This is a little off topic, given today’s report that 104,000 people in the US are hospitalized with COVID-19, but this afternoon I chanced upon a Senate report from the Committee on Foreign Relations about Vladimir Putin. The report explains how Putin is engaged in subversion outside of Russia to fortify his interests. The Senate doesn’t go into detail about how Putin secretly supports and encourages right-wing, anti-democratic forces in the US.
Putin’s interests in the US happened to coincide with those of the soon-to-be former president in his campaign for election. Putin offered to help that campaign, but his overtures were met with confusion rather than coordination. You’ll have to fill in the details from reports in the US media and other non-Senate sources.
The Senate report describes Putin’s ascent to power and his malign actions in democracies through-out the world (although it doesn’t go into any detail on his US activities.) The report also describes how Putin cheated in the Olympics, assassinated rivals and journalists, conducted cyberattacks, and so on. The report includes US and European attempts to defend against Russian subversion.
This report is deeply sourced and describes Putin in chilling detail. It is available from the US Government Printing Office online here and is dated January 10, 2018. A supporting document dated October 24, 2017 from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that describes how Putin’s wealth is held among his family and friends is available here.
The Senate report describes how Vlad the Impaler (you know, Dracula) was picked by his predecessor Yeltsin because Vlad was available and showed an ability (as director of the Federal Security Bureau or FSB) and willingness to help him. Putin blackmailed Yeltsin’s opponent, the prosecutor general, who was investigating Yeltsin’s role in Kremlin corruption.
As acting authority, Putin apparently had a role in major bombings that were blamed on terrorists from Chechnya in 1999. Putin declared war on Chechnya and his popularity rocketed from 2 percent to 53 percent in a few months. After being elected president, Putin protected Yeltsin’s family from prosecution when he stepped down.
Putin then centralized power in himself by indirectly routing all levers through his presidential office. He proceeded to end the independence of Russian media. He used his family and friends to control vast sums of money. He effectively nationalized organized crime. He forced oligarchs to give up their political power to him, while allowing them to keep all their ill-gotten gains from the privatization of Soviet state-owned assets in the 1990s.
Russia is now fully controlled by authoritarian institutions masquerading as a democracy. When necessary, Putin uses his ability to blackmail or extort the oligarchs for state purposes. If he sees his popularity waning, he invades Georgia (the country) or Crimea (the peninsula formerly controlled by the country of Ukraine.)
With the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Russian prosperity has been deeply hurt by the collapse of oil prices. Since Russia’s economy depends heavily on exploitation of its oil reserves, it has few alternatives to obtain hard currency by exports.
Russia has suffered as much as the US from the pandemic, and the Russian vaccine has been critical to relief from its economic depression. The Green Energy revolution is equally inimical to Russia’s prosperity.
Right-wing, anti-democratic forces in the US are working in Russia’s interest. They can be expected to violently oppose any development of renewable energy, even though it is already cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels. This is the real secret behind the power of he-who-must-not-be-named: he is backed by Russian disinformation and fifth-column subversion.
This theme will be further developed in another blog post.
COVID-19 was ranked as the leading cause of death in the U.S. this week, with 11,820, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. That’s more than the number of Americans who died from ischemic heart disease (10,724), tracheal, bronchus and lung cancer (3,965), and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (3,766).
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-leading-cause-of-death-united-states-this-week/
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) published a report dated December 4 (available here) that gives an average daily new case rate for last week of 165,200 and average daily deaths of 1660. This makes COVID-19 the leading cause of death in the US last week, with worse to come this week.
IHME also estimates that 15% of people in the US have been infected. Deaths are predicted to peak in January at 3,000 per day. Their reference scenario (the most likely one) predicts 530,000 deaths by April 1, 2021.
The CDC reported in October that there had been roughly 300,000 excess deaths in the US from January 26 through October 3, about 20% of total deaths. Of these, only about 200,000 had been attributed to COVID-19. Other causes of death have also increased above historical averages: “deaths from circulatory diseases, Alzheimer disease and dementia, and respiratory diseases have increased in 2020 relative to past years… “
We do not know how many of these deaths attributed to other causes were due to the virus or were related to disruptions in care due to inattention. Death rates were 12% higher than normal for White people and nearly 1/3 higher among Black people.
To George, who said (in the comments to a NYT article):
(you haven’t offered any solutions to the problem of capitalism– or words to that effect)
The problem is not capitalism per se, it is a lack of regulation and progressive taxation. Programs like universal basic income are also part of the solution. Jobs building and rebuilding infrastructure are part of the solution.
If everyone had an income, a job, health care, housing, and food, that would go a long way towards solving the problems,
Did I mention equal K-12 education and community college with marketable skills?
Local funding of schools, police, etc. are big parts of the problem.
There’s nothing “wrong” with capitalism– it needs proper regulation to prevent the pyramid effect from destroying the lives of 50% of the population. Those who fight against proper regulation think they are benefitting from more money but the are really destroying the very things that support them.
Why did we have a 6% growth rate when the top tax rate was over 50% (actually 90%)? Why do we have a less than 3% growth rate when the top tax rate (capital gains) is less than 20%?
Why? Government is not the problem, it’s the solution.
Are those enough solutions for you or do you want to pick every one of them apart in isolation? The solutions don’t work if you apply them in a piecemeal, halfway fashion. All together they will work and everyone, even the top 1%, will benefit.
Don’t believe me? That’s your privilege, but don’t say I (we) didn’t offer real solutions with lots of evidence (no room in a 1500 char comment) to back them up. Try confronting Paul Krugman or someone else who knows what he’s talking about.
(photo of cat with one green eye and one blue eye from my personal collection)
George Orwell is best known as the author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, published in 1948.
The quote is used in an article in the Guardian, published on December 3, 2020. The article is labelled a book review, but it prefaces the review with a history of free speech that begins with this statement: “[F]ree speech is impossible. Merely to be intelligible, all communication depends on shared rules.” This paragraph follows shortly thereafter:
None of this is new: what free speech means has been controversial for about 400 years. Our modern concept of it began as a radical Protestant argument – that it was pointless to punish Christians for arguing about dogma and worship, because these were questions to which ultimately only God knew the answers. It was this freedom of speaking and printing that John Milton famously extolled in his Areopagitica (1644): the liberty of speculating about God’s hidden truths. It was never meant to extend to debates about public affairs, politics or morality.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/03/the-free-speech-wars-review-from-censorship-to-cancel-culture
The article makes the proposition that speech is fundamentally not “free” but depends on the power of the individual or groups that want to be heard. To begin, one person’s speech can be drowned out, except at the level of one-to-one communication, unless one has access to at least a loudspeaker. Further dissemination of one’s speech across miles depends on a medium such as radio or television. The more people you want to reach, the more money (and power) you need. A loudspeaker requires electric power to function; a radio or television program requires the use of a radio station’s apparatus, usually supported by advertising or a wealthy person’s monetary resources. Even a program without advertising requires a sponsor, which requires money and power to harness. The power or the advertising shapes the content of the speech in sometimes subtle ways.
Until the Reagan Administration (from 1949-1987), the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) enforced a Fairness Doctrine which required broadcast television stations to provide time for “contrasting opinions” (although it did not require “equal time”…) The Doctrine was finally removed from the books by the FCC in 2011 in response to years of pressure and attempted lawmaking by conservatives and libertarians who claimed that the Doctrine infringed on First Amendment rights of “free speech.” From Wikipedia:
The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been considered by some to be a contributing factor for the rising level of party polarization in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
(Wikipedia gives two sources for this statement: first, on paper, E. Patterson, Thomas. “The News Media: Communicating Political Images.” We the People. 10th ed. McGraw-Hill Education, 2013, page 336. Second, on line, Rendall, Steve (January 1, 2005). “The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost it, and Why We Need it Back”. Extra!. Retrieved October 2, 2017.)
Pulling back our camera to a wide shot, we see that George Orwell’s statement implying that “free speech” is not free actually agrees with the general concept that freedom is an illusion. Nothing is free. Everything has a cost, whether you notice it or not. As the wit said, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Coming back to a tight closeup, we see a cell-phone video featuring the last moments of George Floyd, who repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe” only to be told, “If you can talk, you can breathe.” As the police officer pressed down harder and harder on his windpipe, Mr. Floyd was reduced finally to calling for his mother, and then to silence. For eight minutes and forty-six seconds, a police officer (whose name I will not give because that name is presumed innocent until he is proven guilty of murder) pressed down with their knee on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.
So, you see, speech is not free. It depends on not having someone with their knee on your neck cutting off your ability to breathe and to live. For the offense of passing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, George Floyd was summarily executed by a Milwaukee police officer.
Returning to our wide shot, we see riots, burning businesses and police stations, and tear gassing of peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House for an impeached, one-term president so he can raise an upside-down Bible for a photo opportunity. His “free speech” right to hold up an upside-down Bible depends on his being the most powerful person in the world for a short time, thankfully soon to be finished.
The cost to the United States of that moment of “free speech” is enormous. Nothing is free. We will be paying for that moment (and that eight minutes and forty-six seconds) for decades to come.
(photo of George Orwell by Gordon Johnson via pixabay.com)
An article titled “Admission Hyperglycemia in Non-diabetics Predicts Mortality and Disease Severity in COVID-19: a Pooled Analysis and Meta-summary of Literature” was published in the “Nature Public Health Emergency Collection” and dated October 12, 2020. The article is part of an initiative by the US National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. (nih.gov)
The gist of this article is that, on admission, a patient with COVID-19 (with or without diabetes) may have an elevated blood sugar; the level of blood sugar tends to predict how severe the patient’s illness will be. The observations span numerous studies with widely varying findings and a large number of patients with different disease characteristics. However, the findings can be summarized in this one sentence from the abstract:
“Our results showed that hyperglycemia in non-diabetics was associated with higher risk of severe/critical illness (OR 1.837 (95% CI 1.368–2.465, P < 0.001) and mortality (2.822, 95% CI 1.587–5.019, P < 0.001) compared with those with normal values of blood glucose. ” That is, patients with high blood sugar were nearly three times as likely to die from the virus as patients with normal blood sugar.
The article reviewed 423 studies and selected 13 for analysis. Of these, ten were included in the quantitative analysis of blood sugar and accompanying variables with their effects on hospital course, including admission to the intensive care unit (ICU), intubation and mechanical ventilation, length of hospital stay, and survival to discharge.
High blood sugar was associated with all the typical co-morbidities for severe COVID-19: patients with hyperglycemia were older, more likely to be male, had more co-morbidities, and were more likely to have typical severe symptoms: dyspnea (shortness of breath), hypoxemia (low blood oxygen), polypnea (rapid breathing), fever, chest pain, diarrhea, and nausea/vomiting.
Elevated blood sugars were associated with blood test abnormalities that are signs of severe illness. For example, elevated C-reactive protein (CRP), a widely used and trusted overall sign of severe inflammation, is also linked to high blood sugar. Other laboratory tests included:
Increased neutrophils and leukocytes, decreased eosinophils, were more commonly seen in those with hyperglycemia compared with known diabetics and those with normal blood glucose levels. Abnormalities in liver function test components such as hypoalbuminemia and raised ALT levels were also more commonly recognized in patients belonging to the hyperglycemia group vs the normoglycemia and diabetic group. Similar trend was observed in case of inflammatory markers such as lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), ferritin, and C-reactive protein (CRP). Interestingly, IL-8, an important component of inflammatory response, was also significantly higher in this group compared with the other two (23.8% vs 4.8%, P < 0.05) [7].
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7550017/
In summary, this review article shows a solid association between the presence of high blood sugar on admission and a severe hospital course or death in patients with COVID-19. This association holds regardless of whether the patient had diabetes, pre-diabetes, or a normal blood sugar prior to hospital admission and their acute illness. There was no apparent indication of whether treatment of high blood sugar was helpful to improve in-hospital illness severity.
Of course, there is no statement that high blood sugar directly causes severe illness. However, there are many studies that indicate blood sugar has a deleterious effect in terms of increasing inflammation and impairing the immune system. Some of these studies were addressed in this article, if you should care to explore this issue.
(photo of SARS-COV-2 virus particles by electron microscopy courtesy of NIAID)
Felix the Cat and Woodrow Wilson
Washington Post comments section, my response to a comment about Alexandra Petri’s column on the candidates for “First Cat”– which cited a commenter’s remarks about Woodrow Wilson:
There’s a lot more to that story about Wilson’s final illness (es)… recommend you read up on this. Fascinating history. Also check out Wilson’s censorship during the war and attempts to smear “liberals”– oh, and Wilson’s racism (very, very, very serious, usually glossed over, but he set back integration in the Federal government by roughly 55 years.)
Wilson was a Democrat, old-style, like Strom Thurmond. He was known as a “progressive” when he was president of Princeton and of the US– but his progressivism was highly selective. He also defeated third party candidate Teddy Roosevelt (who was officially a “Progressive Party” member) as well as Republican Howard Taft.
Felix the cat must have been a subversive. He started on film in 1919, the product of Australian Pat Sullivan’s animation studio. He was mostly drawn by American Otto Messmer, who initially received no credit (as was customary at the time.) He appeared in a newspaper comic strip starting in 1923.
He was the subject of jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman’s 1923 “Felix kept on walking” and other tunes. He appeared as a stuffed animal and on many other merchandise items. He faded starting with sound films, with Micky Mouse and others replacing him. He reappeared on TV in 1953, drawn by Joe Oriolo (who had helped with the original Felix), with a “Magic Bag of Tricks.”
Felix was also one of the first images used for experimental television starting in 1928– so ” Felix is considered by some to be the world’s first TV star.” (Wikipedia)
“Aldous Huxley wrote that the Felix shorts proved that “[w]hat the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.”” (Wikipedia)
I couldn’t find any references to Felix’s political leanings– you should look further. He did star in a short about the Russian Civil War in 1924– “Felix all puzzled.”
Felix would be good as an independent, and he’s still recognizable at 101 years of age (only a few years older than the president-elect.)
This story is important because it explains what people think when they are victims of “locked-in syndrome,” Very few people have survived to tell the story. This patient had Stage 4 toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy, which is thought to be usually fatal. The story is written up in The Guardian. The patient himself wrote a piece that was posted on rarediseases.org and quoted below. The patient also has his own website, jhaendelrecovery.com. This post, however, is not so much about the disorder, nor about its cause– it is about a person who recovered enough from “locked-in syndrome” to tell about his experience with the disorder.
Jake Haendel, now aged 32, developed locked-in syndrome gradually, starting in April-May of 2017. His “timeline” states that he began to have locked-in syndrome on December 20, 2017. He was immobile and unresponsive for a long time. He began to show signs of recovery on July 4, 2018– at least to the extent that his doctors realized that he was conscious.
” Doctors thought I was disconnected from all reality, but little did they know I was conscious and cognitively intact. I could hear everything. It was sheer terror!” (rare reflections: Jacob’s story on rare diseases dot org.)
At first, he lost the coordination in his arms and legs, then he developed weakness, and finally paralysis. He lost his speech, then his eye movements, and finally, his ability to breathe on his own. He spent many months completely immobile. In fact, after six months, he stabilized to the point where he was no longer thought to be dying.
His symptoms became noticeable to his wife in early May of 2017. He was arrested while driving to work because a patrolman noticed he was driving erratically. He made bail, but could barely walk.
Three days later, his wife called an ambulance and he was admitted to the hospital. At first, the tentative diagnosis was a stroke. An MRI scan, however, showed “profound, bilateral damage to the white matter.” He was given a diagnosis of toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy– essentially a death sentence. There is no known treatment and patients with this condition usually die within a few months at most.
He was sent home after the initial hospitalization and his family was told that he would continue to deteriorate until a supervening infection carried him off. Instead, he gradually stabilized.
While he was locked-in (or “locked-down”) he remained fully conscious. He could not move his eyes, and they remained open because that’s what happens when you are completely paralyzed: your eye muscles keep your eyes closed until you lose control of them; then they open. When people die, their eyes remain open and gradually glaze over. Jake was given eye drops to keep his corneas from drying out.
So, through his open eyes, he could see part of what was in front of him. He couldn’t move his eyes, so he only saw a part of what went on. He could hear everything that was said around him, whether it was intended for him or not. He was, he said, grateful to people who talked to him, read books to him, or sang to him.
Otherwise, he was bored stiff or profoundly depressed– at times, both. Sometimes people played the television, but he couldn’t always see it because it wasn’t necessarily in his field of view. He could hear it, which was sometimes good– but at other times it was even more boring or annoying. Sometimes, the TV was left on all night– then he could “watch” the late-night TV preachers, over and over again.
He spent hours at a time imagining his own funeral. He counted the seconds up to a thousand, over and over again. He went through terminal boredom. He valued, more than anything, just knowing what time it was– but the clock on the wall was just out of his view. His thoughts can only be imagined, imperfectly. Reading the piece in The Guardian might give you some idea; reading his own personal story doesn’t help much. The only way to really understand what he suffered is to go through something similar yourself.
After several months, it became clear to the doctors that he wasn’t going to die. His payments for at-home medical care expired after six months– he had lived too long. He was readmitted to the hospital for re-evaluation.
In June 2018, he realized that he could exert limited control over his eye movements– mostly just up and down. The medical staff noticed that his eyes were moving, but they couldn’t tell if it was voluntary or just a reflex. On July 5, a doctor noticed that he could move his left (or is it right?– two sites disagree) wrist on command. He was elated.
Gradually, further voluntary muscle control developed. He developed COVID-19 while in a nursing home, survived, and began to improve more quickly. Now he can breathe on his own, talk, eat, move his arms and legs, and has the ambition to eventually be able to walk again.
He has given a history of what he thought while he was immobilized and the emotions he went through. He believes that his personality has changed. His voice is certainly different. The personality he now has is optimistic and cheerful. He has gotten over the chronic depression that he suffered before he became ill.
He even started his own website, which became active on July 4, 2020. He has YouTube videos and a Twitter account. He says that the experience has changed him profoundly, although it is unclear whether the disease or the experience of disease caused the change.
In his case, his acute progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy was caused by smoking heroin on aluminum foil. This is known as “chasing the dragon.” The toxin may be the heated heroin or a contaminant in the drug, a substance added to the heroin by the dealer. He started using opiates– Oxycontin– when he was in high school. He began to use heroin when the oxycodone became too hard to get or too expensive.
Heroin is actually cheaper than prescription opiates on the black market. It is also more pure, which makes it easier to get high. Heroin has become so cheap that dealers now add black-market fentanyl (50-100 times as strong) to their product in order to increase its value. Sometimes people overdose on heroin because it contains too much fentanyl, and they’re not used to it.
People who use heroin don’t always inject it. Pure heroin can be readily “smoked” (actually just vaporized with heat) or “snorted” (inhaled into the nostrils.) In olden days, most street-level heroin was only 5-10% pure, so it had to be injected directly into a vein to have much effect. Over the years, the price of heroin has dropped so dramatically that it is available virtually pure for a “reasonable” price.
Of course, “reasonable” is a relative term. To use a word that has been popularized by anti-climate change activists, the word reasonable ignores the “externalities” of heroin use. An “externality” is the damage associated with use that is not included in the price. In climate change, the “externality” is the accumulation of carbon dioxide and methane in the air that is not included in the purchase price of oil. In heroin use, the “externality” is addiction and associated medical disorders.
In this case, the medical disorder is toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy, the destruction of the white matter of the brain. White matter is the wiring between brain and other nerve cells; it is white because it contains a lot of fat that is used as insulation between the “wires.”
In this condition, the wiring between nerve cells is progressively destroyed. The ability to think and be conscious is preserved, but the ability to move is lost. In severe cases, all muscular actions are completely destroyed. The patient cannot blink, move the eyes, or swallow.
Severe toxic leukoencephalopathy due to smoking heroin is thought to be irreversible and fatal. Other toxic substances can also cause leukoencephalopathy, including overdoses of several medicines like methotrexate and metronidazole.
PS There’s a high rate of new coronavirus cases in Fresno County, California (where I am now): for 11/26, a total of 3,700 cases per 100,000 (37,000 out of just under a million people) and 477 deaths, with 328 new cases– per Johns Hopkins daily tracking web site. Most of the mild cases are not being counted because people are confused as to where to get tested. (Roughly eight times as many cases have occurred as have been counted, according to the Centers for Disease Control.)
Over Thanksgiving, a [redacted] appointee on the Pennsylvania appeals court threw out he-who-must-not-be-named’s case there, saying, “Calling an election unfair does not make it so.” Just today, federal Attorney General William Barr admitted that no evidence of fraud that could have swayed the election has been found.
Reported from 11/26, a holiday: 103,116 new cases and 1,178 deaths– after earlier this week reporting 2,200 deaths in one day (New York Times.)
Reported on 12/1 for 11/30: 167,759 new cases and 1,265 deaths. The change over the last 14 days: a 3% increase in cases and a 28% increase in deaths.
Honestie Hodges, aged 14, died Sunday November 22, 2020 from COVID-19, per the Guardian on Nov. 25. According to her grandmother, Alisa Niemeyer, she tested positive Nov. 9 and was placed on a ventilator not long afterwards:
“She could have been the vice-president one day or maybe the president,” Niemeyer told local news station Wood TV on Monday. “The world was open to her.”
Niemeyer said Honestie tested positive for Covid-19 on 9 November, her birthday, and was sent back to her home in Grand Rapids [Michigan.] Later that night, she was rushed to the hospital by ambulance after experiencing stomach pains. She said her granddaughter had no underlying conditions, but her health rapidly deteriorated in the hospital and she was placed on a ventilator.
“There was no way we thought this was ever going to happen,” Niemeyer said. “You know [we thought], ‘She is going to get better; she is going to come home and we are going to have a birthday party.’”
Honestie was first thrust into the national spotlight in December 2017. The then 11-year-old, her mother and another relative had left their home to go to the store, when police officers confronted them with their guns drawn and handcuffed them. The officers had been searching for a middle-aged white woman suspected in connection to a stabbing.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/25/honestie-hodges-dies-coronavirus
Death rates from the virus as of Nov. 10, disaggregated by race, are 111.4 per 100,000 for Black people (African- and Caribbean-American, mostly), 61.7 per 100,000 for White people (European-American) and 47.6 per 100,000 for Asian people (Chinese-, Filipino-, Vietnamese-, and Japanese-American, mostly.) While the rates for Asian people are lower than for White people, there is some question as to whether that is statistically significant (there’s no significance data available to me.)
The death rate for Black people stated above represents one in 875 Black people in the US; for White people, that represents one in every 1,625. These figures come from the American Public Media (APM) Research Lab, which says that it has “documented the race and ethnicity for 96% of the cumulative deaths in the United States.” (This documentation has not been publicly provided by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), as you would normally expect.)
Why did Honestie Die From COVID-19?
The New York Times had these details:
Honestie developed severe stomach pains on Nov. 9, her 14th birthday. Taken to the hospital, she tested positive for the new coronavirus and was sent home. But her condition worsened that evening, an ambulance was called, and she was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit. Over the next few days she received iron and blood transfusions as complications arose. She was placed on a ventilator on Nov. 14. But her condition never improved. Ms. Niemeyer updated the GoFundMe page asking for prayers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/obituaries/honestie-hodges-dead-coronavirus.html
This suggests that she may have been severely anemic, possibly due to iron deficiency. The quote below suggests that the anemia was present at the time she was admitted…
The following text comes from a WoodTV (local TV in Grand Rapids) online item:
Later that day, Honestie was rushed back to the hospital and admitted to the intensive care unit. She was immediately given an iron transfusion, a blood transfusion and put on oxygen, but her condition continued to worsen.
After spending the next five days battling complications from contracting coronavirus, Honestie was placed on a ventilator Nov. 14, according to Niemeyer.
The family then launched a social media campaign in which family, friends, and supporters could post a picture of Honestie as their profile pictures with a frame around the image titled, “Faith over fear.”
Over the next couple days, it seemed as if Honestie was making progress. Her blood pressure was returning to normal but she was still on medication for her blood sugar and potassium levels, according to the GoFundMe page.
https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/14-year-old-grand-rapids-girl-dies-from-covid-19-family-says/
Another news media story from the same source reported that an unidentified child had died Saturday evening Nov. 21 of Multi-Systemic Inflammatory disorder in Children (MIS-C)– probably not the same child.
Whether the girl’s “blood sugar and potassium” tests indicate that she had diabetes is open to question, but certainly suggestive.
A final piece of this puzzle comes from ATT/Yahoo:
In a 2018 interview, Hodges’ mother, Rennae Wooten, said the incident had left Honestie “traumatized.”
“She can’t sleep. She doesn’t even want to go to school,” Wooten told the Detroit Free Press, “I want justice. My kids are messed up from this. They got my kids terrified. This is crazy.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/michigan-girl-14-detained-police-151450238.html
The role of emotional trauma in susceptibility to infection is underappreciated; factors that make this less likely include the passage of three years since the incident and the age of the victim. Nonetheless, I will add it as a possible contributing factor.
Honestie’s death was an avoidable tragedy
The tragedy here is that a 14-year-old girl with no apparent prior health conditions, even obesity (based on the photograph) died of a virus that kills very few pediatric cases. Her risk factors for death, not to mention for being infected in the first place, are primarily her race/ethnicity and her socioeconomic status– but they only double or triple the risk, which should be less than 1/10 of 1% to begin with.
We should be investigating her death carefully
We would be very interested to learn, from a coroner or other party authorized to investigate, precisely which other factors led to her death. We are dubious as to whether ethnic and socioeconomic status are sufficient explanations for the mortality of a 14-year-old.
This pandemic has laid bare for all who have eyes to see the inequities of American society. Those who have sufficient expertise and involvement in the basic activities of disease and mortality ascertainment should use all the facilities at their disposal to make clear the extent to which people in this country are made sick or killed by factors beyond their own control.
More than 2,000 people a day are dying in the United States
PS Perhaps my predictions of over 2,000 deaths a day were premature, but yesterday’s death toll from the virus was over 2,000: the New York Times reported today that yesterday showed 2,216 deaths and 178,200 new infections. North Dakota, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah all showed very high rates of new infections. North Dakota showed a spike of 2,270 new cases on November 14.
Steven J. Miller, an assistant professor of mathematics at Williams College, was given a data set of phone calls to Pennsylvania Republicans who requested absentee ballots but apparently didn’t return them by a Mr. Braynard. This was in search of suspected voter fraud that would justify throwing out the results of the election in Pennsylvania, which was recently certified as having been won by Joe Biden.
The resulting “declaration” was written up on a conservative news site called “Just the News” with the headline,
“In sworn statement, prominent mathematician flags up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots”
Federal Elections Commission Chairman Trey Trainor says new analysis by professor Steven Miller “adds to the conclusions that some level of voter fraud took place in this year’s election.”
This Steven J. Miller has now “disavowed” the analysis he made of the data set he was given. This disavowal was written up in a local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, with the headline:
“Williams prof disavows own finding of mishandled GOP ballots.“
The article includes the following text, which makes Steven J. Miller look a bit naive about the data set he was given:
“Richard De Veaux, vice president of the American Statistical Association and a colleague of Miller’s in the Williams College Department of Mathematics and Statistics, called the estimates “completely without merit” and agreed that Miller erred in publishing his results without addressing issues in the underlying data.
“To apply naïve statistical formulas to biased data and publish this is both irresponsible and unethical,” De Veaux wrote in a statement to The Eagle. “It is the statistician’s responsibility to verify the data, or to provide disclaimers if that can’t be done.”
Carina Curto, a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, said Miller’s numbers “are almost surely wrong” because they rest on the key assumption that the people who answered the phone are actually a representative sample of all the Pennsylvania Republican voters who requested but did not return a ballot.
“This small sample from the phone survey almost surely has large sampling biases and systematic errors,” said Curto. “There is absolutely no reason to believe it is representative of the larger population.”
Lior Pachter, a computational biologist at the California Institute of Technology, said that simple issues – such as incorrect phone numbers – could have accounted for some of the concerning patterns that Miller saw.
“There’s no guarantee that the people they talked to were the actual people they meant to call,” he said.
He criticized Braynard’s group for not putting the same questions to Pennsylvania Democrats as a control group. More than 230,000 Democrats in the state did not return mail-in ballots that they had requested, according to the U.S Elections Project.”
https://www.berkshireeagle.com/news/local/williams-prof-disavows-own-finding-of-mishandled-gop-ballots/article_9cfd4228-2e03-11eb-b2ac-bb9c8b2bfa7f.html
What an unbiased analysis of this data should have done:
If this Mr. Braynard really wanted to know why so many people requested ballots but didn’t return them, he should have tried calling a random sample of all those people, 165,000 + 230,000. But no.
This is merely a random sample of the so-called data that supposedly proves election fraud, in the eyes of the outgoing president. If there was some more convincing data, surely that would be worthy of headlines in some national news media– but there are no such headlines.
We can conclude that, although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, absence of evidence in the face of concerted efforts by motivated seekers of such evidence, is indeed sufficient to allow us to conclude that there was no appreciable fraud in the presidential election. Therefore, Joe Biden is indeed the president-elect.
There was probably some fraud in the election perpetrated by both sides, but it seems to have cancelled out enough to have given Mr. Biden a 6 million vote margin of victory and a convincing Electoral College majority.
No time to celebrate– we should worry about a large minority of die-hard Republicans who favor authoritarian con-men.
What should concern lovers of our democratic federal republic is that 74 million people voted for someone who is obviously a conman, someone who continues to perpetrate his cons despite his electoral defeat. The prospects for karma to catch up with he-who-must-not-be-named in the next four years are in the balance.
We must continue to fight for our federal democratic republic.
We must form a large popular opinion base in favor of aggressive prosecution of this conman for state tax fraud, state insurance fraud, and any other offenses that the State of New York can think up quickly. There is no use in trying to prosecute him on a federal level because his last act as president will be to have himself pardoned– as surely as the sun will set on his four years of federal mis-rule.
Fortunately we have state attorneys general who are looking into this matter with considerable motivation. We wish them success in their endeavors to hold he-who-must-not-be-named to account.
Why is my “Winston Churchill” post so popular? It’s not a movie review, although it does review a movie. It’s not a source page on Winston Churchill, although it does discuss the apocryphal nature of certain Churchill quotes. For the last week, it has been among the top posts in views– in fact, in November (this month) it has already received 196 views. Somebody is linking to it.
Let me know if you have an answer to this question: who cares about what I wrote about Winston Churchill– and why so much, so recently?
The desperation of the fans of our friend he-who-must-not-be-named.
I received a link to this “declaration” from “Bits of DNA” (another web site from WordPress) that just shows you how desperately crazy certain Republicans can be.
First, the declaration: it purports to be a rigorous mathematical/statistical analysis of Republican absentee ballots requested by someone other than the registered voter in the state of Pennsylvania. It is, however, motivated by a desire to prove “fraud” (although that word is not used anywhere in the declaration) and it is couched in lawyer’s language in an attempt to build up the credibility of the declarer in front of a judge.
The declarer is Steven J. Miller, a mathematician at Williams. The author of the website is Lior Pachter, a computational biologist who does get into the weeds.
Lior Pachter is, on the web site, writing about things he gets “over the transom” and in other ways, but mostly about data, or the absence of data, in things he reads.
This is what I wrote in my comment… now you’ll have to go to “Bits of DNA” for the rest.
Is Steven J. Miller a real person?
I should have gotten my two cents worth in earlier, but I didn’t have time to read Steven J. Miller’s text that prompted your outraged refutatory rant, so I put it off a while. I’m glad I did, because while I was busy elsewhere, some other people put in some very helpful information about the ballots and you even got a snotty remark from the guy who put Steven J. Miller up to his “analysis” of the “data.” — in other words, the guy who pulled the wool over his all-too-willing eyes.
What would be real evidence of fraud?
I read the “declaration”– it appears to be an attempt to be evidence. If we’re looking for evidence, then we would like to have a person say, “I requested a ballot and returned it but it wasn’t counted.” Or, “I didn’t request an absentee ballot, but one was returned in my name.”
Those responses would be prima facie evidence of fraud. But that’s not what we got (as far as I know; surely, there would be big headlines if one person said that they returned their absentee ballot but it wasn’t counted OR that they never requested an absentee ballot but one was requested (by a fraudster) and it was returned BUT they didn’t vote, OR that they tried to vote and were told that an absentee ballot had been returned in their name.)
What did Miller write instead?
Why is someone (Steven J. Miller) doing a complex statistical analysis of murky data? I don’t understand the data nor his analysis, but then I barely passed a course in basic statistics and barely graduated from college, much less medical school. Is this an attempt to allege fraud without using the word “fraud”? Without actually presenting any evidence that would constitute fraud?
I don’t know. But if you (Lior Pachter) understand what he (Steven J. Miller) is saying and you conclude that he’s talking through his hat, then I won’t argue with you. Clearly, this “declaration” was intended to be presented to a judge as “evidence.” Clearly, Google Scholar is not a reliable way to assemble a publication list for a single person, even if it was curated by that person (I’m still unclear on that and I don’t have time to re-read it carefully enough to figure out whether Steven J. Miller actually curated his Google Scholar list.)
Matt Braynard is behind it all
Just as clearly, the declaration proves nothing, no matter what Mr. Braynard in his snotty way says about your analysis. Why would you bother to study a collection of data that comes from the horse’s mouth (that’s what Mr. Braynard is offering) for free when someone (Steven J. Miller) clearly motivated to produce the desired result (even if he didn’t get paid) doesn’t even come within shouting distance of producing said result?
I don’t recall your implying anything about whether Steven J. Miller was paid for his motivated analysis of bad data or not. All you said was that he didn’t say anything about a source of funding or whether there was any conflict of interest– something that scholarly papers usually do say, but which is usually left out of depositions by lawyers. So don’t feel reprehensible.
I forgot that I requested an absentee ballot.
The comment by Dmitry Kondrashov provides an innocent explanation for why some people might have requested an absentee ballot and then forgot about it… although I would have remembered if I received an absentee ballot because, if I went to vote in person, I would have taken care to bring it with me so that it could be invalidated. I’m a little more obsessive-compulsive than the average voter.
The bottom line, though, is Where are the prima facie evidences of fraud– where are the people who attest that they didn’t request an absentee ballot, but one was returned in their name anyway? Or, where are the people who attest that they returned an absentee ballot but it was never counted? Or, where are the people who attest that they tried to vote only to be told that an absentee ballot had already been returned in their name?
In the absence of those attestations, a series of phone calls, no matter what response anyone says they got or how many calls they say they made (“almost” a million), are not evidence.
This won’t hold up in court.
No wonder those suits are being thrown out. Just like all the other lies told by he-who-must-not-be-named, they stand up right to the point where they are supposed to count, and then they fall down.
So don’t feel bad that Mr. Braynard is accusing you of running your mouth without the facts or being reprehensible– we still like you, and we’re (fortunately) in the majority (I checked on that.) Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a statistician– nor a lawyer– but I can tell when someone is talking through their hat (Steven J. Miller) or just being snotty (Matt Braynard.)
Ted Kaczynski, mathematician and mad bomber.
PS for those who are interested, one commenter mentioned idiot savants and… the Unabomber. Ted Kaczynski (a genius and a PhD mathematician) was severely psychologically damaged by a supposedly great psychologist, Henry Murray, as part of a “scientific study” (he spent 200 hours as a subject in an experiment, part of which involved filmed weekly sessions in which he was belittled and humiliated based on personal information he had given to the researcher initially– this was “research” because his EEG was recorded while these sessions were repeatedly replayed to him) while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He graduated in 1962, before this sort of so-called research became frowned upon. See Wikipedia (and an article in the Atlantic from 2000) for a brief summary of this torture that probably had something to do with his later behavior.
There but for the grace of G-d…
(photo courtesy of 5688709 via pixabay.com)
