Walter Williams: Language and Thought

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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Seventeenth-century poet and intellect John Milton predicted, “When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation.” Gore Vidal, his 20th-century intellectual successor, elaborated saying: “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate.” Sloppy language permits people to get away with speaking and doing all manner of destructive nonsense without being challenged.

Let’s look at the concept of “white privilege,” the notion that white people have benefited in American history relative to, and at the expense of, “people of color.” It appears to be utter nonsense to suggest that poor and destitute Appalachian whites have white privilege. How can one tell if a person has white privilege? One imagines that the academic elite, who coined the term, refer to whites of a certain socioeconomic status such as living in the suburbs with the privilege of high-income amenities. But here is a question: Do Nigerians in the U.S. have white privilege? As reported by the New York Post this summer, 17% of all Nigerians in this country hold master’s degrees, 4% hold a doctorate and 37% hold a bachelor’s degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey. By contrast, 19% of whites have a bachelor’s degree, 8% have master’s degrees and 1% have doctorates.

What about slavery? Colleges teach our young people that the U.S. became rich on the backs of free black labor. That is utter nonsense. Slavery does not have a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South and outlawed in most of the North. I doubt that anyone would claim that the antebellum South was rich, and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was outlawed: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Speaking of holding people accountable for slavery, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help. There would not have been much black slavery in the U.S., and the western hemisphere in general, without Africans exchanging other Africans to European slave traders at the coast for guns, mirrors, cloths, foreign alcoholic beverages and gold dust. Congressional Democratic lawmakers have called for a commission to study reparations, but I have not heard calls to hold the true perpetrators of American slavery accountable. Should we demand that congressional Democrats haul representatives of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Muslim states before Congress to condemn them for their role in American slavery and demand they pay reparations?

Some of the greatest language mischief is related to terms such as racial “disparities,” “gaps” and “disproportionality.” These terms are taken as signs of injustice that must be corrected. The median income of women is less than that of men. Black and Hispanic students are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students. There are other race disparities and gaps all over the place. For example, blacks are 13% of the population but 80% of professional basketball players and 66% of professional football players, and on top of that, they’re some of the most highly paid players. To be consistent with leftist ideology, those numbers seem to suggest that there is some kind of injustice toward Asian, white and Hispanic basketball and football players. But before we run off thinking that everything is hunky-dory for black players in football, how many times have you seen a black player kick an extra point in professional football?

What should be done to address these and other gross disparities? How can we make basketball, football, dressage and ice hockey, classical music concert attendance, not to mention incarceration, look more like America? In general, we should ignore disproportionality. There is no evidence, anywhere in the world, suggesting that people sort out in any activity according to their numbers in the general population.

The best thing that we can do is clean up our language. That will have the added benefit of straightening out our thinking so that we do not permit leftists to get away with making us feel guilty and believing in utter nonsense.

Where are Black Lives Matter and the Far Left headed?

Here is Walter Williams - on target again.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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Paul Kengor is a professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He has just published “The Devil and Karl Marx,” a careful look at the diabolical side of Karl Marx. The book has come out during an important time in our history since so many Americans, particularly our youth, have fallen for the seductive siren song of socialism taught to them by the academic elite.

“The Black Book of Communism,” edited by Stephane Courtois details the Marxist-Leninist death toll in the 20th century. Here is the breakdown: USSR, 20 million deaths; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million; North Korea and Cambodia, 2 million each; Eastern Europe, 1 million; and about 3.5 million in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan. These figures understate those detailed by Professor R.J. Rummel in “Death by Government.” He finds that from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. From 1949 to 1976, Communist China’s Mao Zedong regime was responsible for the death of as many as 78 million of its own citizens.

The world’s intellectual elite readily focus on Adolph Hitler’s murderous atrocities but ignore those of the world’s socialists. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country. They often marched around singing his praises and waving his little red book, “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined. Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. Keep in mind that one does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one must believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

Kengor highlights another feature of Marx ignored by his followers. This feature of Marxism should be disturbing to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who said that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists.” I wonder whether she shares Marx’s views on race. Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, was viewed as having Negro blood in his veins. Marx denigrated him as “Negillo” and “The Gorilla.”

Marx had similar hate for Jews. He referred to his fellow socialist labor organizer Ferdinand Lasalle as a “greasy Jew,” “the little kike,” “water polack jew” and “Jewish n——r.” In 1844, Marx wrote an essay titled “The Jewish Question” in which he asks, “What is the worldly cult of the Jew?” His answer: “Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money.”

Down through the years, leftists made a moral equivalency between communist/socialist totalitarianism and democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, “Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.” Walter Duranty called Stalin “the greatest living statesman … a quiet, unobtrusive man.” George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao’s China and praised Mao Zedong and the Chinese economic system. Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmy Carter’s China expert, complained that “America is doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values,” and urged us to “borrow ideas and solutions” from China.

Kengor does a yeoman’s job of highlighting the evils of Marxism. The question is whether Americans will heed his lesson or fall prey to the false promises and live the horrors of socialism. By the way, while Sweden and Denmark have a large welfare system, they have market economies — not socialist economies, as some leftists claim.

Michelle Viscusi – Team GLOCK

 

COVID-19: What the Herd Immunity perspective leaves out

 Tyler Cowen get it right.  How long immunity lasts is an important variable that is not reflected in most of the discussions about second waves.

Here is the link to his comment.

Spiritual Poverty

 Walter Williams gets it right again.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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In matters of race and other social phenomena, there is a tendency to believe that what is seen today has always been. For black people, the socioeconomic progress achieved during my lifetime, which started in 1936, exceeded anyone’s wildest dreams. In 1936, most black people lived in gross material poverty and racial discrimination. Such poverty and discrimination is all but nonexistent today. Government data, assembled by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, shows that “the average American family … identified as poor by the Census Bureau, lives in an air-conditioned, centrally heated house or apartment … They have a car or truck. (Indeed, 43% of poor families own two or more cars.)” The household “has at least one widescreen TV connected to cable, satellite, or a streaming service, a computer or tablet with internet connection, and a smartphone. (Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones.” On top of this, blacks today have the same constitutional guarantees as everyone else, which is not to say that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated.

The poverty we have today is spiritual poverty. Spiritual poverty is an absence of what traditionally has been known as various human virtues. Much of that spiritual poverty is a result of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state. When some people know they can have children out of wedlock, drop out of school and refuse employment and suffer little consequence and social sanction, one should not be surprised to see the growth of such behavior. Today’s out-of-wedlock births among blacks is over 70%, but in the 1930s, it was 11%. During the same period, out-of-wedlock births among whites was 3%; today, it is over 30%. It is fashionable and politically correct to blame today’s 21% black poverty on racial discrimination. That is nonsense. Why? The poverty rate among black husband-and-wife families has been in the single digits for more than two decades. Can anyone produce evidence that racists discriminate against black female-headed families but not black husband-and-wife families?

For most people, education is one of the steppingstones out of poverty, and it has been a steppingstone for many black people. Today, decent education is just about impossible at many big-city public schools where violence, disorder, disrespect and assaults on teachers are routine. The kind of disrespectful and violent behavior observed in many predominantly black schools is entirely new. Some have suggested that such disorder is part of black culture, but that is an insulting lie. Black people can be thankful that double standards, and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility, were not broadly accepted during the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. There would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world’s most successful civil rights movement.

Many whites are ashamed, saddened and guilt-ridden by our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. They see that justice and compensation for that ugly history is to hold their fellow black Americans accountable to the kind of standards and conduct they would never accept from whites. That behavior and conduct is relatively new. Meet with black people in their 70s or older, even liberal politicians such as Charles Rangel (age 90), and Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (85), Alcee Hastings (83) and Maxine Waters (82). Ask them whether their parents would have tolerated their assaulting and cursing of teachers or any other adult. I bet you the rent money their parents and other parents of that era would not have accepted the grossly disrespectful behavior seen today among many black youngsters who use foul language and racial epithets at one another. These older blacks will tell you that, had they behaved that way, they would have felt serious pain in their hind parts. If blacks of yesteryear would not accept such self-destructive behavior, why should today’s blacks accept it?

Black people have made tremendous gains over the years that came as a result of hard work, sacrifice and a no-nonsense approach to life. Recovering those virtues can provide solutions to many of today’s problems.

The coming financial disaster

 John Cochrane gets it right that debt matters, in this case the US debt.

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Last week, the U.S. passed a milestone — US federal debt in private hands exceeded 100% of GDP. But does all this debt matter, or is worrying about debt passé?

This debate has been going on among economists for a while. One does not need to go to the incoherence of "modern monetary theory" to find support for the view that debt has few consequences. Olivier Blanchard, of MIT and the IMF, in his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association, (excellent summary here) declared that “there may be no fiscal costs” of additional debt. The core of his argument is that the interest rate on government debt may be lower than the growth rate of the economy so the US can roll over debt forever.

Larry Summers, ex treasury secretary, President of Harvard, and adviser to presidents, surely the preeminent policy economist of our generation, has advocated that additional debt-financed spending may have so strong a multiplier as to pay for itself. (Paper here) As a result “expansionary fiscal policies may well reduce long-run debt-financing burdens," a super-Keynesian version of the Laffer curve

(I don’t mean to pick on Blanchard and Summers — they are only superbly distinguished representatives of widely held views.)

Unlike MMT, these are logically consistent possibilities. But are they right?

The interest rate on government debt is indeed slightly lower than good guesses of the economy’s growth rate, as sadly low as the latter is, so that if we roll over debt with no additional deficits, the debt to GDP ratio will slowly decline and the US can indeed run this slow-rolling Ponzi scheme.

But how long will this happy circumstance of ultra-low interest rates continue? More to the point, how scaleable is this opportunity? Bond market investors lend 100% of GDP to the US government at 1% interest. Will they lend 200% of GDP at the same low interest rate, or will they start to require higher interest rates? A government that finances itself only with money and no debt need not pay back the money -- but, obviously, cannot double the opportunity.

What happens when, rather than grow out of a given debt, the US piles on larger and larger debt to GDP ratios each year? The analysis is about sustainability of a large, but steady debt to GDP ratio. It does not justify a debt to GDP ratio that grows 10 percentage points per year. At what debt to GDP ratio must the party stop and the growing out of it begin?

Blanchard recognizes these limits are out there somewhere, and that debt crowds out private investment. But just where the limits are is less clear. That finding the limits will be unpleasant is clear.

Summers’ view is likewise limited to a period of “secular stagnation” with perennially deficient demand, sticky prices and wages, and the other requirements of extreme Keynesianism. Are we in such a period, or is covid a supply shock? Was the economy really suffering lack of demand when unemployment hit 50 year lows last February?

Washington knows no such sophistication, but our politicians have grasped the logical implications of the proposition that debt does not matter with more clarity than have economists.

The notion that debt matters, that spending must be financed sooner or later by taxes on someone, and that those taxes will be economically destructive, has vanished from Washington discourse on both sides of the aisle. The covid response resembles a sequence of million-dollar bets by non-socially distanced drunks at a secretly reopened bar: I’ll spend a trillion dollars! No, I’ll spend two trillion dollars! That anyone has to pay for this is un-mentioned. Well, perhaps nobody does have to pay.

And who is to blame them, really? Markets offer 1% long-term interest rates. Blowout spending financed by the Fed printing money — which is no different from debt — has resulted in no inflation so far. Faced with the deep concerns of current voters, worry that our children and grandchildren might have to pay off debt is not particularly salient. They’re either in the basement playing video games or out protesting for the end of capitalism anyway. Politicians will take the cheap money as long as markets are happy to provide it.

The economists, even the modern monetary theorists, envision debt issued to finance worthy investments, or valuable spending, all undertaken with a careful green eyeshade approach. Washington has figured out the logical conclusion of the idea that Federal debt doesn’t matter, in a way these economists have not: If debt and money printing have no fiscal cost, why be careful about how you spend money? Send checks to voters. Why not? It’s costless. No boondoggle project is objectionable. Send billions to prop up dying businesses. Why not? It’s costless. Why bother fixing the post office? Send them another $25 billion. Or $100.

Deeper: Why should citizens have to pay back debts if the Federal government does not have to do so? Bail out student loans. Bail out bankrupt states and locals and their pensions. Cancel the rent. Cancel the mortgage. Why should anyone have to pay any debt if the Federal government has access to a money machine? Why work? Why should the federal government not just keep printing money and sending it to us? Other countries are not so lucky as we are. Why should emerging markets pay back debt if the US does not have to? Bail them out.

Why indeed should anyone pay taxes? Here Stephanie Kelton, MMT proponent, has followed the logic. The only reason to charge taxes at all, in her view, is to expropriate the wealthy to rob them of political power.

These are inescapable logical conclusions of the view that federal debt has no fiscal cost. If you’re uncomfortable with the end of the trip, perhaps you should revisit the assumption from which it inexorably follows. At least, you recognize that the opportunity to borrow with little fiscal cost is limited, so should be preserved.

Advocates point to WWII. It is true, that the US exited an even greater debt to GDP ratio. It was not painless. Growth higher than interest rates was part of it, but not all. Two bouts of inflation, in the late 1940s and in the 1970s devalued much debt. The US ran steady primary (excluding interest costs) surpluses from the 1940s through the mid 1970s. Spending was low in the pre-entitlement economy, and nobody was totting up hundreds of trillions in unfunded promises. The war, and its spending, was over. Statutory personal taxes and actual corporate taxes were high. Financial repression and closed international capital markets kept interest rates on government bonds low, and deprived Americans of better investment opportunities and our and the world’s economies much needed investment capital. And we had an international debt crisis in the early 1970s, prompting the abandonment of Bretton woods and depreciation of the dollar.

In short, the US grew out of WWII debt by not borrowing any more, by decades of fiscal probity, and by strong supply-side growth in a deregulated economy. We have none of these reassurances going forward. And this, and the UK exit from Napoleonic War debt in the 1800s by starting the industrial revolution are about the only historical examples of a semi-successful repayment of this much debt. Otherwise, the history of large sovereign debts is one long sorry tale of default, inflation, devaluation, and consequent financial chaos. The UK did not exit WWII debt successfully, leading to crisis after crisis, and everyone else did worse.

Still, what should we be afraid of? The vision of grandchildren saddled with taxes, or even just unable to borrow more while the economy sits at its limit, of, say, 200% debt to GDP, is indeed not a salient brake to spending.


hat is not the danger. The danger the US faces the danger we should repeat and keep in mind, is a debt crisis. We print our own money, so the result may be a sharp inflation that wipes away the value of debt rather than an even more disruptive default, but the consequences will be almost as dire.

Imagine that 5 or even 10 years from now we have another crisis, which we surely will. It might be another, worse, pandemic; a war involving china, Russia or the Middle East. Imagine the US follows its present trends of partisan government dysfunction, so an impeachment is going on, a contested election, and even militias roaming the streets of still boarded up cities. Add a huge economic recession, but unreformed spending promises.

At this point, the US has, say, 150% debt to GDP. It needs to borrow another $5 - $10 trillion, or get people to hold that much more newly-printed money, to bail out once again, and pay everyone’s bills for a while. It will need another $10 trillion or so to roll over maturity debt. At some point bond investors see the end coming, as they did for Greece, and refuse. Not only must the US then inflate or default, but the firehouse of debt relief, bailout and stimulus that everyone expects is absent, together with our capacity for military or public health spending to meet the shock that sparks the crisis.

Yes, I've warned about this before, and no, it hasn't happened yet. Well, if you live in California you live on an earthquake fault. That the big one hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it never will.

No, interest rates do not signal such problems. (Alan Blinder, covering such matters in the Wall Street Journal, "if the U.S. Treasury starts to supply more bonds than the world's investors demand, the markets will warn us with higher interest rates and a sagging dollar. No such yellow lights are flashing.) They never do. Greek interest rates were low right up until they weren’t. Interest rates did not signal the inflation of the 1970s, or the disinflation of the 1980s. Lehman borrowed at low rates until it didn’t. Nobody expects a debt crisis, or it would have already happened.

We cannot tell when the conflagration will come. But we can remove the kindling and gasoline lying around. Reform long-term spending promises in line with long run revenues. Reform the tax code to raise money with less damage to the economy. And today, spend only as if someone has to pay it back. Because someone will have to pay it back.

Blanchard concludes with “public debt.. can be used but it should be used right.” I agree. We are in a crisis, and thoughtful spending with borrowed or printed money is necessary. (How about a test a week for every American?) But keep constantly in mind, it will be paid back, steadily or chaotically.

There really is no argument. Whether a steady debt/GDP ratio can life with small steady primary deficits, rather than small steady primary surpluses is not the interesting question. There is a limit, a debt/GDP beyond which markets will not lend. On this, I think, we all agree. There is a finite fiscal capacity. Even though in theory the r<g argument would allow a 1,000% debt to GDP ratio, or 10,000%, at some point the party stops. The closer we are to that limit, the closer we are to a real crisis when we need that fiscal capacity and it is no longer there.

Fatality rates for COVID-19 may be wildly exaggerated

 Here is Dr. Malcolm Kendrick' analysis of COVID-19 statistics and the quoted fatality rates.

MK shows how the "experts" can get things wildly wrong, including the modeling that is used to guide Government micromanagement of the pandemic.

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COVID – why terminology really, really matters

[And the consequences of getting it horribly wrong]

When is a case not a case?

Since the start of the COVID pandemic I have watched almost everyone get mission critical things wrong. In some ways this is not surprising. Medical terminology is horribly imprecise, and often poorly understood. In calmer times such things are only of interest to research geeks like me. Were they talking about CVD, or CHD?

However, right now, it really, really, matters. Specifically, with regards to the term COVID ‘cases.’

Every day we are informed of a worrying rise in COVID cases in country after country, region after region, city after city. Portugal, France, Leicester, Bolton. Panic, lockdown, quarantine. In France the number of reported cases is now as high as it was at the peak of the epidemic. Over 5,000, on the first of September.

But what does this actually mean? Just to keep the focus on France for a moment. On March 26th, just before their deaths peaked, there were 3,900 hundred ‘cases’. Fourteen days later, there were 1,400 deaths. So, using a widely accepted figure, which is a delay of around two weeks between diagnoses and death, 36% of cases died.

In stark contrast, on August 16th, there were 3,000 cases. Fourteen days later there were 26 deaths. Which means that, in March, 36% of ‘cases’ died. In August 0.8% of ‘cases’ died. This, in turn, means that COVID was 45 times as deadly in March, as it was in August?

This seems extremely unlikely. In fact, it is so unlikely that it is, in fact, complete rubbish. What we have is a combination of nonsense figures which, added together, create nonsense squared. Or nonsense to the power ten.

To start with, we have the mangling of the concept of a ‘case’.

Previously, in the world of infectious diseases, it has been accepted that a ‘case’ represents someone with symptoms, usually severe symptoms, usually severe enough to be admitted to hospital. Here, from Wikipedia…. yes, I know, but on this sort of stuff they are a good resource.

‘In epidemiology, a case fatality rate (CFR) — sometimes called case fatality risk or disease lethality — is the proportion of deaths from a certain disease compared to the total number of symptomatic people diagnosed with the disease.’ 1

Note the word symptomatic i.e. someone with symptoms.

However, now we stick a swab up someone’s nose, who feels completely well, or very mildly ill. We find that they have some COVID particles lodged up there, and we call them a case of COVID. Sigh, thud!

A symptomless, or even mildly symptomatic positive swab is not a case. Never, in recorded history, has this been true. However, now we have an almost unquestioned acceptance that a positive swab represents a case of COVID. This is then parroted on all the news channels as if it were gospel.

I note that, at last, some people are beginning to question how it can be that, whilst cases are going up and up, deaths are going down, and down.

This is even the case in Sweden, which seems to be the final bastion of people with functioning brains. However, even they seem surprised by this dichotomy. In the first two weeks of August they had 4,152 positive swabs. Yet, in the last two weeks of August, they had a mere 14 deaths (one a day, on average).

That represents 1 death for every 300 positive swabs or, as the mainstream media insists on calling them, positive ‘cases’. Which, currently, represent a case fatality rate of 0.33%. Just to compare that with something similar, the case fatality rate of swine flu (HIN1), was 0.5%. 2

Thus, lo and behold, COVID is a less severe infection than swine flu – the pandemic that never was. That’s what these figures appear to tell us. They tell us almost exactly the same in France where they ‘appear’ to have a current case fatality rate of 0.4%.

On the other hand, if you look at the figures from around the world, they are very different. As I write this there have been, according to the WHO, 25 million cases and 850,000 deaths. That is a case fatality rate of more than 3%. Ten times as high.

Why are these figures so all over the place? It is because we are using horribly inaccurate terminology. We are comparing apples with pomegranates to tell us how many bananas we have. Our experts are, essentially, talking gibberish, and the mainstream media is lapping it up. They are defining asymptomatic swabs as cases, and no-one is calling them out on it. Why?

Because… because they are frightened of looking stupid? Primarily, I believe, because they also have no idea what a case might actually be So, it all sounds quite reasonable to them.

The good news

However, moving on from that nonsense, there is some extremely good news buried in here. Which I am going to try and explain. It goes as follows.

At the start of the epidemic, the only people being tested were those who were being admitted to hospital, who were seriously ill. Many of them died. Which is why, in France, there was this very sharp, initial case fatality rate of 35%. In the UK the initial case fatality rate was I think 14%. Last time I looked at the UK figures, the case fatality was 5%, and falling fast.

This fall has occurred, and will occur everywhere in the World, because as you increase your testing, you pick up more and more people with less severe symptoms. People who are far less likely to die. The more you test, the more the case fatality rate falls.

It falls even more dramatically when you start to test people who have no symptoms at all. In fact, as you broaden your testing net, something else very important happens. You gradually move from looking at the case fatality rate to the infection fatality rate.

The infection fatality rate is the measure of how many people who are infected [even those without symptoms, or very mild symptoms] who then die. This is the critical figure to know because it gives you an accurate assessment of the total number of deaths you are likely to see.

IFR x population of a country x % of population infected = total number of deaths (total mortality)

So, where have we got to. Well, although the case fatality rate in the UK still currently stands at 5%, because it is dragged up by the 14% rate we had at the start. If we look at the more recent figures things have changed very dramatically.

In the first two weeks of August there were 13,996 positive swabs in the UK. In the second two weeks of August there were 129 deaths. If you consider every positive swab to be a case, this represents a case fatality rate of 0.9%. Around one fifteenth of that seen at the start.

• I think you can clearly see a direction of travel here.
• At the start on the pandemic we had a, brief, 35% fatality rate in France
• It was 14% in the UK at the start
• It now sits at 5% in the UK – over the whole pandemic
• In August, in the UK, it was down to 0.9%
• It is currently 0.47% in Germany
• It is currently 0.4% in France
• It is currently 0.33% in Sweden

It is falling, falling, everywhere. Where does it end up, this hybrid case/infection fatality rate? Remember, we are still only testing a fraction of the population, so we are missing the majority of people who have been infected, mainly those who do not have symptoms. Which means that these rates must fall further, as they always do in any pandemic.

To quote the Centre for Evidence Base Medicine on the matter:

‘In Swine flu, the IFR (infection fatality rate) ended up as 0.02%, fivefold less than the lowest estimate during the outbreak (the lowest estimate was 0.1% in the 1st ten weeks of the outbreak).’ 3

The best place to estimate where we may finally end up with COVID, is with the country that has tested the most people, per head of population. This is Iceland. To quote the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine once more:

‘In Iceland, where the most testing per capita has occurred, the IFR lies somewhere between 0.03% and 0.28%.’ 3

Sitting in the middle of 0.03% and 0.28% is 0.16%. As you can see, Iceland, having tested more people than anywhere else, has the lowest IFR of all. This is not a coincidence. This is an inevitable result of testing more people.

I am going to make a prediction that, in the end, we will end up with an IFR of somewhere around 0.1%. Which is about the same as severe flu pandemics we have had in the past. Remember that figure. It is one in a thousand.

It may surprise you to know that I am not the only person to have made this exact same prediction. On the 28th February, yes that far back, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD (A.S.F., H.C.L.); and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta. 4

In this paper ‘Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted’ they stated the following:

‘On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate (my underline) may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.’

A case fatality rate considerably less than 1%. Their words, not mine. As they also added, ‘the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.’

At this point, you may well be asking. Why the hell did we lockdown if COVID was believed to be no more serious than influenza? Right from the start by the most influential infectious disease organisations in the World.

It is because of the mad mathematical modellers. The academic epidemiologists. Neil Ferguson, and others of his ilk. When they were guessing (sorry estimating, sorry modelling) the impact of COVID they used a figure of approximately one per cent as the infection fatality rate. Not the case fatality rate. In so doing, they overestimated the likely impact of COVID by, at the very least, ten-fold.

How could this possibly have happened?

When they put their carefully constructed model together on the 16th of March, if they had been reading the research, they must have been aware that they were looking at a maximum case fatality rate of just over 1% in China, right at the start, where the figures are always at their highest.

Which means that, unless COVID was going to turn out nearly 100% fatal, we could never get anywhere near 1%, for the infection fatality rate. Even Ebola only kills 50%.

But they went with it, they went with 1%. Actually, Imperial College reduced it slightly to 0.9%, for reasons that are opaque.

From this, all else flowed.

If the INFECTION fatality rate truly were 0.9%, and 80% of the population of the UK became infected, there would have been/could have been, around 500,000 deaths.

0.9% x 80% x 67million = 482,000

LOCKDOWN

However, if the case fatality rate is around 1%, then the infection fatality rate will be about one tenth of this, maybe less. So, we would see around 50,000 deaths, about the same as was seen in previous bad flu pandemics.

DO NOT LOCKDOWN

What Imperial College London did was to use a model that overestimated the infection fatality rate by a factor of ten.

We now know, as the IFR rates of various countries falls and falls, that the Imperial College estimated IFR was completely wrong. The UK, for example, has seen 42,000 deaths so far, which is 0.074% of population. The US has seen about 200,000 deaths 0.053%. Sweden, which did not lockdown down, has seen about 6,000 deaths, which is an infection fatality rate of 0.06%. All three countries are opening up and opening up. Whilst the ‘cases’ are rising and rising, the deaths continue to fall. They are, to all intents and purposes, flatlining.

In Iceland it is around 0.16% and falling. In other words…

Stop panicking – it’s over

Whilst everyone is panicking about the ever-increasing number of cases, we should be celebrating them. They are demonstrating, very clearly, that COVID is far, far, less deadly then was feared. The Infection Fatality Rate is most likely going to end up around 0.1%, not 1%.

So yes, it does seem that ‘the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.’

Wise words, wise words indeed. Words that were written by one Anthony S Fauci on the 28th of February 2020. If you haven’t heard of him, look him up.

Critically though, eleven days after this, he rather blotted his copybook, because he went on to say this “The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent. This (COVID) has a mortality rate of 10 times that. That’s the reason I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.” 5

The mortality rate Dr Fauci? Could it possibly be that he failed to understand that there is no such thing as a mortality rate? Did he mean the case fatality rate, or the infection fatality rate? If he meant the Infection mortality rate of influenza, he was pretty much bang on. If he meant the case fatality rate, he was wrong by a factor of ten.

The reality is that, no matter what Fauci went on to say, severe influenza has a case fatality rate of 1%, and so does COVID. They also have approximately the same infection fatality fate of 0.1%.

It seems that Dr Fauci just got mixed up with the terminology. Because in his Journal article eleven days earlier, he did state… ‘This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza… [and here is the kicker at the end] (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).’

You see, he did say the case fatality rate of influenza was approximately 0.1%. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong… wrong.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. With influenza, Dr Fauci, the CDC, his co-authors, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health and the New England Journal of Medicine got case fatality rate and infection fatality rate mixed up with influenza. Easy mistake to make. Could have done it myself. But didn’t.

You want to know where Imperial College London really got their 1% infection fatality rate figure from? It seems clear that they got it from Anthony S Fauci and the New England Journal of Medicine. The highest impact journal in the world – which should have the highest impact proof-readers in the world. But clearly does not.

Imperial College then used this wrong NEJM influenza case fatality rate 0.1%. It seems that they then compared this 0.1% figure to the reported COVID case fatality rate, estimated to be 1% and multiplied the impact of COVID by ten – as you would. As you probably should.

So, we got Lockdown. The US used the Fauci figure and got locked down. The world used that figure and got locked down.

That figure just happens to be ten times too high.

I know it is going to be virtually impossible to walk the world back from having made such a ridiculous, stupid, mistake. There are so many reputations at stake. The entire egg production of the world will be required to supply enough yolk to cover appropriate faces.

Of course, it will be denied, absolutely, vehemently, angrily, that anyone got anything wrong. It will be denied that a simple error, a mix up between case fatality and infection fatality led to this. It will even more forcefully stated that COVID remains a deadly killer disease and that all Governments around the world have done exactly the right thing. The actions were right, the models were correct. We all did the RIGHT thing. Only those who are stupid, or incompetent cannot see it.

When wrong, shout louder, get angry, double-down, attack your critics in any way possible. Accuse them of being anti-vaxx, or something of the sort. Dig for the dirt. ‘How to succeed in politics 101, page one, paragraph one.’

However, just have a look, at the figures. Tell me where they are wrong – if you can. The truth is that this particular Emperor has no clothes on and is, currently, standing bollock naked, right in front of you. Hard to believe, but true.

I would like to thank Ronald B Brown for pointing out this catastrophic error, in his article ‘Public health lessons learned from biases in coronavirus mortality overestimation.’ 6

I had not spotted it. He did. All credit is his. I am simply drawing your attention to what has simply been – probably the biggest single mistake that has ever been made in the history of the world.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate

2: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(10)70120-1/fulltext#:~:text=Methods%20for%20estimating%20the%20case,a%20novel%2C%20emerging%20infectious%20disease.&text=To%20avoid%20similar%20underestimations%2C%20accounting,be%20about%200%C2%B75%25.

3: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/

4: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejme2002387

5: https://reason.com/2020/03/11/covid-19-mortality-rate-ten-times-worse-than-seasonal-flu-says-dr-anthony-fauci/

6: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/disaster-medicine-and-public-health-preparedness/article/public-health-lessons-learned-from-biases-in-coronavirus-mortality-overestimation/7ACD87D8FD2237285EB667BB28DCC6E9

COVID-19 and mRNA Vaccines – First Large Test for a New Approach

 From JAMA - a nice summary of current vaccine development.  The implications for COVID-19 and other diseases are immense.

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On January 10, Chinese researchers posted the novel coronavirus’ RNA sequence on a preprint server. Immediately, scientists who study genetic vaccines turned their efforts to the emerging pathogen that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). They knew that rapid response genetic platforms could shave precious weeks to months off development, crucial during a pandemic.

They were right. When the first US clinical trial for a vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) began just 66 days later, volunteers received mRNA-1273, a messenger RNA (mRNA) candidate codeveloped by biotechnology company Moderna, Inc and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

On July 27, based on encouraging early results, mRNA-1273 and another mRNA vaccine candidate, BNT162b2 from BioNTech and Pfizer, both entered phase 3 trials, which together will enroll an estimated 60 000 volunteers. The milestone came “at a remarkably rapid pace compared to the usual pace for vaccine preparation,” National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, said at a press briefing that day. Results could be available as early as this fall, NIH officials said.

Despite the unprecedented speed, mRNA vaccines are clinically unproven. No commercially available vaccines use the platform and, until now, it hasn’t been tested in large-scale human trials. With COVID-19, that’s all set to change. Experts said in interviews that if the technology pans out, the pandemic could help to usher in a new plug-and-play approach to vaccinology.

The Genetic Advantage

Current antiviral vaccine designs can be described as falling into 2 camps: protein based or gene based. Protein-based vaccines deliver the immune system–stimulating antigen to the body. This category includes whole-inactivated (killed) vaccines, as in the polio and flu shots, and subunit vaccines and virus-like particles, like in the hepatitis B and human papillomavirus vaccines.

Gene-based vaccines take a different tack. They carry the genetic instructions for the host’s cells to make the antigen, which more closely mimics a natural infection. In the case of coronaviruses, the antigen of interest is the surface spike protein the virus uses to bind and fuse with human cells. “You’re not giving them the protein—you’re giving them the genetic material that then instructs them how to make that spike protein, to which they make an antibody response that hopefully is protective,” University of Pennsylvania vaccinology professor Paul Offit, MD, explained in a JAMA livestream in June.

The approach isn’t entirely unfamiliar. In live-attenuated vaccines, like the measles, mumps, and rubella shot, weakened viruses incorporate their genetic instructions into host cells, causing the body to churn out viral copies that elicit antibody and T-cell responses. In newer gene-based designs—viral vector, DNA, and mRNA vaccines—scientists synthesize and insert genetic instructions from the pathogen of interest to induce immune responses.

The viral vector technique transports genetic information in a less harmful virus—often a common cold–causing adenovirus—that’s sometimes engineered so it can’t replicate in the host. DNA and mRNA vaccine designs deliver naked nucleic acids or, more recently, encapsulate them in a carrier nanoparticle. Within each of these versatile platforms, the same production and purification methods and manufacturing facilities can be used to make vaccines for different diseases.

These highly adaptable techniques were waiting in the wings when COVID-19 hit. “The people who jumped on this right away are the people who had vaccine platforms that were conducive for this that were simply sitting there,” said Louis Picker, MD, associate director of the Oregon Health & Science University’s Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute. “All they had to do is basically figure out what part of [the virus] they were going to put in the vaccine and then run with it.”

Thanks to research beginning in 2002 on the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus and then the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, which emerged a decade later, scientists knew to focus their initial attention on the novel coronavirus’ spike protein. They also already knew which genetic modifications would stabilize the spike in its “prefusion” configuration—important for a robust and safe antibody response—and those that would make the mRNA less inflammatory and therefore safer. They had also learned how to purify mRNA to rid it of contaminants and how to protect it from degrading too quickly in the body by encasing it in lipid carrier molecules. These delivery vehicles, already in use with therapeutic small interfering RNAs, also help mRNA cross the cell membrane and may even have an immune-stimulating adjuvant effect.

Many of these innovations weren’t possible until recently, according to Barney Graham, MD, PhD, deputy director of the NIAID Vaccine Research Center. “Over the last 10 years, vaccinology has just changed radically,” he said. “I’ve been doing this kind of work for a long time and the kinds of things that can be done now, the technologies available, the way we can understand things in a very detailed level is really stunning to me.”

Unlike conventional vaccines, mRNA vaccines aren’t grown in eggs or cells, a time-consuming and costly process. At their essence, these vaccines are simply chemicals catalyzed in test tube or a tank. This makes them easier to develop quickly and—at least theoretically—at scale, although they’ve never been mass-produced before.

“We were making RNA within a week or so” of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence being published, said Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, who researches mRNA vaccines at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. That speed propelled development: according to Weissman, both groups currently testing nucleic acid-based vaccines in phase 3 trials licensed his team’s mRNA formulation from the university.

Why mRNA?

As of August 20, thirty potential vaccines against COVID-19 were in clinical trials, with another 139 in preclinical development, including both gene- and protein-based candidates. But genetic approaches have a potential immunological advantage. In addition to eliciting antibodies and CD4+ helper T cells, they recruit CD8+ cytotoxic T cells, also known as killer T cells, through the major histocompatibility class I pathway.

According to Otto Yang, MD, an infectious disease researcher and clinician at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine, the body’s cells only display viral proteins on their surface through this pathway if those cells themselves have produced the proteins. “If you just inject a protein or inject a dead virus, it doesn’t get into that pathway and doesn't get displayed that way, and so the T cells don’t get stimulated,” he said.

Even among the gene-based platforms, distinct advantages exist. In cutting out the viral vector, both DNA and mRNA vaccines eliminate the risk of preexisting immunity against it, which can limit effectiveness. “If your immune system clears a vector before it will actually get into the cells, that’s a big problem,” Yang said. Such immunity could also be more common in some geographic areas than others, rendering a vectored vaccine more or less effective depending on the region.

Preexisting immunity could explain why a non–replicating viral vector COVID-19 candidate from CanSino Biologics Inc and several Chinese institutions elicited less-than-impressive neutralizing antibody levels in a phase 1 trial. Preexisting neutralizing antibodies to the vector, the human adenovirus 5, known as Ad5, ranges from up to 69% in the US to 80% in Africa. Of additional concern, Offit said in an August livestream, more than a decade ago, men with preexisting Ad5 immunity had an increased risk of acquiring HIV infection after receiving an experimental Ad5-vectored HIV vaccine.

To get around these issues, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, a non–replicating viral vector candidate in phase 3 trials from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, uses an adenovirus that infects chimpanzees instead of humans. But, it’s possible that cross-reacting preexisting immunity to human adenoviruses could still diminish the response.

According to Weissman, mRNA vaccines also have a leg up on DNA vaccines. In a DNA vaccine, the genetic material must first enter the host cell’s nucleus. From there, messenger RNA is created, which travels out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm, where protein is formed from it. However, genetic information can only enter the nucleus when the cell is dividing, making the process inefficient.

Researchers are trying to solve this problem using electric pulses to increase DNA uptake into cells at the time of vaccination. But the mRNA platform simply bypasses that step. “Ninety-five percent of cells that meet the RNA take it up and make protein, so it’s an incredibly efficient process,” Weissman said.

Proof Is in the Pudding

The first 4 COVID-19 vaccine developers with published clinical trial data all used either a non–replicating adenovirus or mRNA platform. The US government is betting on some of these new technologies. Under the auspices of its Operation Warp Speed vaccine development initiative, it has already purchased hundreds of millions of doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, mRNA-1273, BNT162b2, and an investigational non–replicating viral vector vaccine in early trials from Johnson & Johnson–owned Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, as well as other candidates. Doses should be standing by if or when any of these are approved.

All eyes are now on safety and effectiveness. Non–replicating viral vector vaccines, while a relatively recent approach, have been studied extensively in HIV and other disease trials. Janssen’s new Ebola vaccine regimen, which uses 2 different non–replicating viral vectors, received European authorization in July.

mRNA vaccines haven’t been clinically tested to the same extent, though. Researchers have studied investigational mRNA-based therapeutic antibodies and therapeutic cancer vaccines. But German firm CureVac and academic collaborators published phase 1 results from the first prophylactic mRNA vaccine clinical trial, for a candidate against rabies, less than 3 years ago.

Since then, potential mRNA vaccines against rabies, influenza, Zika, and a few other viruses have been studied in small, early-phase trials, many of which are still underway. In both rabies and influenza trials, the candidates stimulated promising but lower-than-expected neutralizing antibodies. Some moderate and severe injection site or systemic reactions were reported, although severe events were rare.

So far, in early COVID-19 trials, mRNA platforms have turned up encouraging results. “Certainly, these vaccines look like they’re generating the immune response that we need, and the reaction profiles have not been associated with severe reactions,” said Kathryn Edwards, MD, scientific director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program. But, she continued, “the real proof of the pudding will be the phase 3 trials where we see if the vaccine actually prevents disease.” The US Food and Drug Administration has said that a COVID-19 vaccine will need at least 50% efficacy to be approved.

Tolerability could be another issue. “People will have to know that they may have some local reactions or feel like they’re a little under the weather for a day or so after the vaccine,” said Edwards, who is among the independent experts monitoring investigational COVID-19 vaccine safety. She and others said that, as with any new pharmaceutical product, phase 3 studies could also reveal more serious safety concerns and unexpected adverse effects could emerge later.

Speaking at the July 27 media briefing, Collins addressed concerns: “Yes, we’re going fast. But, no, we are not going to compromise safety or efficacy.” Experts say several factors argue for mRNA vaccines’ safety. For one, mRNA can’t cause an infection. It also doesn’t enter the cell’s nucleus, so the chance of its integration into human DNA is believed to be very low. In addition, the body breaks down mRNA and its lipid carrier within a matter of hours, assuaging some concerns about long-term risks.

However, this rapid degradation raises questions about mRNA vaccines’ protective duration. Of added concern for vaccine durability, researchers in Hong Kong recently confirmed that a man with SARS-CoV-2 was later reinfected, although his second case was asymptomatic. Yang and colleagues found that antibodies rapidly wane among patients with mild COVID-19. The current candidates’ 2-dose regimens could help to overcome this, Yang noted, and their cell-mediated immunity should provide additional oomph.

Offit, who is a member of an NIH Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines working group, said that how long protection from any COVID-19 vaccine lasts likely won’t be known until after a product is approved and put into use. But, as Picker put it, a vaccine that’s safe and effective for even a finite amount of time could be enough to “break the back of the pandemic.”

Beyond COVID-19

If an mRNA vaccine works, the implications could stretch far beyond COVID-19. Success could pave the way for the platform’s widespread use for both emerging and established pathogens.

“We are really making great strides in vaccine development, which will hopefully change the way vaccines are approached in the future,” said Amesh Adalja, MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

One such advance might be thermostable vaccines that don’t have to be frozen or refrigerated, something scientists say mRNA might enable. Chinese researchers recently showed that a potential mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine could be stored at room temperature for at least a week.

Weissman is trying to develop a more potent second-generation mRNA vaccine that protects with a single shot. He’s also set his sights on a universal coronavirus vaccine using the genetic platform. “We’ve had 3 coronavirus epidemics in the past 20 years,” he said. “The next time this happens, we’ll have a vaccine already made, ready to be shipped out and used very quickly to prevent the pandemic from taking over.”

Before COVID-19, his team was working on mRNA flu vaccines, as well as candidates for genital herpes and HIV. Influenza viruses acquire variations from season to season, making them excellent candidates for a rapid “vaccine on demand” platform.

In Weissman’s view, mRNA has the potential to be truly transformative. In a soon-to-be-published study, he said he combined mRNA for 20 antigens for different diseases in the same vaccine. All 20 elicited good responses in mice. In theory, he said, it might one day be possible for children to get 2 shots that cover their more than 50 vaccinations.

He’s not alone in that belief. The authors of a recent review article wrote that mRNA vaccines that “can simultaneously target multiple antigens, and pathogens will have broad utility for a range of diseases, reduce the number and frequency of vaccinations, and alleviate healthcare worker burden.”

Much of this could rest on the success or failure of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine—and hopes are high. “I think this is an opportunity for that technology to shine,” Yang said.

Sweden’s approach to COVID-19 suggests that Government micromanagement cost lives

 Sweden did not impose a lockdown or micromanage its COVID-19 response.  It did issue guidelines about how to flatten the curve by hand washing, distancing, avoiding unnecessary travel, etc.  In the US, Government micromanagement of the COVID-19 response damaged the economy, substantially reduced health care to non COVID-19 patients, and increased the non COVID-19 death rate.  It is likely that the Government micromanagement cost lives.

One more example that Government usually is the problem, not the solution.

 

A Looter speaks out

 Here is Araeme Wood at the Atlantic commenting on NPR's interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of the book "In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action".

VO's beliefs suggest a serious mental illness.  There is no connection between her characterizations and reality.

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Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.

Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”

The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.” Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense—Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.”

By now you have guessed that I am not the audience for this book. I have a job, and am therefore invested in building a system where you get paid for your work and pay others for theirs, and then everyone pays taxes to make sure that if these arrangements don’t work out, you can still have a dignified life. (Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”) My job sometimes entails traveling to countries recently or currently destroyed by civil unrest, and that experience has made me appreciate the fragility of peace, and has not made me eager to conduct a similar experiment in my own city.

I am also from recent-immigrant stock. Osterweil euphemizes looting as “proletarian shopping,” and no one from a place that has recently experienced this phenomenon can take seriously her assurance that it can happen justly and bloodlessly. When I think of riots and smashed storefronts, I think of Kristallnacht. I think of American businesses built by penniless immigrants who preferred to forfeit their vacations and weekends for 30 years rather than see their children suffer as they did; I think of these businesses ransacked in 30 minutes and left in ruins. Osterweil at least has the psychology right when she says that looting can be “joyous and liberatory.” I have never seen a sullen looter, but I have seen plenty of shop owners crying next to the smoking remains of their children’s future.

Absent from this book is even fleeting recognition that anyone (or nearly everyone) might prefer the current nonrevolutionary arrangement. Osterweil does not say what property-less system of government or anti-government she prefers, but I suspect it is not democracy, a term she uses only sneeringly. Nor is it clear how she intends to move from the past disgraces and present unrest to her goal, whatever it is, other than by rioting and stealing things until morale improves. What do you do when the free stuff runs out, the businesses and ordinary people who invested in your city decide not to make that mistake again, and—oops!—a few shopkeepers get beaten to death? This messy process is the “new world opening up, however briefly, in all its chaotic frenzy,” she writes. To me it sounds like a prequel to The Road.

Osterweil is unable or unwilling to relate to anyone at all with anything resembling a sense of humanity. Comrades and enemies alike are described without compassion, emotional detail, or distinction as people endowed with feelings or moral complexity. Once cast as a villain, a villain one remains, with no intricacies of the human condition explored under any circumstances. In the NPR interview, Osterweil describes the Los Angeles convenience store where Latasha Harlins was shot to death in 1991 as the location of “white-supremacist violence.” That shooting, which came two weeks after the beating of Rodney King and contributed to riots that killed 63 people, was perpetrated by the store owner, a female Korean immigrant—an irony that surely deserves probing. But Osterweil’s great class war has only two sides, so a working-class Korean woman is effortlessly enlisted on the side of the white-supremacist cisheteropatriarchs. Osterweil quotes a communist magazine: “Just as Jews were in 1965, Koreans in 1992 were ‘on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central LA—they are the face of capital for these communities.’” As explanations of communal violence go, this is contemptibly inane.

Her conviction that her opponents deserve violence would be easier to abide if it were not obvious that nearly everyone counts as an opponent. Up against the wall are members of the media; “liberal commentators, de-escalators, nonprofiteers, right-wing trolls, vigilantes, and, of course, the police”; clergy who physically intercede between cops and protesters; and Nation of Islam members whose crime was to “broker a peace between gang leaders” and “chase looters” from neighborhood stores. You are not safe, at least not forever, even if you yourself are a victim of racism or capitalism. Perhaps you think that Dr. King’s speeches were more inspiring because he did not deliver them with a rifle in his hand, like Saddam Hussein. People like you are not part of the real civil-rights movement. “They must allow the real movement to change them,” Osterweil writes, “or they can only live to see themselves become its enemy.”

Happily I see very few people sharing Osterweil’s NPR interview approvingly, and nearly everyone consuming it in that joyous and liberatory mode known as “hate reading.” I haven’t yet encountered anyone who has read the actual book, which combines tedium and indecency in ways I had not previously contemplated. America is, after all, the country that nominated Joe Biden, who said that looters and rioters “make a mockery” of Black Lives Matter and “should be tried, arrested, and put in jail.” The consensus, especially among Donald Trump supporters, seems to be that NPR must be beyond salvage if it uncritically distributes sophomoric agitprop. (A sample question: “A lot of people who consider themselves radical or progressive criticize looting. Why is this so common?” I might have led with: “What do you think will do more for your community—a store that employs six people, or in that same location, a pile of bricks and broken glass?”)

Instead of writing off NPR or Code Switch, I prefer to think of them as coming very close to doing excellent journalism—and indeed I am jealous that I did not think of conducting this interview first. Since looting became widely reported in this season of protest over police violence, the reaction has split among those who do not support the protests or the looting, those who support the protests but denounce the looting, and those who support the protests and consider the looting a condign response to systemic injustice. Osterweil is enthusiastically in the last category and has given voice to a view that has heretofore been only gestured at. Good journalists find such voices and interrogate them roughly and fairly. The roughly part could, in the case of the NPR interview, have used a little work.

In a funny reversal of the normal polarities of “cancel culture,” conservatives might object to NPR’s decision to give Osterweil a platform at all, given that her defense of looting is a call to criminal behavior likely, even if not intended, to cause death and impoverishment. Should NPR also interview Nazis? Yes, actually—if the year is 1933, and most Americans don’t know what Nazis believe. Osterweil is not a Nazi (I have even sweeter compliments for her where that came from), but she has taken up a position that others espouse implicitly. A full exploration of that position is exactly what we need, and Code Switch found its best defender. If Osterweil’s defense is a bad one, she has now given other pro-looters a chance to reply to it and say why. If they do not, we can assume that they agree with Osterweil, and her argument is the pinnacle of looting apologia. A week ago, you could have said that looting might not be so bad, and I might have wondered what you meant by that. Now I will ask you if your reasons are the same as Osterweil’s, and I will make fun of you if you say yes. This is progress. For that, thank Code Switch.

On Looting - An Example of the Far Left's Lunacy

 Here is John Cochrane on looting.

JC is on target.

This is a test.  If you don't see the truth of what JC says, you fail.

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A good read: Graeme Wood's Atlantic essay covering Vicky Osterweil, her popular book In Defense of Looting, and NPR interview. (HT Niall Ferguson)

NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree.

That's as nice a topic sentence as you could ask for.

Looting is good, she [Osterweil] says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”

Just who is going to produce those things and work hard to sell them in a looting society? Wood essentially asks that gaping question.

Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”

This quote, I think, provides a deep understanding of our current far left.

Our society and our prosperous economy are built on the bedrock of private property and the rule of law which defends that property. That may not be pretty or fulfill a college sophomore's utopia, but the hard lesson of a thousand years is that only private property provides the incentive for people to maintain that property -- farms, houses, factories, stores -- and to put in the immense effort to provide commodities of value to their fellow humans. Wood puts this observation well:

Osterweil euphemizes looting as “proletarian shopping,” and no one from a place that has recently experienced this phenomenon can take seriously her assurance that it can happen justly and bloodlessly. When I think of riots and smashed storefronts, I think of Kristallnacht. I think of American businesses built by penniless immigrants who preferred to forfeit their vacations and weekends for 30 years rather than see their children suffer as they did; I think of these businesses ransacked in 30 minutes and left in ruins. Osterweil at least has the psychology right when she says that looting can be “joyous and liberatory.” I have never seen a sullen looter, but I have seen plenty of shop owners crying next to the smoking remains of their children’s future.

What do you do when the free stuff runs out, the businesses and ordinary people who invested in your city decide not to make that mistake again, and—oops!—a few shopkeepers get beaten to death? This messy process is the “new world opening up, however briefly, in all its chaotic frenzy,” she writes. To me it sounds like a prequel to The Road.

Property rights are not in vogue. Many landlords are also immigrants or others of little means who work hard and put their savings in to an apartment building. That a Republican administration has joined "cancel the rent," tells us something about how much respect for property rights and the incentives they create remains.

Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”

Delicious.

Osterweil does not say what property-less system of government or anti-government she prefers, but I suspect it is not democracy, a term she uses only sneeringly.

An important point. A movement that espouses violence, not just theft, that espouses political violence, and justifies such violence against all who disagree, is profoundly anti-democratic. For all the wailing about Trump's threats to our democracy, this part of the left is not just authoritarian, it is violently authoritarian.

I haven’t yet encountered anyone who has read the actual book, which combines tedium and indecency in ways I had not previously contemplated.

A great line for a book review. [Disclosure, I haven't read the book either. This is a review of a review.]

Wood wisely sees wisdom in a book that one is simply tempted to trash. This is a deep and wise point about many bad but authoritative books:

If Osterweil’s defense is a bad one, she has now given other pro-looters a chance to reply to it and say why. If they do not, we can assume that they agree with Osterweil, and her argument is the pinnacle of looting apologia. A week ago, you could have said that looting might not be so bad, and I might have wondered what you meant by that. Now I will ask you if your reasons are the same as Osterweil’s, and I will make fun of you if you say yes. This is progress. For that, thank Code Switch.

My Palo Alto neighbors, white, wealthy, and living far from any actual experience with such matters, express such sympathies with looting. Perhaps they too will have to face uncomfortable truths by reading, before it comes to their doorstep.

Looting also destroys a public property -- decades worth of progress on quiet every day relations between people of different races and backgrounds. The videos of looters, of violent street mobs, of storeowners and (last week) a pedestrian murdered in cold blood, will remain in people's brains. They will form an unstated and silenced set of expectations that no amount of lecturing will overcome until more positive everyday experiences slowly replace them.

Review of John Lott’s book “Gun Control Myths”

 Here is a review of John Lott's book "Gun Control Myths" by Robert B. Young, MD, a psychiatrist practicing in Pittsford, NY, an associate clinical professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

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Doctor of Economics John Lott, Jr. is the expert on gun research because he’s done most of it. His Crime Prevention Research Center is the central repository of answers to all questions about the wrongness of gun control and how in truth guns save lives. More Guns, Less Crime (his classic introduction) and his previous book The War on Guns are the perfect foundations for Gun Control Myths—together these form a compendium that addresses most of the fraudulent claims that have been made about how guns surely (but don’t) cause “gun violence”.

I know Dr. Lott, and believe me, he’s no Dan Quayle. He’s the real thing—an ultra-conscientious researcher who makes all his data public, willingly considers criticism, and addresses newly published research by others as well as conducting his own projects to add to our knowledge base. This behavior is exactly opposite to that of nearly all other gun-related researchers, who often for not-so-good reason obscure their data, use skewed analyses, and achieve their preferred results.

In Gun Control Myths he doesn’t attempt to cover every misleading idea about guns, but has chosen to address the biggest issues of today. He begins by correcting the errors of several of the seemingly comprehensive summaries in circulation about the dangers of gun ownership. He moves on to thorough discussions about mass shootings, which are so preoccupying although very rare and more often than the media reports, ended by good guys with guns.

There has been too much manipulative politicization for far too long about guns used badly by criminals and psychopaths. In addition to correcting media misreporting, Lott points out the FBI’s “political biases [and] corruption” beginning with the Obama administration that have not been fully rooted out. This reflects worry about many levels of government picking winners and users in how they interpret laws that blatantly infringe on citizens’ “right to keep and bear arms”.

Lott is admirable in accepting no organizational funding, which leaves the non-profit CRPC running on a shoestring compared to Bloomberg and blue state millions pouring into generating anti-gun studies every year. Thankfully, the excellence of CRPC’s work continues to win on quality if not quantity.

Do you value graphs and tables? There are scores and scores, from both sides of the “debate” as he shows there’s really none. How about footnotes? There are hundreds. Appendices? Six, over 17 pages and online. John Lott leaves no room for misunderstanding at any level of inquiry.

It would be nice to refer to an index, which is absent. However, that’s a minimal issue because the chapters are clearly focused on particular topics, which makes it easy to find a specific item or reference again.

There’s no question that, as Lott concludes, “the reality is that an armed citizenry is as necessary as it’s ever been.” And given the threats lined up against our staying rightfully armed, we must arm ourselves with the facts to oppose the false “truthiness” of the anti-gun movement.

John Lott again gives us the ammunition we need.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Nonsense

 Walter Williams gets it right, again.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University

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Check out any professional and most college basketball teams. Their starting five, and most of their other 10 players, are black, as is 80% of the NBA. This does not come anywhere close to the diversity and inclusion sought by the nation’s social justice warriors. Both professional and college coaches have ignored and threw any pretense of seeking diversity and inclusiveness. My question to you is: Would a basketball team be improved if coaches were required to include ethnically diverse players for the sake of equity? I have no idea of what your answer might be but mine would be: “The hell with diversity, equity and inclusion. I am going to recruit the best players and do not care if most of them turn out to be black players.” Another question: Do you think that any diversity-crazed college president would chastise his basketball coach for lack of diversity and inclusiveness?

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (National Accelerator Laboratory) is home to the world’s most powerful experiments, fastest supercomputers and top-notch physics researchers. Much of SLAC’s research is on particle accelerators that are complicated machines that are designed, engineered and operated to produce high-quality particle beams and develop clues to the fundamental structure of matter and the forces between subatomic particles. You can bet that their personnel makeup exhibits very little concern about racial diversity, equity and inclusion. The bulk of their scientists is not only Americans of European and Asian ancestry but mostly men. My question to you is: What would you do to make SLAC more illustrative of the racial, ethnic and sexual diversity of America? As for me, my answer would be the same one that I gave in the basketball example: I am going to recruit the brightest scientists and I do not care if most of them turn out to be men of European and Asian ancestry.

In the hard sciences, one will find black Americans underrepresented. For example, a 2018 survey of the American Astronomical Society, which includes undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and retired astronomers, found that 82% of members identified as white and only 2% as black or African American. Only 3% of bachelor’s degrees in physics go to black students. In 2017, some fields, such as structural engineering and atmospheric physics, graduated not a single black Ph.D. The conspicuous absence of black Americans in the sciences have little or nothing to do with racism. It has to do with academic preparation. If one graduates from high school and has not mastered a minimum proficiency in high school algebra, geometry and precalculus, it is likely that high-paying careers such as engineering, medicine, physics and computer technology are hermetically sealed off for life.

There are relatively few black fighter jet pilots. There are stringent physical, character and mental requirements, which many black applicants could meet. But fighter pilots must also have a strong knowledge of air navigation, aircraft operating procedures, flight theory, fluid mechanics, meteorology and engineering. The college majors that help prepare undergraduates for a career as a fighter pilot include mathematics, physical science and engineering. But if one graduates from high school without elementary training in math, it is not likely that he will enroll in the college courses that would qualify him for fighter pilot training.

At many predominantly black high schools, not a single black student tests proficient in math and a very low percentage test proficient in reading; however, these schools confer a diploma that attests that the students can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level and these schools often boast that they have a 70% and higher graduation rate. They mislead students, their families and others by conferring fraudulent diplomas.

What explains the fact that over 80% of professional basketball players are black, as are about 70% of professional football players? Only an idiot would chalk it up to diversity and inclusion. Instead, it is excellence that explains the disproportionate numbers. Jewish Americans, who are just 3% of our population, win over 35% of the Nobel prizes in science that are awarded to Americans. Again, it is excellence that explains the disproportionality, not diversity and inclusion. As my stepfather often told me, “To do well in this world, you have to come early and stay late.”

Thomas Sowell Insights