Up From Facebook

  The pandemic has confronted many folks with a novel sort of isolation. Being alone with yourself makes introspection and self-awareness difficult to escape, and for many people, that's what they spend a lot of their waking hours doing-escaping themselves. There are many paths to introspection and self-awareness that don't require involuntary exile or quarantine. Regardless, developing your own compass is an important life skill that serves well in the age of plague. "In other words, you’ve got to quit seeing solitude as an experiment in subtraction, and start seeing it as an experiment in addition. What you’re adding is your self — a true self, because at last it’s you who’s building it, not anyone else. You’re no longer looking to other people for their attention or approval. The psychologist D.W. Winnicott often drew a distinction between the “authentic self” and the “false self.” Without realizing it, he said, we look to other people to scaffold our sense of who we ar...

  I've spent some time in the medieval city of Halle, in the former "East Germany." It is near to Wittenberg, where Martin Luther lived. Off the Marktplatz in Halle is a street called Grassweg. The name comes from a time when the Black Plague arrived in Halle, and some people were infected in the houses along the street. In response, the street was bricked up. Years later, when the bricks were removed, grass had grown up among the cobblestones. I've seen several posts on FB by people who object to masking and other public safety precautions, saying they "trust God." This isn't trusting God, this is tempting God, something the Bible forbids. Here's Martin Luther: "Others sin on the right hand. They are much too rash and reckless, tempting God and disregarding everything which might counteract death and the plague. They disdain the use of medicines; they do not avoid places and persons infected by the plague, but lightheartedly make sport of it an...

  "Part of what I’m getting at here is that to be a citizen you have to care about your country and you have to care about the people who make it up, but in a capitalistic society like ours, market logic shapes our relationship to nearly everything, including and especially people. We’re not part of some shared project. We’re all competing for money, for power, for status, for whatever advantages we can get. How do you build a viable conception of citizenship on that foundation?" https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22150375/america-consumerism-shopping-ethan-porter-the-consumer-citizen?fbclid=IwAR3SdtWqqvxrXfovg0vYgWQMYMCd7_myK9SxVJexaKWNVLUGtYxp-h4f8bg

Under Stalin, every aspect of life in the USSR--agriculture, the military, science, etc--was subordinated to the Party. In an example close to my heart, Russian geneticists were world leaders until the political hack, Trofim Lysenko, convinced Stalin that his phony model for crop improvement conformed to Party dogma and authentic genetics was sabotage. As a result, geneticists in the USSR were imprisoned or shot, and millions of peasants starved. Flash forward to the pandemic in the Trump administration. Messaging from scientists at the CDC didn't conform with the WH message, so the science had to be replaced by Party propaganda. While only tens of thousands may have died unnecessarily, and no CDC scientists were jailed or shot, the Trump administration, like the Stalin administration, subordinated science to politics and the control by Party hacks. Shame. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/former-cdc-staffers-kellyanne-conway-ivanka-trump-meddling?fbclid=IwAR3q-hkBYco2lrMCBaM6qDK...

  I see where an editorial in the Wall Street Journal says folks should stop calling the future First Lady "Dr. Jill Biden" because the term should be reserved for physicians. This is facially nonsense, as the honorific "Doctor" began as a term of respect for "teacher." But, of course, the real reason the WSJ thinks this is worth column inches in the age of the COVID plague is because Jill Biden is a Democrat and a woman. "It was not until the late 1500s that the term “doctor” began being with any regularity [applied] to physicians, who had until that time been called “leech.” So historically speaking, educators like Dr. Jill Biden had first dibs on the title “doctor.” The medical doctors saved my life, and I love them, but they got the title second hand. It isn’t, of course, that Epstein is just wrong about the history of usage. (Or rather, he is being a contrarian, since he surely knows that history and chose to disregard it). It is that he is being...

  Emergency use of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine has been approved in the UK. Similar approval for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in the US is imminent. There are, of course, important unanswered questions about all the vaccines. Here’s the tl;dr summary from the Nature link below. If you want to find out the current status of these questions, you know what to do. • Do the vaccines prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2? • How long will vaccine-induced immunity last? • How well do the vaccines work in groups such as older people and children? • How do the vaccines stack up against each other? • Could the virus evolve to evade immunity given by vaccines? • How will scientists monitor for long-term safety concerns? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03441-8

  Bar owners and patrons are complaining that COVID-19 shut-downs are an infringement on their freedom. They believe that they should be free to risk suffering or death. Setting aside the fact that if you get infected, you will likely spread the disease to others who didn't go to the bar, there's another strange hypocrisy at work here. For decades, bars and restaurants have been shut down for public health reasons (unsafe food storage, vermin, lack of cleanliness). I have yet to see a bar owner or group of patrons assert their freedom to get food poisoning. And yet, they would have a stronger case than the COVID-19 protesters: if you get food poisoning, nobody can catch it from you. As Yul Brenner used to say in The King and I, "It's a puzzlement." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/nyregion/staten-island-bar-owner.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR1AJF04y7gLtrAOIPVEgZrnHDnSH2XuqnZgdqrRhAJhulVkOUegMwi_gQg

  I doubt seriously that most Americans will be vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2 before fall of 2021. So next year at this time, I predict (write it down) that daily cases and daily deaths will be way down compared to this year. But we're easily six months away from any discussion of relaxing masking and social distancing. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-early-waves-of-vaccination-may-not-be-enough-to-halt-covids-spread?fbclid=IwAR0RhLSUY2jsiQgxB0CmbUaorB2OWomMXm7VZ_uaSt61LXqqPJG_HZKaTow

 " A good place to start would be helping consumers understand what automotive tech can and cannot do. Today’s “advanced driving-assistance systems” include functionality like lane-keep assistance (keeping a car between the lines on the road) and automatic emergency braking that reduces the need for driver engagement in certain road conditions. Often seen as a step toward fully autonomous vehicles, ADAS nevertheless requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road and be ready to turn the steering wheel or apply the brakes if a problem arises. That kind of vigilance doesn’t jibe with a term like “Autopilot,” which suggests a vehicle that can operate independently. Indeed,  European regulators  bluntly concluded that “Tesla’s system name Autopilot is inappropriate as it suggests full automation.” Musk disagrees; he  recently called  the idea of changing it “idiotic.” As misleading as “Autopilot” may be, the term “Full Self-Driving” seems even worse. “The real name...