A New Coronavirus Strain Emerges

Sources are reporting the displacement of various strains by a strain of the virus that appears to have arisen in the last month or two. The New York Times writes:

LONDON — Alarmed by a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson abruptly reversed course on Saturday and imposed a wholesale lockdown on London and most of England’s southeast, banning Christmas-season gatherings beyond individual households.

The decision, which Mr. Johnson announced after an emergency meeting of his cabinet, came after the government got new evidence of a variant first detected several weeks ago in southeast England, which the prime minister asserted was as much as 70 percent more transmissible than previous versions.

Viral mutations are not uncommon, and British officials said this variant had been detected in a handful of other countries, without naming them. But the government’s medical experts expressed alarm about its apparent infectiousness, noting that it now accounts for more than 60 percent of the new infections reported in London.

“This spread is happening at a moment in time when there are already many lineages circulating, and despite that it is displacing them all,” said Kristian Andersen, a geneticist at the Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif. “We can’t say for sure, but to me it looks like this very explosive growth is primarily because” of its new mutations.

“We normally see 20 to 30 lineages in our samples at a given time,” said Tulio de Oliveira, a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, in Durban, who first flagged the variant. “Now, we see only one.”

More research will be needed to confirm that the new strain is more infectious. So far, it does not appear to be more virulent or deadly. Also, it does not appear to be resistant to vaccines, but this will be closely monitored in the coming months. If  a second mutation arises that leaves the new strain more infections but also more virulent, that would probably ratchet up pressure to get populations vaccinated as soon as possible.

That leaves the question, can the president handle this or will he botch (incompetence) and/or sabotage (treason) the vaccination effort? Only time will tell.

JUST IN TIME FOR THE WEEKEND - SNOWFLAKE HAD AN IDEA (YES WE KNOW - THAT IS RARE)

 I kind of stole this idea from Susan who did a similar thread on my Forum, but that one was exclusive to ANGER expressed at Trump.

I would like to expand beyond TDS though.

It has become increasingly clear, people just need to vent, let all the anger, anxiety, angst and anguish out of their system so they can ENJOY a nice calm, headache and bellyache free Christmas.

You can do so in the form of a meme, or a picture or something that let's you express your frustration.

Within limits of course, you wouldn't want to run afoul of Germaine.

Here is my minor contribution, and I feel confident you can all do better and challenge you all do do so:

courtesy of your favorite SNOWFLAKE 

Christian Preacher Calls Out Trumpism as “Dangerous” and “Not of God”

 Among white evangelical preachers, Beth Moore has been unique over the past few years because she’s used her virtual pulpit to call out the hypocrisy of the Christian Right. It even led to one pastor telling her to “go home”

Yesterday, she pulled no punches in calling out Trumpism and Christian Nationalism. It came on the heels of a MAGA cult rally in Washington, D.C. on Saturday that featured many prominent conservative Christians.

Beth Moore

@BethMooreLPM

I do not believe these are days for mincing words. I’m 63 1/2 years old & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.

She’s right that, for many Americans, Trumpism is both “seductive & dangerous.” Those of us who aren’t members of her conservative Christian tribe have been saying that for years. But it obviously means more coming from someone who shares the faith of many of MAGA cultists.

Religion News Service points out that Moore wasn’t alone in the denunciation either. Former Liberty University professor Karen Swallow Prior said something similar:

Karen Swallow Prior (Kiddo Notorious KSP)

@KSPrior

While I did not ever vote for Trump, I did vote for local and state @GOP candidates. (I am a lifelong conservative, after all.) I am now embarrassed and ashamed that I did so. What a bunch of money-grubbing, power-hungry, partisan cowards who care nothing about conservatism.

Once again, I’m grateful she said that. And once again, I’m internally screaming about how she missed what critics have been saying about conservatives for years.

It’s not news that the Republican Party is morally bankrupt and frequently corrupt. They don’t play fair. They use their power to hurt people. This happened long before Trump even if he accelerated and amplified the problem.

How ignorant do you have to be at this point to still vote for Republicans at any level, if you actually care about decency, evidence-based policies, and more effective government?

It’s one thing if you didn’t see this until Trump came along, because you weren’t paying close attention, even though it was there for decades.

But maybe the Christians who didn’t recognize the batshittery among their own tribe members until now will do us all a favor and start listening to — and appreciating and amplifying — those of us who saw what was happening this whole time. At least recognize that the critics were never “anti-Christian” despite the best efforts of conservatives to paint us that way.

BY HEMANT MEHTA

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/12/14/christian-preacher-calls-out-trumpism-as-dangerous-and-not-of-god/

Science based Medicine -- is it Pseudoscience???

 

Germaine occasionally links or recommends a blog by Steve Novella, the champion of Science Based Medicine.  Rather than something to recommend positively, I consider Novella to be an exemplar of a pseudoscience practitioner.  I also consider the use of Bayesian statistics to be the statistical equivalent of heroin – a really really bad idea to get oneself hooked upon if one is seeking truth.  These thoughts are both  counter to this blog’s general inclinations, so counter arguing these points is something I will try to deliver on.   J

What is Science?  And what is pseudoscience?  I will follow Karl Popper on both of these questions, as I think he thought the answer through well.  Science, per Popper, is an investigative methodology directed toward finding discoveries about the world, which focuses on hypothesis formation and revision based on test.  The process varies in different fields and at different maturities of a field.  A general summary is that it includes exploration, investigation, speculation, guided investigation, hypotheses, derivation of tests, tests and revisions, repeat test/revise cycle. This approach can be used for all sorts of subjects, and has been.  Note, there are no subject areas that are or should be excluded from science – the key question is whether there are usefully testable hypotheses, plus an attitude of seeking and accepting refuting tests.  If Intelligent Design or Astrology had productive hypotheses and engaged in the test/revise cycle, they could in principle be “science”.

Pseudoscience, again per Popper is an approach claiming “truth”, which REJECTS the test/revise process, AND  which claims to be science. 

So –what about SBM?  Here is SBM’s definition of science: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-is-science/  SBM does not come out and explicitly reject Popper’s definition, instead they suggest there are TWO definitions, and they want to use both: 

In common use the word “science” has several meanings, which may or may not be clear in context. Two that readily come to mind are 1) the growing body of knowledge about nature, accumulated over the several hundred years during which a distinctive, rational method of inquiry, or at least parts of it, have been employed; 2) that method of inquiry, also known as the “scientific method,” characterized by the collective tools of science—observation, generation of hypotheses, controlled and repeated testing of hypotheses, the use of mathematics for generating hypotheses, for aiding in complex measurements, for statistical inference, and so on. 

There is no such difference.  In actuality, definition 1 is the result one arrives at when applying definition 2.  Asserting two definitions is an effort to blow smoke, the reason for which becomes clearer later in the essay.  The purpose to asserting two definitions is to provide smoke to obscure the claim that physicalism is irrefutably demonstrated by science.  Here is where the bait/switch of physicalism for science is done:

The late physicist, Milton Rothman, wrote three small books that are useful for a discussion such as this. One of those books, A Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism, has an entire section titled “Laws of Permission and Laws of Denial.” The chapter on “Laws of Denial” begins as follows:

It is fashionable in some circles to insist that “nothing is impossible,” as though to admit the impossibility of some cherished goal is to “give up trying,” to have a closed mind, to be a spoilsport, a pessimist. This cliché is most prevalent in inspirational rhetoric connected with therapeutic, educational, or sporting activities. Nevertheless, one of the basic functions of science is to determine what actions are impossible in this real world. Choosing between the possible and the impossible is a task carried out by means of the laws of denial, which tie us firmly to reality even as imaginations soar unfettered through the universe.

Another fashionable cliché is that “all scientific theories are provisional,” as though physics knows nothing with a certainty, and that anything we think we know is likely to be found false in the future…If all scientific knowledge is tentative, what have we been doing for the past 300 years? How can I be so sure that the computer upon which I am typing will print out the words that I am putting into it?

A more accurate assessment of the situation is to recognize that one of the fundamental tasks of science is to critically examine all knowledge and to separate from the tentative ideas and false notions of the past facts that are so well established that to think them subject to change is to invite wishful thinking and foolishness.

Laws of denial, as explained by Rothman, are the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum, and of electric charge; the principle of Lorentz invariance, “from which the conclusions of special relativity follow: no object, energy or information can travel faster than the speed of light”; the principle of causality, by which it is “impossible for an effect to appear earlier in time than its cause”; and the first and second laws of thermodynamics. There are other statements that can be made with a degree of certainty much higher than is necessary to preclude their being overturned by clinical research, even if they are less certain than the laws of denial. For example, since all known interactions can be explained by the 4 forces of the standard model, and since only two of those forces—gravity and electromagnetic force—explain all actions other than those at the subatomic level, there is no reason to invoke fanciful forces (the vital force, ‘biofields’) that have never been detected and that add nothing to our understanding of natural phenomena.

Note what is done here in this quote – falsifiability, and the tentative nature of all empiricism, is explicitly rejected, based on a fallacy (argument by ridicule).  And what is substituted is a concept of science as something like bookkeeping, which offers certainties. 

Applying falsifiability to SBMs definition of science shows that it is FALSE, in every particular. 

·         First – LAWS in science are NOT inviolable!  Laws are just regularities.  SBM’s bookkeeping alternative to science, relies upon the pre-scientific concept of inviolable laws. 

·         Conservation principles are not inviolable either.  Noether’s theorem showed that conservation principles are the outgrowth of symmetries.  And the study of symmetries in physics has showed that they all spontaneously break (IE, the conservation laws do not always hold).  Here is a physics reference that explains why all symmetries break. https://www.pnas.org/content/93/25/14256

·         Note – decades ago for my undergraduate degree one of my essays was on the conservation law breakage needed of the baryon conservation law to there to be any matter.  More recently, I asked, on physics stack exchange, about whether either Hoyle’s proton creation speculation, or the Zero Energy Hypothesis, could be relevant to the plausibility of dualist interaction effects.  https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/494408/the-zero-energy-hypothesis-and-its-consequences-for-particle-creation-and-dualis Note these speculative violations of conservation laws are common in theoretical physics. 

·         The Bell Inequality demonstrated that physics cannot be both localized (limited by light speed), and real (observer independent), hence the “light speed limit” claims are also untrue

·         Another physicalist and fellow member of CSI, Victor Stenger, noted in one of his books that the average entropy of an expanding universe can decline, explicitly violating the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. 

·         We cannot “explain the interactions” between matter and either dark energy or dark matter, and these interactions cannot be explained by the Standard Model and its four forces. 

·         Additionally, neither the interactions of mind with brain, nor of abstract objects with matter, nor the postulated process of emergence are explained by physical reductionism, nor can they be.

SBM holds by a dogma – reductive physicalism – and rejects the falsification of its dogma.  Asserting a dogma as science, and in particularly a REFUTED one – is pseudoscience. 

SBM then takes the pseudoscience project further – not only rejecting the methodology of science and replacing it with a dogma, but then campaigning to PREVENT THE EXPERIMENTS WHICH FURTHER CHALLENGE ITS DOGMA.  One of the most fruitful sources of evidence for the falsity of reductive physicalism is the experimental success of psi and CAM (complementary and alternative medicine).  SBM, though, considers the experimental data relative to CAM and psi to be ”incorrect”:

Such Trials Don’t Work

The final reason that efficacy trials of highly implausible claims are a bad idea is that they don’t work very well: they tend to yield, in the aggregate, equivocal, rather than merely disconfirming results. Yes, the biases are so serious that they have led to incorrect conclusions about CAM, at least for a substantial period. 

I.E. – the results of good testing do not provide the support that Novella wishes they did for his wish to reject the reality of psi and CAM effects, SO – he wants to PREVENT ANY FURTHER TESTING!!!!!

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/of-sbm-and-ebm-redux-part-iii/

Note this rejection of testing and evidence is not limited to Novella and SBM – it is a common position across the “skeptic” community.  Here is one skeptic paper making this same point of refusing to even look at evidence supporting phenomena that challenge physicalism.  Susan Blackmore, another CSI fellow, made the rationale explicit in her autobiography -- NO evidence would convince her of the reality of psi-- because she will always consider creating and data fraud to be more likely than the overturning of physicalism.      https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/07/why-parapsychological-claims-cannot-be-true/ Novella is not alone as an advocate of pseudoscience, he is part of a pseudoscience movement which is much larger than SBM.

OK – second subject – Bayes. 

Bayes developed his statistics in order to emulate how humans actually think – that our conclusions are based on both the evidence, AND OUR PRIOR KNOWLEDGE.  This is NOT actually a good thing to do!  We humans are HIGHLY subject to confirmation biases – which lead us to DRASTICALLY overestimate the likelihood that what we think is true, actually IS true.  Basically anyone can see this, by trying to talk to somebody about what they believe on almost any subject.  One will quickly run into multitudes of poorly supported, but certainly held positions.   Therefore, IF one gives permission to set the probability of priors as a user action, USERS SET PRIORS FAR FAR FAR TOO HIGH (or low, depending on what their beliefs are). 

This effect was in action with SBM and “science”.  Novella wants to believe in physicalism, hence he approaches “physics” with a confirmation bias, and does not look for refutations, but instead falsely thinks science confirms physicalism.  This is not a problem unique to Novella, we ALL suffer form this sort of cognitive bias.    Then he sets the prior for “physicalism” to 1, which under Bayes methods, leads to legitimately rejecting all contrary data.  There is NO HOPE FOR HIM to ever change his mind, as long as he maintains a Bayesian approach to experimental data. 

Using user-independent statistics – frequentist statistics -- is how “paradigm shifts” ever occur in science, and that individuals change their minds.  The “Bayesian method is better” approach will, I fear, basically shut down science. 

Monarch Butterflies & Radical Right Governance

Monarch butterflies

The New York Times reports on the state of affairs in the cash-strapped Environmental Protection Agency, which is unlike the cash bloated Department of Defense:

The monarch butterfly is threatened with extinction, but will not come under federal protection because other species are a higher priority, federal officials announced Tuesday. ..... But their numbers have been decimated by climate-change-fueled weather events and pervasive habitat loss in the United States.

“We conducted an intensive, thorough review using a rigorous, transparent science-based process and found that the monarch meets listing criteria under the Endangered Species Act,” Aurelia Skipwith, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement. “However, before we can propose listing, we must focus resources on our higher-priority listing actions.” As part of the decision, monarchs’ status will be reviewed each year by the agency and conservation efforts will continue.

Federal protection would have helped, Dr. Oberhauser said. But officials said Tuesday they do not have the money or resources to protect all the species that need it.

“We have to work within the funding resources that we have,” said Lori Nordstrom, assistant regional director for ecological services for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Midwest region. (emphasis added)

This is what the leadership of the radical right GOP has been working toward for decades. As we all know, the radical right hates government generally. Agencies like the EPA are especially hated because it sometimes impairs revenues flowing to companies and rich people. Instead of blatantly getting rid of government functions that most Americans approve of, like the EPA, the radical right simply starves the agencies for cash and slowly strangles the function to death. That way the American people do not understand what is going on and the GOP leadership escapes a lot of blame and public blowback.

The radical right operates by heavy reliance on dark free speech to distract, deceive, divide and then betray the American people. Among the GOP leadership, there is great rejoicing over the fate of the monarch butterfly and dozens of other species the EPA does not have the budget to try to protect. Once those species are extinct, there's nothing left for people to get upset about. That is how the radical right operates day to day. Profit first, foremost and only. That's the modern GOP leadership.

A bit of context

1. In December 2017, the GOP passed a tax cut law. No democrat in congress voted for it. Over 80% of the tax cut benefits went to the top ~10% of earners. That new law added about $1 trillion/year to the federal debt. The radical right howls in outrage that due to the debt, the federal government cannot spend money on domestic programs like the EPA, food stamps, etc. Nonetheless, the GOP finds ways to massively deficit spend for rich people and special interests. 

The radical right goal is simple: Starve domestic spending into non-existence, while money gushes up to the rich and powerful, making them richer and more powerful and the rest of us less rich and less powerful.

2. My estimate of the net tax gap (tax that is owed minus what was paid) is that it is running at about $700 billion/year. My estimate is based on extrapolation of detailed tax data analyses from 2001 and 2006, showing that the gap was increasing by $19 billion/year starting from about $290 billion. The IRS disputes that and estimates that the tax gap is 'only' about $400 billion/year. Since the IRS refuses to do another detailed analysis, I'm sticking with my estimate. The IRS knows how to prove me wrong but it doesn't have the guts to do so. That is because the GOP would damage the IRS more than it already has. (the GOP hates the IRS -- taxes are theft)

Independent analysis indicated that for every extra dollar that congress gives the IRS for enforcing tax law, the treasury would get about $4 dollars in extra collected taxes. Every year, the IRS pleads for a bigger budget to shrink the tax gap. Every year the GOP (and to a lesser extent, democrats who have been bought by lobbyists) in congress blocks money to do that. Therefore, every year, tax cheats in America get a gift of about $700 billion from the tax-hating radical right GOP (and some corrupt democrats). The IRS is simply denied the budget it needs to collect taxes from tax cheats.

So, when the radical right GOP leadership screams in outrage about federal debt and too much domestic spending, just ignore it. That's just dark free speech and hypocrisy intended to poison our minds and keep us deceived and thus powerless.

What Biden is in For

The Grim Reaper is grimly reaping, 

and enjoying every moment

Salon writes in an article entitled Mitch McConnell's dark pivot: Wreck the economy — and sabotage Biden's presidency:

Mitch McConnell, however, appears to be moving on to his next mission: kneecapping Joe Biden.

The Senate majority leader is doing what everyone who actually learns from history predicted he would, and deliberately sabotaging the American economy, in a belief that voters will blame the incoming Democratic president for the disaster and not the Republican senators who are actually responsible.

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders proposed a compromise coronavirus relief bill, worth about $900 billion. The bill is meant to rescue the economy from what is likely to be a disastrous winter, as lockdowns tighten and people stay home in the face of rising cases of COVID-19. It falls far short of the $3 trillion relief package that the Democratic-controlled House passed in May — a bill that was ignored by the Senate — but is substantially better than anything McConnell has proposed. It's also better than nothing, which is what McConnell's actions so far have amounted to.

Unsurprisingly, however, McConnell's reaction to this carefully drafted and dramatically announced bill was to blow a big, fat raspberry, refusing to even look at it.  

"We just don't have time to waste time," McConnell told reporters, even though he has been wasting time since May, pretending he intends to pass a real relief bill while actually focusing the Senate's precious time on cramming as many Trump appointees onto the federal bench as he can.

McConnell is as shameless a liar as Trump, even if he's less theatrical about it. He is clearly in no hurry to pass a stimulus bill and, frankly, is behaving like a man who hopes no bill gets passed at all.

This is what the radical right planned and did to Obama from the moment he won election.[1] The GOP hated his guts and they still hate his guts. The radical right GOP has no interest in compromise. Not one shred of interest. Biden is going to get exactly the same treatment, no compromise, no cooperation and no bipartisan help. None at all. 

Footnote: 

1. Jane Mayer wrote this in 2017 about what Obama faced from the authoritarian radical right GOP:

"The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined [...] they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.

Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Caroline Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment frings of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.

. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."

In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.

As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division." (emphasis added)