes doing what I wanted her to do. Yeah, calmly picking the toys up off the floor would have been my perfect world. Not an option. Stomping around whilst putting those toys away? Total win.
 
It’s not like removing the symbol over their mouth is magically going to change their opinion on much of anything (and, in the context in which they were wearing the mask, it does not seem like they actually think Nazi-ism is a Good Thing™). They’re certainly uninterested in a calm discussion of valid scenarios where the government really should be mandating people take (or not take) actions, nor would I want my quick trip to the store turning into an hour long debate over slippery slopes. They want to tell me that voting for Biden means I’ll be living in Nazi Germany? Well, at least I’ll be living. A vote for Trump means I’ll be dying a painful death in Nazi Germany.

Death Panels

Texas is going to start sending the least likely to survive home to free up healthcare resources. A few months back, Italy had been floating some metrics for determining who got sent home and who rcv’d treatment. Had a few friends freaked out over the inhumanity of it, but … there’s a limited resource exceeded by need (and a metric may make it easier for healthcare workers charged with delivering awful news to families). To act like the choice is between this awful scenario and something awesome — like we could have this most-apt-to-survive-gets-treatment rule or everyone would immediately be treated (successfully, of course) for whatever ailment — is living in a fantasy world.

Those aren’t the choices available. What we’ve got without “least likely to survive get no treatment” seems to be either first-come-first-serve or highest-bidder. Neither of those are great algorithms for determining who is saved. A “death panel” sounds inhumane (and it’s obviously branding from an opposition group), but some outcome prediction to determine who gets treated … well, I guess it sucks for those with unlimited cash to ensure they’re always going to be the high bidder because they’ve now in the same boat as everyone else. But it’s about as close to an equitable solution as you can get in an awful situation.

One of my biggest problems with politics is the short-attention-span theatrics of it all. Both death panels and now — yeah, someone can come up with a terrifying phrase to make a solution sound unthinkable. But talk about the options and the rational for the approach for an hour and it’s a different picture.

I wish progressives would get better at branding and marketing — yeah, we’ve got death panels. But you’ve got the medical treatment auctioneer. This vial of insulin goes to the highest bidder — and Anne Rice wins this round. Sorry, all you penniless rubes. If you’re not in a coma in two hours, we’ll have another auction.

Hopefully people will be a little more understanding of treatment allocation based on predicted outcomes next time we talk about universal healthcare.

Influenza Data

Scott hypothesized that 2020 should have a fairly low rate of illness apart from SARS-CoV-2. The preventative measures taken to limit the spread of this virus should also have reduced the number of people with colds, flu, etc. There’s no way to tell for mild illnesses, but I knew the CDC tracked flu and pneumonia cases … you can link the CDC’s CSV data sources into Excel, create a Pivot table to get rows of week numbers or months & columns of year-by-year case counts, then create a chart that compares case counts year-to-year. Unfortunately, they have a new file name each week. You’ve got to find the latest URL from https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

I was surprised to see 2020 significantly higher than the previous two years through the end of April and bumping back up again between weeks 26 and 27 (late June / early July)

Broken out by state and filtered to a few states to make the chart readable, I see the same trend. 2020 is generally higher than 2019 or 2018.

The significant increase in pneumonia deaths this year? That’s probably not people who actually had pneumonia completely unrelated to SARS-CoV-2. The influenza/pneumonia data set includes an “All Deaths” column — which depicts the excess deaths for 2020 (I assume the past month or so of data is not yet finalized, as thee numbers fall off sharply in the final weeks of the data set).

The Evolution of Protests

People who have been dealing with police brutality for decades need to be remembered as protests against police violence continue. I could get brutalized for showing up at a protest, but someone with different DNA could get brutalized for walking downtown. But the evolution of BLM protests into protests against police brutality used against protesters and protests against federal policing of American cities are perfectly valid movements too. I see people who had no personal experience with police brutality who joined a protest based on their reaction to the Floyd video got to experience profiling (you’re here with a sign, so must be a violent anarchist out to smash glass), police brutality, and violent over-reactions. Brings to mind the hypothesis that military action in Iraq was a huge recruitment driver for radical groups — people who disliked abstract America policy in a non-violent way experienced that policy as friends and family became collateral damage. And wanted to “do something” to push back.

Although, that may be the point of the BLACK Lives Matter movement — that given two equally valid movements, the one impacting white people hold the nation’s attention while the equally valid concerns from a minority group fall by the wayside.

The New Caravan

Federal agents policing cities is a total campaign-as-reality-show move, just like the caravans were in 2018. Enough legit story there to ensure coverage, attention-getting footage. “The caravans” was a “get out the vote” instead of “appeal to voters” strategy — make sure your voters fear the possibility of loss to ensure they show up. Caravan fear didn’t work well in 2018, so it’s not exactly a fail-proof strategy.
Why didn’t it work? Well, for one — people had bigger concerns. Republicans want to throw my 22-year-old kid off my health insurance, and they promise preexisting conditions aren’t coming back but have no answer for how that becomes financially sustainable to private insurers. Those are really personal concerns, whereas an invasion of caravans was a far more abstract concern.
But the caravans weren’t the boogie monster Trump made them out to be either. There was a pastor in Texas — Gavin Rogers — who spent time traveling with one of the “caravans” that I thought did a really good job of humanizing those refugees. I’m sure there were others, but he had a pretty public media tour and gained a lot of followers. Without having empathy for other people, I can see how Trump couldn’t fathom people having sympathy for refugees … and, yeah, there were some news agencies promoting racist views and villainizing “the caravans” even after stories about people fleeing cartel violence started airing.
In 2020, he’s replacing ‘caravans’ with ‘protesters’ — which seems even less likely to succeed. And not just because employer-based health care amid a pandemic an economic collapse means people have *way* bigger problems than protesters. And that protesters out in the big city are still a fairly abstract concern for the majority of the country. Not to mention voter’s desire for competent disaster response. The protesters seem like they’d be a lot more generally sympathetic than refugees — protesters are Americans, a huge majority of Americans think police brutality is a problem that needs to be addressed. I had a good discussion with an acquaintance a few weeks ago — she didn’t see why sports players had to kneel in protest when there were so many other ways they could have talked about whatever they wanted to talk about. I’m sorry you were uncomfortable, but do you think the message needed to get out there? (And, post George Floyd, she totally thought the message needed to get out there). Those people did try many other ways to communicate the problem. People ignored the protest until the form of protest selected made people uncomfortable. So, evidently they did need to kneel at public sporting events. Maybe protesters today need to destroy some property for people to take notice too.

Black Helicopters Approach

So there are unidentified federal agents picking up protesters in Portland?! The guiding principal of Republican governance: States rights above all else … except when I don’t agree with how you’re running things. Then we’re invading your city and teaching you radicals a lesson.
 
How long you think it’ll be before random psychopaths start dressing up like unidentified federal agents and rounding people up downtown? No one is going to believe the Trump administration when they swear they never kidnapped Uncle Frank. Hell, there’ll be a whole army of Trump supporters hitting the Army Surplus store for camo outfits and renting vans on election day.

Censorship?

This may be a paranoid thought, but … a bunch of high-profile people’s Twitter accounts were hacked today, and the messages posted asked followers to send Bitcoin. Twitter shut down these accounts for a few hours.

There’s obviously a profit motive here — as of 11:30 today, they’ve garnered over 118k (and have been clearing the money out, so money isn’t just an unfortunate consequence of the hack).

The target list that is hyped includes a lot of big names, and it’s interesting to see which names seem to create the biggest bump in transactions to the wallet.

But the one that stands out to be is Joe Biden — and, yes, it looks like his account was hacked.

This looks like a proof of concept test to me. Now, it’s possible that Trump wasn’t hacked because it is so implausible that he’d be giving back to the community. But forcing the platform to shut down a bunch of accounts, including a number of your political opponents, is a brilliant approach to disrupting campaigning. Seems like a next level move from a government-sponsored intel group looking to interfere with elections after their troll accounts and advertising attempts get shut down.

Re-imagine the Police

The defund movement suffers from a branding problem. There are a lot of people for whom ‘defund the police’ seems to mean ‘decent into anarchy’. Few are looking to cede all property rights, eliminate personal property, eliminate speed limits. To me, defunding the police means funding a new government organization staffed with social workers, psychologists, and mediators to handle the massive number of calls that don’t involve arrest. Possibly moving toward the UK idea of generally unarmed officials with a small group of armed police to respond to situations where armed police are actually needed. Personally, I’d have three groups — social-workers for mental heath issues / inter-personal relationship problems, non-armed responders (the trespassing call we put in a few weeks ago certainly didn’t need an armed guy responding — just someone with legal authority to remove the trespasser), and armed responders for dangerous situations. But that idea is hardly encompassed in the word “defund”.

I’ve been thinking reorganize might be a better phrase — reorganize the police. There’s a shared responsibility for public safety, and it would be beneficial that the two groups not be working at odds. I see St Petersburg “reimagining” the police to include a group of more social-work oriented police. I like that turn of phrase. It doesn’t address the awful historic roots of policing … but there are a lot of institutions in this country (government and business) with horrible pasts. I think an organization’s roots are far more acceptable if the current entity wasn’t exploitative, abusive, or colonialistic. United Fruit became Chiquita — their exploitations today are the problem! “Re-imagine” suggests there was something wrong with the original conceptualization that needs to be changed. By keeping the non-police responders under the same organization, the budget it retained (maybe even grown — move a lot of current funding over to social services, add a little more). And there’s no “but the anarchy” strawman.

Mid-stream

Hospitals have been instructed to provide SARS-CoV-2 data to HHS instead of CDC. CDC falls under HHS so it’s a little like having the “parent company” handle something some subsidiary used to do. Which means the move isn’t as alarming as some people are making it out to be. The ‘parent company’ will authority to more readily mobilize resources, and moving responsibility for a project to the parent company can signify the importance of the project.
Which isn’t to say I think it’s a good move … from an IT perspective, CDC has the infrastructure in place to handle the reporting & publicizing of data. About the best case would be a reorganization — same people supporting the same thing, but adding in the uncertainty of a new organizational structure (new processes, new priorities, a new person’s take on what you should be doing). If HHS is taking over that system, there’s opportunity for failure because the new people don’t know what the old people know. If HHS is bring up a new system, there’s a LOT of opportunity for failure because, well, it’s a new system. Mid-disaster isn’t when I’d want to change my reporting process. Maybe run two in parallel because the new one is going to provide some great new insights. But I would never say “hey, everyone, stop using A and move over to B on Thursday”.
Additionally, it doesn’t inspire confidence that the HHS website has been throwing a lot of connection errors since the announcement. I expect it’s a load problem as people begin to learn what HHS is … but ‘the guy who cannot keep his website online will be taking over statistics for us’ is not exactly the direction I’d move critical reporting.

Aced

Worries me that Trump considers “acing” the cognitive test somehow indicative of fitness to serve as president.
 
When I’ve been in the room with people getting that test, I remember a few questions standing out — I don’t generally know the date (I know it’s Sunday & I don’t need to go to work, but had to check the bottom of my screen to see it is the 12th). When I wasn’t working, I didn’t always know the day of week either. I traveled for business & often had to check the keyring for my hire car to know where I was (and what I was looking for in the carpark). None of these were *hard* — I could easily tell you I have no idea.
 
But I don’t remember any occasion where I thought “oh, great, she passed … she’s ready to go back to mentoring graduate students” or “awesome, she’s going to be able to finish that new widget design”. Or even “great, she can drive home today”.