Visiting Column #56 -- Medical Dramas Go South, and Probably Don't Even Know It

Over the past few years, my wife's and my list of TV shows being DVRed has gone from a fairly modest percentage of them being reality shows, to even more being reality shows.  That is done at the expense of situation comedies and TV dramas, the latter being today's main topic.

I was, as you know, a medical-school student, so I am relatively conversant in medical jargon, certainly enough to understand the TV shows that have a medical setting, by which I specifically refer to the two that we watched fairly religiously.  That would be the old standard of contemporary medical dramas, Grey's Anatomy, and the more recent-vintage one, Chicago Med.  We had watched both of them since their inceptions years ago.  That's a lot of investment.

In their developmental years, both shows put out a set of characters that tried to create an appealing group, sometimes with quirks, but for the most part the producers realized that people watch medical dramas for the characters and not the medicine.  For years, that worked.

Both shows, however, have strayed toward the edge of being taken off the DVR list in the last couple years.  When I want to get a sermon, I turn to my pastor.  I do not enjoy being lectured by TV shows, especially when I may disagree with the message.  Grey's, in recent years, has decided that it needs to preach rather than spin good stories, and then preach some more.

Chicago Med befuddled me in an episode whose playing out was so contrary to its basic message that I wrote a piece about how they completely missed they way one plot should have developed.  Read my article here; it will help you get my drift.  You get the idea regardless.  For both shows, my best girl had to take me to task for yelling "Stop preaching!" to a mindless TV set.

I imagine that when you've produced a show like that for years, living in insulated Hollywood, you feel perhaps that you own that audience.  Perhaps it blinds you to reality, particularly the reality of why that audience is actually watching.  Most importantly, it can blind you to why we watch fiction in the first place.

Both shows were taken off our DVR list within ten minutes of the first episode of this season.  Moreover, it was for the exact same reason.

We watch fiction for the same reason we read fiction -- as an escape from the day's stresses and the reality of the world.  In the case of 2020, that reality is heavily COVID-centric.  We have businesses everywhere shut down and closed, governors and the House Speaker with their "Do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy, masks abounding, toilet paper shortages, all that.  I don't have to explain; we're living it.

So I was particularly disappointed when both shows chose to put masks on their characters and go all coronavirus-stories on us.  I was disappointed, because it meant they'd have to keep it going all season, and I didn't particularly need to have the virus coughed in my face weekly by my choice of television shows.

Think about it.  I haven't seen much in the way of new sitcom episodes this season, but the few I have seen have completely ignored what is going on COVID-wise in the real world, and done so to their credit.  COVID-19 is not funny; nothing about it is.  Once you insert it into your plot line, you can't get it extracted, and we are not going to laugh.  The purpose of comedies is ... well, you get the idea.

But it wasn't just the masks on the two medical shows.  I am not lying to you when I say that it did not take ten minutes for both shows to find a way to work into their dialogue the idea that black people have a higher death rate from coronavirus than non-blacks.  Now, that's probably true and all, but without any context, so what?  Why, in God's name, did two separate shows on separate networks feel like we really, really needed to be told that in the first few minutes of their new seasons?  What, like we could do anything about it?

I had had it.  My best girl and I almost immediately shouted "Stop preaching!" at the TV, whereupon we looked at each other and switched to the recording-management screen and canceled them both.

As we are so early into the seasons of the fictional comedy and drama series, it is hard to tell whether or not more of them will insist on introducing the dreaded mask and our contemporary reality into their series.  But I beg this of them: Don't.  Resist the temptation, and let the stories tell their own tales, mask-free.

As a dramatic device, in TV dramas, it would now be beyond cliche.   In the context of a comedy, it would snuff out any humor in your entire season were you even to touch it once.  COVID-19 is the third rail of the 2020-21 television season.

I am right, am I not?

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 #55 -- Three Things that SCOTUS Will Have to Decide

Good morning, fair readers.

As I write this, it is mid-November, and the 2020 election is in hot dispute.  What is being disputed is, well actually, a number of things, all related to whether there was an epidemic of ballot-stuffing, ballot destroying, a lot of 135-year-olds voting (they all seemed to like Joe Biden), and some very curious banning of Republican poll-watchers from cities with corrupt election histories like, you know, Philadelphia.

I'm expecting that in the coming weeks, a lot of court cases will be heard, and ultimately, they will float up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will have to make a few different findings and hand down a few different rulings.

While I don't know what those rulings will be, or even what cases they will hear, this particular column is meant to point out that the rulings will not be nearly as straightforward as those in Bush v. Gore, 2000, and they will have quite a bit more long-range impact.

There are three things that will have outcomes as far as this situation is concerned, and SCOTUS will have failed miserably if they don't execute on all three, to wit:

1. What happened?  This is a finding, in the sense that the Court will have to determine the facts of the cases.  I say "cases", because in different states, the Democrats did somewhat different things.  We don't know for sure (that's the Court's job to decide), but regardless, there have to be rulings of what the evidence showed happened in each of the contested states.  SCOTUS will find that X, Y and Z happened in Michigan, and X and Y happened in Pennsylvania, and maybe V and W in Arizona and, oh yeah, W, X and Y in Wisconsin and Georgia.  You get the idea.

So the first outcome is that the Court will make one ruling per state as to what it has found to have happened with the election.  Neither you nor I can tell you what that is going to be, because there are multiple legal teams pursuing this, some with no ties to the Trump campaign and others connected to it.  Some of them are being very close-hold with their evidence, lest the leftist media put forth their opposition to the public ahead of time.

Obviously, if the Court rules that nothing happened, or if maybe only one state played fast and loose with election laws, it's over and Biden will be sworn in on January 20th.  You don't need to read my column for that, so let's deal with the assumption that the Court finds multi-state problems took place.  Then we get to ...

2. What is the remedy?  So let's say that the Court finds that the elections in three states were corrupt, and the electoral count of those states is enough to swing the election to President Trump. Here's where SCOTUS becomes a real wild card, because I didn't attend enough law school (i.e., none) to know the answer to the $64,000 question -- what is the fix for this one, the 2020 election?

Obviously, there are multiple avenues of repair -- a replacement election, or the discarding of all successfully-contested ballots, or simply voiding the general election in that state and defaulting to the Constitutionally-mandated solution where the legislature of the state votes on the electors it will send to the Electoral College in December.  I honestly don't know, and those remedies could theoretically be different for what the Court orders each state to do, depending on all that X, Y and Z stuff I wrote above.

But the point is, that if the Court finds that the election was in any way corrupted, it has to order a specific solution; it can't pass the buck.  I do not know what that would be any more than I know what their finding would be, but I can tell you this -- the Court must, in that case, specifically mandate the immediate solution to tell the states how to determine what electors go to the College in December.  It cannot leave that to others.

I'll add this.  The left (meaning the Democrats and the media) will riot in the streets if that remedy does not go their way.  The Court -- and I'm serious -- must not care.  During her confirmation hearings, Justice Barrett pointed out that the Court should not be taking outcomes into account in making a Constitutionally-acceptable ruling, and this would be a good example.  They must rule properly, and provide a Constitutional remedy, and the remedy must be explicit so as to order how the electors for each state will be chosen.  And if the left (or the right) doesn't like the outcome, well, that's simply not relevant.

3. What is the future?  So whatever the Court finds, as long as something is found to be wrong, the nation can no longer trust its own electoral process.  And here is where the Court has to act decisively.  If there was corruption, in the eyes of the Court, then it owes it to the citizens (i.e., legal voters) of each affected state to do what it can to prevent that sort of thing from happening ever again.

Let's say that the Court finds that the prevention of Republican poll-watchers from overseeing the ballot counting in Philadelphia was felonious, and logically leads to the elimination of trust in the outcome.  It is incumbent on the Court to order penalties for those responsible, and it is equally incumbent on the Court to order the city and, assumedly, the commonwealth, to take affirmative, auditable steps so that such corruption can never recur.

Face it, my friends, right now we do not believe that the 2024 election will be on the up and up, and we certainly don't feel the 2020 election was.  The Supreme Court can not allow future elections to be subject to the same tortured doubts that we have about this one.

So if there was wrongdoing in 2020, then people need to be sent to prison, and systems need to be fixed.  Now.  Not two years from now, and certainly not four years from now.

The nine justices on the Supreme Court are going to have a very tough task in front of them, but they cannot finesse it, or do it halfway, or kick the can down the road.

They need to decide very specifically what happened. 

They need to order how to fix anything that went wrong so we have legitimate electors in December.

They need to punish the guilty and ensure that future elections can be trusted.

All three. This is their moment.

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 #54 -- Election Day Ramblings

This column was started in 2014, and for over four years I wrote a column every workday, until I reached 1,000 articles.  That means, though, that there has only been one other Election Day column on a presidential election day, so I went back to see what I had actually written, what pithy advice I had given, what remarkable insights I had shared with the world. 

You what I wrote?  Why I like cats and don't like dogs as much.  I'm serious; it is right here.  Election Day 2016.

So today, I feel that perhaps I might want to share some thoughts that might have a bit more relevance to the presidential (and Congressional) elections taking place today, that perhaps may end in the declaration of a winner.

I voted already.  My home state has early voting, but I chose to send for an absentee ballot, fill it out and hand-deliver it to my county's government center at the Board of Elections, and verify that it was counted.  I voted for Donald Trump for reelection as president.

But of course I did.   I am a conservative, unapologetic indeed.  I believe that the long view of our nation is one where people of all backgrounds have unlimited opportunity to succeed.  I believe that view has a support net for the truly needy, but that motivates everyone to get off that net if physically possible.

I believe in a long view of the nation where government keeps us safe, both domestically and internationally.  I believe in law and order, properly and compassionately administered.  And I believe in the idea that we reward talent, intelligence, diligence and accomplishment as a society and an economy.

Finally, I believe that the governance of that view is the Constitution.  Most particularly, it is the "powers not delegated" phrasing that effectively states that if a role is not assigned to the Federal government in the text of the Constitution (such as the national defense, the post, interstate commerce and coinage), it is the province of the states (such as, you know, education and morality).  I detest Federal overreach into areas the government has no business being in.

Donald Trump can be a frustrating man to support.  But the bottom line is simple.  The vision of the country that I just expressed is his vision.  Therefore I can be assured that his energy directed toward policy will be in the promotion of legislation and executive orders that closely align with that vision.

The opposition Democrats do not agree with any of that.  Their vision is of an all-powerful centralized government run by the elites, with policies that govern the election system so as to ensure their power.  It is, indeed, all about power for them.  It requires a socialist system to prevent non-elites with the aforementioned talent, intelligence and work ethic to succeed and challenge them.

There is no excuse for the way this year's riots have been managed in cities and states all run by Democrats.  The police are ordered to stand back and let the looters loot and the rioters vandalize and  burn, even when the minority owners of some of those businesses, already ravaged by the Wuhan virus impact, protest that it is hurting them.

There is no excuse for the Democrats' impeachment of President Trump for literally asking about the potential influence peddling by the Biden family and for the Ukrainians to please look into it. I can't possibly support that incredible "judicial" overreach by the House.

There is no excuse for Obamacare, particularly the way it was rammed down the throat of our nation with the pomposity of the elites, with the notorious declaration by Nancy Pelosi that we'd "have to pass it to see what's in it."  People who say things that condescending ought not to be allowed within a country mile of power.  Because "what's in it" forced 63-year-old couples to pay for coverage for maternity and pediatric dentistry but stripped our own dental coverage from the plans the law outlawed.

There is no excuse for Joe Biden.  The man clearly was engaged in selling access through his son and brother, and an apolitical judiciary would have no problem declaring those actions to be treasonous in that they involved our adversaries.  And there is no excuse for the actions of the news media and Big Tech in stomping on the evidence of that access-selling and trying to prevent you from knowing about it. 

I honestly don't care much how President Trump expresses himself.   One could argue that if he weren't who he is, then he couldn't get done what he does, and there is some truth in that.  It is all about what he does; and what he does is to get things done -- with achieving energy independence, with ISIS, with Israel, with the USMCA, with the removal of onerous regulations, with the cutting of corporate and individual tax rates -- the way a businessman with an eye on efficiency would.

Yes, I voted for President Trump and it wasn't even close.

 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 #53 -- Pardon Biden (But Only the Elder One)

This is one heck of an election year, and I don't have to tell you why.  As I write this, it is the early morning of October 21, 2020, and with about two weeks left in the election period, the rest of us are pretty much hoping it will just be over quickly.

There has been all manner of relevant and irrelevant diversions and actual crises coming to play in this, the year of COVID-19, but one particularly is concerning.  That would be the revelation that Joe Biden, the Democrats' candidate and former vice president, apparently was getting a percentage kicked back to him from the strange dealings his son Hunter had with the Chinese and the Ukranians and at least another country or two.

Well, that's half the deal.

The other half is that the story, although quite a bit better-documented and with more evidence than the invented scandal that got President Trump impeached, has been buried by the major media, Fox News excepted.  Broken by the New York Post, the story has gotten the Post's Twitter account suspended by applying a rule that didn't actually apply, and the major networks have almost totally ignored the story.

So while we have the conspiracy among Big Tech and the mainstream media to prevent your knowing that Joe Biden sold out his own country while vice president, we still have the actual facts of the case, i.e., the sellout, and its impact on the election.  We have the FBI, its senior leadership still apparently anti-Trump, hanging onto evidence for months without doing anything with it.

With two weeks left, I have the perfect solution to President Trump's dilemma about how to get the story out there when the mainstream media refuse to cover it.

Issue a pardon to Joe Biden, right now, for the crimes of influence peddling and treason.

Now, tell me that's not the perfect solution!  Think about it -- with Joe Biden pardoned, no one can claim that an immediate high-octane FBI investigation into Hunter Biden's actions is "political" or "influencing the election", since the candidate has been pardoned.  But clearly any manure that is dug up as to what Hunter did dramatically implicates the now-immune Joe Biden and the stench would stay with him even if criminality no longer could.

Moreover, the media simply could not let this go; they'd have to report on it, which would provide some oxygen to the whole Hunter-kicking-back-cash-to-the-Big-Guy aspect.  They couldn't possibly leave that one alone.

In fact, since the last debate is tomorrow night, maybe Trump ought to bring the pardon with him, so that the whole nation can see it, and the poor slobs out there who only watch CNN or ABC News could ask themselves "Hunter who?" and maybe learn what's been hidden from them.

OK, I'm plagiarizing myself a bit; I wrote in 2017 that President Trump should have pardoned Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (but not the Clinton Foundation) so as to allow the FBI to move on to other affairs and still provide the "stink" that would never leave them.  I've kept that idea handy for just such a moment as this.

If you know anyone with the President's ear, I hope you will make sure this idea comes up to his desk, really soon now.  I'd love to see his face when he hears it.

Joe, you are pardoned.  But not forgiven.

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 #52 -- The Toidy-Toid Was a Boid

The previous 1,051 columns since 2014 were almost invariably for the reader to enjoy, or to contemplate, or just laugh, not infrequently at me.  Certainly I intended that they often be a departure point for some reasoning and thought on an issue of the day.

This one?  Not so much.  This one is really for me to preserve a memory before it goes away, a memory of something I did that I couldn't believe I could do, still can't, and I want to remember it while it is fresh and still being enjoyed.  So bear with me.

I took up golf as a freshman in high school in 1965.  Since I have played the game since, that means I have been playing for 55 years.  Of course, in high school and college I played pretty often, not so much in med school and thereafter (singing and then raising kids), but after my 40s I tried to play a couple times a month, and usually failed to do so.

There have been some highlights, of course.  I have had two eagles in my life, bizarrely within a week of each other in 1987, and both at the Fauquier Springs Country Club in Virginia, where I played for a few years.  The first was a hole in one, so that milestone is at least checked off the list.

I'm a very distinctly mid-80s golfer.  If I were to have to bet an over/under on my score, no matter the course, before playing, I would say "84."  There are four courses in the plantation where we live, and though I have broken 80 on three of them, I'm still a reliable 84, if you're betting.

My best lifetime rounds were a 76 (four over par) in Concord, Massachusetts in a college competition, and then a couple years later a 75 (also four over par) in Chapel Hill, NC on the last day of first-year med school finals in 1974.  But those were very much the exceptions.  I'm not that good a player.

In that 75 in Chapel Hill, I played the back nine in 36 strokes, the lowest nine holes I'd ever had, and the only time I've played nine holes in even par.  That's plot material.

- - -

So last week, I went out for a practice round with three other guys I had not met before; I just plugged myself into a threesome with a missing fourth.  And here is what happened.  Remember, this is for me to keep a memory alive that I hope I'll read years from now.

The first hole is a fairly straight par-4 with large bunkerage in front of the green to the left.  I drove up the right side into light, very playable rough, and had a pretty open 9-iron shot left to a two-level green, elevated in the back where the pin was.  I got the shot about 15 feet short of the pin for a pretty simple two-putt par.  I could also feel the greens were a bit slow and breaking less than you would read them.

Number Two is a fairly long par-3 with lots of water on the right all the way up.  It's usually a 4-hybrid for me, into a green that slopes downhill left to right and toward the front.  With little wind all day, and with the pin center right, I took the usual clubbing and got it just on the front of the green for another two-putt par.  How about that, even par after two and, better yet, I hit both greens in regulation, something I try hard to do.

The third hole is a relatively long par-5 that I've never reached in two and probably can't, even with a good supporting breeze, which there wasn't anyway.  But I did get a drive up the left center, comfortably left of a pair of traps in the right center of the fairway in driving distance.  I took time over the 3-wood second shot and got it up left center about 40 yards short of the green.  I remembered to commit to the gap wedge shot and got it within ten feet of the pin, which was right center of the green.  The birdie dropped, and son of a gun, I was actually one under par after three holes.

Number Four is a short par-4, but a hard hole.  There is a swamp about 200 yards out, so I can't hit driver off the tee.  Moreover, the green is a wide but shallow one, elevated on the right side.  So you have to get your drive up close to the swamp area, so you can hit a shorter (higher-loft) iron into the green to get it to hold.  This time the pin was on the much-easier left side.  I drove a 3-wood up the left center, but my full pitching wedge in was pulled a bit left and just off the putting surface.  I could still putt, though, and approached within a foot for a tap-in par.  Still minus-one.

The fifth hole is also a par-4 with a swamp in front of the green, but longer and you can hit driver off the tee.  There is a trap up the left center of the fairway to avoid, but if you fade your drive a bit, and it reaches the peak about where the trap is, you'll get a nice roll down the other side of the hill, which I did.  My drive rolled through the fairway and was in light rough with a side-hill lie down to the right.  The pin was on the left side of the green on a sharp slope forward.

Being in some rough, I added one club and hit 8-iron into the green to be sure to clear the swamp.  I thought I didn't swing hard enough, but having added a club, it was enough to clear the swamp and a trap just in front of the green, ending up a dozen feet uphill of the hold and past it.  I tapped the fairly straight downhill putt lightly and it went right up to the center of the hole and dropped in.  Two under par after five, and four greens hit out of five.  Yesss!

This is where I started telling the guys in the foursome that I do not play like this; I'm not the player they were watching.  We have a custom here like a lot of places, the "birdie flask."  Make a birdie, you take out a flask and share a wee nip o' whiskey.  I forgot it on #3, but this time took out the flask, and sure enough, it was empty!  The other players were already good-naturedly teasing me, and one said that he would take care of the booze -- whereupon he took out his flask only to discover it was also empty. 

We headed to #6, a mid-range par-3 with the pin on the center right.  I hit a 7-iron but poorly, and ended up short right of the green with a 50-foot pitch-and-run.  The 7-iron was bad, but the pitch was really bad, and ran another 25 feet past the pin and just past the putting surface.  I was resigned to trying to lag a putt close enough to save bogey, but the putt was pretty straight, and dropped in the hole for a very lucky par -- two bad shots and a fortunate putt.  Still two under after six, territory I had never, ever been.

Number 7 is hard to describe.  It's a par-5, a dogleg left with a stand of trees 250 yards out up the center.  Your "normal" approach is to keep your drive to the right (but not too far, because of course there is water there), and then hit a second shot up the right side (but not too far, because of course there are traps there).  Then you turn left for a third shot into a very narrow (and not all that deep) green.

Alternatively, you can hit a drive up the left side, where there is a secondary fairway to the left of the trees.  That route cuts the dogleg and is shorter -- except you can't hit driver, because there is a waste area 190 yards out.  So you either hit a 5-wood and go that way, or take the normal approach up the right.  I'd rather not go left, because your third shot is to the shallowest angle and likely runs over the green.

My drive tends to fade, so I took driver and faded it up the right side.  I decided on a 4-hybrid second shot to favor accuracy over distance, and left a full gap wedge third.  But I pulled the wedge a bit and went left of the green, between two traps but safe.  That left a short pitch; I left that one ten feet short but again, it was a straight putt and dropped for a fortunate par.  Seven holes, two under.  Who knew?

Number Eight is a mess waiting to happen.  It is a longish par-4 with the fairway narrowed by trees that poke into the right half of the fairway at 180 yards out.  I've found it best to stay short of those trees and hit a 5-wood or the 4-hybrid up the center so the trees don't block the approach.  I never hit driver there unless I have already messed up the round.  This time I hit the hybrid but pulled it a bit; nothing special and still in the fairway a long 7-iron out.  I didn't hit the 7 perfectly but not terribly; it came up a few feet off the green for an easy two-putt par.  I'd survived both #7 and #8 and was still minus-two.

The ninth hole is a short and easy par-4, and I was pretty sure I was going to have my first-ever under par nine holes.  I have never driven it, but I've come within 25 yards a few times.  This time I hit the drive left-center and on a small hill, not in the fairway but a good lie.  I just wanted to hit the gap wedge somewhere on the front of the green -- the pin was in the center toward the front and not the hardest placement.

I took a deep breath, really concentrated and hit the wedge to eight feet past the pin.  At that point, I figured every putt was going to drop, since they pretty much all had.  This one was a bit downhill, fairly straight, and the thirty-third stroke of the day rolled in for the third birdie of the round.

Like I said, I'd never had nine holes better than 36 before; only once been as good as even par for nine, and never played nine holes without a bogey.  I have no idea what came over me, and I know I played over my head, but at least there is a round to remember, a 33.  And now that I've recorded it for my own future enjoyment, I will indeed remember it.

You're probably wondering about the back nine.  Unfortunately, as we got to the back nine a different group was in front of us, and they were playing incredibly slowly.  I have back issues normally, and when you don't swing a club for ten minutes, repeatedly, your back can stiffen up and mine did, reverting me to my normal game.  I didn't have any expectations of "shooting my age" (I'd have needed a 36 on the back), and was lucky even to get through 18 holes with the very slow pace and the hopes for a hot shower.

But I have a neat afternoon to remember otherwise.  If you're reading this, cool, but the article is really for me.

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 #51 -- If "Contact Tracing" Works for COVID, Then ...

As I write this, I am 69 years old, which is not a surprise to regular readers of the column, but relevant for this piece. It is relevant because it means that I am old enough to remember another pandemic, which started about 40 years ago and therefore, being an adult at the time, is in my adult memory. 

I am talking about AIDS, if you haven't already figured that out. And I'm also talking about COVID-19, and I'm going to talk about hypocrisy because, well, I see that a lot. Only in this case, no one seems to be connecting dots. 

I have to assume that a lot of people reading this were not around 40 years ago, or were too young to recall the news details. So I'm going to help you out a little, because those details are, as usual, where the devil is hiding. Let's snap back, if we could, to 2020 and COVID-19. 

Specifically, I want to talk about "contact tracing", the practice of figuring out all those with whom an infected person has been in contact since their becoming infected with COVID-19. 

I would say that, while conservatives are not particularly opposed to contact tracing, we are not so passionate about it as the left which, for whatever reason, seems to raise it every other word, possibly because the Federal government has not gone all nanny-state and tried to implement it with the almighty power of the government -- you know, power. 

 I suppose I see the point of both sides, but what I do or not see as far as COVID-19 tracing is less important than the disparity, where the left is so gung-ho on it. Why? Because now we're going to head back to about 1980. AIDS at the time was (listen close if you are under 50) an invariably fatal and very ugly disease that was almost totally in the gay community and among IV drug addicts and, aside from reused-needle transmission, was sexually transmitted (aside from a rare transmission through such means as blood transfusions). 

The virus, HIV, was a nasty bug, and it is important to note that, as opposed to the COVID-19 fatality rate of about 1% of symptomatic patients, and about .05% of infections, the fatality rate for HIV infections was essentially 100% back then. 

You would think -- and most sane people would as well -- that if you thought that contact tracing was a good public health measure for COVID-19 in 2020, you'd have practically insisted on it for the much more dangerous AIDS in 1980, right? Well, you would be so wrong. 

The left was all "individual rights" back then, and violently opposed contact tracing for AIDS. Gee, I wonder why then and not now? It's not hard to figure that out. In the spirit of the times back then, "outing" someone as gay was not a good thing, and testing positive for AIDS pretty much labeled you back then as being gay. To their discredit, there were people who regarded AIDS as a plague visited on the gay community for their "sins." So I get it, I really do. But we were talking about a universally fatal disease in those days. 

As an straight actor at the time, back then I saw its horrors nearly first-hand (as if you didn't know how many actors were gay). Unfortunate as it was, the fact that it was a death sentence for those who contracted it, was a great deal more important than the embarrassment to someone who was "outed" as a contact. 

This all broke during the Jimmy Carter administration, when the Democrats had both houses of Congress and the White House as well, and could do what they wanted. With a large Democrat campaign-funding source being Hollywood (and its closet-gay community), can you make the logical leap to why the left, then running the government, was so reluctant to trace patient contacts? I truly dislike that kind of hypocrisy. 

I've written often that with the left, it is all about power, and you can tell that when the hypocrisy is exposed. What I don't understand is why, even though it is 40 years since, not one article has come out pointing out the vast difference between the left's nanny-state approach to contact tracing for COVID-19 in 2020, vs. their knee-jerk "don't touch our gay donors" opposition to the same technique for a 100x more fatal disease in 1980. 

So now there is an article. Comments welcome. 

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 #50 -- Trump and the Middle East Grand Plan

Within the past couple three weeks, something most of us thought impossible has had its first steps, and not only do those steps seem productive, but for once the process seems inexorable, in the good way.

It started -- well, it actually started in 2017, as we will see, but for those among you who only read headlines, it seems to have started with the surprising step of the United Arab Emirates recognizing the nation of Israel and exchanging ambassadors, which constitutes full diplomatic relations.

Now, the UAE is one of those oil countries of the Middle East with a large concentration of power shared among the emirs who give the nation its name, as you know.  More importantly, they are capitalists who know which side their bread is buttered, or which side their oil ... OK, oil doesn't have sides, but you get my point.  They act in their own self-interest.

Last week, Bahrain followed suit, also recognizing Israel and actually having a ceremony to celebrate the two nations' new ties right there in good old Washington, DC, in the People's House, where resides one Donald J. Trump.  As Bahrain was taking that step, words of support for the new relationship with the once-upon-a-time enemy came from other Middle East petrocracies like Morocco and Saudi Arabia, meaning that they, too, were on the verge of swapping ambassadors with Israel.  Dominoes were falling all over.

A bit surprised?  Of course you are.  Peace in the Middle East, at least peace between Israel and the Arab world, was that long-sought but frustrating goal, failed at by pretty much every president for decades, save for Barack Obama, who didn't so much "fail" at trying to pacify the region, as "ignore" the region, never seeming to care if there were peace there.

Donald Trump is a different president.  We knew that when we elected him.  He was the guy who built the ice rink in Manhattan privately when the city government couldn't get it done.  One thing we know about him is that when he looks at government and sees it doing something stupid, or doing something stupidly, he tries to figure put how to do it cheaper and better, like the ice rink.  It's in his DNA.

When Trump looked at the Middle East, he saw countries like the UAE, which only hated Israel on paper, since Israel did not in any way threaten the emirs, but they had to go along with their fellow Arab nations.  All the UAE wanted was to be able to drill and sell oil, and stay rich.  Israel was not a barrier to that.

But, interestingly, the USA was a potential problem.  Under our lands and off our shores is a vast resource in oil and natural gas, to the point that if it were allowed to be tapped with far less restrictions than the Obama and Biden types had imposed, the USA could become energy-independent and, in fact, a next exporter of fossil fuels.  Adding a net exporter to the market would drive down prices, and that would hit the emirs right in the wallet.  That was a threat indeed.

President Trump could see that, and he could also see that playing nice with the Arab world had not settled the Israel peace issue.  Plus, he could see -- and here is the important point -- that if the USA were in a position to export gas and oil, and thus threaten energy prices, not only would he gain leverage in the Middle East for peace purposes, but it would also cause economic problems for Russia, which was peddling gas to Europe without competition.  Nice bonus there.

So look at all the factors.  Most of the Arab world didn't really hate Israel; like the UAE, they mostly just wanted to sell oil and stay rich.  Israel was not a threat to that.  The Palestinians were showing that they simply wanted to play the victim card, walking away from every previous peace deal.  Since the Palestinians and their terrorist buddies were no asset to the Arab world, their actions were getting tiresome to the Arab nations, who were asking themselves why they should even care, if the Palestinians didn't.

And one other factor, perhaps the biggest -- Iran.  Iran has been the biggest source of instability in the region, funding terrorists (including with the $150 billion that Obama and Biden gave them) and fomenting wars.  The Arab world truly hates and fears the Iranian mullahs, since not only are they Shiites (where the Arab oil nations are mostly Sunni) they represent an unnegotiating, wartime threat to their oil business.  And the mullahs are kind of nuts.  Trump's energy policy is a threat to the Arab oil types, too, but they knew that, unlike the Iranians, they could negotiate with Trump and did not see the USA as a military threat.

One of the first things that President Trump did in 2017 was to start lessening the barriers to becoming energy-independent.  Silly, Obama-era drilling restrictions were lifted, and steps were taken toward becoming energy-independent and a net exporter, which we now are.

I hope you are following, because if you are, you see the grand plan.  Where prior presidents failed in achieving Middle East stability, because they tried to do it just diplomatically, Trump understood their self-interest.  He knew that the Arab world didn't really care about the whining Palestinians, that they didn't have a gripe with Israel, and that their real fear was (A) Iran, and (B) getting euchred out of their oil profits.

So President Trump quickly put the USA in a position to influence the world's oil producers, by becoming the biggest one -- and we not only can now influence the world market, we are also the biggest consumer and can thus manage both the supply and demand side.  With his plan, we could get what we want.

And what we wanted, along with stymieing Russia and handcuffing Iran, was peace.  Peace between the Arab nations and Israel, a very achievable goal, given the bigger threats out there.  Trump sends a team including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, over to Dubai.  "We are the big dog in the energy world now", Kushner might have said.  "You know what we'd like to see?  We'd like you to recognize Israel and institute diplomatic relations.  It's no skin off your back to do that, right?  And then we're going to ask your friends to do the same, but we need you to go first.  And if you do, perhaps we'll be a bit more conservative in how much energy we dump on the world and compete with you."

The Wuhan virus has been an almost unmitigated disaster for the entire world, but there has been one helpful aspect.  When the world shutdown crushed demand for fossil fuels, oil prices tanked, getting the attention of the OPEC types fast.  Whatever Kushner told the emirs in Dubai, it surely resonated with them that the oil demand curve was a lot more fragile than they could handle, and maybe those Israelis weren't so bad after all.

If I had to guess, I'd think that when Trump loosened the constraints on energy production in the USA, his primary goal was to boost our own economy and, secondarily, to damage the hold that OPEC had on the rest of the world.  But I will bet that early on, it occurred to him that the Arab oil sheiks, capitalists and realists all, saw that their real threat was Iran, and that their best ally was going to be the USA, providing Trump made sure they knew that they could work together.

I can't say that was the original plan.  But diplomacy based on UN-style diplomats sure hadn't worked, but diplomacy based on mutual understanding of what side of the bread had the butter, now that was something that could work.

And let's face it, it worked here.  The Nobel Peace Prize would be well-earned.

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 #49 -- The Underpolling Problem, 2020 Style

I remember 2016 as if it were only four years ago even though it was ... well, yeah, it actually was four years ago.  But Lordy, have things changed.

In the fall of 2016, my best girl and I got a fair number of polling calls asking about our preference in the upcoming presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  They came through on our cell phones and they came through on the home phone as well.

They were annoying as heck, but we answered them and dutifully indicated our intent to vote (hint: it wasn't going to be for Hillary).  We watched as the poll numbers continually suggested that the former first lady was going to get her wish and get elected.  And we watched on election night with amazement as the polls showed themselves to be completely wrong -- so wrong, in fact, that Larry Sabato, the respected Virginia political science professor frequently on TV commenting and forecasting results, went out the next day to say that he apparently didn't know politics and would have to start all over.

But that was 2016.  This is 2020, and my best girl and I have taken a completely different tack this year.

It is pretty obvious from the caller ID when you are getting a polling call, and we get two or three every day.  Where in 2016 we would have done what we thought was our civic duty and answered the call accurately and honestly, this year we simply do not answer.  We do not pick up the phone, and we do not share our intentions.

If we happen to answer the phone, because the caller wasn't obvious, we do not answer polls, or we do not answer them accurately.  I don't know who the caller is.  People have literally been killed for supporting the current president, and I'm not sure when the Antifa types start doing fake polls.  What a time, am I right?

I didn't consult with anyone on this practice of no longer answering poll calls accurately, mind you; we just do it.  We decided, and that was it.

So as I contemplate the impact of that, I have to ask the obvious question -- "Who else is doing the same?".  And you should be too, and so should Larry Sabato, and Gallup and Pew and Rasmussen and all the other polling companies out there.

Because polling is simply a data collection procedure, it is evident that if the data is inaccurate, the results will be as well -- "garbage in, garbage out", or "GIGO" as we used to say back when I was learning to program in the latter 1960s.  My old college fraternity brother, Fred Faltin, had a similar take 50 years ago, creating the "Faltin Fudge Factor" -- an amount you added or subtracted from your test results to end up with the outcome you actually wanted.  Ahhhh, MIT.

After 2016, we already know that the data is not completely accurate.  I believe that for the most part there was a 5-10% bias in the polling data toward Hillary Clinton; the actual voting went for President Trump, about that percentage higher than where the polling had the numbers a day earlier.  We know that.  You could look it up, as Casey Stengel would have said.

But this is 2020, and that factor, at least 5%, representing polling undercount, exists today at least as much, if our own feelings about responding to polls are in any way representative.  I've seen some broadcasts discussing the topic, and while they still refer to the usual 3% "margin for error", they're also mentioning, although not quantifying, the polling undercount of Trump voters.

And that undercount is at least another 3% on top of the margin for error, based on 2016.  At least.  I hesitate to extrapolate our own situation too far, but we are two Trump voters who were willing to tell polling callers that in 2016, but are either telling them nothing, or lying and saying that we'll vote for the other guy in 2020.

Do the math.  If you poll 100 people and their actual intent is split 50-50 Trump and Biden, the difference is zero points.  If even one couple like my wife and I tell the caller that we're voting for Uncle Joe, then the reporting is 52-48, and that is a four-point spread, above the margin for error!

I hope you get the idea.  There is the accurate data (i.e., whom people are actually going to vote for), and then there is the 2016 factor, the at-least 5% undercount of Trump voters based on how people felt.  Add to that the 2020 factor, where some Trump voters feel threatened or otherwise choose not to answer the calls (accurately) -- and we don't know what that percentage is.  I respectfully decline to guess.

We have not had debates yet, and Biden has essentially not answered a challenging press corps yet to explain all the questions in his policy and opinions on current events.  There is a lot that can change in the last two months of the campaign.  So the "accurate data" part I mentioned in the previous paragraph still has room to swing a bit.

But there is definitely that third group of voters out there, and the polling companies must be wracking their brains trying to figure out how to apply the "new liar" factor, among the 2020 voters, to their predictions.  That's hard because they don't actually "predict", they have to report. If they count 51-46 in one direction, what else can they report?  But if the election comes and their reported 51-46 ends up 53-47 the other way, they look like idiots!

The Democrats have long since started their effort to stack ballots through their mail-out campaign, so what, we have to ask, are they planning for?  Are they thinking that they'll need ten million phony mail-in votes to ensure Biden wins?  How do they even know how to prepare when Gallup can't provide reliable data?

Oh, it will be such fun.

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 #48 -- How Can We Trust the 2020 Elections?

Houston, we have a problem.  And it's huuuuuge.

If you're a regular reader, you know that I'm a big fan of asking candidates where their proposed solutions have worked before, when used to address whatever problem they say they're trying to fix. 

For example, I would always ask a leftist proposing tax increases (like, you know, Joe Biden), where the act of increasing tax rates has ever actually increased tax revenues.  I'd ask where cutting defense spending has ever maintained our defensive posture.  That sort of thing.

In November, there is supposed to be an election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  In any other year, we would be vigorously polling registered voters and talking about "swing states" and "margins of error" and all that, leading up to where we went to the polls on Election Day and pulled a lever, figuratively or not.

Now, I'm sure you know, unless you've been under a rock for a while, that the polling in the 2016 presidential election campaign turned out to be horrendously wrong, as exhibited by the fact that Hillary Clinton is mercifully off in the woods somewhere, as opposed to being president.  Oh, yeah, and by the fact that the influence-peddling Clinton Foundation is a dried-up shell of its former self, with no actual influence to peddle.

I think we can comfortably say that the disparity between the polling and the 2016 election result had much to do with the press's vilification of candidate Trump, leading people to lie to the polls, lest they be bashed for holding a view contrary to what the press and the left (but I repeat myself) wanted you to think.

And it's more so now, with lots of us who are going to vote for President Trump's reelection simply hanging up on polling calls, or lying about all manner of things we're asked.  Frankly, I can't be sure that the call isn't actually coming from some Antifa thug who is ready to fire-bomb my house if I don't give the "right" answer ... can you be sure?

It was never that Trump drew a lot of former Democrats in 2016; that didn't end up being as big a factor as the overall turnout for Hillary, or lack thereof.  Trump voters were enthusiastic, and a lot of people stayed home.

Or didn't vote.  That's not always the same thing, and that's the point.

The leftist Democrat legislature of the once-great State of Nevada just rammed through a bill, signed by the leftist Democrat governor, essentially mandating mail-out ballots for everyone.  Now, "mail-out" is not the same as "mail-in" (absentee), the good and valid system by which you can request that a ballot be sent to your registered address, get validated as a registered voter, and have it sent to you.

Nope, not good enough.  Nevada now joins other states which have blown up the chain of custody that preserved the integrity of our election system.  For 200-plus years, there was a process -- you registered to vote, demonstrated your residence and age, and then showed up at an approved polling site with people who would look you up in the rolls, confirm your registration, and point you back to a machine or paper ballot where you voted in private.

The actual votes were right there in the polling place, and when the voting time ended, the local board of elections, overseen by both parties, would tabulate the ballots, secure in the knowledge that the person who was supposed to cast the ballot did indeed do so, at least theoretically.  More importantly, that system imposed a validation chain -- you had to register, show up, have a name on the polling list, and then your vote ended up in the container.

Nevada and its fellow states have now made that scary.  I, for one, do not know how many ballots will go out to people who no longer live at the registered address (hopefully the USPS has a "no forward under any circumstance" rule).  I don't know how many will go to the deceased, may they rest in peace but their votes not be counted. 

I do know that in Los Angeles, there are 10% more registered voters than citizens of age, meaning that at least ten percent of the votes in LA this November will be invalid, if the city even has the ability to distinguish them -- and if they don't, that's its own problem.

There is an ongoing special congressional election in New York that is hopelessly dragging out, not because it's so close but because they can't accurately count the ballots.  You want to see that on a national level?

So how can we trust the 2020 presidential election?

I can't.  Well, if Donald Trump is reelected, I suppose we can, because it just means that despite the incredible forces lined up against him, the nation voted against the press, the rioters and looters, Nancy and Chuck and Schiff and the rest, and even their contemptible actions like ballot harvesting weren't enough.

But if not ...

Let's face it, Joe Biden is generating the enthusiasm of a dormant sloth.  He can't answer a question; the press don't even ask him challenging questions on the rare occasions he takes any.  You cannot convince me that in a free election with only legitimate voters, he'd win a single state.  He stands for nothing, and his cognitive skills have decayed into something pathetic.

So if he were to win, and ballot harvesting is allowed, can anyone legitimately assure me that there wasn't massive voter fraud?  I mean, the LA election board doesn't appear to be doing anything about the tens of thousands of expired, incorrect or deceased registrations on their rolls.  So where are those ballots going to be mailed?  And who in the city government is going to assure the nation that only legitimate votes were counted?

Think of it -- we know that over ten percent of LA's registrations are incorrect, but they're going to mail them anyway.  That means that on Election Day, every single one of the millions of votes has to be validated, right?  And they won't be, we know that.

That tells me that I can have not a shred of faith in the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, and I'm concerned that this is the future as well.  None of this is being done for an appropriate reason; the mail-out process is meant to get a bunch of ballots out in circulation to allow Democrats to mass-vote, corruptly.

What happens if Biden is elected because of that, and mail-out balloting is claimed to be unconstitutional (it might be) and the election has to go to the Supreme Court?  And the Court invalidates the election?  Who is president then?  That case will make Bush v. Gore look like a traffic citation.

Mail-out balloting has simply not worked, and it is not going to work in 2020, and not work in a big way.  Ask your candidate where it has ever worked.

I'm scared.  I don't like the way things are starting to play out, and I think you should be just as concerned.

Then ask why the media are not.  You won't like the answer.

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 #47 -- Huey Long and the Fascist Left

A week or so ago, I was finishing up a book that I had quoted briefly in a fairly early post on this site.  The book is "Try and Stop Me", a 1944 collection of stories and anecdotes compiled and written by Bennett Cerf, who along with being one of the long-time panelists on the old "What's My Line" quiz show, was a founder of the publisher Random House.

My dad had a copy of that book, and when I was a callow youth I read it often, never cover-to-cover though (it was, after all, an anthology).  After I quoted it in this column once, though, a kind reader actually sent me a gift copy of the 1944 edition, and recently I got around to doing a read-through of it.

Naturally I remembered most or all the stories after a dusty brain synapse would fire.  But having not seen or read it for over 50 years, some of the little anecdotes rang quite true.

One involved Huey Long, the former governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, who was a dictatorial type with a flamboyant outer shell.  "The Kingfish" used a populist platform to concentrate power in his own office, and was pretty successful at it until he was assassinated by the son-in-law of a judge whom Long was trying to oust.  But I digress.

As Cerf relates, "Huey Long was once asked if we'd ever have fascism in this country.  'Sure', he replied, 'but we'll call it anti-fascism.'"

Like you, I'm sure, my immediate reaction was to think that the old Kingfish was quite right, because we have that in spades right now in the form of "Antifa", the anarchist group that has been fomenting violence around the USA in the name of ... well, none of us really knows.

The Huey Long quote, of course, reminds us that the name "Antifa" is supposed to be a portmanteau word meaning, of course, "anti-fascist." 

Although there are a few definitions of fascism out there, I think they (and we) all agree that the two distinguishing characteristics are a dictatorial centralization of power, and violence deployed to get the dictator's way.  It's pretty hard not to attribute both to Antifa, and see it borne out every time they have the opportunity to grab some form of power, such as in Seattle last month.

The Democrats -- and clearly that's the side on which Antifa comes down -- are famous for accusing their opposition of exactly what they are doing or have done.  There are lots of examples; just think about their engaging the Russians to create the Steele dossier to try to devalue Donald Trump prior to the 2016 election, and then after they lost, accusing Trump of having conspired himself with the Russians to win the election (and then Schiff, and Mueller, dragging that nonsense out for another three years).

In fact, it's astonishing -- try it yourself next time the Democrats accuse Trump of something, anything -- how often it will turn out that they will have done exactly that, themselves, and gotten the lapdog leftist press to ignore it.

It's hard to imagine that most of the Democrats in the House and Senate actually believe that Antifa is a good thing, and that they don't go home at night thinking to themselves "Really, Self, this is what we're supporting?"   But they are.  At heart, they're about grabbing and holding power.  They run in elections not to serve, but to rule.

And so Antifa is becoming more and more the perception of what mainstream Democrat ideology actually is, because no Democrat has the cogliones to stand up and say "Wait a minute."  Antifa indeed is the fascist organization, while even by their name they pretend to be in opposition to fascism.  They portray the violent representation of leftist, fascist policy exactly as they claim to oppose it.

No one ever said that Huey Long was stupid, but few probably realized how prescient he was.  He knew how Democrats operated, being not only a Democrat himself, but a power-hungry dictator in his own realm.

I think that when a quote comes to life 90 years later, it is worth a moment to contemplate and consider the perspective.

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 #46 -- Separation Anxiety

I was in my car today when I heard that the House and Senate had each proposed its own version of a form of legislation to address police operations.  The intent of each was supposed to be to prevent the kind of actions by individual policemen that lead to the death of perpetrators during arrests.

I wanted to vomit, though, when I heard that the Democrat-controlled House had decided to name its version the "George Floyd Act", or some title that was named after George Floyd.

And that's when I couldn't get home fast enough to type this piece.

You see, the whole Minneapolis incident -- and I'm specifically talking about the topic of the cop keeping his knee on Floyd's neck until he died -- should be about the now-former cop, Derek Chauvin, and what he did, and not at all about Floyd.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but Floyd was a piece of crap.  Now, I'm going to keep mentioning in this piece that what happened to him was wrong on so many levels, and that Chauvin should be punished to the full extent of Minnesota law, so no one tries to contend that I think Floyd deserved to die.

But this was a man who went to jail multiple times for some seriously bad things he did, the topper being a home invasion where he held a pregnant woman at gunpoint, pointing the gun at her unborn baby.  What's amazing is that he only got five years in prison for that one, given that it was far from his first conviction, far from his first incarceration, and that he had shown no real evidence of straightening out -- for sure, if he was on two illegal drugs and passing counterfeit bills when he was arrested.

In a better world, we would look at the incident and spend far more time condemning Chauvin than trying to canonize Floyd -- this is all about what Chauvin did, and not about whom he did it to.  It should be a discussion about how to stop future unwarranted killings by cops (note the word "unwarranted").

The left, however, is fundamentally unwilling to look at the individual, unless it is the victim (or the person they claim to have been victimized, even if they happily have to create more victim classes to use the term).  They insist on making a group look guilty (vice an individual), so that they prevent us from pointing out bad apples.  In this case, a cop killed an arrested suspect, via choke-hold.  Therefore, according to leftist mythology, all cops must be bad.

Watch how many times the word "systemic" shows up in the left's narratives.  It is vital for them to make it sound like a whole class of people is evil, which renders the remainder as victims, who need more government, led by -- guess who -- the left.

What we need to do is a lot of separation.

For example, we need to separate the late George Floyd and what happened to him, from Derek Chauvin and what he did to him.  The attempt by the left to deify Floyd is because they need to try to create a victimized class by crying "systemic racism."  Floyd's name should be nowhere near a congressional act.

Next -- we need to separate what Chauvin did from why he may have done it.  Think about it -- 100% of the stories out there portray this as a racially-motivated killing.  But has anyone even explored whether it might be something else?  Do we even have a clue that Chauvin was virulently racist, or any kind of racist?  That seems to be assumed, but is it true?  We know he worked with Floyd and knew him; has anyone even considered the fact that maybe they just couldn't stand each other and it nothing to do with race?  Floyd wasn't a great guy, we know.

Next -- we need to separate fact from fiction.  The fiction I refer to is that cops are killing unarmed black suspects all over the place and it's getting worse.  The fact, as the FBI crime statistics tell us, is that such situations -- unarmed black suspects killed by white cops -- has dwindled in recent years down to next to nothing, precisely because of preventive measures and training.  To say otherwise is heresy, but those are the facts, and for Congress to try to address bad police actions based on a problem that is almost gone is just foolish.

Note -- This is just an interruption to point out that what Chauvin did was wrong and he needs to be punished, in case you missed my saying that before.

Next -- we need to separate the actions of Chauvin from those of his team that day, which, by the way, had three other people, one of whom was black and another Asian.  Did the black cop allow it to happen because he was -- what, a racist?  One of the other three was in his first week of service.  Does anyone expect he would have corrected the much-more senior Chauvin?

Next -- we need to separate the legitimate protestors from the vandals and looters.  Someone needs to tell CNN's Chris Cuomo this, after they put clothing on him, but the Constitutional right to assemble literally qualifies that right as needing to be "peaceful."  And he still has a job.  The looters, for their actions, are simply bearing out the stereotype of minorities rioting to get those flat-screen TVs for free.  Nothing is destroying the effectiveness of those legitimately concerned and protesting peacefully than the fact that they have allowed the criminals to take the spotlight.

When we keep "separating", if we have an open mind, we realize that all the attempts to group people are flawed beyond belief.  They cry "No justice, no peace", but "justice" in the USA properly consists of a day in court for Chauvin, and his having to face a judge or jury to determine punishment if he pleads or is found guilty.  That is the justice for Floyd as well.  There will be justice, friends.

I would be really happy if, before Congress votes on a police reform bill, the victim of Floyd's home invasion would testify as to what happened to her, and perhaps urge Congress to rethink what name shows up on the final Act.

Maybe it should be hers.

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 #45 -- Wait a Minute, I Actually KNOW That Guy!

OK, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world, which makes it the perfect time to write about something that is totally irrelevant and will in no way make the world better, unless reading it distracts someone from doing something unproductive.

My wife had some family up north back 20 or 30 years ago, and she and I and the boys were visiting them then, when we decided to take the kids on a side trip and head further up, to New York to see a show on Broadway.  The show was "Oklahoma", one of what I assume to have been several revivals over the years of the ancient Rogers and Hammerstein classic.

At some point early on, a male character appeared on stage -- forgive me, I have long forgotten most of the plot, but this was a friend of the main male character, if I recall correctly.  The actor was a tallish blond fellow who looked really familiar ... really familiar ...

I leaned over to my wife and whispered, "I know that guy!"  As it turned out, I was right.  I hadn't seen him in maybe 20 or 25 years, and barely knew him then, but sure enough, there in the program was his name.

Now, as you know, I am an MIT graduate, and trust me, MIT does not have a theater department, although there is a lot of theatrical extracurricular activity, at least back in my undergraduate days.  The idea of someone who was a student there, a year behind me, having a career in show business is a pretty wild one.  The odds that I would happen to show up from far out of state and actually see him on stage and recognize him are pretty long.

Now, in case you're wondering, no, I didn't wait outside the stage door, or whatever they have there, to see him after the show.  To be honest, although we were both in a production of "Camelot" in 1972, I didn't know him that well and frankly, I kind of hated "Camelot."  I didn't even have any good or bad feelings about the guy himself; I just knew him and he seemed perfectly nice in our minimal interactions.

The funny thing is that while he was pretty good in "Camelot", he was not someone who got your attention with his talent, the way some people do.  He was perfectly fine, but not in an attention-grabbing way.  I hate to say that occurred to me as soon as I realized it was he up on stage there on Broadway, but it did, kind of like "Good for him, but how'd he get there?".

I believe he is a home contractor in South Carolina these days, in case you are wondering, and his IMDB listing suggests that he also had parts in a couple movies or TV shows.  I'd reach out, except that (A) I have nothing to reach out for, and (B) I imagine he doesn't have any memory of knowing me, either.

You would think that kind of occurrence would be a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing, but not in my lifetime.  By God, if you're going to knock Lucille Ball over on national TV and do the national anthem at a baseball game in front of 40,000 people and have to lip sync to a recording of four people, well, you're going to have some things occur twice.

Sure enough, not long afterward, my missus and I were watching an episode of the original Murphy Brown show with Candice Bergen (back when it was reliably funny).  There was a scene in which she was in a line in a store for some reason, and cut in front of a little fellow with glasses, who took exception to her self-importance.  The fellow had a high, thin voice, and seemed kind of familiar, and ...

I leaned over to my wife once again and whispered, "I know that guy!".

Well, I thought I did, anyway.  The person I thought it was in this case was not an actor, to my knowledge, so I thought I was likely mistaken.  And in this case it was someone we both would have known, her less so than I.  The fellow was named Bob Ryan, and he had been in a chorus with the two of us that was a sort of two-county high school all-star chorus back in the 1960s.  Bob was in a different school, but we were in the same voice-part section and hit it off pretty well.  Same stupid sense of humor, I guess.

Of course, I couldn't wait for them to roll the credits, and sure enough, that was he.  In that case, as opposed to the Broadway fellow, I did indeed reach out to him, and discovered that he had moved out to LA a few decades earlier to pursue acting, despite his degree from Dartmouth.  He was working as a law librarian and had been a writer for the Fox NFL pregame show, but without much other acting credit.

Bob passed away a few years ago.  Indeed, I did "actually know that guy."

It's sort of the opposite of the social game where people our age compare notes on famous people they have met in their lives.  These two were far-less-famous people seen in very public settings that we didn't expect to have seen them in.

Perhaps we all have had that sort of experience, or maybe few of us have.  Just thought I'd share mine.  Have a nice day. 

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 #44 -- My COVID-19 Figures or Yours

I got a tweeted reply today to something I had written, in regard to the status of breweries in North and South Carolina relative to Wuhan virus handling:

"If masks work, why are some businesses forced to stay closed? On the flip side, if masks don’t work, why are we all being forced to wear them?"

I have an answer for him, but it was going to take too long for a tweet and, anyway, the answer is fairly deep.

The first part of the answer is that, as I think the science is fairly clear on, masks are a pretty ineffective way to avoid getting the virus, but a fairly decent way to avoid spreading the virus.  Follow?  According to the figures, face masks are really for the infected person to avoid spreading it through coughing, sneezing or other means of expelling virus-laden droplets.

The second part is the harder part, since almost anything said or written dealing with Wuhan virus spreading is subject to political spin, and I'm more interested in factual stuff.  That's why I used the word "stuff", since it's real technical and I'm an MIT guy.

I might have the virus.

I don't know, because I have no symptoms and have not been tested, and I don't think I have it, but I have no idea.  You see, I have not been tested because I have no symptoms.

And that's the thing.  Neither have a lot of people; they don't have symptoms.  We don't find out if they do or do not have the virus, because they're not tested.

Do you get the missing part of all this?  Of all the people exposed to the virus and who would test positive for it, some percentage are symptomatic and the rest not.  Of all the positive-test people symptomatic, some percentage die and the rest recover.  Two different things. Pause on that for a second.

We do know that in this country, that second percentage is about four or five percent now, and maybe above 5% in some countries with not-great medical facilities.  So in the USA, about 5% of people with the virus and who show symptoms die, very skewed toward the very elderly.  That's about what it is with the flu, although the flu doesn't skew as badly toward the elderly.  As one example, in Minnesota as of this week, more people in Minnesota over 100 years old have died of COVID-19 than Minnesotans under 50.

But I digress.

While we know the second figure, the mortality rate for those people with symptoms who test positive, we do not know the other figure at all yet -- that is, we don't know what percentage of people exposed to COVID-19 show any symptoms!

We don't know that because we have not taken a population -- a city, a state -- and tested everyone to see what the infection rate is.  There are not enough tests to do that, but it sure would be a good thing to know.  It is possible, friends, that 50% of the USA would test positive, and I'm not kidding.

While I realize that not having that figure makes this article a bit incomplete, the point of the piece is just that -- something we do not know, that would affect policy greatly if we did.  For example, let's say that only 50% of infected people show symptoms (I'm expecting it is even less, but let's be conservative).  That means that the 1.8 million symptomatic cases in the USA as of today is actually from almost four million infections, and the death rate is only 2.5%, not 5%.

But it could be much more extreme than that; we know that many names listed as COVID-19 deaths are not.  It is also certainly possible that only 20% of people exposed (and who would thus test positive) become symptomatic.  That means that the death rate for all positive tests would be 1%, and that is less than the flu, for which we don't shut the economy down.

So masks ...

The question from the fellow on Twitter was why, if masks don't work, we have to wear them and why, if they do, we need to shut down businesses.  Good question.  And after the missing data I point out above, you should see the answer.

We know that masks are for the spreader, not the "spreadee."  Am I a spreader?  Well, since I've not been tested, I don't know -- and that's why I should wear a mask, because I could already be infected, and need to protect others around me.  And it is why even people without symptoms should wear them for now, because you might be infected and don't know it.

And why are businesses shut down if they do work?  Now, I don't agree with doing this (I think business should open right now and practice safety, but still be open), but it's because masks aren't 100%; they're only about 70% effective.  They would reduce the transmission rate but not eliminate it. 

So in certain business situations, with big crowds, masks would help a lot, but not be as effective as one might want.  And given the missing data on asymptomatic infections, it's possible that masks are even less effective than that 70%.

I'll be candid -- I personally think the reason "businesses are shut down" still, even after the curve is flattened, because the more leftist governors have seized on an opportunity to control their citizens, and free economies are not conducive to tight government control.  It is a rare opportunity for the left not to miss a crisis opportunity to seize power, and they don't then relinquish it readily.

But just remember -- until we know the symptomatic rate among the infected, there is some serious policy-making going on in a vacuum.

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 #43 -- Where Goes the Judge?

Yes, this is about Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and I sure as heck don't like having to write it and to be hearing about the case.

But this is also about gestalt, which is the German word for "looking at the whole freaking thing", which is what we need to do in the Flynn case.

So let's quickly review.  After Donald Trump was elected in November of 2016, and after he had started to create his Cabinet and senior staff, but before Barack Obama left office and still had power, there was a phone call.  Lt. Gen. Flynn had been named the incoming National Security Advisor, and was speaking to the Russian ambassador to the USA.

Obama had just imposed some mild sanctions against the Russians for their attempt to meddle in the 2016 elections, and Flynn was saying to the ambassador not to retaliate; that the new Trump Administration was going to look at the sanctions first to see if they were warranted.

Now, Obama hated Flynn.  He hated that Flynn wouldn't go along with Obama's public assertions that Al Qaeda was essentially done for, which he needed the general to support, so he could pose the "I stopped Al Qaeda" narrative for his, you know, legacy.  Flynn would have none of that.

The intelligence community leadership (the political appointees, not the agents) hated Flynn as well, because he planned to do some reorganization of national intelligence, and that would expose some of their leadership's missteps.  So a lot of people did not want Flynn to have a role in the new administration, and those people generally didn't have ethics.

The intelligence folks had been recording all the conversations the ambassador had with Americans, and that included the one with Flynn.  So James Comey, part of that cabal, sent FBI agents to meet with Flynn and entrap him -- one actually made a note in the meeting to that effect, which was not made known to Flynn or his legal team.  Never mind that they came back from the meeting noting that he had been truthful; no matter that he had not been told he was being investigated.

It's not legal to expose the name of an American citizen, in this case Flynn, on an intelligence-wiretapped phone call -- unless a request to "unmask" the American is filed.  Gee whiz, all of a sudden everyone in the Obama administration from Joe Biden down to the janitor filed an unmasking request, and one of them (or more) leaked the contents of the call to the Washington Post.

Flynn was then charged with lying to the FBI, and then threatened that if he didn't plead guilty, they'd go after his son.  As one of the Obamist cabal said, "If the FBI wants to get you, they can."  So Flynn pleaded guilty, lost his job, and incurred $6 million in legal fees, losing his house in the process.

Of course it ultimately came out that the FBI withheld evidence that would have cleared Flynn, and his new lawyers and the Justice Department, both realizing that the plea was inappropriate, went back before the judge, Emmet Sullivan, where the United States of America withdrew the charges.  Simple as that.

Not so fast.  Judge Sullivan huffed and puffed and decided that he would allow amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs, from parties with no connection to the case, as to why Flynn's withdrawing of his plea should constitute perjury (!).  He then appointed another former judge, John Gleeson, to -- get this -- challenge the Justice Department's withdrawal of its charges!

That's where the "gestalt" thing comes in.  Look at the whole thing, and ask why Sullivan isn't.

An incoming government official is framed in a perjury trap for talking to the Russian ambassador, which he is completely permitted to do as, you know, part of his job.  He is threatened by the FBI, which is trying to "get" him, with going after his son, so he pleads guilty and loses his job, still not having committed a crime.  We find evidence that the FBI phonied up their actions, so the DoJ pulled its charges three years later, which should never have been filed in the first place.

That is the whole picture.  That is "gestalt."

But the judge is not happy about that.  He's unhappy that the DoJ admitted it framed Flynn, I guess.  And so he appoints someone who, by the way, has already written anti-Flynn newspaper commentary, to try to fight the actions of DoJ in withdrawing charges it should never have filed.  All the while, Flynn is paying lawyers a boatload of money to defend himself against corruptly-filed charges.

Why is the judge not dismissing the charges, tossing them out of court, and demanding the testimony of the actual guilty parties, the Obama officials and FBI administrators who started this whole mess?  Why is he not looking at Flynn as the aggrieved party as opposed to the victim of a government-wide plot to ruin him?

Good questions all.  But the mainstream media are not asking them.

Maybe they can't spell "gestalt."

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 #42 -- Nothing New, Apparently

It has been a while since the last column here, so I thought it might be a good idea to share that yours truly is still alive and well, holed up in quarantine but doing fine.  The bigger news is that there didn't seem to be a lot to write about, at least in the sense that I could share an opinion.

"What?", I hear you cry.  "But there's this pandemic, and ...".

Well, sure there is.  But alone among the masses, I don't know that there is a lot to have an actual opinion on, you know, where there is a point to be made.  The facts are what they are, which is that Red China somehow became aware of the virus and its transmission last November or so, and lied their red butts off about it while they were buying up every protective mask they could get their filthy red hands on, including ones they're now selling to the governor of California at inflated prices.

So I suppose you could have an opinion on what is the deserved punishment for Beijing, and maybe I do.  I'd like those artificial islands in the South China Sea or wherever they are to have a MOAB dropped on them, but I'd be equally OK with every penny of Chinese assets in the USA seized and held for potential civil settlements by victims of the Wuhan virus -- medical and economic.

I'd be equally OK if, instead of tying up the courts with individual cases, the USA simply confiscated the cash value of the assets to replenish the Treasury for the cost of the stimulus and Paycheck Protection bills that were necessitated by the Red Chinese lies, deceptions and actions.  That would be fine.  Or we could simply declare that the entirety of the national debt that is owed to Red China is no longer owed.  That's good, too.

But in fact, the reason I'm not full of opinions is that as a nation, we had to wing this thing.  Every step taken by every level of government, all through the process, has been based on "ground truth", i.e., what we know on that day.  For the most part, government has had to say "We know A; we project B over time C; so we think the best course of action is X."  There was no time for hindsight.

How do you criticize that?  President Trump's first major decision was very early on, and that was to stop all flights from Red China.  The left screamed "racism" because, well, that's what they do, but that really was the logical step to take, don't make the problem worse while we're figuring out what the problem is.  Even the left knew that was the right thing to do; they just couldn't admit it, because, well, Trump.

His next major decision was to delegate the rules of engagement and operation -- i.e., what to close down and when -- to the governors.  New York City was a mess, but Scott City, Kansas (where the United Nations should be, as I argue here), was not.  Thousands of such contrasts existed, the president reasoned, so the sensible tack was to let those decisions be made more locally and not have the Federal government mandate rules that were needed in some places but crippling to others.  Opinion?  Perfect sense, there, nothing to argue about.

All along the way, and that "way" has now been more than two months, Trump has been saying that we needed to focus on opening the nation for business as soon as it was possible.  That would mean stages, of course -- certain businesses first, then others; certain protections required first, then fewer -- and also that the movement to the next stage would be a local, not a Federal decision.  If the governor of Texas felt that the state could advance to stage two, he could (and would) do so, even if the governor of Massachusetts did not.

Isn't that common sense?  How does anyone not think that was the right idea?  So no, I have no real opinion to share, because there is no reason for contention.

Well, OK, so I do have an observation.  If anyone ever thought that liberalism and the left in general were not all about grabbing and holding power, I would think that they have firmly grasped the notion now that they are only about grabbing and holding power.

Note that the left and the media have taken the position that bills, intended to borrow money that we don't have to provide funds for working people to pay their mortgages and feed their families, should be gummed up with all manner of things about voting, along with giving more to the Kennedy Center, and shoveling unrestricted taxpayer money to incompetent cities.

What was it that Rahm Emanuel, Obama's sidekick and later mayor of Chicago, said?  "Never let a good crisis go to waste."  In a joint endorsement video this week, Hillary Clinton quoted him, as if it were a good thing and not a contemptible admission of the left's political tactics.

Everything the left is doing now; everything they are saying, is toward slowing the economy, keeping more government more in charge, putting a bigger stranglehold on the American citizen, suppressing freedom.  It is all in the name of adding power to the government, a government that they think they will eventually take over to the point of dictatorship with them as the dictators.  The voting laws they propose are meant to ensure that.

We are lucky that they were not able to do even worse in the first two years of the Obama presidency, when they had the House, a filibuster-proof Senate and the White House.  The voters rebelled at what they were able to shove through and kicked the Democrats out of the House majority. 

We are lucky that a no-nonsense guy like President Trump (and not a RINO type) won in 2016, not just to keep the Clintons and the rest of the power-mad left out of authority, but because he has the cogliones to tell the nation that what the left wants is power, and not governance.  He speaks truth to power, because the people are the power in the USA.

We are lucky that so far, the left has not corrupted our electoral system to where they could grab a choke-hold on our government and utterly corrupt it, too, much as the Obama types did when they loosed the FBI to try to frame Trump team members.

We are lucky.  OK, so yes, I have an opinion.

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