Isaac Laquedem

Ted Cruz would eat his words, if he had electricity to cook them with

Except now it's Texas that can't perform even basic functions of civilization as millions of Texans are without power because the state elected to go it alone with its electric grid.  Ted Cruz took off for a vacation in Cancun, where the state government is able to provide power and water.

Schrödinger's senator gives us our first quantum-state president

To explain one aspect of quantum mechanics, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined his eponymous cat as a feline shut into a box with a timed mechanism that releases poison and kills the cat at some unknown time in the next six hours.  He argued that until you opened the box, the cat was neither alive nor dead, or possibly both alive and dead.  Only when observed could we say which of the two possible states of being the cat in fact occupied.

Schrödinger's cat has had many more than nine lives, in and out of physics, popular culture, and more recently Facebook memes.  Senator Mitch McConnell today contributed to the uses of Schrödinger's cat when he first voted to acquit Donald Trump of inciting the January 6 riot and attempted looting of Congress, and then roundly condemned Mr. Trump for his actions, calling Mr. Trump "practically and morally responsible for the events of the day" - the riot and insurrection.  Why, then, did he not vote to convict Mr. Trump?  Because, Senator McConnell reasoned, the Senate has "no power to convict a former officeholder who is now a private citizen."  He could have voted to convict Donald Trump and debar him from future office until noon on January 20, but not afterward.

That makes Mitch McConnell Schrödinger's senator: able to acquit and convict nearly simultaneously.  But his achievement in becoming our first quantum senator pales in comparison to what Senator McConnell has made of Donald Trump: our first quantum president, in Mr. McConnell's view able to be guilty and not guilty on the same day, or in Mr. McConnell's more elaborate reasoning, able to be convicted on January 19 but not on January 21.

Harvard Professor Raj Chetty explains COVID-19's impact in a nonpartisan way based on actual data and economics. We should listen.

Here is a link to actual data on the effect of the pandemic on the American economy.  It's a website, "Track The Recovery," maintained by a group of economists led by Harvard professor Raj Chetty.  Bloomberg News has a good description of Professor Chetty's work, and the data on which it's based, here.

Among the most pointed findings is that "the recession has nearly ended for high-wage workers, but job losses persist for low-wage workers."  The money quote from the Bloomberg article:

On video calls with dozens of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as Treasury officials and state and local policymakers, his message has been consistent: Get the virus under control at all costs—a task the U.S. has so far failed at pitifully. No matter how many businesses are allowed to reopen, normal economic life will not resume until their customers feel they’re no longer at risk of contagion. In the meantime, he tells them, target assistance to the people, businesses, and places that need it. There’s no use sending stimulus checks to people making $150,000 a year or cutting their payroll taxes. They have plenty of money; what they lack is places to safely spend it.

 

Are you better off than you were four years ago (III)?

https://www.statista.com/chart/21269/daily-deaths-covid-19-selected-countries/ 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention orders a stop to evictions. Why doesn't it order everyone to wear a mask in public?

This week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acting under authority given to the Surgeon General and the Department of Health and Human Services, issued an order entitled "Temporary Halt in Residential Evictions to Prevent the  Further Spread of COVID-19," which you can read in the Federal Register here.  The order prohibits landlords from evicting residential tenants for nonpayment of rent if:

• The tenant has tried to obtain all available government housing assistance;
• The tenant expects to earn $99,000 or less in 2020 ($198,000 or less for a couple), or was not required to report any income in 2019, or received a CARES Act Economic Impact Payment;
• The tenant can't pay the full rent due to substantial loss of household income, work, or wages, or a layoff, or extraordinary medical expenses;
• The tenant is trying to make timely partial payments of as much of the rent as possible; and
• Eviction would likely make the tenant homeless or force the tenant into group living.

How does CDC get the authority to freeze evictions of residential tenants?  It comes from 42 USC §264, a provision of federal law that authorizes the Surgeon General to "make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

The  Knower of All Things observes that an order prohibiting residential evictions in the United States won't do anything to prevent communicable diseases from entering the United States, and it won't do anything to prevent communicable diseases such as COVID-19 from spreading from state to state unless the assumption is that evicted tenants will change states.  He adds that if CDC has the power to issue an order to prohibit residential evictions, then CDC also has the power to order everyone to wear a mask in public, which CDC recommends but is strangely reluctant to direct.

It's time for CDC to face up to facts and act on its own advice.

 

John T. Molloy has some advice for Donald Trump

John T. Molloy came to public attention 40 years ago when he published "Dress For Success," a volume on what men should wear to the office that he based not on his opinions but on 15 years of testing and research, and declared himself "America's first wardrobe engineer."  He followed his first book up with "The Women's Dress For Success," "Live for Success," and "Why Men Marry Some Women And Not Others," all, like his first book, based on research and statistical analysis.  The titles of his books don't convey the full nature of his half-century of research and testing, which broadly deals with how Americans react to symbols of success and failure in clothing, speech, and manners.  He's applied his knowledge to advising political candidates on how to dress and speak.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump haven't hired Mr. Molloy (one of them should), but he has some free advice for them anyway. I recommend reading his entire post, which you can find at this link.  He says Mr. Trump has made a mistake in referring to his opponent as "Crooked Hillary," because he is turning off large sections of the country that are turned off by New York City rudeness.  Here are two snippets of his advice.

First, his advice for Secretary Clinton:

If I were advising Hillary I would tell her the minute Trump called her “Crooked Hillary” to become indignant and walk off the show. Most people particularly in the Midwest and the South would agree with her reaction. The reason I would give her such advice is Trump needs the debates to win, in fact, I’m sure he and his team are counting on them. If Hillary can avoid debating when she has a substantial lead she wins hands down.

And his advice for Mr. Trump:

If on the other hand I were advising Trump I would have him apologize for using such language before the debates started. I would have him say something to the effect it was all right in the primaries but a debate for the presidency should have and will have dignity and decorum and he will refer to his opponent as Mrs. Clinton, Hillary or candidate Clinton. That would force Hillary to debate and give him a shot at the presidency since I believe he is a better debater than Hillary and has all sorts of information about Bill and Hillary that he can use to his advantage.

 

The Washington Post calls out another bit of Trumpery

During the Democratic debate Saturday, Hillary Clinton returned late to the podium from a bathroom break.  Yesterday Donald Trump said, "I know where she went - it's disgusting, I don't want to talk about it."  Then today Post columnist Zachary Goldfarb said that in using the word "disgusting," Mr. Trump had played a clever trick, describing research showing that conservatives react far more strongly to disgusting or repellent images than liberals and moderates do.  Mr. Goldfarb summarized the research as follows:

Consciously, liberal, moderate and conservative participants showed no significant differences in rating these pictures [such as pictures of dead animals and dirty toilets], although conservatives “had marginally higher disgust sensitivity than the liberal group.” But things changed when the subject had their brains scanned using fMRI machines as they saw the images.

With a more than 90 percent success rate, the researchers were able to predict whether the participants were conservative or liberals based on how regions of their brains lit up while viewing the images. And it turned out that conservatives had a much stronger reaction to disgusting images than liberals. Reactions to other types of images were not predicted by political views.

“Disgusting images … generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation,” the authors write. “Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.”

The delightfully ironic kicker:  immediately below this portion of the online version of the article, the Post ran this apposite image. Someone in Washington has a sense of humor.

 

John T. Molloy takes on the American voter

John T. Molloy has turned his attention to researching voter patterns.  The author of "Dress for Success," a book on business dressing based on research instead of opinion, took 18 months away from his blog, resurfacing on July 5 with the intriguing news that he had been training a Democrat and a Republican (not competitors) to speak to large groups.  A large store closed down in the district of one candidate, who asked what effect that would have on voters.  The other candidate said he wanted to know also, and that he'd pay for half the research, which Mr. Molloy carried out over the next several months. 

Mr. Molloy's first post on the subject contained this teaser: "If the Republicans wish to capture a larger part of the black vote it is counterproductive to ask blacks to vote Republican.  Republicans would be much better off asking them to vote for the right Democrat.  Obviously that takes more explanation but the key issue is education." 

Why is he disclosing his research now?  The two candidates both dropped out of politics, but had imposed restrictions on what he could do with the information.  Mr. Molloy has concluded that he can't sell the information he gathered, so he's giving it away.  Watch his blog for more.

Keep the team names simple: let's call them "pro-measles" and "anti-measles"

Years ago the opponents of abortion renamed their cause from "anti-abortion" to "pro-life," followed by their adveraries renaming themselves from "pro-abortion" to "pro-choice."  This follows a long tradition of factions renaming themselves (q.v. "Bolsheviks" and "mahayana") to claim the moral high ground, and renaming their opponents (q.v. "Mensheviks" and "hinayana") for propaganda reasons.

The contenders in the vaccination debate have the same opportunity but haven't used it much except that one side sometimes calls the other "anti-vaxxers," which sounds vaguely derogatory.  It's time for the side that understands science to come up with better and more resonant names for itself and its opposition.

I'd like to suggest referring to the opponents and proponents by simpler names:  "pro-measles" and "anti-measles."  That gets the message across.  One side may end up being nicknamed the "measlies," but I don't know which.

Other states don't teach evolution; we don't teach basic biology

Two stories, at first glance unrelated, were published recently.  One story (here) identifies Oregon as the state with the lowest rate of high school graduation, which is a polite way of saying that the least educated among us have, on average, less education than the least educated in 48 other states.  (Idaho didn't report its results.)  The other story, often repeated (here's an Oregonian story from October about the topic), identifies Oregon as the state with the highest rate of parents who prefer not to immunize their children against what used to be the common diseases of childhood -- measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox, for example.  In the early 1960s the United States saw more than 400,000 cases of measles a year; in 2012 there were only a few hundred reported cases.   The 99.5% drop is the result of the vaccine.

Maybe there's a connection between these two stories, and the reason that Oregonians don't believe in the science behind vaccination and the immune system is that Oregonians simply aren't, as a group, all that well educated.  As we make fun of the Southern states' continued efforts to teach creationism in biology class we might ask ourselves whether their citizens mock our simple-minded disbelief in bacteriology.