Archive for the ‘USA’ Category
a conversation about dictatorship, intellectuals, bonobos and the strange case of the USA
Francisco Lopez, one of the world’s lesser known dictators – unless you’re Paraguayan (see references)
Canto: So there’s now Putin’s macho invasion of Ukraine, Trump & co’s macho trampling of US democracy, such as it is, Hamas and its macho terrorist attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s massive macho response, Xi’s macho politburo and his assault on female empowerment, and the usual macho claptrap in Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Yemen, etc etc, etc, so how’s your bonobo world going?
Jacinta: Well, my teensy-tiny part of the world is going okay, and hopefully that tiny-teensy patch south of the Congo River is too, for now. And patches of the WEIRD world are making slow progress, from century to century.
Canto: So you’re taking the long view. How admirable. Seriously, it’s the only way we can maintain any optimism. When the internet suddenly became a big thing in everyone’s life, I was excited – so much useful knowledge at our fingertips without having to visit libraries, subscribe to science magazines, buy books and so on – I didn’t really pay much attention to the social media aspect and its dangers, which have become so overwhelming in the USA, but probably here as well for all I know. I often hear – it’s repeated so often it’s almost as if I comprehend it – that so-and-so has been ‘radicalised by social media’. But what does that really mean?
Jacinta: Well, I think it starts with the fact that people want to be with like-minded people. They like to be part of an ‘in-group’. People who really deserve the ‘intellectual’ title are actually in a tiny minority. They’re generally more independent-minded and suspicious of any in-group thinking.
Canto: And yet, bonobos are real groupies, aren’t they? Isn’t that a problem for you?
Jacinta: I’m not pretending we should be like bonobos in all ways, but, since we’ve been focussing on free will, and the lack thereof, our recognition of this lack should make us more compassionate, from an intellectual perspective. And bonobos are the compassionate, and passionate apes, presumably not coming at it from an intellectual perspective. What they’ve become ‘instinctively’, we need to become from a more knowledge-based, intellectual perspective.
Canto: Way to become more sexy, by just giving it more thought.
Jacinta: It doesn’t require that much thought, just an open-eyed – and certainly more female-centred – view of what macho violence has done and is still doing.
Canto: What about the ‘problem’ of female self-obsession, fashion-consciousness, and general ‘femininity’ – highlighting the decorative over the functional?
Jacinta: Like the ‘problem’ of male dressing tough, or business-like or sporty-casual or whatever, these are minor differences which are already changing with greater equality. Visit any Aussie pub. Anyway, looking decorative rather than functional has often to more to do with status than gender. Though there’s still a way to go.
Canto: I’ve noted that human society, at least in the WEIRD world, seems to be divided into right or left wing obsessionalism. What do you make of this?
Jacinta: Taking the long view, it’s a passing phase..
Canto: Well if you take the long view everything’s a passing phase. Nations are a passing phase, and now everyone’s obsessed with borders and the status of immigrants, as if migration hasn’t been a thing since humans came into being and before – ask any bird-dinosaur.
Jacinta: So, such terms as neo-Marxism or neo-fascism seem laughable to me. It’s largely macho stuff. We’re more about wanting to get on with people, recognising our different backgrounds and influences and trying to find common grounds rather than ideological grounds for grievance. And what are those grounds? The desire to be heard, accepted, even loved. Youse men are too interested in besting, in winning. Of course, I’m generalising – there are male-type females and vice versa.
Canto: Well, I can’t disagree. But isn’t that competitive spirit good for capitalism as well as war?
Jacinta: Ah, capitalism. There are info-wars out there about whether capitalism is good or bad. To me, it’s either, or it’s both, because it’s much more than some political ideology. Birds do it, bees do it, even the fungi in the trees do it. It’s more than just human nature.
Canto: So, you mean capitalising?
Jacinta: Yes, and you can do it in a dumb way – say, by basing much of your diet on one or two species, hunting and gathering them to extinction, then heading towards extinction yourself because you can’t change your culinary ways. Moving to an agricultural lifestyle was a smart but risky thing to do, and was best done gradually, as with any change of diet….
Canto: But this has nothing to do with capitalism as we know it.
Jacinta: Ha, I neither know nor care about the dictionary definition of capitalism. Or the political definition, I should say. I’m thinking it in the broadest sense – capitalising on food and other resources, on our smarts, our technology, our history. And we can be synergistic capitalists, or symbiotic capitalists. Isn’t that what trade is all about? And getting back to bonobos, isn’t their sexual play a kind of synergistic capitalism, especially with the females? They’re building bonds that unite the community, especially the females when the odd too-aggressive male starts to cause trouble. Social capital, they call it. We need more social capital.
Canto: Trade alliances seem to be good for maintaining the peace I suppose, but it’s all beginning to fray…
Jacinta: Idiots like Trump, as far as he has any policies, think that closing the borders and shitting on your allies will MAGA, as if isolationism has ever benefitted any nation that wants to progress. How are the Andaman Islanders going?
Canto: Trump just intuits that the idea will resonate with his base, insofar as he thinks at all.
Jacinta: Yes, being born into wealth, but without intellect, by which I mean intellectual curiosity, the kind of mind that tries to ‘rise above the self and grasp the world’, to quote our blog’s motto, he’s purely interested in self-promotion, and his instincts tell him it’s not the curious and the questioning that’ll follow him, but those impressed by his wealth and his bluster. Look at any dictator – they all project this air of extreme self-importance, it’s the first and last, the ‘must-have’ quality.
Canto: And the fact that there are always so so so many dupes for these guys, that’s what astonishes me most. Why is it so?
Jacinta: I think conditions have to be right. There has to be a substantial proportion of the population that are under-educated, but above all suffering, feeling deprived, abandoned, desperate. Smart, successful and well-heeled people seek out their own, and easily slip into the fantasy that most people are like them. They’re not, especially in places like the USA, with its rich-poor gap, its tattered social safety net, its pathetic minimum wage, its massive incarceration rate, its group-think holy rollers and the like. And surely no nation is more deluded about its own superiority than the USA, so vague but persistent appeals to patriotism, which are the sine qua non for dictators (Hitler being the prime example of that) will always play exceptionally well there.
Canto: Hmmm, quite an indictment, but the USA, to be fair, is very diverse, almost like a few countries rolled into one. New York State and the north-east coast seem to be no-go areas for Trump, and California too… that’s my uneducated guess. It’s like the civil war never ended, it’s so divided. United States indeed!
Jacinta: Haha, we should get off this obsession with the US, but indeed, I’ve often thought they’d be better off dividing the place into two, or even three. Or rather, I just wish they’d do it for our entertainment’s sake.
Canto: Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of macho ground – though it often feels like the female Trumpets blow the hardest. But they can’t help it – no free will after all, right?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but that’s not a cause for despair – determinism isn’t pre-determinism. It means working towards a world in which the determining factors are as positive as they can be. But that’s for another time…
References
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/trump-approval-rating-by-state
US democracy: another problem
Please Be Sensible, and fund public broadcasting properly
Jacinta: So we’ve long been wondering why things are so bad in the USA, why so many people believe such rubbish, and even act on it, to the detriment, it seems, of their democratic system. We’ve talked about their jingoism and their religiosity, but there’s so much more to it. For example, there’s a movement of the religious Right, the supposedly Christian Right, which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the supposed teachings of Jesus…
Canto: Or his example, since he clearly wasn’t much of a family man. Actually much of Jesus’s behaviour and speakings were contradictory, certainly nothing you could build a coherent moral framework from.
Jacinta: Yes the Christian Right is all about ‘old-fashioned family values’, men who are men, women who know their place, the corruption that is homosexuality, feminism and the pro-abortion crowd. And this stuff is prevalent in Australia too, but with nowhere near the force and noise. And the same goes for the conspiracy theories, the misinformation, the libertarian, anti-government breast-beating and so forth. In the USA it has threatened, very seriously, to bring down their democracy, which is clearly still under serious threat. But something I heard today on the SGU podcast (The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe episode 875) has helped me understand why so many United Staters are so loopy. Their public media outlets – as opposed to private media – have nothing like the presence that Australia’s ABC and Britain’s BBC have. Kara Santamaria, the SGU’s resident (but not token) female, presented research on this. Government-funded media (not of the Putinland or CCP kind of course) can be seen as ‘funding democracy’. The research comes from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, presented in a paper called ‘Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries’. It’s behind a paywall, but the link is below, for anyone who ever reads this, haha. I’m basing my comments on an article about the research, published on the Annenberg website – and on Santamaria’s commentary.
Canto: My turn. From the abstract of the research article we get this conclusion:
Correlations and cluster analyses show that high levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.
In terms of its public media funding, [the USA] is almost literally off the chart for how little it allocates towards its public media compared to other democracies around the planet. It comes out to .002 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At $465 million dollars, 2020 federal funding of U.S. public media amounted to just $1.40 per capita. Meanwhile, countries such as the UK, Norway, and Sweden spend close to $100 or more per capita toward their public media.
Since the market is no longer supporting the level of news media — especially local journalism — that democracy requires, there is arguably now an even stronger case to make that public media needs to step into the vacuum to address the widening news gaps as the commercial newspaper industry continues to wither away. News deserts are expanding across the country and around the world. This should be public media’s moment – an opportunity to revisit its core purpose and assess how it should operate within a democratic society and within an increasingly digital media system. Ideally, we would both restructure and democratize our public media system as we expand this critical infrastructure.
References
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/public-media-can-improve-our-flawed-democracy
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19401612211060255
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
getting wee Donny 3: Georgia on his mind
this list is from 2019, and so the list goes on…
Canto: So several pundits are claiming that Donny’s Georgia antics may pose the most immediate of his problems.
Jacinta: ‘I jes wanna find 11,780 votes, which is more than we have..’ That’s from the January 2 call to Brad Raffensperger, to be used in evidence.
Canto: Yes, the Georgia Secretary of State, a Republican, released this recorded phone call to the public, and has become a hero, and a target, ever since.
Jacinta: The key word here is ‘find’ – as well as the number, of course. He could no doubt claim that he feels certain some votes were ‘lost’, accidentally or deliberately, by the vote-counters, whom he’d like to claim are opposition plants, but he only wants to find, with the help of the Secretary of State, enough to win the election in Georgia – which still wouldn’t win him the presidency.
Canto: Which raises the question – so obvious to investigators – as to whether he leaned on other close jurisdictions (Arizona from memory was one) to find other votes, considering that his target wasn’t just Georgia.
Jacinta: Must be hard on wee Donny, having to think of more than one problem state at a time.
Canto: Apparently a new Georgia DA, Fani Willis, is looking to make a name for herself – and all power to her – by launching an investigation into the nappy-clad buffoon that United Staters, in their infinite wisdom, chose – or actually didn’t choose by some 3 million votes – as their numero 45.
Jacinta: She’s been in the job for six weeks, and is destined to become quite the historical figure. Already the case might involve Lindsey Graham, Joker Giuliani and other trumpets trying to carry out wee Donny’s agenda. The key statute is ‘criminal solicitation to commit election fraud’, a phrase that plays in my ears like the music of the spheres.
Canto: Mmmm, sounds a bit clunky to me. ‘Conspiracy to commit treason’ sounds sweeter.
Jacinta: Come on, he doesn’t want to betray his nation, he just wants to own it.
Canto: True enough.
Jacinta: So this is a felony requiring at least a year in prison, and it’s surely as strong a case as can be had, and there may be more, including racketeering and conspiracy charges. But according to the NYT, Willis is a centrist who feels she has an obligation to follow the law in these matters.
Canto: Actually she’s the Fulton County DA. How many DAs do they have in that country?
Jacinta: One for every district presumably. That’s 94, according to the DoJ. Almost two per state, but presumably a state like Alaska would have one, and California several. But I’m looking at these districts, and Fulton County isn’t on there, and Fani Willis isn’t mentioned. Georgia apparently has three districts – northern, middle and southern – but it also has county DAs, and dog knows how many of them there are throughout the country. Anyway, Fulton County covers much of Atlanta, the state’s capital, so it’s pretty central.
Canto: So, in this infamous phone call, wee Donny also issued threats – first, that he’d refuse to support the Georgia candidates for the Senate, who both went on to lose their elections.
Jacinta: Though I wouldn’t blame wee Donny for that – great grassroots work by the Democrats was, I prefer to think, the principal reason for Warnock’s and Ossoff’s wins.
Canto: And secondly, Donny actually threatened Raffensperger with criminal charges if he didn’t comply with his orders. I’m reading this Slate article, which says, inter alia:
As election law expert Rick Hasen noted at the time, there is no question that Trump was asking Raffensperger to manufacture enough votes to overturn the Georgia election on the basis of paranoid delusions.
But I’d object to the term ‘paranoid delusions’. Donny’s just a manipulating windbag, it’s his only way of being. That means never ever losing, as he’s not adult enough – to put it mildly – to take it. Anyway, the Slate article lays out the law:
Any person who “solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person” to falsify voting records is guilty of “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree.” The crime is a felony offense, punishable by up to three years in prison (and no less than one year). An individual is culpable even if they failed to induce fraud.
Jacinta: So that seems pretty straightforward, but what with the role of money and dodgy lawyers and such, it doesn’t seem that anything to do with crime is straightforward in that country. Anyway, as mentioned, there’s a possibility that Lindsey Graham might be in trouble too, due to his ‘enquiries’ about maybe tossing out some mail-in ballots, and Joker Giuliani for promoting conspiracies about the election.
Canto: But the Georgia republicans are making a desperate attempt to change the rules so that a ‘grand jury’ (United Staters love their ‘grand’ shite) would have to be drawn from the whole state rather than Fulton County, which is a Democrat stronghold. But they don’t have the numbers, apparently. But it’s an indication that republicans are still keen to go along with wee Donny and his government-stuffing ways to hell and back.
Jacinta: So, lots to look forward to. We might turn our attention to the new administration’s Department of Justice next. Merrick Garland has a senate confirmation hearing on February 21, and no doubt republicans will throw dumb partisan questions at him, but he’ll be confirmed, and I don’t think he’ll be able to avoid all the corruption that clearly went on at the behest of wee Donny.
Canto: I’ve heard he’s also going to make domestic terrorism a major focus – so look out Antifa, or something…
Jacinta: Yes, on that matter, I’m wondering if wee Donny will actually get caught up in all the charges resulting from the January 6 events, since so many seem to be now saying Donny made us do it, if it weren’t for wee Donny, etc etc.
Canto: Oh let me count the many many ways to get wee Donny…
References
Donald Trump may be charged in Georgia court for election fraud, conspiracy (video)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/trump-raffensperger-election-fraud-criminal-charges.html
Georgia Republicans Are Trying to Change the Rules for Fani Willis’s Prosecution of Donald Trump for Election Crimes
Will the USA ever reform its federal system? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
the USA is flagging
So I’m writing this on the last day of the Trump ‘administration’, and I don’t know if I’ll finish it today, and currently I don’t know if Trump will come out with the hundred or so pardons that some reporters are predicting, or if there will be one final attempt at insurrection, or if any more lives will be lost etc etc.
Whenever I write about Trump I feel as if I’m repeating myself for the nth time, and of course I know that virtually nobody reads my blog and I basically get no feedback on it. Still I feel compelled…
Robert Sapolsky begins his book Behave (and he presents this orally on a video available on Youtube) with a fantasy about what he would do with Hitler if he could’ve gotten hold of him at the end of the war. It isn’t nice. As he points out, he’s a liberal fellow, and opposed to capital punishment, but – humans are complex and contradictory. I’ve had similar fantasies about Trump, among others – in fact I might blame Sapolsky for giving me permission. But seriously, I’ve had fantasies about doing horrible things to horrible people long before I read Behave. I’ve long had a kind of visceral loathing of bullies and thugs, whether they’re world leaders or in the local neighbourhood, possibly because I was bullied quite a bit at school, being the smallest kid in my class for about ten years. When in the morning I read or listen to the latest horror story about Trump, or Putin, or some other apparently unpunishable tyrant, I get so mad that my dog, who regularly sleeps on my bed, starts shaking and looking at me with either fear or, I like to think, reproach.
I think I’ve been following the Trump debacle, or what I’ve called the slo-mo train wreck, because I’ve been wanting it to end like the movies, with the villain crashing and burning. And again to emphasise our complex and contradictory impulses, I’ve been hoping, and am still hoping, that Trump ends in gaol, but I’ve also been convinced, since before he decided to claim that he was a politician, that he wasn’t a ‘normal’ person, that there was something fundamentally wrong with him, and that he’s been this way for his entire adult life, and more. And I’ve become convinced, over the years, that free will is a myth, and that this has major implications for our systems of punishment, incarceration and the like. So what should be done with Trump? My feeling is that anyone with an average degree of intelligence and psychological insight should be able to see that this man should be kept away from any position of public responsibility. He’s an extremely, narcissistic, tantrumming pre-adolescent, and has been for 60 years. This is someone who couldn’t manage a public toilet, let alone the government of an uninhabited island. And yet he was put in charge of the most militarily and economically powerful nation on the planet. I don’t blame Trump for this, I blame the USA, and its federal political system.
The USA is, as I’ve written before, exceptional in two things, its religiosity and its jingoism. As a non-believing non-American, a dual citizen of the UK and Australia, where I’ve lived since the age of five, I struggle with my lack of sympathy for these American features. I’ve never waved a national flag or sung a national anthem in my life, and I never will. I feel a kind of emotional aversion to nationalism, and I suspect any explanation will simply be post-hoc rationalisation. So Trump’s patriotism, which is as fake as his religion, his complexion and his business acumen, naturally gets my goat, but it isn’t Trump I want to write about here.
Since realising that Trump was being taken seriously as a contender for US President, I’ve been following US politics like never before, and what I’ve learned has frankly horrified me, and continues to do so. Their federal system and their presidential system are real shockers, and frankly seem to be a disaster waiting to happen. There are plenty of pundits happy to dump on Trump of course, but hardly any are willing to dump on a system that allowed Trump to manipulate it so effectively (though it was more like bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour than calculated manipulation). I would cite Fareed Zakaria as an honourable exception, but his obvious Indian accent suggests that he hasn’t been fully infected by the native jingoism that his colleagues appear to suffer from.
So here – again, but with additions – are some of the glaring problems of a political system, and some political beliefs, that no nation in its right collective mind would want to emulate.
1. The ‘constitutional president’ becomes so as a result of a popularity contest between one superhero and another, in keeping, apparently, with ‘American individualism’. The ultimate recipe for demagoguery. These superheroes are either worshipped or reviled, and remembered by their numbers!
2. The Presidential candidate gets to choose his own running mate, plucked from the general population.
3. The President gets to choose a whole suite of personnel, or courtiers, to effectively run the country for the next four years, with only limited vetting, and has minimal contact with the parliament – living, during incumbency, in a White Palace.
4. Major elections occur every two years, last far too long, and involve obscene amounts of money, inevitably leading to corruption.
5. The political system is based on a much-worshipped, brief, vague and out-dated constitution, written for a small semi-democratic former British colony, and hopelessly inadequate for the needs of the third most populous country in the world. This urgently needs to be supported or replaced by laws, and lots of them.
6. The American people’s attitude to government, from the outset, has been disturbingly negative, so that interventionist government of any kind, to improve healthcare, education, race relations and so forth, is branded as socialism – the dirtiest word in the American language. And that’s something, considering the country’s religiosity, where the most lively and fun ‘curse-words’ aren’t even allowed on TV!
7. The popularity contest for the nation’s presidency is interfered with by an ‘electoral college’, which is state-based and regularly prevents the winner, based on popularity, from actually winning!
8. The President has exceptional pardoning powers, veto powers, government shut-down powers, power to select members of the judiciary and heads of innumerable government departments, as well as, apparently, total immunity from committing offences, however grave, while in office.
9. It follows from the above that the political process known as impeachment would be surplus to requirements, and all politicians’ wrong-doing, up to and including the President, would be dealt with by the judiciary on the basis of law.
The USA should look to the government of its neighbour, Canada, which has a far better political system, but it is of course prevented from doing so by its pathological jingoism. My hope is that the USA might be pressured by the international community to be more reformist in its approach to its national government. It’s a faint hope, of course, but the wreckery of the Trump period has, at least, exposed many glaring deficiencies. Gentlemen’s agreements aren’t anywhere near sufficient to keep ‘commanders-in-chief’, in a nation bristling with nuclear weaponry, with an at times disturbing superiority complex, in check.
19: the USA – an anti-bonobo state?
Of course it would be ridiculous to compare the complex, diverse collection of human apes – some 330 million of them – who call the USA home, to the few thousand bonobos who make their home in the forests of the Congo. So call me ridiculous.
Bonobos appear to be an egalitarian lot. They have fun together, sexually and otherwise, they share responsibilities, they look after each other’s kids, and they generally nip disagreements, which do occur, in the bud, either with sexual healing or with female group force. Unfortunately they don’t read, write or do much in the way of science, but you can’t have everything.
They don’t kill each other, which their close rellies the chimps occasionally do. And it’s the male chimps who tend to do this, just like male human apes.
Now, Americans. They like to think they’re exceptional, many of them, but to an outsider like me they seem exceptional in only two respects – their religiosity and their jingoism, neither of which I have much time for. The nation’s foundational religiosity has been well dealt with by Sam Harris and many others, and the backlash to their writings, as well the more recent kowtowing by so-called evangelical Christians to the mendacious messianic misanthrope whose presidency has effectively destroyed the nation’s reputation for the foreseeable, indicates that they still have a lot of growing up to do. Their jingoism seems another form of infantilism, and I suspect they get it drummed into them from kindergarten on up. That’s why even their best cable news pundits and politicians carried on a ‘how has the mighty fallen’ narrative over the four years of the misanthrope’s reign, without seeming to realise that the problem wasn’t Trump but their massively flawed federal political (and legal) system. It’s also why they’ll never engage in the root and branch reform of that system, the failings of which Trump has done them the great favour of exposing.
However, in comparing Americans unfavourably to bonobos, it’s not their lack of modesty and self-awareness that I want to focus on, but their violence. The violence of the state, and states, towards individuals, the violence, or violent feelings, of individuals towards the state, the violence of partisanship, and ordinary violence between individuals. And of course the gun culture.
Incarceration is a form of violence, let’s be blunt. The USA, with less than 5% of the world’s population, has some 22% of the world’s prisoners, making the nation’s incarceration rate the highest in the world. It was up at nearly 25% twelve years ago, and declined slightly during the Obama administration, but no doubt has been rising again under Trump. State authorities have also played a role in rising or declining rates of course.
The nation tries to delude itself by calling their prisons correctional institutions, but very little in the way of formal correction is attempted. The tragedy is exacerbated by prison privatisation, which first occurred under Reagan in the eighties. A for-profit prison system, fairly obviously, benefits from a high prison population, and from skimping on counselling, training, facilities, and even basic needs, covering all of Maslow’s hierarchy.
As is well known, US prisons are top-heavy with those people designated as black (I’ve always been uncomfortable with black-white terminology). So much so that a 2004 study reported that ‘almost one-third of black men in their twenties are either on parole, on probation, or in prison’. So it would surely be correct to say that every person ‘of colour’ is touched by the prison system, either personally or via friends and family. I won’t go into the reasons why here, except to mention the obvious issues of poverty, disadvantage and endemic despair, exacerbated by the imbecilic war on drugs, but clearly imprisonment is itself violently punitive and rarely leads to human betterment. It appears to be a ‘sweeping under the carpet’ response to all these issues. People are free to do whatever they like, but if they make a nuisance of themselves in the street, and make the place look bad, best to put them out of the way for a while, until such time as they clean themselves up. But the sad fact is that very few if any of those incarcerated blacks have done anywhere near as much damage to the nation as has their outgoing President.
As to a sense of violence towards the state, this is evidenced by paramilitary anti-government groups and the strange sense amongst a huge swathe of the population that if governments try to do anything interventional or ameliorative that in any way affects their lives they’re engaging in socialism, thus leaving the path open for white-collar crime (especially the gleefully celebrated crime of tax evasion), bank banditry and the like, and for real minimum wages to fall well below those of comparable countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Japan etc. And so, while their fellow-citizens are struggling in poorly paid jobs with inadequate conditions, people placard the streets screaming about their constitutional right to be protected from their Great Enemy, government in all its despicable forms. Ronald Reagan, who seems to have become a doyen of the moderate right, is now celebrated for saying that government is the problem, not the solution, surely one of the most imbecilic utterances of the pre-Trump era.
So with this eschewing of government oversight and guidance, the USA has devolved into a war of all against all, with rights eclipsing responsibilities, and with parts of the country resembling the worst of so-called third world countries in terms of entrapment, suffering and despair. But of course it’s different for the rich, who protect their own.
Finally I want to explore another form of violence, which relates to the US military. It’s amusing to note that there are arguments raging online about whether or not the US military is a socialist organisation, since it’s run and massively funded by by the federal government, with congress never delaying and rarely debating such unaudited funding. This is all fun to read since so many Americans become apoplectic when the word socialism comes up, but the fact remains that the Pentagon is, to most outsiders, something like a supermassive black hole sucking in funds that are never to be seen again.
US military spending is estimated to be close to one trillion dollars over the 2020-21 year, with something like 85% described as discretionary spending, which means essentially that they can spend it any way they choose. Three attempts have been made in the past three years to audit the Pentagon, and they have all ended in failure, but it’s unclear whether the auditor or the Pentagon is the responsible party. Needless, to say, conducting such as audit would be a largely thankless task. Of course defenders of all this expenditure claim that vast sums of money are required to keep safe this exceptional beacon of liberty to the world. Yet much of US military personnel and materiel are deployed outside of the country, and the USA has never been under serious attack from any other nation since its foundation. The fact is that the US uses its military as has every other powerful military state in history, dating back to the Egyptians and before, and including the Romans, the Brits, the Germans and the Japanese, that’s to say, to enhance its power and influence in the world. And the US certainly is exceptional in its military. Its defence budget is ‘more….than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined’.
Every powerful nation in history has fallen for the same fallacy, that their economic and military superiority somehow infers moral superiority. Might is right, essentially, and this translates to non-human ape societies too, as they all have their power hierarchies. Bonobos, however, less so than any of the others. In bonobo society, it seems, group power is used to stifle individual power-mongering, so that the group can get back as quickly as it can to the main purpose of their lives, surviving and thriving, exploring and foraging, looking out for each other and having fun. If we could have all this, in our more mind-expanded, scientific, with-knowledge-comes-responsibility sort of way, what a wonderful world this would be.
References
https://ussromantics.com/category/identity-politics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
a bonobo world and other impossibilities 15
returning to the ‘farm’ in 1919 – 10 million dead, 21 million more mutilated
stuff on aggression and warfare
Warfare has long been a feature of human culture; impossible to say how far back it goes. Of course war requires some unspecified minimum number of participants, otherwise it’s just a fight, and one thing we can be certain of is that there were wars worthy of the name before the first, disputed, war we know of, when the pharoah Menes conquered northern Egypt from the south over 5000 years ago. The city of Jericho, which lays claim to being the oldest, was surrounded by defensive walls some three metres thick, dating back more than 9000 years, and evidence of weapons of war, and of skeletal remains showing clear signs of violent death by such weapons, dates back to 12000 years ago. None of this should surprise us, but our knowledge of early Homo sapiens is minuscule. The earliest skeletal data so far found takes us back nearly 200,000 years to the region now covered by Ethiopia in east Africa. We know next to nothing of the lifestyle and culture of these early humans. There’s plenty of dispute and uncertainty about the evolution of language, for example, which is surely essential to the planning of organised warfare. The most accepted estimates lie in a range from 160,000 to 80,000 years ago, but if it can ever be proven that our cousins the Neanderthals had language, this could take its origins back another hundred thousand years or more. Neanderthals share with us the FOXP2 gene, which plays a role in control of facial muscles which we use in speech, but this gene is regulated differently in humans.
In any case, warfare requires not only language and planning but sufficient numbers to carry out the plan. So just how many humans were roving about the African continent some 100,000 years ago?
The evidence suggests that the numbers were gradually rising, such that the first migrations out of Africa took place around this time, as our ancestors sought out fresh resources and more benign environments. They could also be escaping human enemies, or seeking out undisputed territory.
Of course there may have been as much collaboration as competition. We just don’t know. What I’m trying to get at is, were we always heading in the chimp direction of male dominance and aggression, or were there some bonobo traits that tempered this aggression? Of course, I’m not talking about influence – we haven’t been influenced, in our development, by these cousins of ours in any way. We only came to recognise them as cousins very recently. And with this recognition, it might be worth learning more from family.
Human warfare has largely been about the expansion or defense of territory, and it was a constant in Europe from the days of the Roman Empire until well into the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, armaments became far more deadly, and the 1914-18 war changed, hopefully for good, our attitude to this activity, which had previously been seen as a lifetime career and a proof of manliness. This was the first war captured by photography and newsreels, and covered to a substantial degree by journalism. If the Thirty Years’ War had been covered by photojournalists and national newspapers it’s unlikely the 1914-18 disaster would have occurred, but the past is another country. Territory has become more fixed, and warfare more costly in recent times. Global trade has become fashionable, and international, transnational and intergovernmental organisations are monitoring climate change, human rights, health threats and global economic development. Violent crime has been greatly reduced in wealthy countries, and is noticeably much greater in the poorer sectors of those countries. Government definitely pays a role in providing a safety net for the disadvantaged, and in encouraging a sense of possibility through education and effective healthcare. It’s noteworthy that the least crime-ridden countries, such as Iceland, New Zealand, Portugal and Denmark, have relatively small populations, rate highly in terms of health, work-life balance and education, and have experienced long periods of stable government.
Of course the worry about the future of warfare is its impersonality. This has already begun of course, and the horrific double-whammy of Horishima-Nagasaki was one of the first past steps towards that future. Japan’s military and ruling class had been on a fantastical master-race slaughter spree for some five decades before the bombs were dropped, but even so the stories of suffering and dying schoolchildren and other innocents in the aftermath of that attack make us all feel ashamed. And then what about Dresden? And Auschwitz? And Nanjing? And it continues, and is most egregious when one party, the perpetrator, has far more power than the other, the victim. Operation Menu, a massive carpet bombing campaign of eastern Cambodia conducted by the US Strategic Air Command in 1969 and 1970, was an escalation of activities first begun during the Johnson administration in 1965, in the hope of winning or at least gaining ground in the Vietnam war. There were all sorts of strategic reasons given for this strategy, of course, but little consideration was given to the villagers and farmers and their families, who just happened to be in the way. Much more recently the Obama administration developed a ‘kill list’, under the name Disposition Matrix, which has since been described as ‘potentially indefinite’ in terms of its ongoing targets. This involved the use of drone strikes, effectively eliminating the possibility of US casualties. Unsurprisingly, details of these strikes have been hard to uncover, but Wikipedia, as always, helps us get to the truth:
… Ben Emmerson, special investigator for the United Nations Human Rights Council, stated that U.S. drone strikes may have violated international humanitarian law. The Intercept reported, “Between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes [in northeastern Afghanistan] killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”
Cambodians, Afghans, distant peoples, not like us. And of course it’s important to keep America safe. And the world too. That’s why the USA must never become a party to the International Criminal Court. The country is always prepared to justify its violent actions, to itself. And it’s a nation that knows a thing or two about violence. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the USA is ranked 121st among the most peaceful countries in the world.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strike#United_States_drone_strikes
https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/non-economic-data/most-peaceful-countries
a bonobo world? 11
another bitter-sweet reflection on capacities and failures
I was in a half-asleep state, and I don’t know how to describe it neurologically, but subjectively I was hearing or being subjected to a din in my head, a kind of babble, like in an echoing school canteen. Then I heard a knocking sound above the din, then in a transforming whoosh all the din stopped in my head, it became silent apart from the knocking, and then, as a kind of wakening crystallisation clarified things, another sound, of trickling water. I quickly realised this was the sound from the shower above me, and the knocking was of the pipes being affected by the rush of hot water. But what really interested me was what had just happened in my brain. The din, of thought, or inchoate thought, or of confusedly buzzing neural connections, was dampened down instantly when this new sound forced itself into my – consciousness? – at least into a place or a mini-network which commanded attention. It, the din, disappeared as if a door had been slammed on it.
I can’t describe what happened in my brain better than this, though I’m sure that this concentration of focus, or activity, in one area of my brain, and the concomitant dropping of all other foci or activity, to facilitate that concentration, was something essential to human, and of course other animal, neurology. Something observed but not controlled by ‘me’. Something evolved. I like the way this is shared by mice and men, women and wombats.
But of course there are big differences too. I’ve described the experience, whatever it is, in such a way that a neurologist, on reading or listening to me, would be able to explain my experience more fully, or, less likely, be inspired to examine it or experiment with its no-doubt miriad causal pathways. I suppose this experience, though more or less everyday and unthreatening, is associated with flight-or-fight. The oddity of the sound, its difference from the background din, or perhaps rather my awareness of its oddity, caused a kind of brain-flip, as all its forces, or most of them, became devoted to identifying it. Which caused me to awaken, to marshall a fuller consciousness. How essential this is, in a world of predators and home intruders, and how much fun it is, and how useful it is, to try for a fuller knowledge of what’s going on. And so we go, adding to our understanding, developing tools for further investigation, finding those tools might just have other uses in expanding other areas of our knowledge, and the world of our ape cousins is left further and further behind. For me, this is a matter of pride, and a worry. I’m torn. The fact that I think the way I do has to do with my reading and my reflections, the habits of a lifetime. Some have nerdiness, if that’s what it is, thrust upon them. I’m fascinated by the human adventure, in its beginnings and its future. Its beginnings are connected to other apes, to old world and new world monkeys, to tarsiers, to tree shrews and rodents and so on, all the way back to archaea and perhaps other forms yet to be discovered. We need to fully recognise this connectivity. Its future, what with our increasing dominance over other species and the earthly landscape, our obsession with growth, our throwaway mindset, but also our ingenious solutions, our capacity for compassion and for global cooperation, that future is and always will be a mystery, just outside of our manipulating grasp, with every new solution creating more problems requiring more solutions.
A few hundred years ago, indeed right up to the so-called Great War of 1914, human warfare was a much-celebrated way of life. And we still suffer a kind of hero-worship of military adventurism, and tell lies about it. In the USA, many times over the most powerful military nation on earth, the media are always extolling the sacrifice of those who fought to ‘keep America safe’. This is a hackneyed platitude, considering that, notwithstanding the highly anomalous September 11 2001 attack, the country has never had to defend its borders in any war. Military casualties are almost certain to occur in a foreign country, where the USA is seeking to preserve or promote its own interest, generally against the interests of that country. In this respect, the USA, it should be said, is no better or worse than any other powerful country throughout history. The myth of military might entailing moral superiority, which began with the dawn of civilisations, dies hard, as ‘American exceptionalism’ shows.
But globalism, international trade, travel, communication and co-operation, is making for a safer and less combative human society than ever before. So, as militarism as a way of life recedes, we need to focus on the problems of globalism and economic growth. As many have pointed out, the pursuit of growth and richesse is producing many victims, many ‘left-behind’. It’s dividing families and creating a culture of envy, resentment and often unmitigated hatred of the supposedly threatening ‘other’. The world of the bonobo – that tiny community of a few tens of thousands – tinier than any human nation – a gentle, fun-loving, struggling, sharing world – seems as distant to us as the world of the International Space Station, way out there. And yet…
what Americans will never do to save their democracy
– stop relying on their gentlemanly 18th century constitution and create more L-A-W.
– reduce the presidency to a figurehead and place more power in the congress where it belongs
– encourage a wider range of parties to create an effective multiparty system which works by compromise rather than a two-party adversarial system which encourages hostility and winner-takes-all
– get rid of these worthless, ridiculous presidential debates (goes with reducing the power of the presidency)
– cap individual and corporate campaign contributions at a very low level.
– ban all electioneering claptrap until 2-3 weeks before elections
– thoroughly vet all presidential candidates via testing on US political history, presidential responsiblities, US foreign relations, treaty obligations etc A vetting for the job as for any CEO position. Duh!
covid19: sensible testing, mostly
Canto: So we’re looking at medcram coronavirus update 98 now, and it’s a fascinating one entitled ‘Rapid COVID 19 Antigen Testing at Home – A Possible Breakthrough’, though it comes with the clear proviso – this would require co-ordinated political action, and that won’t happen in the USA, not just under Trump, but at any time.
Jacinta: Well, but especially under Trump. But the issue is one of trying to get much more testing done, with far less emphasis on the sensitivity of the test, because rapid-fire, fast turnaround testing is far more useful than expensive, hard-to-evaluate slow-turnaround testing, which puts a premium on sensitivity. But before we get to all that, Dr Seheult looks at a paper on viral loads vis-à-vis covid19 patients. They looked at nasal and throat swabs, and then checked the Ct values over time.
Canto: The Ct values are a measure of viral load and it works inversely – a 3.32 reduction in Ct value means a ten-fold-increase in viral load.
Jacinta: Yes, so a low Ct value means a high viral load, and of course viral replication works exponentially, at least during the early infection period, so your viral load can be massively different from one day to the next – think about that for testing, and delayed results.
Canto: A Ct value of 40 is close to undetectable, depending of course on the sensitivity of the test. And the value can go down as low as 5, all approximately of course. The course of the virus is generally, exponential growth, then a tapering off of the growth rate, reaching a peak, then a descent to finally a remnant population of largely disabled viral scraps, with of course mortality intervening along the way in the worst cases.
Jacinta: Far from the majority of cases, thankfully. So the ‘gold standard’ test is the reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rt-PCR) test – also called real-time PCR, I’ve just found out. It’s relatively expensive at around $US100, with turnaround times – and this might depend on demand and other factors – of between 3 and 9 days. There aren’t enough of these tests to go round, but they are very sensitive, detecting the virus reliably from a Ct value of about 35, or maybe even 40 (for argument’s sake, Seheult says). But there are other, cheaper, less sensitive tests, called paper tests, that can be rolled out more easily to the general public. The paper is coated with monoclonal antibodies that can detect antigens – substances that evoke an immune response. These paper tests cost at most a couple of dollars each, and would be sensitive to a viral load measured at a Ct value of around 32. These figures aren’t exact but this would make the test around 50-55% sensitive.
Canto: But there’s this issue called the ‘threshold of transmissibility’, which is important in all this, and a virologist, Dr Michael Mina, shown speaking on this update, explains:
So people who are transmitting probably have Ct values that are below 30 and the vast majority probably have them below 25 or so.
As Seheult explains, people may be testing positive at that range above 30 (i.e. low viral load) but not transmitting the virus. This is especially so if they’re on the downward trajectory, as described above, and what the rt-PCR test (or assay) is detecting are those remaining viral fragments. And as Dr Mina points out, it’s the downward trajectory that’s being picked up for the most part, because the initial upward trajectory is exponential. Here’s what he says:
A lot of people are saying, ‘we need the really sensitive tests to be able to detect people early on in their infection’, but almost all the time that people spend with this virus near the limit of detection of PCR is on the tail end of their infection. This is a virus that, once it hits PCR positivity levels, it’s growing well in its exponential phase and it’s probably a matter of hours, not days, before it passes the threshold to be detected on some of these slightly lower sensitivity assays. And then it may persist for weeks or possibly months even in some cases at very low RNA levels. So it’s after people are well beyond their transmissible period that we’re actually seeing the loss in sensitivity of these assays. It’s very rare that you actually detect somebody with a Ct value 0f 39 in that window on their way up, because they’re only sitting there for a few hours before they get down to a 33, so if you’re missing Ct values of 39… it’s really not that important..
Jacinta: Not that important, but the point Dr Mina is making is really important – if the threshold of transmissibility is at 33 or below vis-à-vis Ct values, then a high-sensitivity test may even be a barrier to focussing on getting at the most transmissible subjects.
Canto: Yes, especially when you have an alternative test that can be applied much more regularly with a quick turnaround – results on these paper tests take ten minutes! And being cheap, you can test as often as you feel you need to. If you’re positive, you quarantine yourself for a while, keep testing, find yourself negative, wait for a few more days, considering the low sensitivity of the test, keep testing in case there’s a recurrence, and when it’s still ok after a few days you can resume your life, go back to work or school, whatever, being pretty sure you’re past the infectious phase.
Jacinta: Yes, as Dr Mina says, 9 out of 10 people go undiagnosed with the virus in the USA, according to the CDC – indicating the inadequacy of testing. And he goes on to say, of the other one out of ten, those that are caught, are mostly post-infectious, at the ‘tail end’. The point is that, because of the woeful lack of testing and the long turnarounds, they’re catching far fewer of the transmissible cases, the ones they want and need to catch, than the pitiful few that they actually find testing positive.
Canto: The bottom line being that if they tested with a far less sensitive, but cheap and readily available quick-result assay, they would capture far more of the transmissible cases, and save lives.
Jacinta: Dr Mina and many colleagues have written a paper on this, entitled ‘test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for covid19 surveillance’, and he points out that with this approach they would drive down the ‘r effective’ – the reproduction number – which is the number of people who can be infected by a carrier at any specific time – to well below 1. So if you were to give a significantly high proportion of people in in the worst affected areas these types of tests, you could bring the numbers down very rapidly, and this would eliminate the need for contact tracing. It would have an effect on schools, workplaces and so forth – because if you’re given one of these long-turnaround tests and your results eight days later turn out negative, that may be because you had just contracted the virus when the test was taken, but it didn’t show on the test – so you go back to school and infect people. With regular testing this problem would be eliminated. Hate to belabour the point, but – people are dying.
Canto: It seems the CDC put a high priority on sensitivity, and so rejected these cheap paper tests, neglecting the obvious problem of turnaround more or less completely. The low sensitivity tests usually miss the subjects that are beyond infectivity. If they were on the upward trajectory they would likely be caught by the next test. It’s this upward trajectory that is the infective period. You would think regulatory organisations like the FDA or the CDC would twig to this, but not so much in the Trump era, when non-scientists are put in charge. Yet another failing of the individualist, anti-collaborative, egotistical destruction of all government agencies…
Jacinta: Or just the unwieldiness, the lack of finesse, of lumbering bureaucracies. Or a mix of both.
Canto: Anyway, as things deepen and darken in the USA, we might have to skip a number of updates to keep up with the chaos, the failures, the resistance and everything else. It isn’t a great time to be living in the USA, but as outsiders we’re kind of ghoulishly fascinated by the mess they’re making of this pandemic, and much else besides.
Jacinta: But also genuinely sympathetic to those who are trying to make thing work in the teeth of all the craziness.
Canto: Today, September 16, marks the day that 200,000+ deaths from covid19 have been recorded next to the name of the USA, according to Worldometer’s stats. Taiwan, a country that is separated from the so-called ‘China virus’ only by the narrow Formosa strait, has suffered only seven deaths in the nine months that this virus has raged. It has a population of about 24 million, slightly less than that of Australia, into which we find ourselves thrown. Australia has had 824 deaths thus far, and we’re regarded as something of a model!
Jacinta: Yes, several cheers for Tsai Ing-wen and for female leadership, sans egotism. And a special thanks to Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister – but she’s actually real, and a life-saver. We need more of her.
Audrey Tang
covid-19, more on fructose, vitamin D, treatments and the vagaries of testing
Canto: Ok, so note that in the graphic from the previous post, Australia is third highest in the group of 31 countries studied for caloric intake from sweeteners, but we don’t use HFCS much at all.
Jacinta: It might be a misleading graphic too. You might be forgiven for thinking that it somehow shows the USA as the most unhealthy, sweet-toothy country on the list, and Australia in third position, but since we’re more concerned here with links between fructose and covid-19 co-morbidities such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems and oxidative stress, the graphic doesn’t tell us much.
Canto: Yes so I found on this indexmundi site a list of 195 countries – and that’s all of them – showing prevalence of diabetes 1 and 2. That’s to say, the percentage of the adult population (from 20 to 79) that is diabetic. The USA ranks 43rd on that list, and Australia is down at 137th, level with Finland and Japan. But the site doesn’t name sources, and provides an end-note on the unreliability of much evidence: ‘National health authorities differ widely in capacity and willingness to collect or report information’. I should also add that though the USA is 43rd, the only other major nations above them are just about every Middle Eastern country, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Sudan and Mexico. Make of that what you will.
Jacinta: Let’s avoid that rabbit hole, and return to medcram update 83, which briefly describes vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) metabolism. This may involve a bit of repetition but that’s rarely a bad thing for us. So the D3 that we absorb or ingest goes to the liver and is hydroxylased at the 25th position (25-OH), but it doesn’t become activated until it’s again hydroxylased at the first position by the kidney (1,25-diOH, aka 1,25 dihydroxy vitamin D). And there’s another enzyme that can convert the vitamin to inactive forms.
Canto: With that, Dr Seheult looks at another article from 2013 which describes a rat study that indicates that if fed on a high fructose diet, lactating rats suffered reduced rates of active intestinal calcium transport and active vitamin D. Or, more, accurately I think, they didn’t get the increased rates and levels that would be expected during lactation. So, because calcium is essential for skeletal growth, the study says ‘our discovery may explain findings that excessive consumption of sweeteners compromises bone integrity in children’.
Jacinta: Interesting, and I presume that means consumption by the mother during pregnancy. Anyway, in more detail, what they found was that increased fructose intake inhibited the enzyme that converted vitamin D into the active form in the kidney, and promoted the enzyme responsible for the inactive forms. Disturbing, as Seheult says, for the excessive fructose in American diets, which may consequently affect calcium and vitamin D levels, though that would surely require more research.
Canto: Well, the same group released more research in 2014 which found that chronic high fructose intake in calcium-sufficient rodents (rats and mice) reduced their active vitamin D levels. And a 2015 study from Iran looked at something different but again having to do with effects on enzymes and metabolism. They looked at S-methyl cysteine (SMC), and this recalls the investigation of N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) a few updates ago. Found naturally in garlic and onions, SMC is described as a hydrophilic cysteine-containing compound, which they investigated for its putative effects against oxidative stress and inflammation. So they induced oxidative stress in rats via a high-fructose diet over 8 weeks and then dosed them with SMC. Results from the high fructose diet were – here goes – increased blood levels of glucose, insulin, malondialdehyde, and tumour necrosis factor-alpha.
Jacinta: Okay so the increased insulin is presumably a reaction to the increased glucose. Its role is to absorb excess blood glucose, and too much of it can result in hypoglycaemia, low serum glucose levels. Malondialdehyde (MDA) is described as a marker for oxidative stress, so it’s not good. Tumour necrosis factor (TNF or TNFα) is a ‘multifunctional cytokine’, and although cytokines (types of proteins) perform many vital functions, the cytokine storm that appears to be associated with oxidative stress and covid-19 is a bad thing.
Canto: But there were also decreased levels of glutathione (GSH), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and catalase as a result of this fructose diet, and Seheult talked about these enzymes and such as important in reducing oxidative stress. However, the SMC dosing improved antioxidant enzyme activities and reduced levels of glucose, insulin and TNFα.
Jacinta: So this SNC seems another promising antioxidant treatment. Meanwhile, watch your sugar intake, especially with fructose. More studies required of course, but I suppose there are ethical issues involved in fattening up and inducing oxidative stress on human subjects with a high fructose diet. Okay updates 84 and 85 deal with questions that hospitalised covid-19 patients might want answered, so we’re going to skip those or we’ll never catch up on these updates. With update 86 they’re into the second half of June and noticing a resurgence of the virus. So at the Johns Hopkins site they’ve ‘working to fill the void of publicly accessible covid-19 testing data’, because without testing you obviously can’t work out the numbers.
Canto: But more than testing itself, the turnaround of results is a problem. A young woman was just on the tube saying it took three weeks to get her test results, which renders the test useless. And another person on the tube reported that she’d tested positive, felt generally okay or asymptomatic, then tested negative, after which she came down with a heavy case replete with many of the covid-19 symptoms, and then tested positive again. How can this happen?
Jacinta: It’s still a mysterious virus, but to return to the update and Johns Hopkins, they’re generally looking at US data, but I’m interested in understanding the testing process and how well it maps the prevalence of this virus. The website has a graphic which shows the fairly rapid rise in daily testing from March through to June (with a drop-off from mid-June, when perhaps they thought it was more under control), and the number of positive daily tests, which hasn’t of course risen so much, so that the percentage of positive test results has gradually fallen. The WHO recommends that the percentage of positive tests, the positive percentage rate (PPR), in nations or states where there’s widespread testing, should be under 5% for at least fourteen days before those states can start ‘relaxing’, but I’ve read different, more flexible recommendations elsewhere from health authorities, so it seems still a matter of educated guesswork with an unpredictable pandemic.
Canto: For the different US states, looking at the figures now in mid-August, the figures are weird. Washington has a PPR of 100% (?!) and are testing 1 in every 10,000, so it seems they’re only testing those they know are positive? That’s top of the list and bottom is North Carolina with a PPR of -13.1, and yes that’s a minus, and they’re testing -.09 in every thousand, and I’ve no idea what that means.
Jacinta: But most states’ figures are clear enough. New York is at 0.8% PPR with over 4 tests per 1000, which is good, but Nevada, Idaho and Florida are at over 16% PPR, each with around 1.5 tests per 1000, and that’s obviously a problem. An indication of the lack of centralised control of the situation – it’s hard to compare data from state to state. Anyway, the key, some say, is to scale the testing to the size of the epidemic in that nation/state, not to the state’s population – but how can you do that when you’re using the testing to determine the size of the epidemic?
Canto: Well presumably if nobody is reporting unusual, covid-like symptoms, as is the case here in South Australia, you don’t need to spend so much time, money and energy on testing. Not the case in the USA. Anyway, in this update, Dr Seheult noted, as we have been, that the case numbers for covid-19 are increasing, but the death rate is decreasing slightly, or at least levelling off. Possibly a result of more testing combined with better treatment. They may also be catching weaker levels of the virus due to measures put in place. But there’s no evidence as yet that the virus itself has become less potent, and this seems unlikely.
Jacinta: And speaking of treatments, the steroid dexamethasone is apparently reducing mortality by as much as 35% for covid-19 patients on ventilation, according to a WHO preliminary report of work done at Oxford. It’s only good for those with severe hypoxia and associated problems though, but its a cheap, off-patent medication which can be added to the box of tricks for ICUs, once the data is confirmed.
Canto: Okay, next time….
References
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 83: High Fructose, Vitamin D, & Oxidative Stress in COVID-19
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 86: COVID-19 Testing & Cases Increasing but Daily Deaths Decreasing
https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SH.STA.DIAB.ZS/rankings
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing