Visiting Column #60 -- It Didn't Have to Happen

This will be the last column of 2020, a year like few others, and certainly unlike any in my lifetime.  We have had pandemics before, and we have had presidential elections stolen by fraud and immense illegal votes, but not, you know, in the same year.

But when I say that "it didn't have to happen", I'm referring to the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath thereof.

We have to set aside the gargantuan role of China and the Communist Party there, in allowing the virus to spread outside Wuhan and its borders, without allowing the world to come in and figure out how bad it was and how to contain it.  I hate to "set that aside" because they are criminally accountable, but that's not the point.

Donald Trump, as president, had an extremely difficult balancing act to handle, and I may be the only one giving him appropriate credit for the dilemma he confronted.  By that I mean the dual problems -- the medical problem and the economic problem.

We all understand that the two factors, medical and economic, were not only at unrelated ends, they were often at opposing ones.  The president had to oversee the actions of the medical community and the CDC and, at the same time, oversee the social and economic reality of the everyday, healthy American.

Lest anyone rewrite history, let us be very clear as to what he did: President Trump chose to delegate the responsibility for the social and economic effort to contain the spread of the virus to the states via their governors, and turned his personal oversight to the medical side, working with the CDC, the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry to accelerate the development of treatments and vaccines to stop the morbidity and mortality of the virus.

This made sense, both at the time and in hindsight -- an organized medical response should be centralized to get therapies and vaccines out to the populace far quicker than ever before.  

 At the same time, not imposing Federal guidance but letting each state's governor oversee the social and economic steps seemed the sensible choice -- the states are very different animals, from the urban to the suburban to the rural (often all three widespread in the same state).  Moreover, with 50 separate "laboratories", the success of various steps and various efforts at constraint and freedom could be (or could have been) compared and the more successful ones emulated.

In as less political environment, with fewer governors determined to reject anything from President Trump's White House, the better and more successful programs would have been emulated.  And early on, even staunchly anti-Trump governors like those in New York, New Jersey and California were profusely thanking him for helping them with support -- such as the hospital ship that the president sent to New York City.

Of course, the freedom granted the governors to handle their economies with the flexibility needed was promptly abused, with the newfound power to control people's lives and livelihoods a crisis not allowed to go to waste, such as New York's Cuomo actually putting COVID-19 patients in nursing homes and killing thousands of patients.  Thereafter, to save face, he tried to blame President Trump for his own mistakes, and the rest of the Democrat governors took it from there.

And yet, it didn't have to happen.

We know now, although we didn't then, is that the statistics were extremely deceptive.  COVID-19 proved out not to be as deadly as first thought; many deaths of people with co-morbid diseases -- cancer, heart disease, Type 1 diabetes for example -- were attributed to the coronavirus, when the patient was dying already.  Test positive?  OK, must have died from COVID.  There were even reports of hospitals being instructed to maximize the death toll attributed to the virus.

We know now that, given reasonable treatment, about 99.5% of all people infected with the virus (i.e., testing positive) survive, some 40% without even any symptoms.  COVID-19 infections are in that way, very similar to the annual flu.

We know now that COVID-19 is an opportunistic virus, preying particularly on those with compromised immune systems, such as diabetics and heart patients, and those under therapies with immune system suppression as a side effect or goal (like transplant patients).  The rest of us?  For the healthy (and particularly the non-elderly), it's anywhere from nothing to a bad cold with a rare fatality.  At one point, more people in Minnesota over 100 years old had died from reported COVID infections than people under 50 years old.

Knowing that, we have to look at the gargantuan cost of the shutdown, severe in most states.  Small businesses were closed, a high number permanently.  Extremely hard-hit were restaurants and bars, leaving literally millions unemployed.  Schools converted to the utterly ineffective Zoom class.  Brick-and-mortar stores closed; a great boon for Amazon but not nearly so good for mom and pop.  And oh, by the way, we're on our way to $3-4 trillion, with a "t", in Federal debt that will ultimately get borrowed from places like China.  Ironic, right?

And while the governors grabbed their new power to control the economy and lives of their people, others took the low road, from the media blaming the president for things the governors had done, to teacher unions agitating for their dues-payers not to have to go to work.

If we had it to do all over again, weighing the cost of the shutdown and understanding the medical nature of the virus and the disease, and if I were president, I would do this.

(1) I would let the population know that this will be painful; sick people are going to lose their lives as they do in any pandemic.  It is the inevitability of epidemics.

(2) I would explain to them in as simple language as possible, that the cure -- the economic action -- cannot be allowed to be worse than the disease.  It is terrible that 300,000 people died from COVID-19, yes, but many of them were going to die of their underlying disease in 2020 regardless, and to cause severe economic pain to 200,000,000 or more of our population is unsustainable.

(3) I would therefore explain that the safest course of action is to allow the virus to run its course without closing society, schools and businesses, to where over a period of some months, the general population would have been exposed.  At that point, the infection rate would decline sharply as immunity became widespread.  During that time, those with high susceptibility as noted above should take applicable precautions (isolation, masks, etc.), as should also be done in nursing homes and the like.

(4) I would simultaneously implement a version of the wildly successful Operation Warp Speed to get the vaccine(s) developed (and also work rigorously on applicable therapies using existing drugs). It worked for COVID-19; in ten months we have five vaccines in at least human testing, and three of those are going to patients widely as this is written with a fourth imminent.  That is incredible.

We did not have to shut down the economy in 2020.  We would have had more deaths, yes, we understand.  But the treatment was far worse than the disease.  The massive unemployment, the massive business closures, coming after an amazingly successful 2018-19 in the Trump economy could have been, and should have been, avoided.

It is ironic that of the two sides to the effort, the one that President Trump took on, the medical side, was wildly successful.  The one left to the governors was, for the most part, done poorly.

History should give proper credit, but it just seems like that won't happen.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #59 -- Careful, Baseball, Be Very Careful

Major League Baseball is a truly screwy institution.

So ... ice cream.  Ice cream is a really tasty treat, and most everyone likes ice cream.  And a good ribeye steak, well-grilled, gee, that's a wonderful flavor.  I like steaks, and work hard to get mine grilled perfectly when we have them.  Yum-mers.

But you don't put ice cream on a steak.  Individually they are wonderful; putting them together simply ruins the integrity of both.

Yet baseball is about to do just that; to put ice cream on top of a well-grilled ribeye, at least metaphorically.

You may have read recently about MLB's decision to recognize the Negro leagues that operated in the 1920-1948 period (i.e., until integration of the majors killed the Negro leagues) as "major leagues."  This recognition, of course, would put them on a par with not only the American and National League but also the brief outlaw Federal League of the 1910s and the major leagues pre-1900.

It is, of course, an effort on the part of MLB to be "woke" and apologize for excluding black players prior to 1947.  I get that; it wasn't exactly to baseball's credit that it was not an integrated institution all those years.  And a ceremonial recognition of those Negro leagues that filled the gap is not a terrible thing at all -- it was not unusual for their teams to outdraw the majors in the same cities in years where the AL or NL team was poor.

The problem is not with the recognition itself, but for the misguided attempt to try to integrate the statistics of those leagues with those of the majors.  And that's where we need to draw the line.

First there is the problem of the record-keeping.  MLB games since before the turn of the century have been recorded carefully, box scores recorded for posterity including in the newspapers of the day, and scoring decisions, though frequently challenged, done by official scorers -- the choice of a hit or error had universal guidelines (though not always followed as well as we'd like).

As for the Negro leagues, well, let's say that for a long time the box scores were nonexistent, and diligent efforts to recover or recreate them have been made, but the veracity is, let's say, far less than what exists for the majors.

When we say that this or that MLB player had a lifetime average of .296, we don't challenge it because the underlying data is there to support it.  Ty Cobb's hit total literally was validated by someone reading thousands of box scores, that sort of thing.  And someone did that for Bevo LeBourveau, I'm equally sure.

The difference is that those box scores were there to be plumbed; they could be validated by contemporaneous accounts, not recreated by them.

Now MLB has to deal with Negro leagues players with batting averages of, say, .385.  How do you say that a .385 from a player in the Negro leagues compares in any way to the average of a player on MLB, when the provenance of the data on which the .385 is based is far sketchier?

Perhaps you are prepared to put that player in the Hall of Fame (I am fine with that); but are you going to then try to compare his career average with Cobb's and say that his average for all time will be shown above Cobb's?

I am not, and it is not just that the data is impossible to validate as tightly.  Given the quality of some of the research into the Negro leagues, there is certainly a high percentage of validation, although it is far from perfect.

The problem is more the second issue, the level of the competition.

There are countless recorded match-ups in exhibitions between the stars of the Negro leagues playing against MLB stars -- Satchel Paige pitched on a number of occasions (successfully) against white MLB stars; Babe Ruth batted against black pitching stars as well, many of whom held their own quite well.  The black star players most assuredly could have played and starred in MLB had they been allowed.

The point I have not read anywhere is that it is not the caliber of the black stars of the era, but of the non-stars who pitched to them and hit against them.

Having read extensively on the subject, I can assure you that the detailed, well-organized roster management in MLB bears little relationship to the contract management of the Negro leagues.  Players came and went regularly, and it was not unusual to find teenage players and local pickups filling out rosters, for players to come and go or be barely identified -- the same Jim Jones who played for Team A in 1927 might have played for Team B in 1932.  Same guy?  Who knows.

Why do I mention that?  Because that is the uneven level of competition against whom the black stars compiled their career totals.  It wasn't always Satchel Paige pitching to Josh Gibson (and to be fair, not always Gibson batting against Paige).  We can readily make educated guesses about how Paige would have fared had he made it to the majors ten years earlier, based on his performances in exhibitions against white star teams.

What we can't do is to try to imagine what, say, Ted Williams would have hit had he faced the full range of Negro leagues pitchers for his career, many of whom would have never emerged from the minors had the leagues been integrated then.  We can, of course, be pretty sure that he would have hit a good bit better than the lifetime .344 average he compiled over his long career.

So how do you include the career average of players who faced substantial doses of minor-league pitching, and match them against Williams?  Ted hit .366 as a Minneapolis Miller in 1938 before coming to the majors.  Does that now count?  Wasn't the pitching in the American Association, the AA league of the Millers, on average about the same as the Negro leagues of 1938?

The answer, of course, is that we don't know.  We do know the level of pitching in the majors at that time, because the records are all there.  Any pitcher who pitched in the majors in the 20th Century, well, we know how good they were because the records are there for them, as well as those of those who hit against them.

But there really was no organized Negro minor league for player development, nothing remotely like the actual minor leagues.  As such, there were plenty of black prospects who were immediately in the "majors", doing their development there, and providing fodder for the stars among their opponents.

I have no problem with the Negro leagues being called "major", even though the designation has no real meaning.  I have no problem with their most deserving stars being inducted into the Hall of Fame; they were famous and they were good.

I do, however, have a huge problem with an attempt to commingle the statistics of the Negro Leagues with the far-better-researched data from MLB.  It is unfortunate that the leagues were segregated; in fact, a lot of that era was simply unfortunate.  But just as you cannot escape history, as Abe Lincoln said, you cannot rewrite history for your own narrative.

The Negro leagues' stats simply need to be out there as a separate database, with the caveats as to its provenance and the very erratic level of competition against whom the stars played.  It seems a little "separate but equal", with their data over there, you know, by the kitchen, but much as the steroid stars belong in the Hall of Fame, the Negro leagues' data needs to be somewhere.  Just not incorporated into the MLB stats.

Otherwise, well, to treat it on a par with the MLB data is to put ice cream on that grilled ribeye.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #58 -- A Not-Unexpected Screwage from China

It's Christmas, when billions of dollars are spent ordering gifts for the season.  With all that money being tossed around, we can be assured that people with marginal morals will be out there trying to take advantage.  And no one does that better than the Chinese.

My best girl was looking for some modest, identical gifts for her friends in her card-playing circle, and as we live in a beach-adjacent community, she was very happy to have found a sort of sea-glass Christmas tree, 12 inches tall and festooned with what was meant to look like bluish sea glass.

The picture at the right, from the actual online ad, is quite clear as to the basic look of the product; trust me, it actually did look a lot like sea glass even though it wasn't supposed to be sea glass, or have the recipient believe it was sea glass. 

Oh yeah, also ... "American made", the company advertised, from an "American company."  It sounded good, the price was right, and the product was a perfect gift for her friends.  So she ordered six of them, for a total of $122.97.  Since they took PayPal, we used that, and awaited the order.

A couple weeks thereafter, a box arrived with our order.  As they say, "imagine our surprise" when we opened up the box to find six Christmas trees shipped not from anywhere in America but from Wuhan, China, as we know, the home of COVID-19.

As the picture at the left suggests, what we received was not exactly a "sea-glass" tree, and you'll have to take my word for it that it wasn't near twelve inches high.  What it was, was an eight-inch high cheap clear plastic tree that must have cost all of four cents to make, whatever that might be in yuan, since they were indeed shipped not from America but from China.

Now, I grant you that what we actually ordered wasn't expected to be a very high-quality product, so when I say "cheap" I'm not suggesting that we were expecting actual sea glass.  But irrespective of that, it was not, in height, color and structure, what we ordered.

My best girl had a justifiable fit.  So she looked up the customer service phone number for the "American" company she had ordered it from.  Guess what she heard on the other end of the line?  "We're sorry, this number is no longer in service ..."

Since we had paid via PayPal, and I handle the PayPal account, I said I'd put in the complaint.  My younger son uses PayPal all the time, and swears by their customer service, so I went online and filed a complaint, and had it acknowledged as received.  In their process, they carry the complaint to the seller to reply and offer a solution.

Sure enough, next morning I get a message from PayPal.  At 2:00am, the seller, who was being open at this point about using their actual Chinese company name, had offered to refund an amount of  $12, and we would not have to return the incorrect items.  No offer to provide the correct products was made.

Got it?  On a $122.97 order, the Chinese company was offering to refund less than 10% of the price we paid, and made no offer to provide the proper items.  Naturally, I replied through PayPal that we would not accept that and required a full refund of our payment.

And of course, next morning there was another "offer" from the company -- they had upped their offer to $20.  Now, how we were supposed to be expected to accept less than a sixth of what we paid to settle our claim, being allowed to keep a bunch of garbage that was nothing like what we ordered?

I wrote back essentially the same response via PayPal, that they could take their offer and place it gently where the sun doesn't shine, which at that point it was not shining since it was daytime here and they were, you know, in China.

Next day I got a message from PayPal that was a bit different.  They had offered to refund the entire amount, but only if we sent the clear plastic trees back to China, on our nickel, no later than December 15th.  The problem was that PayPal looked at that as a settling offer, and their online messaging did not give me an avenue to reject it.

Now, it was not what we had agreed to.  In order to get our money back, not only would we have to ship the garbage back to China, and pay for it ourselves, but the Chinese company would have to acknowledge receipt by December 15th.  And according to PayPal, if we didn't accept this within a week, they would drop the claim.  But there was no actual message section for me to respond and reject that!

Do I trust that even if we shipped the garbage back, that the Chinese company would properly acknowledge receipt?  Why would they?  The same people who thought we'd accept $12 as a settlement could easily lie about receiving products back, and with no recourse.  I was not going to put myself in a position to have to chase them down again.

I finally found a separate messaging channel to PayPal and sent a very loud message that we were not accepting that "solution" and wanted the full refund, no conditions.  I wasn't sure even if they were going to get my message and link it with the case; after all, a lot of people use PayPal.

I know everything doesn't always work out the way it should.  But in this case, about 36 hours later I got a message back from a lady at PayPal.  They had looked quickly into the exchange of the previous few days, and then looked to see whether this Chinese outfit had a track record.

And of course they had; they had shipped enough incorrect product paid for via PayPal, and PayPal had had enough similar complaints, that they had decided to provide an unconditional refund, and in almost no time had gone ahead and credited our account the full amount of the purchase.  Case closed.

There are several takeaways here, but primary among them is that when you are ordering from a company that portrays itself as American, and they are Chinese, there need to be penalties, and we need not to have to rely on PayPal to settle it.  Chinese companies are China, friends, and the penalties need to be assessed toward China.

Because it ain't about Christmas trees.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

 

 

Visiting Column #57 -- On Mourning and Our Cultures

People leave us, often when we don't expect them to.

I've written on a few occasions about topics wherein I invoked a grand-niece of mine, a young lady of twenty-six.  For the most part -- well, every time I mentioned her -- it related to her extreme liberalism, and the linkage to her extreme success in her academic pursuits.  She was brilliant and dedicated, and this past spring was awarded her doctorate after doing extensive research in her field.  The family was incredibly proud, despite the political chasm between her and pretty much all the rest of the family.

And she was twenty-six.

She was still twenty-six years old, when a few months later we received the late-night call you never want to get.  Stricken by a pulmonary embolism, the otherwise-healthy young woman had collapsed and died in her home shortly before beginning her post-doctoral research on the way to what was undoubtedly going to be an amazing academic career.

How do you mourn?  She was an only child, and her parents were, of course, relatively young.  They, along with a grandparent from each side, now have to "go forward", as they say, with an incredible hole in their lives.

No one can honestly feel guilt about what happened, of course; her passing was not precipitated by any action or mistake and, of course, was neither her nor anyone else's responsibility.  And it's not so much guilt that is felt, as it is a reluctance or inability to move forward with one's life when a loved one is unexpectedly taken, certainly at such an early age.

How, we ask, can we go back to work, or a hobby, or engage in anything pleasurable, even enjoy a nice dinner, in such circumstance?  It simply feels as though we are dishonoring the memory of the lost loved one, and I get it.

So not long ago, I happened to be watching a show within which there was a passing reference to some Asian culture and the fact that they had a period of mourning for the passing of a family member -- thirty days, maybe?  

It struck me then that a fixed period of mourning was embedded in the cultures of many societies, faiths and sects worldwide, and that it had been the case for a very long time.  For most of my sixty-nine years I have paid only subconscious notice to that fact, always with the equally subconscious thought that the widespread nature of that fixed mourning period had been to pay respect to the dead, and to make sure that we took that time to honor them.

But now, I truly contemplated the notion and have come to the conclusion that the idea of a fixed mourning period was not to ensure that we remembered the dead, and focused attention on their memory for at least a certain minimum respectful period.  

Rather, it was for the living; that is, by devoting a month, or a week, or a fortnight to the honor of the lost loved one, the mourners could become freed thereafter to return to their lives, without the guilt of feeling as though they were ignoring the honored loved one.  Not, of course, that the departed would be forgotten; it meant that society removed any stigma from the family for living their lives.

It is not helping now.  For the most part, "American culture" does not have that universality of mourning process; no book of rules to say how long to mourn when your loved one is young and the loss sudden and unexpected.  And so our family has still, short months thereafter, not come so much to grips with this loss that everyone's lives are back to a semblance of daily routine.

Perhaps there should be something in American culture.  Perhaps we would be better served if there were such a period that then thereafter allowed us to go forward and live a normal life, not ignoring or forgetting the departed, but acknowledging that we had indeed mourned -- and that almost certainly the late loved one would not have wanted to have felt responsible for paralyzing the lives of the living.

It is a lesson too late for us, as we cope with a return to normalcy.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton