The Continuing Failure of the Mainstream Media

CONTEXT

Before the 2016 election, the broadcast media gave the president more far air time than other candidates. An estimate the New York Time published in March 2016 was that the free air time was worth about $1.9 billion to the president's campaign.

NPR's failure

NPR's Morning Edition program broadcast a 4-minute segment on how the Trump campaign is raising money for the 2020 elections. It is a fluff piece. It is very supportive of how the president is harvesting cash from the public for his campaign. The segment sounded like an advertisement paid for by the president's re-election campaign.

There was no mention of Biden or his campaign anywhere in today's Morning Edition program.

I found the segment to be highly offensive. I wrote to NPR complaining about supporting the president's re-election without also supporting Biden's election campaign with equal air time and an equal tone of approval.




Questions: Am I overreacting and this piece isn't anything of importance to the president's re-election? Should Biden be given equal airtime for every second that NPR and other broadcast sources give to the president?

Coronavirus Update 9

Some states are going to start reopening their economies within the next few days and weeks. That is coming despite a persistent inability to do large scale testing in the US. Reopening has already started in some places such as Georgia and Alaska. Some states never issued stay-at-home orders and are under various degrees of business and health care closures. Despite assertions from some governors that it is safe to begin to reopen, there is no way to know that without large scale testing. In essence, each state will be a separate experiment in how the Covid-19 pandemic will play out.

Absent testing data, it will be basically impossible to follow the course of the infection in detail. The number of infections and deaths could increase in coming weeks. The president continues to reject responsibility for spearheading and coordinating testing efforts. The New York Times commented: “A White House document makes clear that the states are still primarily responsible for testing and that Washington is only the ‘supplier of last resort.’” Clearly, the president has rejected a major role for a federal government testing effort, despite being the only source of national authority for coordination efforts. That level of incompetence and stupidity is incomprehensible.

The new set of symptoms

The CDC announced that it now considers nine symptoms to be common to most Covid-19 infections. Previously, three symptomes were considered dominant, i.e., shortness of breath, cough and fever. The list now also includes chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell. These nine symptoms most commonly appear at two to 14 days after exposure to the virus. This nw listing of overt symptoms is an astonishing change in how the disease is perceived by the CDC. Why it took this long to simply see what the dominant symptoms are suggests that there is a profound problem or dysfunction in the CDC. This revelation comes weeks after hundreds of thousands of cases have been observed.

My guess is that the president has neutered the CDC for his personal political reasons. Maybe the president has muzzled the experts. Maybe he put incompetent loyalists in charge. Whatever the reasons, it is very hard to understand why it has taken this long to simply characterize the main symptoms of the disease, except for attributing it to factors such as the president's typical gross incompetence, his blatant dereliction of his duties, concern for his own re-election, and/or just plain corruption.

People still trust Trump

Reuters reports that an astounding 47% of Americans report that they are “very” or “somewhat” likely to follow recommendations the president makes about the virus. Although that is a 15% decrease from a poll at the end of March, it is arguably staggeringly high in view of how poorly the president has performed so far. The poll did indicate that 08% of democrats and republicans will not take the president's advice to inject themselves with bleach or other disinfectants. At least that sliver of reality appears to have sunk in with Americans. Reuters comments that the president’s popularity remains stable: “Overall, Trump’s overall popularity has not changed much over the past week. Forty-three percent of Americans said they approve of his overall job performance, and the same number also approve of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Where we are and where we are going

Given America’s feeble, failed federal response to Covid-19, the imminent reopening of states and our continuing inability to do adequate testing, it now appears reasonable to speculate that the virus is going to spread through almost the entire US population. Isolated pockets of people may avoid the disease, but most of the US population seems destined to develop herd immunity on its own whether we want to get immunity that way or not. That will probably happen before a widespread antiviral treatment or vaccine becomes available. It also assumes that once people recover from an infection, they will have protective immunity. That is an open question at the moment, but it is reasonable to think that that protective immunity probably will result in most people who survive the infection.

Some evidence indicates that an antiviral drug now in testing, remdesivir, may be somewhat helpful if given fairly early in the course of the infection. That is good news, but it needs to be confirmed. Also of concern is whether the company can ramp up to large scale production if the drug does prove to be useful. Also, a team in England is optimistic that an effective vaccine they are developing can be available by September of this year. If that comes to pass, it would about as close to a medical miracle as humans can muster in such a short time.

That is something no longer possible from the US government. It is too late for that.

UTILITY AND ALL THAT! Part 1

Arming You to Fight Mainstream Economic Theory by Reconstructing It Into What It’s Properly About

Mainstream economists have adopted the hypothesis that pleasure or satisfaction from consumption is proportional to the benefits of consumption. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

If you said, “No, it doesn’t”, then congratulations. You’ve clearly seen through the veil to what lies hidden beneath it: Namely, how one obtains a benefit, not to mention its size relative to what’s needed or wanted, factors into whether or not one is ‘satisfied’ with the benefit one has.

For instance, the late President George W.H.Bush hated broccoli all his life.

It didn’t matter that his mother saw the vegetable as a good source of nutrients he would benefit from if only he ate it. What mattered to him was that he hated it! To her, the benefits he got mattered more than his being ‘satisfied’.

Now before he left home, he avoided the greater pain his mother might dole out by eating it even though couldn’t stomach it. (Jeremy Bentham would have approved this as the wise utilitarian strategy of avoiding any pain and suffering one could.) After George left home, he never again ate it ... even when dining with his mother. When he casually mentioned this one day, it caused him no end of troubles with broccoli farmers :: You can read up about that. :: yet, troubles or not, he just plainly refused to eat the stuff.

Which is to say "all that benefits does not satisfy". (That seems oddly familiar, doesn’t it?) [See note 1 below]

“Utility” is said to be a benefit or a pleasure or a satisfaction in mainstream economics. Since realizing a benefit and having much,if any, satisfaction from having gotten that benefit are being treated as one and the same thing, ‘utility’ in mainstream theory hinges on the assumption that getting a benefit always brings ‘satisfaction’ which can 'stand in' for the benefit. This confusion between two different things: -- Namely, realized benefits versus realized satisfaction -- makes ‘utility’ not a concept but a percept; and, a wrong one at that.

So, in the Theory of the Consumer, if a consumer gets a benefit, then that consumer has realized some satisfaction with having done so. If so,then the latter can stand in, as it were, as a proxy for the former.

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Then, by employing what I term ‘mathemagics’ :: what mathematicians would call a misuse of mathematics that is just plain wrong, if not ignorant. [I’ll be mentioning a very good article about this misuse in Utility And All That Part 2.] :: then they can dispense with ‘benefits’ completely even while purporting to talk about the ‘well-being’ of the consumer and how that would be ‘maximized’ by a ‘rational consumer’.

Jeremy Bentham first suggested mathematics might be used to measure utility. Yet he would be horrified at how it has become used by economists.

He, a philosopher-lawyer of the 18th and 19th centuries,had many ideas which affected the later development of economics. Among these are two main ones that are outstandingly important for how post-Bentham economic theory developed.

One important idea was that communities were merely agglomerations of individuals. He said that only our imagination that has us think communities are distinct bodies with interests of their own. He argued that community and society don't exist as anything more than as individuals in them. So, if the welfare of communities was neither more nor less than the welfare of its individual members, then the welfare of communities had to be ‘the greatest 'good/happiness' of the greatest number’.

That outcome,he argued, resulted from individual members altogether pursuing their singular interests as individuals. This is an idea which later economists incorporated badly. It accounts for the singular focus on individual consumers found throughout mainstream economics.

Inevitably this means that the economic notion of the welfare of societies is simply the sum total of the welfare of all individuals pursuing their individual interests within it. That’s not a bad idea on its face. If economists actually went about actually measuring well-being objectively, then I’d have only a few problems with this approach

But that would, of course, require actually measuring objective benefits and, among other matters, actually determining if a level of realized 'benefit’ was adequate relative to some objective standard of adequacy.

They don’t do either. They neither measure objective benefits nor have developed any standards for when benefits realized are insufficient.

For instance, if someone manages to get only 200 calories or 8 units of protein daily when, on average, men/women need about 2500/2000 kilocalorie units and about 80 units of protein simply to maintain their health and continued life,then we can hardly say that this person is doing well or has maximized his or her ‘well-being’ any more than we can say that a small business getting $200 per day in sales revenue while needing $2000 daily to remain in business is doing well.

What we should say is that the former, should this deficiency in calories or proteins go on for any significant period of time, is actually starving to death. The business certainly appears to be headed for bankruptcy. When needs go unrealized, welfare ain’t being maximized and businesses fail! {A proper Theory of the Consumer, would see both persons and firms as consumers ... or, as I put it in Economics And All That, see both as producers-who-consume.}

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Instead of measuring the measurable, mainstream economists purport to measure well-being as the amount of subjective pleasures or satisfactions which consumers have with what they buy.

And, how do economists do that? Well, remember when I said they endow consumers with budgets? They do the same with subjective preferences. They give unchanging but made up subjective preferences for ‘goods’ to the consumer just like they give the consumer unchanging budgets. They then ask what’s the rational thing for this a consumer to if these are the consumer’s preferences and if this is the consumer’s budget!

They do this because, after all, they’re not mind readers now, are they? If you read either Austrian School economists or those of the Chicago main school, both make a big point of not knowing what's going on in the mind of the consumer. But, after making that point, they say "Suppose it's this with this budget. Introduce a price change. Now calculate what the rational consumer has to do to maximize his or her well-being."

Did you notice that the pea --well-being-- has vanished in this shell game? It always has.

Now whenever economists tell you a model contains a representative consumer,you should ask whoever is speaking what that consumer’s subjective preference function is and, most importantly, where it comes from. {That’ll shut ‘em up. It should!}

But that’s enough for today. Utility And All That! Part 2 will go more into this fantasyland called maximizing ‘utility’ or maximizing ‘subjective preferences’ without, of course, knowing what these are.

Note 1. That we don’t always manage to obtain or have what we prefer to have is, of course, a reality for most of us most of the time. I will demonstrate that this is especially so when, in monetary economies, the distribution of income and the price system are primary determinants or influences on what one can afford to buy. As noted in Economics And All That earlier, the operations of money price systems are such that changes in prices require budget reformulations. If one hopes to obtain or have the same levels of objective benefit as one had before a price rise for a good, then one must be able to add money into the previous budget one had. Similarly, if one wants only to continue purchasing what one purchased before a price fall, one would take money out of the budget.

When prices of a good rise, if one is unable to add money to the budget,one might forgo buying one of the good the market ‘provides’ but only to those who can afford to buy it. In short, the ability to stay in a market, like the ability to derive benefits in a market is a positive function of incomes.

Note2. It's very important to recognize that Bentham, as a lawyer, operated well within an ethical tradition wherein ethical/moral considerations imposed limits on individuals’ actions. These considerations led to restraints on how one pursued one's singular, individual interests. Later utilitarian economists (still studied intensively today) successfully culled out such considerations out entirely when they took away what they did from his thought. They threw out all normative matters, leaving no ‘shouldas’ when they tried to establish economics as a science. ‘Shouldas’ obviously don’t apply to objects being bounced about by ‘forces’. I’m not presenting here the culturally powerful normative dimension always in the background of Jeremy Bentham's thought. This normative context both shaped and framed his thoughts. It was never absent in the economic thinking of his premier disciple, John Stuart Mill who, though he was philosophically a utilitarian like Bentham, never thought normative issues were beyond economics as he practiced it. J.S. MIll never‘bought into’ the ‘mathemagics’ of post-Bentham ‘utility’ economists. (BTW, Bentham remains well worth reading. Mill,a brilliant economist,is sadly no longer studied for the meaning of his thoughts about the greatest happiness for the greatest number in terms of economic policy.)

Fun With Copyrights

The US Supreme Court just handed down an interesting 5-4 decision on the scope copyright coverage. This case raises an issue that has been a personal pet peeve for the last 35 years or so, namely the copyrighting of scientific publications that are funded by tax dollars. In essence, taxpayers pay for the research and then have to pay again to read the results. That really pisses me off. This case is not spot on my peeve, but it is real close.

In Georgia et al. v. Public.Resource.org Inc., the court held that state law annotations in Georgia are not copyrightable. That holding is a medium deal, not a little deal. State legislatures write and pass bills, and then the governor signs the bills into laws. States then usually publish their state laws in two sets of volumes. The first is the language of the law with not much else. The second publication is annotated laws. The annotations are non-binding law but they help explain it. They appear beneath each statutory provision or law. The annotations usually include summaries of judicial opinions construing each provision, summaries of pertinent opinions of the state attorney general, a list of related law review articles, and other reference materials. As one can imagine, the annotations are valuable for people who want to understand what the often ambiguous and hyper-complex language of the laws is written in actually means. Sometimes (usually?) it is impossible to understand the gobbledygook of the language of a law.

Digression: Another pet peeve

A common reason that lawsuits arise is due to the ambiguity and often sheer incoherence of the language the law is written in. Call it the legislative incompetence factor. The legislative incompetence factor is probably among the top two or three reasons for the filing of all lawsuits in the US. The reasons for legislative slop often is, not surprisingly, self-centered and political. In the video below, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), a reasonable looking and sounding, but far right anti-government radical, attacks US Senate legislative incompetence as a tool to avoid accountability at re-election time.





The point: In the video, Sasse makes these comments on legislative incompetence and why the Kavanaugh hearings were so toxic: “. . . . . the people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”

In the big picture, what Sasse is angling for is getting rid of government agencies and forcing congress to not be so sloppy and incoherent in writing laws. Shrinking government until it could be drowned in a bathtub isn't possible as long as congress remains sloppy and incoherent. Big agencies are needed to try to translate the garbage that congress routinely spews out as its work product, if that is what one can call it.

Why the Georgia et al. v. Public.Resource.org Inc. decision is important 

In my opinion, what Georgia was trying to do is to hide the laws from the people of Georgia as much as possible. They cannot copyright the statutes alone, but they tried the next best thing. By copyrighting the annotations, the legislature and governor can try to limit free public accessibility to the annotations. That makes it easier for (1) the legislature and governor to hide behind the ambiguity and slop in laws without annotations, and (2) special interests to deny that laws they bought and paid for benefit them and their interests or their power and freedom from regulation and taxes.

Maybe that is unfounded conspiracy theory, but maybe it isn’t. Consider what Sasse says about why legislation in congress is mostly incoherent slop. Also consider that the annotations in Georgia are assembled by the Georgia Code Revision Commission. That is a state entity composed mostly of legislators, funded through legislative branch appropriations, and staffed by the Office of Legislative Counsel. In other words, it is another example of my pet peeve #2, namely taxpayers pay legislators to write laws, bad as they are, and then they have to pay a second time to try to figure out what the hell the nincompoops in the Georgia legislature were trying to say or hide, as the case may be.

The 5-4 split

The split here was not along pure party lines. Roberts, wrote the majority opinion and Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh joined in. Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion, that Alito, joined, and Breyer partly joined. Ginsburg wrote her own dissenting opinion, which Breyer joined. The dissents focused on the fact that the annotations are not binding legal authority and thus they are copyrightable content. On that latter point, Roberts wrote that “annotations published by legislators alongside the statutory text fall within the work legislators perform in their capacity as legislators.” Georgia argued that people wanting access to the annotations could get it. That is true, but it (i) increases the burden on researchers to assemble relevant information, and (ii) could still lead to annotations that are very different from what the legislature may have had in mind.

In essence, trying to make it harder to get annotations looks to me a lot like an effort of the Georgia legislature and/or governor to hide what they are doing as much as they can. That's the essence of authoritarianism and it makes corruption a little easier.

ECONOMICS AND ALL THAT!

Arming You to Fight Mainstream Economic Theory by Reconstructing It Into What It’s Properly About

INTRODUCTION

The world’s a mess. That's partly because economic theory with it's dicta and 'laws' is a fantasyland often used to argue or aver that we live in the best of all possible worlds short of heaven itself, one wherein everyone who is rational has always been able to maximize his or her well-being, and, of course, we should pay no attention to irrational people who complain that this doesn’t seem to be true, for irrational people wouldn’t be in the bad situations they’re in if they’d acted rationally.

The theory is well-disguised as 'scientific'. It isn't. It's jargonistic balderdash. It only serves useful ideological functions. As it is, It is not about the economic activity of people or their economic behavior at all.. And it hides who has control over whether, how and if we provide for ourselves, and why those in control have the power they do. [Clue: This has to do with 'he-who-has-the-gold-makes-all-the-rules-affecting-others' in monetary systems of exchange.)

I'm about to arm you to fight back.

Most people can't fight back. Almost all, well, because economics is intimidating. More precisely, what's taught as economics is. I don't blame most people for thinking this. Even economists can't fight back. Due to their training as economists, they aren't fighting back even when they think they are. Their training blinds them to most of the problems intrinsic within what they were taught. So even when some question theoretical 'laws' as some do, they use what they learned to do so. Sadly, although small parts of what they learned can be used to question or partially refute commonalities like oft-claimed 'laws' of supply or demand, these economists cannot break free from the chains which bind them within the theory that they've learned.

Economists like Steve Keen, for instance, debunk economics as far as their training allows. And that's well and good and entertaining.

But it's not enough. It tinkers about within the margins/limits of what they learned. It is those very margins that they must escape from.

Their being stuck occurs because the assumptions underlying and supporting the structure of mainstream theory hide what economics is really about. These assumptions make all existing theory descriptively inadequate regarding our economic activity and behavior.

That descriptive inadequacy leads to prescriptive inadequacies. Serious ones! For following such prescriptions is akin to letting a drinking buddy perform open-heart surgery because he's a very good juggler.

Mainstream economists are expert at juggling the balls within their theory, but juggling those balls is not what economics is about. Expertise at juggling such balls does not lead to any expert knowledge related to the economic activity of human beings.

For instance, current economic theory, wherein consumers are implied to be people like you or I, simply endows consumers with never changing budgets even as prices change. This absolutely ignores the reality that consumers must, can, and do change their budgets whenever prices change.

Because all 'demand curves' derived within in all mainstream economic theory nowadays rely on consumers’ having ever-fixed, never changing budgets, one must ask if it is possible to derive 'demand curves' since budgets are, in fact, constantly being reformulated when prices change. [Note 1.I will show why budgets must be reformulated when prices change in a later section entitled “DEMAND AND ALL THAT!” Which will follow after the parts A and B of “UTILITY AND ALL THAT!”] For if such demand curves cannot be derived when consumers change their budgets as prices change, then the so-called 'laws' of demand, and the mechanics underlying all equilibria between demand and supply... [Note 2. An equilibrium is said to exist when the amount of a good purchased by a consumer (or consumers) at a given price is equal to the amount supplied by the sellers of the good at that price. Because a ‘market equilibrium’ is obtained at the conjunction of ‘total market demand’:: obtained by theoretically adding up individual demand curves :: with total market supply at a given price, it is necessarily the case that if individual demand curves cannot be derived, then neither can ‘market demand curves’.]... simply do not exist. In addition, if people are not maximizing preferences based on their likes between goods but are more affected in their choices by the kinds of benefits they need or want to have and realize, then we must not derive ‘demand curves’, including aggregate demand curves within markets, given the limitations of the theoretic itself.

So, what is economics about?

It's about how we provide for ourselves through how we use goods to obtain benefits that we need and want to sustain our lives and improve our well being as individuals, families, groups, communities, and societies. In brief,,whether, how, and if we provide for ourselves is the subject matter of economics. Throughout history, human beings have had to manage the use of what they had to provide for themselves. Though, across time and cultures, needs change--Viz, a technological society with its water, energy, and communications infrastructures generates needs for indoor plumbing, wiring, and domestic technologies as essentials one must have to get by with-- as have our 'wants’ the important subject matter economics :: whether, if, and how we provide benefits for ourselves by using goods :: never changes.

You won't find anything like the above definition in economics texts. [You can find that out for yourselves.] But with it we can begin to to deconstruct modern economic theory and, while doing that, reconstruct economics as it should be. That’s my plan here: to reconstruct economics in a manner that disposes with existing theory more or less in its entirety while giving you the ammunition to fight against it and what it prescribes. In the process, I’ll be laying new foundations for you to use.

We live in monetary economies.

In such economies, whether and if we can provide for ourselves as individuals, families, communities, and nations depends largely on how the distribution of income and the accumulation of wealth occurs. That is because monetary economies uniquely impose an architecture of price ratios between goods, one absent in non-monetary economies. That price ratio architecture, in combination with the distribution of incomes/wealth, determines the budgets consumers must have to purchase goods for their use. Every change in prices between goods forces budgets to become reformulated. When such budgets cannot be reformulated, this drives people out of some markets completely. This forcing out of a market regularly happens in monetary economies.

Current economic theory has this forcing out happening rarely and effectively as special cases within the theoretic. That is because the entire body of what is called the Theory of the Consumer has never addressed how budgets are determined when prices change (and thus price ratios between goods). Rather than seriously examining this very important issue and its impacts on human well-being, the current theoretic always endows consumers with fixed, unchanging budgets in the face of price changes between goods. Such endowments with ever-fixed budgets remove from economic analysis all matters related to whether, how, and if people can provide for themselves in monetary economies. In short, it removes the essential subject matter economics itself.

In some ways, I am building this airplane as I am flying it. I apologize in advance if you experience any difficulties understanding what I say. Sometimes I may not be as clear as I want to be, not to mention that what’s clear to me may be mud to you. Let me know when that happens, for I can and will clarify whatever you find difficult. I’ll do that either as quickly as I can, or by discussing the matter thoroughly in a section to come.[It's also true that I can't footnote in this format so, sorree.

Now we can begin with all of the above in mind.

Cooperative vs Competitive vs False Balancing Argumentation

The empty neighborhood in the fog

In a short 2018 Scientific American article and a 2017 research paper published in the journal Cognitive Science, a team of cognitive scientists and psychologists describe their research findings on the effects of modes of engagement on how people perceive political issues and truth itself, including moral truth. Modes of engagement can be thought of as the mindset that a person in disagreement brings to the table when they are in disagreement with others about political issues.

The cooperative mindset

People who engage with a cooperative mindset tend to seek to learn from a person or people they disagree with. In that mode of engagement, people tend to try to learn from people they disagree with. They also tend to be more open to the idea that there is no objective truth about an issue such as abortion. This mode of engagement was found to influence how people view truth, which tends to be seen as mostly subjective and personal. Absolute or objective truth is not what people with this mindset usually see in various issues. The authors comment in their Cognitive Science paper:

“One form of social reasoning consists of a group of people searching together for the solution to a problem. Groups pursuing this strategy reap cognitive gains such as quickly identifying problems (Hill, 1982) and discovering the best solutions (Schwartz, 1995). These characteristics allow the performance of the group to go above and beyond the sum of its individual members (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). 

However, group reasoning does not always involve finding solutions to problems. Some group reasoning consists instead of argumentation (Walton, 1998). In group reasoning using argumentation, people start out with opposing views on a given question, and each individual proceeds by offering reasons or evidence in favor of his or her own view and against the opposing one.”

The competitive mindset

By contrast, when people are competitive and engage to win arguments, their view of truth tends to be more objective and absolute. It also affects their social behaviors, beliefs about people they disagree with and how truth and the issue at hand is understood. The competitive mindset leads to unfavorable views of, and increased animosity toward, people they disagree with. The researchers associate the rise of political tribalism with increases in competitive engagements relative to past years. This tendency to tribalize and weaponize politics is exacerbated by social media. The researchers comment in the SciAm article:

“At the same time, the rise of social media has revolutionized how information is consumed—news is often personalized to one’s political preferences. Rival perspectives can be completely shut out from one’s self-created media bubble. Making matters worse, outrage-inducing content is more likely to spread on these platforms, creating a breeding ground for clickbait headlines and fake news. This toxic online environment is very likely driving Americans further apart and fostering unproductive exchanges. ..... And although plenty of evidence suggests that contemporary political discourse is becoming more combative and focused on winning, our findings do not elucidate why that change has occurred. Rather they provide an important new piece of information to consider: the mode of argument we engage in actually changes our understanding of the question itself. The more we argue to win, the more we will feel that there is a single objectively correct answer and that all other answers are mistaken. Conversely, the more we argue to learn, the more we will feel that there is no single objective truth and different answers can be equally right. So the next time you are deciding how to enter into an argument on Facebook about the controversial question of the day, remember that you are not just making a choice about how to interact with a person who holds the opposing view. You are also making a decision that will shape the way you—and others—think about whether the question itself has a correct answer.”

As noted here in a recent discussion, political discourse has been weaponized by injecting moral absolutism into politics. Politicians, partisans and special interests have discovered that increasing irrationality and decreasing social trust lies in manipulating the moral framework of politics and fomenting competitive discourse over cooperative discourse. In my opinion, the point of increasing irrationality and decreasing social trust is to deceive and distract members of society, thereby draining both power and wealth from the masses and accumulating it at the top.

False balancing

False balancing is a complicating but important factor in political discourse. This arises when disagreements over a certain topic do not make much sense in view of actual objective knowledge. For example, enough objective knowledge exists to render moot disagreements over whether the Earth is flat, humans are causing climate change or vaccines are safe or effective. The evidence is overwhelming and there is not enough basis for rational debate. Engaging in false balancing debates tends to elevate the status of the contrary evidence and arguments to a level that is not socially or rationally merited. Such debates tend to foment and maintain false beliefs, confusion and distrust. That is much more socially damaging than beneficial.

False balancing and the president

Based on my recent online engagements with various Trump supporters or apologists, I now believe that trying to debate whether the president is a chronic liar, a crook, grossly incompetent, self-centered and maybe also a traitor engages in false balancing. In my opinion, the scant evidence that the president’s supporters sometimes raise does not come close to balancing contrary objective evidence of his character flaws and his bad behavior and failures in office. Of those topics, the allegation that he is a traitor is supported by less direct and circumstantial evidence than the other assertions of truth, which are backed by far more relevant evidence, much of it based on undeniable facts.

Holy Crap-a-roni!

A reporter, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, was threatened with the Secret Service coming in and forcibly moving her to the back row of yesterday’s White House press briefing on the Coronavirus.  Evidently, the fellow in the back row refused to give up his chair also.  Here’s a link to the short video.

Yeah, another failure, among many, likely perpetrated by our illustrious POTUS, by going to the “totalitarian lengths” to rig his game.  [Can I hear a Sieg Heil??]  Is anyone surprised?  He's been doing this kind of self-preservation "me, me, me" thing all his life.

Acosta tells us that Trump’s personal aides are advising him that these nightly briefings are bringing “diminishing returns,” and he has more to lose by them, than to gain by them.  I personally see it that way too.

From my point of view, while Trump is already a loser, a wrecking ball par excellence, these briefings showcase his spectacular ignorance and still childlike thinking.  So I’m a bit bummed that he won’t be showing up and rambling on, with the same old-same old repeat phrases and (tremendous) "best words," night after night, implosion after implosion.  While I grant that it might be a dangerous game for us never-Trumpers to play ourselves, I want him out there making a fool of himself, so we can prove his ineptitude, showing how he really doesn't “know more than the generals,” and how he “alone can[not] fix it.”

Questions: What do you think?  Should Trump continue showing up at these briefings, force feeding us his word salad?  Is it good or bad for the country?  How so?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Coronavirus Update 8

“The financial contributions will stop” if the GOP failed to pass its tax cuts. -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC); “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'” -- Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY); “Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed. “Get it done and we’ll open it back up.”-- wealthy Texas GOP political donor Doug Deason referring to the “piggy bank” being closed by GOP donors; “The most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.” -- Trump's National Economic Director Gary Cohn; “You all just got a lot richer.” Trump speaking a few hours after he signed the bill into law to happy patrons at Mar-a-Lago

--- GOP comments about the December 2017 GOP tax cut (discussed here)

Trying to grasp what is going on is now is like trying to take a drink from a firehose. It will slap your lips around, like dog lips in the breeze, but you'll still be thirsty. 😲

The New York Magazine Intelligencer section writes on the increasingly obvious disconnects between conservative and populist rhetoric and behavior (CPRB) compared to actual contradicting reality. One crumbling bastion of CPRB ideology is the lie that “undocumented immigrants are a scourge of American society, a nefarious invading army that’s depriving native-born workers of precious jobs, filling our cities with crime, and leeching off our welfare programs.” That lie is made obvious by the government declaring many immigrants working in essential functions such as food production and distribution as “essential workers” doing work that the Department of Homeland Security considers such people to be, e.g., “critical to the food supply chain.”

The NYM article points out that, while the current administration has done a lot to go after undocumented immigrants, it has done almost nothing to go after the illegal employers who hires them, including the president himself.

The invisible hand vs visible rich people’s hands

Another pillar of CPRB ideology that has crumbled under the weight of obvious contradictory reality is the lie that the market is an apolitical thing that the impartial invisible hand governs. According to this vicious lie, (1) wealthy people and interests earn their gains fair and square, and therefore government usually (~always) cannot justify redistributing wealth from the top to lower levels, while (2) the working poor contribute no more value than what they are worth to the impartial invisible hand.

The contradictory reality is that wealthy people and interests use their undeniable political power to favor themselves and their interests. They buy influence in our corrupt pay-to-play political system. The market and its workings do not constitute a meritocracy. Governments, shaped by self-interests of donors, create and control markets, money, and corporations and the rules of operation.

Of course, this lie will die hard. CPRB on this point was obvious when the GOP’s initial cash relief proposal was less assistance to Americans too poor to pay federal taxes than to earners making  $75,000 a year. Recent data indicates that most tax cut and bailout benefits are going to the rich. That isn't invisible hand and meritocracy. It is bought and paid for government service by the wealthy for the wealthy. The marketplace is immoral and political, not amoral and apolitical.

We still do not know much about this virus - it is getting creepier

The Washington Post reports that doctors are starting to report new complications associated with SARS CoV-2. This is unsettling, but the reporting is still anecdotal. WaPo writes that some patients, about 20-40%, develop blood clots despite being given anticoagulants that should prevent clots. Also, anecdotal reports of damage to kidney, heart, intestine, liver and brain continue to come in. Initial thinking was that the virus would attack the lungs like similar respiratory viruses. The damage to other organs is tentatively linked to a damaging inflammatory reaction (a cytokine storm) the virus causes in some people. Nearly half the hospitalized people have blood or protein in their urine, which indicates kidney damage.

WaPo writes: “Autopsies have shown some people’s lungs fill with hundreds of microclots. Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or heart attack. ..... ‘The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we don’t yet understand why there is a clot,’ Kaplan said. ‘We don’t know. And therefore, we are scared.’”

Other bizarre, almost impossible symptoms in some patients, are being reported as anecdotes. WaPo writes: “Increasingly, doctors also are reporting bizarre, unsettling cases that don’t seem to follow any of the textbooks they’ve trained on. They describe patients with startlingly low oxygen levels — so low that they would normally be unconscious or near death — talking and swiping on their phones. Asymptomatic pregnant women suddenly in cardiac arrest. Patients who by all conventional measures seem to have mild disease deteriorating within minutes and dying at home.”

When it comes to the pathology of this virus, we do not yet know what we are dealing with.

Tracking the virus

America is still woefully incapable of large scale testing for current infections (swab up the nose) and for antibodies in the blood people who have recovered from an infection, which sometimes they may not have known they had. The New York Times reports that data from California strongly suggests that the virus had been spreading for weeks in the US public weeks before there was any evidence of this. That raises the possibility that the same thing could have been happening in other states. It has taken until now to test the body of an infected woman who died on Feb. 6.

The NYT writes: “The unexpected new finding makes clear that the virus was circulating in the Bay Area of California as early as January, even before the federal government began restricting travel from China on Feb. 2. It also raises new questions about where else the virus might have been spreading undetected. ..... The new test results made public late Tuesday show that even this timeline failed to reveal how long the virus had been circulating. Ms. Dowd had not recently traveled outside the country, the authorities said, and yet she died a full 20 days before the earliest recorded case of community transmission. Another previously unconnected death in Santa Clara County, on Feb. 17, has also now been linked to the coronavirus. ‘Each one of those deaths is probably the tip of an iceberg of unknown size,’ Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s medical officer, said in an interview.”

Incompetence and corruption

The president’s handling of this at the federal level has been incompetent and literally corrupt. The corruption includes his now-abandoned attempts to foist a possibly lethal hydroxyquinoline treatment on people, presumably in return for campaign contributions. In a different article, the NYT writes:
“In a scorching statement, Dr. Bright, who received a Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis from Emory University, assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several ‘potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections’ and repeatedly described by the president as a potential ‘game changer’ in the fight against the virus.

‘I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,’ he said in his statement. ‘I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.’”

This definitely is not going well, despite contrary claims from the president, his enablers and propagandists, and his deceived rank and file supporters. The last group is one that is going to pay the biggest price in all of this. The kleptocrats and blowhards at the top will be just fine, except for the few that get infected and die from it.

A Post-News World

Why are most of the media misquoting Trump?

Right. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number (INAUDIBLE) interesting to check that so that you are going to have to use medical doctors with but it sounds interesting to me so we will see but the whole concept of the light the way it kills it in one minute that's--that's pretty powerful. Steve, please.

I had to go to RealClearPolitics to find this because so many of the "news" sources are eliminating the bolded bit.

Now, I don't feel it changes the statement too much, but it sure makes me look foolish if I'm misquoting him to people I'm arguing this statement with.

What the hell is wrong with the "news?"

This is why I've mostly unplugged from it all.

Run RealClearPolitics against your favorite "bias checker" - and if I'm right it comes out as right wing.

While almost every left leaning or traditional media source misquotes him.

Now, call me crazy, but even minor misquotes like this being run by nearly everybody in the "news" gives Trump ammunition against the press.

The press has every reason to avoid this nonsense right now. They need the moral high ground here and they can't get it by taking shortcuts, like aggregating each other from a single source instead of sitting and transcribing his actual words independently. I'm assuming this happened that way, out of expedience rather than malice but how did one misquote get such wide circulation without the press being lazy?

Earth Day at 50: 'There is no Planet B'

COVID-19 makes this year's day of action different, but also is a reminder that a concerted response is still needed. 

In fall 1968, the first Whole Earth Catalog reproduced on its cover a NASA composite photograph never before seen in public — Earth floating in the arid blackness of space, beautifully blue and alone and fragile.

In January 1969, a runaway oil rig blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel in California devastated local wildlife and alarmed the nation with images of oil-soaked beaches, seabirds and seals. Then in June, the Cuyahoga River, an industrial sewer running through downtown Cleveland, caught fire. In fact the river had combusted many times before, and some of these fires were bigger, but Time magazine reported on this one and the story went national.

In 1969, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, flying back to Washington from an inspection of the California spill, read an article about “teach-ins” created by activists opposed to the Vietnam War and thought: Why not create a teaching event for the environment? He hired young organizer Denis Hayes to run a national environmental teach-in out of his D.C. office. He and a handful of staff organized what became, on April 22, 1970, an estimated 20 million people taking action for what was by then firmly labeled “Earth Day.”

Citizens and their representatives in Washington were galvanized, the policy results transformative. President Richard Nixon deserves credit for proposing, on July 9, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency, and later signing pioneering environmental legislation protecting clean air and water, although he did so in part to outflank potential Democratic opponent Sen. Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson of Washington — both were consummate politicians who heard the citizenry’s howl and responded.

This April 22, the 50th anniversary of what is now the largest secular holiday worldwide, it is useful to recall these founding stories: an inspirational image of fragile earth, omnipresent now as the “big blue marble” photograph taken from Apollo 17; fossil-fueled calamities, now all too familiar; Earth Day’s organized citizen action, and determined political response.

The 50th anniversary will be the strangest, as the COVID-19 pandemic will require most citizens to demonstrate at home and online. Yet this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, requiring the urgent, game-changing response COVID-19 received. This year is forecast to be the hottest on record, after 2019’s frightening and costly fires, floods and storms that devastated the Australian bush and Midwestern farms. The melting of the ice caps and glaciers accelerates as temperatures soar, a record 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in Antarctica on Feb. 8, the same temperature as Los Angeles that day. Already 90 American cities experience some flooding, while officials in low-lying cities like Manila consider how to move.

Yet good news is also plentiful. Wind and solar energy are booming at a scale and cost unimaginable even a few years ago, with electric cars, buses, trucks and charging stations rolling out fast around the world. In September, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power accepted a bid for electricity produced by renewable energy, including storage capacity for round-the-clock supply, at 2 cents a kilowatt-hour, far cheaper than any other source. And Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are building an island to house 7,000 wind turbines to provide electricity for 80 million Europeans. The green-energy revolution is now.

Meanwhile, the global fossil-fuel industry is reeling from falling demand, a price war and withdrawal of the global finance system from further investment. The fossil-fuel divestment movement begun in 2012 has surpassed $12 trillion in public commitments to divest from fossil-fuel stocks and investments. And in January the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest financial firm, wrote to global CEOs that his company will be considering climate change in investment decisions: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

Still, none of these changes is moving remotely fast enough given the pandemic of fossil-energy excess. On a typical day, the global economy still dumps the heat equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs into the atmosphere.

Yet the Trump administration, abetted by coal-state Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other fossil-fueled representatives and talk show advisers who reflexively denied the severity of COVID-19 just as they derided the climate “hoax,” daily unravels not only longstanding environmental protections but subverts any responsible clean climate policy, most recently cutting clean car-mileage standards against the wishes of much of the auto industry.

But it is fair to remember that, 50 years ago, the nation was also facing a wide swath of environmental calamities and did not despair. Citizens raised hell, took action, changed practices and elected leaders who enacted strong, effective laws that produced dramatic improvement in health and quality of life, all without the economic calamity forecast by naysayers — in fact, with major economic benefits. Modern industrial America has blue skies and clean lakes and rivers not by accident but by design, a legacy of 50 years of Earth Days.

Today’s global response to the COVID-19 pandemic offers a valuable lesson in concerted action. The formerly unimaginable $2.2 trillion in federal funding is an example of what support the climate crisis also calls for. Meanwhile, the air over China is temporarily clear and breathable due to COVID-19’s forced reduction in fossil-energy intensity.

Will that lesson be learned? Or after the pandemic passes will fossil-fueled economies again fire up all cylinders of their 19th-century internal combustion machine, leaving in its exhaust today’s vision of a cleaner, safer planet?

“There is no Planet B” is a phrase that has appeared spontaneously on placards waved at climate crisis demonstrations around the world and is now the title of a book. Its wisdom is twofold. Earth, that “beautiful blue marble” floating in space, has the water, air and renewable energy we need. And there is a viable green economic future.

As the nation fights through the COVID-19 pandemic toward the November elections, voters need to remember two facts. When asked in a Democratic debate if climate change is an existential crisis, every candidate answered yes without hesitation. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and its allies, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, do everything they can to prop up the struggling fossil-fuel industry while undoing regulations aimed at curbing the climate crisis. Planet Earth is on the ballot this November.

James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Star Tribune covering education, energy and the environment.

https://www.startribune.com/earth-day-at-50-there-is-not-planet-b/569742012/

Coronavirus Update 7

Various sources, e.g., CNN and the Washington Post, are reporting about a small pilot study to test the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus infection. Hydroxychloroquine is approved for use to treat malaria, a parasite infection. The reported data is not from a randomized clinical trial. It is also not yet peer-reviewed. This data is only anecdotal, not the kind of evidence that constitutes solid evidence of safety or efficacy.

Two critically important thoughts to keep in mind are these:

1. Randomized, double- or triple-blinded, placebo controlled clinical trials are needed to assess safety and efficacy.

2. That an approved drug is safe enough for treating a specific disease does not mean that it is safe to treat a different disease. I will explain this in the context of hydroxychloroquine and coronavirus.

The data

The study included 368 male VA patients with coronavirus infections. That is considered to be a small study by experts, not a large study as Fox News is falsely reporting. This study is larger than past studies reported so far, but that doesn't make it a large study. Ninety-seven patients received hydroxychloroquine, 113 received hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin, and 158 did not not receive hydroxychloroquine.


As reported by the WaPo, rates of death in both drug-treated groups were worse than the 158 who did not receive the drugs. The drugs produced no benefit for patients who were on ventilators in either drug-treated group.

The observed death rates were as follows:

No drug treatment: 11.4%

Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin treated: 22%
Hydroxychloroquine treated: 27%

Failed pandemic politics

The president has politicized an weaponized the pandemic to serve his personal political re-election agenda. CNN's broadcast last night played about six short clips of the president repeatedly urging people to use hydroxychloroquine because he claims that ‘he heard good things about the drug’, or that ‘he heard very good things about the drug’. His ‘scientific rationale’ is based on posing questions such as, ‘what do you have to lose?’ and ‘why not try it because you have nothing to lose?’.

Unfortunately, it may turn out to be the case that people have their lives to lose.

Presumably, some people took the president’s idiotic advice and doing so could have killed some of them. If that turns out to be true, the president should be impeached and jailed for medical malpractice, gross incompetence and inexcusable arrogant stupidity. Dr. Trump’s unsound medical advice would have literally killed some people.

How hydroxychloroquine might be lethal in coronavirus infections 

The following is personal speculation about why it might turn out to be the case that hydroxychloroquine is lethally toxic for some coronavirus-infected patients. One study reported that when hydroxychloroquine is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, it appears that it works by inducing a form of immune suppression, i.e., “down-regulation of the immune response against autoantigenic peptides.” Other research indicates that hydroxyquinoline modulates biological pathways that regulate immune responses by other mechanisms including  blocking inflammatory responses, e.g., “there is some evidence that antimalarials decrease secretion of monocyte‐derived pro‐inflammatory cytokines, such as tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα).”

Based on that, I speculate that it is possible that hydroxychloroquine-induce causes an immune suppression that (1) unleashes the virulence or replication capacity of coronavirus in lungs to a point that it becomes lethal, and/or (2) allows bacteria in the lungs to replicate and cause a lethal bacterial pneumonia. Anecdotal evidence for that is in the different death rates of the two drug-treated groups. People who also received the antibiotic azithromycin may have had a lower death rate than the group treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. If that turns out to be true, then the azithromycin may have prevented a lethal pneumonia in some of the patients, leading to a lower death rate. Azithromycin is used to treat various bacteria, including ones that that can cause pneumonia.

Again, all of this is personal speculation. I'm not an expert and thus my speculation may turn out to be completely wrong, e.g., because we still do not know much about coronavirus pathology at the molecular level. 

The Failing Media is Failing Dismally, Yet Again

An opinion columnist for the New York Times has written a piece arguing that the media should stop airing the president's briefings. For over a year it seemed reasonable to me to stop broadcasting almost everything the president says to the American people. The reason is obvious: His rhetoric consists mostly of socially damaging and immoral, dark free speech.[1] What social value is there in his lies, deflections and disinformation that outweighs the damage? I see none.

The NYT opinion piece comments:

“Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as ‘earned media’ coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media. 

The firm computed that Donald Trump had ‘earned’ a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising. 

The Hollywood Reporter in February of 2016 quoted CBS’s C.E.O. as saying, ‘It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,’ because as The Reporter put it, ‘He likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.’”

The editorial points out that the daily coronavirus briefings over the last 5 weeks or so have been aired extensively. They are are full of misleading and false statements, deceptions, deflections of blame from his own failures and assertions of no responsibility for his own crucial role in the failed US response to the virus. The president has scientists and officials on stage with him to lend a false appearance of credibility to his dark free speech. People trapped indoors due to coronavirus are nervous and tune into the daily dark free speech blizzard.

The press is not obligated by any law to broadcast any, some or all of what a president says. Journalism requires editing and commentary on content, including the pointing out of lies and deceit. Simply broadcasting the president’s self-serving propaganda isn't journalism. It is abdication of journalism. It is anti-journalism.

The president’s open contempt for and denial of inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning is undeniable and of staggering proportions. As of April 3, 2020, the president had made 18,000 false or misleading statements. That qualifies him as a chronic liar, which is something he has probably been at least his entire adult life.

In essence, the media has learned nothing. Once again, the for-profit American broadcast media is one of the president’s most important sources of campaign exposure, lies, deceit and deflections. The media is simply giving him hundreds of millions or billions of free, unrebutted air time.

The NYT editorial ends with this accurate characterization of the situation:

“Trump has completely politicized this pandemic and the briefings have become a tool of that politicization. He is standing on top of nearly 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.”

Footnote:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism, and (4) ideologically-driven motivated reasoning and other ideologically-driven biases that unreasonably distort reality and reason. (my label, my definition)