Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I hope you all are having a solid Christmas Eve. I am, as I choose, doing NOTHING, and it is quite pleasant. I have a touch of a sinus thing going on, so I’m rocking some alka seltzer cold and flu and taking steam showers and basically gaming and watching netflix, which is not too shabby, if you ask me. Made a solid chicken parm for dinner, and waiting to have some fruit cake later.
What are you magnificent folks up to?
Democrats will try again with a roll call vote on a new bill Dec. 28, when the House also plans a vote to override Trump’s veto on the National Defense Authorization Act. https://t.co/vg1jR2ZVnj
— Bloomberg Government (@BGOV) December 24, 2020
But now you can say Merry Christmas again!!!1!!…
… Republicans on Thursday objected to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer‘s attempt to replace the $600 payments in the latest pandemic relief legislation with the $2,000 payments Trump said he wants. Democrats will try again Dec. 28, with a similar new bill that will be put to a full vote on the House floor.
“House and Senate Democrats have repeatedly fought for bigger checks for the American people, which House and Senate Republicans have repeatedly rejected – first, during our negotiations when they said that they would not go above $600 and now, with this act of callousness on the Floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.
GOP Death Cult Open Thread: Merry Xmas, GOP ScroogesPost + Comments (100)
On Christmas Eve, I thought this list of New Yorkers who had their crimes pardoned or sentences commuted by Governor Cuomo would remind us that this executive power is usually used for just and compassionate reasons, not to reward shitty grifters or war criminals:
Kaydian McKenzie, 43, was convicted of Criminal Possession of Marijuana in the Second Degree and Criminal Trespass in the Third Degree in 2001 and 2002. Ms. McKenzie has been crime free for 18 years, is a registered nurse, and has worked at a nursing home in New York State throughout the COVID-19 public health crisis. In addition to her role as a frontline worker, Ms. McKenzie is the mother of three U.S. citizen and is active in her local church, where she has volunteered with a program that delivers food to older New Yorkers who are living alone. A pardon will help Ms. McKenzie remain in the United States with her family.
[…]Theresa Debo, 64, was convicted of Murder in the Second Degree in 2006. She has served 16 years of a 22 years to life sentence. As a child, Ms. Debo was removed from an abusive family environment and placed in foster care. She cycled in and out of abusive relationships throughout her adult life, including a relationship with victim of the crime for which she has now been incarcerated for more than 16 years and who she maintains she killed in self-defense. Ms. Debohad no prior criminal history. While incarcerated, Ms. Debo has participated in numerous programs addressing the effects of abuse. Ms. Debo has earned certification as a hospice aid and has participated in several animal caretaker training programs, including Puppies Behind Bars as well as veterinary assistance, pet grooming, and dog obedience training.
I read the whole list and didn’t see any white collar criminals or family members. Lots of marijuana convictions — I hope when we finally legalize it, they’ll all be released in a blanked pardon or legislative act. Since it is essentially decriminalized now, some kind of clemency should have happened already.
Dr. Fauci is warning us that it may take more than we thought to get to herd immunity. Now that anti-science Donald Trump is on the way out and Fauci is advising President-elect Joe Biden, he’s telling us what he thinks.
A year ago, we knew next to nothing about SARS-CoV-2. Since then, experts have bootstrapped us all the way to effective vaccines. The bootstrapping started from what we know about other coronaviruses and pandemics in general. It’s a matter of informed guesses, testing them against each other and observations, modifying them, and testing again.
Because the math of epidemiology is similar to the math of chemical kinetics, I’ve been following the modeling. It is also bootstrapping, guessing parameters, testing them, and modifying them. It’s a set of multiple parameters (an unknown number of them) being fitted to data that has serious limitations. The estimates get better as we get more data. That’s what Fauci is saying. Our first guess for herd immunity was around 70%. With almost a year of data, it looks like that could be as high as 90%.
This ties in with what I’ve been thinking, but I want to let the people who are expert in epidemiology and virology lead. I can see what they are doing, but they have knowledge that they’ve acquired through experience that I don’t have. Here’s my version of what’s behind Fauci’s warning.
We don’t know R0, the inherent rate of spread of SARS-CoV-2, and we won’t know for some time. Pulling it out of the data is a statistical operation and needs a lot of data. Additionally, the data are lumpy – that’s what people are talking about in “superspreaders.” The lumpiness is measured by another parameter, k. We don’t know k either.
We can measure the rate of spread in a particular situation. I’ll call that R, but it sometimes is designated RT and other names. I have seen confusion of R and R0, even from modelers, who should know better. R0 does not vary, but R does. However, the estimate of R0 changes with time, as more data comes in. Because the level of immunization depends on R0, that changes with time too. That’s what Fauci is saying.
New Mexico has recently gone from an R of about 1.3 to an R of about 0.86. That’s R, not R0. R above 1 means the number of cases is going up; less than 1, that the number is going down. The reason R has decreased for New Mexico has very little if anything to do with the virus itself or R0. It’s because people are acting more responsibly and staying home, wearing masks, practicing hygiene. Here’s a site that estimates up to date values of R for all the states, although they call it Rt.
In order to back out R0 from that, we need to know how much of that decrease is due to staying home, how much to wearing masks, and so on. It’s hard to get at those numbers. Modelers estimate them, try them out in the models against observation, modify them, and try again.
And k. Don’t forget k. Lumpy data can help or hinder the analysis. What I see so far is that it seems to be more of a hindrance.
Fauci is probably being conservative – it’s better to predict a more difficult situation so that people can be relieved when it’s not that bad – but there are many indications that the first guesses of 70% immunization for herd immunity are too low. As percent immunization goes up, estimates of R0 and k will improve.
SARS-CoV-2 won’t be easy to control. But we control measles, and it needs 95% herd immunity. A year ago, nobody – nobody! – was immune to SARS-CoV-2. That’s why it has swept the world. For the diseases we’re familiar with, most people have some immunity, whether old folks who had the measles when they were kids or residual immunities to the flu carried over poorly every year. Better times are coming.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
Two fun opportunities for a bit of Christmas magic!
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Today I’ll be performing an African folktale, & O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, at about 6 pm ET.
If anyone is interested, feel free to shoot me an email for the zoom reading link. Just doing something fun for people who don’t get to witness a table read.
Next year, I’ll be starting a table read workshop (The Rising Workshop) focused on giving under-represented minority writers a chance to have their works read/performed. We’ll see how it goes, I’m not exactly a very important person. We’ve nearly made it to the end of 2020. That’s not a bad thing.
Christmas Eve reading at about 6 pm ET.
Email ruemara or me for a link.
(Her address is just like mine, only ruemara instead of watergirl.)
I had to ask Rue if she has a fundraising link, in case anyone is so inclined. She does! Any donations will go to fund the table read workshop she mentions above. Donations welcome but not required.
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Letting you know, in case you find yourselves with an odd hour to kill, that my theater, The Westcliffe Center for the Performing Arts, just did a radio production of “The Business of Good Government: A Christmas Play”, by John Arden – a Nativity/Epiphany Play, but with a modern twist – will be airing tomorrow night, Christmas Eve, at 10 pm ET, and Christmas Day, 8 pm ET, on our local community radio station, KLZR-FM – you can stream it here: https://klzr.org/
It’s rough-cut, not polished – we basically knocked it out in a couple days, in the theater, all masked up and with socially-distanced microphones scattered around the stage. Some stuff got cut that I wanted to keep, and some stuff I wanted to cut, got left in. You can hear pages rustling and footsteps and hum from the room. The sound quality differs depending what day we were on.
In short, it sounds like…a community theater doing a Nativity play. On the radio. : ) But it’s got heart. Like Arden would have wanted, I think. We threw it together for KLZR, but also for ourselves – we hadn’t seen each other or tried to do anything for almost a year. I’m sure you can understand.
Christmas Eve performance time is 10 pm ESTChristmas Day performance time is 8 pm EST
I asked Miss Bianca about a fundraising link, too. Donations welcome but not required.
OPEN THREAD.
AUTHOR’S NOTE, 2020: I first shared this true story here seven years ago, when I was living about 100 miles from where the action takes place. I’m now back in my home county. There was going to be a Christmas parade again this year — the Republicans who run the joint are on board with Gov. DeSantis’s “Pandemic? What pandemic?” strategy for containing the public health crisis.
But the county’s top health official told the commissioners that the hospital is already at capacity and that holding the traditional parade would lead to rationing healthcare. Remarkably, that got through to them. So, the commissioners decided to have a parked parade instead. The floats will be stationary in a big parking lot, and people can walk around them in family groups instead of gathering at the side of the road in a crowd to watch the floats pass. We’re still going to skip it. Anyhoo, on with the story…
I grew up in a small coastal town in Florida. Every year there was an annual holiday parade featuring an honor guard, Future Farmers of America, the school marching band, floats sponsored by local merchants and Santa and his elves on the town fire truck.
One year, my younger sister and I got to be in the parade. We were about five and six at the time, so when we were told that we were actually going to be on a float in the parade instead of mere spectators, it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to us.
Even when our mom told us we would be riding on the Florida Pest Control float (a display sponsored by the exterminator business where our grandfather worked at the time) and costumed as vermin, it didn’t dampen our enthusiasm. At least, not until we saw our costumes, which our mom spent days sewing for us. I was to dress as a rat, and that was okay with me:
However, my sister had to be a cockroach, and she was NOT happy about that, even though our mom had cleverly used fishing line to make the costume’s fake roachy arms move whenever my sister moved her real arms:
The Pestivus Parade: A True Story (Rerun and Open Thread)Post + Comments (90)
(President-Elect Biden has a really good media team)
Biden going old-school and meeting with newspaper columnists including @GeraldFSeib
Biden tells them why he's optimistic on bipartisanship: "Republicans are beginning to realize that there is a center that has to be responded to"https://t.co/nNz8TEZ6q8— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) December 23, 2020
Thursday Morning Open Thread: National Readership CapturePost + Comments (165)