Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The words do not have to be perfect.

In my day, never was longer.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

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On The Road – Captain C goes to Japan: Second Tokyo 2

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All good things must come to an end.  Captain C, thanks for taking us along on your trip!  ~WaterGirl

Captain C

We come to the end of the journey. The day after the baseball game was my last full day in Japan; I went to the Ota Museum and wandered around Shinjuku and Shibuya for a bit, before spending the evening hanging out with C. The next day, I went to the lovely Shinjuku Gyo-en National Garden in Shinjuku, before departing by train to Narita and leaving Japan at 6:20pm on Friday, arriving back at JFK at 6:15pm that same Friday. All in all, one of the best trips of my life and one I hope to repeat (with different specifics; I’d like to see Hiroshima, Kobe, Nara and/or Hokkaido if possible).

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Shibuya, TokyoApril 3, 2019

While Tower Records is a late, lamented chain here in the US (and in most of the world), in Japan it survives, as their Japanese unit was sold off a few years before their bankruptcy. This particular one is eight stories high, and as I discovered when C and I visited it earlier in the trip, has an entire floor dedicated to K-Pop, and another to J-Pop. We went to the floor which had various Jazz, Blues, World, and Electronic music and spent some time there. As with Los Apson, I showed great restraint and only purchased 3 CDs (albeit 2 of which were 3-album sets): A 3-disc set by the Sun Ra Arkestra, a 3-disc set by Bill Laswell (including some Material), and a collaboration by Bugge Wesseltoft and Prins Thomas.

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Wednesday/Thursday, Dec. 30-31

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On The Road – Karen H – Great Sand Dunes National Park

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I look at the last photo and I suddenly believe that spring and summer will be here soon.  ~WaterGirl

Karen H

In August of 2019, I spent a few hours at the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado as a detour on my way to Taos and Santa Fe.  The first sight of the dunes is startling and the photos don’t begin to capture how immense they are.

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Great Sand Dunes National ParkAugust 2, 2019

The approach to the dunes is across the Medano Creek, which was just barely running. In the spring the snow melt causes it to be a fast-flowing stream which makes it popular for water play.

Race to the Bottom?

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Hawley of Missouri announced he’ll object to the certification of the Electoral College votes next week. David Plouffe thinks Hawley will have company in effecting a brief and pointless certification delay. Plouffe also predicts the spectacle will foreshadow a repulsive clown show in the next Republican primary:

There’s good reason to suppose Plouffe’s prophesy will come to pass. Even elite invertebrate Marco Rubio is attempting to bolster his anti-elitist cred by slapping an 80-year-old physician around. It would work better if Rubio managed to land blows on Fauci instead of punching himself in the face, but Marquito’s pathetic antics aside, he does have an unerring instinct for following his party down identity rabbit holes, having latched onto and discarded every dominant strain of Republicanism in its turn.

There’s an interesting piece in The Atlantic that explores UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s theory about Trumpism, i.e., the narrative Trump cultists perceive in our political drama, and how that might evolve when the object of veneration is sulking in Palm Beach rather than the Oval Office:

Hochschild is telling us that Trumpism is not just a garland of public-policy proposals that any other Republican can drape around his or her neck. And it is more complex than a personality trait, or a talent for saying mean stuff on Twitter. Rather, Trumpism is an emotional planet that orbits around Trump’s star. Breaking the connection between Trump and the better part of the GOP will require either that Trump disappears (an unlikely proposition) or that a larger star emerges from the Republican backbench (also unlikely).

At the end of our conversation, I asked Hochschild what she’s learned from the past four years. “I used to think of political identity as something more solid,” she said. “I now think of political identity as like water that’s always going somewhere, that needs to go somewhere, but where it goes depends on the lay of the land, the rock formations that stand in its way,” she told me. She’s still waiting to see where Trump moves the mountain.

Somehow, this made me feel better. I’ve been pessimistic about America ever since the election. I’m overjoyed that we’re getting rid of the buffoonish monster, of course, but it’s distressing that 74 million people voted for four more years of chaos and calamity. Or, to put in more accurately, 74 million voters no longer recognize chaos and calamity when they see it.

Hochschild’s quote about political identity as a fluid thing sounds right, but that said, I think it’s possible Trump won’t “move the mountain” at all. He’s a lazy fuck, for one thing, an obese, 74-year-old man with a poor diet and habits. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself, so it’s hard to imagine him putting serious effort into grooming a successor. From Trump’s perspective, even Ivanker is just a reflection of his own greatness, not really a separate person with ideas of her own.

So, absent any credible sluices to channel it forward, maybe Trumpism just stagnates, like a fetid bog, while the country surges past it. Maybe we’ll be living in such a different reality three years from now that the thought of GOP primary contenders aping Trump will seem preposterous. I don’t know about you, but that possibility cheers me up a bit.

Open thread.

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Data quality, marginals and COVID

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The COVID Tracking Project is showing a significant drop in reported new COVID cases with the seven day moving average peaking at about 213,000 new cases per day on December 17th down to 178,000 new cases per day on the 7 day moving average on December 29th.

This is great news if it is not a data quality problem?

There is a pretty good chance that this is a data quality problem and it is a predictable data quality problem. We had a huge and well predicted discontinuity event that is likely messing up the data. Christmas happened. Testing dropped by at least 15% in the same time period.

We see this notably in North Carolina data. On 12/28, only 19,000 tests were reported back to the state with 3,888 people reported as positive on that day as well. On 12/21 (to control for day of the week seasonality) 4479 people were reported as newly positive on ~37,500 tests. Case counts went down significantly even as positivity rates increased by a lot in North Carolina.

What does this mean?

We have a change in the marginal person getting tested. The over-exaggerated version of the story is that in mid-December, people who even thought they might have had an exposure or the sniffles or any reason to suspect that they might have COVID got tested. The positivity rate in North Carolina would still be high which implies a lot of people who are positive and infectious but non-symptomatic were out and about, but the marginal person getting tested had a good probabilty of being negative.

This story changed. Very few people got tested on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or the day after Christmas. Again, exaggerating, but the only people getting tested on these days were already running a fever and hacking up a lung. The marginal person getting tested over Christmas is far more likely to be positive. This is driving up the positivity rate significantly even as the reported case count is dropping because the drop in testing overwhelms the increase in positivity rate. We are likely seeing a lot more people with either no or modest symptoms walking around without knowledge that they are positive right now.

We are likely to get another testing drought between New Years Eve through January 4th as people tend to not get tested as frequently on weekends plus the holiday will reduce testing. We probably won’t get good data that is comparable to mid-December data until the second week of January.

We do have some data that is higher quality. Our hospitalization data is decent. It has two major challenges. First, hospitalizations lag infections. Today’s record hospitalizations are a reflection of case counts in mid-December. Secondly, hospital admission data also has a changing marginal problem. When there is plentiful capacity, a patient who is a flip a coin decision to admit or keep for another night instead of discharging to home is probably a lot healthier than the patient who is a flip a coin decision to use one of the last three available beds in fifty miles. Patients who would have been admitted when daily hospitalizations were only running at 30,000, 40,000, 50,0000 hospitalizations per day probably are not be admitted when hospitalizations are running at 110,000+ hospitalizations per day. Sewage system data is reliable and near real time. But it is not universal.

So when we think about COVID data, we need to know about external shocks that change the nature of the current marginal in relationship to the previous marginal and also think about lags. Thinking about the quality of the data and its quirks helps with making effective interpretation.

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