Last month, Brookings Institution Press published Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane, an edited volume exploring the legal and policy issues posed by state efforts to legalize marijuana for various uses despite continuing federal prohibition. I previewed the book here.
The Covid-19 pandemic has prevented us from doing much in the way of live events on the book, but over the next week I am participating in two scheduled web programs on the book.
Today, at 11am, the Cato Institute is hosting a book forum on Marijuana Federalism. Panelists will include John Hudak of the Brookings Institution and Cato’s Ilya Shapiro. Cato’s Trevor Burrus is moderating.
Next Tuesday, April 21 (just one day after 4/20), CWRU School of Law will be hosting a Marijuana Federalism webinar. On this program I will be joined by Julie Hill of the University of Alabama and my colleague Cassandra Robertson. They contributed chapters focused on the implications of marijuana federalism for banking regulation and legal practice, respectively. Of note to lawyers: This program has been approved for 1-hour of CLE by the the Ohio Supreme Court.
President Donald Trump has grown impatient with Congress. The COVID-19 outbreak has brought normal business to a near standstill in Washington, D.C., and the Senate is no longer confirming Trump’s nominees to federal office at the steady clip that it once did. So Trump is now threatening an end-run around the Senate’s constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent” on presidential picks.
“The Senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments,” Trump said on Wednesday. “If the House will not agree to that adjournment, I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers.”
To be clear, the president has no independent authority to send Congress home. Rather, under Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, “in Case of Disagreement between [the Senate and the House of Representatives], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” In other words, in the rare instance in which the Senate and the House cannot together settle on a time for Congress to adjourn, the president may then—and only then—get involved. Since no such disagreement over the time of adjournment currently exists between the Senate and House, Trump currently has no power to act in this fashion.
Trump is not the first president with the bright idea of expanding executive power by misusing the Recess Appointment Clause, which grants the president the limited authority “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the end of their next Session.”
In 2005, for example, President George W. Bush, who was then butting heads with Senate Democrats over the fate of several of his nominees, simply waited until the Senate went home for its winter break and then made 17 recess appointments. The Senate reacted to this executive overreach with a novel defensive tactic: A member would remain on hand during future breaks in order to gavel the body into a pro forma session every few days, thus preventing the Senate from ever technically going into recess. That did the trick. As New York Times reporter Charlie Savage noted, “Senate Democrats repeated the move during breaks for the rest of Mr. Bush’s presidency, and Mr. Bush did not try to make any further recess appointments.”
President Barack Obama proved to be even more overreaching than Bush. In 2012, while the Senate was holding a pro forma session, Obama went ahead and made four purported recess appointments, including the addition of three members to the National Labor Relations Board. The unseemly act of making recess appointments when the Senate was not actually in recess earned Obama a 9-0 rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court. “In our view,” declared Justice Stephen Breyer in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, “the pro forma sessions count as sessions, not as periods of recess.” Therefore, “We hold that, for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says it is.”
Breyer’s Noel Canning opinion also anticipated the Trump scenario. The Recess Appointment Clause, Breyer wrote, “gives the President (if he has enough allies in Congress) a way to force a recess.”
Here’s what that might mean in the present context: Assume that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) likes the sound of Trump’s scheme to bypass the Senate in order to have a free hand to make recess appointments. So long as McConnell and his allies are willing to abdicate the Senate’s “advice and consent” role, McConnell could, theoretically, engineer an adjournment battle with the Democratic-controlled House, thus paving the way for Trump to step in. But as Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) correctly pointed out on Twitter, “Without one chamber participating in this improper scheme, [Trump’s] action would be unconstitutional.”
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If any politician is looking for a lesson on how not to deal with the coronavirus crisis, they would do well to look at Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). Even if you have zero sympathy with the people who violated basic social distancing rules yesterday to protest Whitmer’s new stay-at-home-order, you should at least understand that her policy was bound to spark an ugly blowback.
The spread of coronavirus represents a massive failure of public health authorities, but Americans everywhere—including in Michigan, where I live—have thus far willingly complied with their edicts. It has been amazing to see just how completely American society has transformed itself in three short weeks: Businesses that have been deemed non-essential have shut down, laying off millions of workers. The ones that are still operating are letting their employees telecommute from home. Grocery stores have become thinly populated because shoppers are limiting their trips. Every store near me has erected spit barriers between cashiers and shoppers and some are disinfecting every single cart before use. The vast majority of shoppers wear masks (regardless of whether local laws mandate this or not), sanitize their hands a gazillion times before touching items, and refrain from unloading their carts when someone else is checking out. Drivers wipe down pumps and steering wheels. Park visitors maintain a scrupulous six-foot distance.
Most local lockdowns have their share of nuttiness (for example, in Florida and D.C., you can walk through parks but not sit down) and excesses (a Philadelphia man was handcuffed for playing with his daughter in an empty softball field). But so long as the ratio of good sense to nonsense is relatively high, for the most part Americans have gone along. Irate residents and partisans seeking to exploit these measures for political gain have been marginalized.
But that changed in Michigan with Whitmer’s new executive order that not only extended the state’s shelter-in-place mandate till the end of the month—something most everyone had expected and accepted—but added arguably the country’s most draconian and nonsensical provisions.
Even as neighboring Indiana and Ohio are relaxing their orders and the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency guidelines are classifying more industries as “essential” so that they can reopen and minimize the economic hit from the shutdown, Whitmore has gone the other way on the pretext that Michigan has the third-highest share of coronavirus cases in the country.
She ordered big box stores to stop selling paint, carpets, and other home-improvement material not considered essential, though as Reason’s Billy Binion reported, she does allow lottery ticket sales, probably because the proceeds go to the state’s K-12 funds.
She shut down lawn-care services. Contender’s Tree and Lawn Specialist Inc., a company that purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars of fertilizer and other supplies had to stop spraying its plants in the middle of spring season, risking its entire crop. (Michigan’s gardening industry, with an estimated retail value of $580 million to $700 million and 9,000 employees, faces a complete loss this year if it isn’t able to operate soon.)
In addition to large gatherings, she also barred families that don’t share a home from getting together, preventing one man from seeing his girlfriend of 14 years because she doesn’t live with him.
She forbade families from traveling to their vacation cottages in northern Michigan, a popular springtime activity in Michigan. She shut down golf courses and prohibited motorized boats, although non-motorized ones are allowed, for some reason.
This is arbitrary and irrational micromanagement that has understandably irritated many residents.
What’s more, Whitmer has decreed that violations will count as misdemeanors punishable by up to a $1,000 civil fine. Criminal penalties are also on the table, should prosecutors choose to pursue that. Meanwhile, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has gone full China and is encouraging employees to rat out their bosses and call the police if they try to open up shop in violation of the lockdown.
What’s so outrageous about all this is that the new businesses and activities that Whitmer is targeting can all be safely conducted while adhering to strict social distancing rules. But Whitmer’s theory apparently is that anything beyond absolutely essential conduct jeopardizes frontline workers. This is the precautionary principle on steroids. It considers even an infinitesimal increase in secondary risk as unacceptable, a mindset that could justify stopping virtually any activity anytime.
That’s why this order has disrupted the political equilibrium in support of her efforts. To date, hardly any legal challenges have been filed against any stay-at-home orders. But Whitmer’s new order has already prompted four Michigan residents, including the guy who can’t see his girlfriend, and Contender’s, the landscaping company, to sue her for violating their right to free association and perpetrating an uncompensated regulatory taking. More lawsuits might well be underway.
A Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantining—whose very name suggests that it isn’t opposed to reasonable quarantining—gained steam with over 282,000 members. Four Michigan sheriffs have declared that they won’t enforce parts of Whitmer’s executive order that they view as unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, Operation Gridlock, which was mounted by the Michigan Conservative Coalition inviting motorists to drive to Lansing, the state’s capital, and shut down its roads, elicited a massive response Wednesday. Thousands of Michigan residents heeded the call and created an hours-long traffic snarl.
Although the motorists adhered to the social distancing rules as they were advised, the protest also brought out a lot of nasty gun-toting thugs onto the streets. Michigan Proud Boys, a supremacist outfit, blocked the intersection around a hospital. Not only did they ignore safety guidelines, exposing themselves and others to the virus just when Michigan was beginning to flatten the curve, they also waved Confederate flags and chanted “lock her up.”
This is horrifying and indefensible.
However, Whitmer ought to take the pushback from responsible protesters seriously. She needs to use the minimal force necessary—not the maximum possible—to maintain public buy-in. If she is seen as too power-hungry, she will lose legitimacy. Instead of defeating coronavirus, she’ll spark civil unrest.
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Systemic FBI Effort To Legitimize Steele and Use His Information To Target POTUS
Newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December FBI report reveals that senior Obama officials, including members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team knew the dossier compiled by a former British spy during the 2016 election was Russian disinformation to target President Donald Trump.
Further, the partially declassified footnotes reveal that those senior intelligence officials were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment (ICA).
As important, the footnotes reveal that there had been a request to validate information collected by British spy Christopher Steele as far back as 2015, and that there was concern among members of the FBI and intelligence community about his reliability. Those concerns were brushed aside by members of the Crossfire Hurricane team in their pursuit against the Trump campaign officials, according to sources who spoke to this reporter and the footnotes.
The explosive footnotes were partially declassified and made public Wednesday, after a lengthy review by the Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell’s office. Grenell sent the letter Wednesday releasing the documents to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa and Sen. Ron Johnson, R- Wisconsin, both who requested the declassification.
“Having reviewed the matter, and having consulted the heads of the relevant Intelligence Community elements, I have declassified the enclosed footnotes.” Grenell consulted with DOJ Attorney General William Barr on the declassification of the documents.
Grassley and Johnson released a statement late Wednesday stating “as we can see from these now-declassified footnotes in the IG’s report, Russian intelligence was aware of the dossier before the FBI even began its investigation and the FBI had reports in hand that their central piece of evidence was most likely tainted with Russian disinformation.”
“Thanks to Attorney General Barr’s and Acting Director Grenell’s declassification of the footnotes, we know the FBI’s justification to target an American Citizen was riddled with significant flaws,” the Senator stated. “Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his team did what neither the FBI nor Special Counsel Mueller cared to do: examine and investigate corruption at the FBI, the sources of the Steele dossier, how it was disseminated, and reporting that it contained Russian disinformation.”
The Footnotes
A U.S. Official familiar with the investigation into the FBI told this reporter that the footnotes “clearly show that the FBI team was or should have had been aware that the Russian Intelligence Services was trying to influence Steele’s reporting in the summer of 2016, and that there were some preferences for Hillary; and that this RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] sourced information being fed to Steele was designed to hurt Trump.”
The official noted these new revelations also “undermines the ICA on Russian Interference and the intent to help Trump. It undermines the FISA warrants and there should not have been a Mueller investigation.”
Russian’s Appeared To Have Preferred Clinton
The footnotes also reveal a startling fact that go against Brennan’s assessment that Russia was vying for Trump, when in fact, the Russians appeared to be hopeful of a Clinton presidency.
“The FBI received information in June, 2017 which revealed that, among other things, there were personal and business ties between the sub-source and Steele’s Primary Sub-source, contacts between the sub-source and an individual in the Russian Presidential Administration in June/July 2016 [redacted] and the sub source voicing strong support for candidate Clinton in the 2016 U.S. election. The Supervisory Intel Analyst told us that the FBI did not have a Section 702 vicarage on any other Steele sub-source.”
Steele’s Lies
The complete four pages of the partially redacted footnotes paint a clear picture of the alleged malfeasance committed by former FBI Director James Comey, former DNI James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, who were all aware of the concerns regarding the information supplied by former British spy Christopher Steele in the dossier. Steele, who was hired by the private embattled research firm Fusion GPS, was paid for his work through the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. The FBI also paid for Steele’s work before ending its confidential source relationship with him but then used Obama DOJ Official Bruce Ohr as a go between to continue obtaining information from the former spy.
In footnote 205, for instance, payment documents show that Steele lied about not being a Confidential Human Source.
“During his time as an FBI CHS, Steele received a total of $95,000 from the FBI,” the footnote states. “We reviewed the FBI paperwork for those payments, each of which required Steele’s Signed acknowledgement. On each document, of which there were eight, was the caption ‘CHS payment’ and ‘CHS Payment Name.’ A signature page was missing for one of the payments.”
Footnote 350
In footnote 350, Horowitz describes the questionable Russian disinformation and the FBI’s reliance on the information to target the Trump campaign as an attempt to build a narrative that campaign officials colluded with Russia. Further, the timeline reveals that Comey, Brennan and Clapper were aware of the disinformation by Russian intelligence when they briefed then President-elect Trump in January, 2017 on the Steele dossier.
“[redacted] In addition to the information in Steele’s Delta file documenting Steele’s frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from [redacted] indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’ election reporting,” stated the partially declassified footnote 350. “A January 12, 2017 report relayed information from [redacted] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen. The [redacted] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.
A second report from the same [redacted] five days later stated that a person named in the limited subset of Steele’s reporting had denied representations in the reporting and the [redacted] assessed that the person’s denials were truthful. A USIC report dated February 27, 2017, contained information about an individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia who claimed that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s sexual activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS (Russian Intelligence Services) ‘infiltrate[ing] a source into the network’ of a [redacted] who compiled a dossier of that individual on Trump’s activities. The [redacted] noted that it had no information indicating that the individual had special access to RIS activities or information,” according to the partially declassified footnote.
Looming Questions
Another concern regarding Steele’s unusual activity is found in footnote 210, which states “as we discuss in Chapter Six, members of the Crossfire Hurricane Team were unaware of Steele’s connections to Russian Oligarch 1.”
The question remains that “Steele’s unusual activity with 10 oligarch’s led the FBI to seek a validation review in 2015 but one was not started until 2017,” said the U.S. Official to this reporter. “Why not? Was Crossfire Hurricane aware of these concerns? Was the court made aware of these concerns? Didn’t the numerous notes about sub sources and sources having links or close ties to Russian intelligence…so why didn’t this set off alarm bells?”
More alarming, it’s clear, Supervisory Intelligence Agent Jonathan Moffa says in June 17, that he was not aware of reports that Russian Intelligence Services was aware of Steele’s election reporting and influence efforts.
“However, he should have been given the reporting by UCIS” which the U.S. Official says, goes back to summer 2016.
Footnote 342 makes it clear that “in late January, 2017, a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team received information [redacted] that RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] may have targeted Orbis.”
Scientists Discover Alarming Coronavirus Mutation That Could Render Vaccine Useless
The prospect that SARS-CoV-2, the “novel” coronavirus responsible for causing the illness COVID-19, might be mutating and evolving as it spreads across the globe has been such a terrifying prospect for the scientific community, that medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci seem to avoid even engaging on the topic.
Asked about the possibility of viral mutation during one of the White House’s inaugural task force press briefings, Dr. Fauci assured the public that scientists have found “no evidence” of any concerning mutations, though the prospect that a mutated version of the virus might return during next year’s flu season has kept some virologists up at night with nightmares about needing to start the vaccine clock from zero.
The problem is that vaccines often aren’t as effective against viruses that mutate, like the flu does every season (that’s why you need to keep getting that flu shot year after year). And now, a new scientific paper that – like most of the coronavirus research being cited in the press – has yet to be peer reviewed claims to have identified a mutation in a sample of the virus collected in India that could create serious problems for researchers working on a vaccine.
Monitoring the mutation dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 is critical for the development of effective approaches to contain the 21 pathogen. By analyzing 106 SARS-CoV-2 and 39 SARS genome sequences, we provided direct genetic evidence that 22 SARS-CoV-2 has a much lower mutation rate than SARS. Minimum Evolution phylogeny analysis revealed the putative original status of SARS-CoV-2 and the early-stage spread history. The discrepant phylogenies for the spike protein and it receptor binding domain proved a previously reported structural rearrangement prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Despite that, we found the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 is particularly more conserved, we identified a mutation that leads to weaker receptor binding capability, which concerns a SARS-CoV-2 sample collected on 27th January 2020 from India. This represents the first report of a significant SARS-CoV-2 mutant, and raises the alarm that the ongoing vaccine Development may become futile in future epidemic if more mutations were identified.
The ominous discovery underscores how the virus’s destructive potential will likely be tied to the vagaries of viral evolution.
Fortunately, the team appeared to confirm an earlier finding by a team of researchers in Italy that the virus “has a much lower mutation rate and genetic diversity” than SARS, which means that a vaccine will likely be able to treat wide swaths of people before becoming ineffective as the virus changes and evolves.
However, this new finding shows that it’s not just the speed of the mutation that matters, but the specific nature of the mutations, when scientists are developing a vaccine.
Experts say that a vaccine could take up to 2 years to develop, and some city officials have warned that life likely won’t return completely back to normal until a vaccine is ready for mass production. But a mutation could throw a wrench in this process, transforming the process of developing a workable vaccine into a “cat and mouse” game – or at the very least lengthen the time it takes for the initial vaccine to be developed.
As of Thursday morning, more than 2 million patients have tested positive for the virus around the world, while nearly 140k have died of the illness (with many more likely uncounted).
President Donald Trump has grown impatient with Congress. The COVID-19 outbreak has brought normal business to a near standstill in Washington, D.C., and the Senate is no longer confirming Trump’s nominees to federal office at the steady clip that it once did. So Trump is now threatening an end-run around the Senate’s constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent” on presidential picks.
“The Senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments,” Trump said on Wednesday. “If the House will not agree to that adjournment, I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers.”
To be clear, the president has no independent authority to send Congress home. Rather, under Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, “in Case of Disagreement between [the Senate and the House of Representatives], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” In other words, in the rare instance in which the Senate and the House cannot together settle on a time for Congress to adjourn, the president may then—and only then—get involved. Since no such disagreement over the time of adjournment currently exists between the Senate and House, Trump currently has no power to act in this fashion.
Trump is not the first president with the bright idea of expanding executive power by misusing the Recess Appointment Clause, which grants the president the limited authority “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the end of their next Session.”
In 2005, for example, President George W. Bush, who was then butting heads with Senate Democrats over the fate of several of his nominees, simply waited until the Senate went home for its winter break and then made 17 recess appointments. The Senate reacted to this executive overreach with a novel defensive tactic: A member would remain on hand during future breaks in order to gavel the body into a pro forma session every few days, thus preventing the Senate from ever technically going into recess. That did the trick. As New York Times reporter Charlie Savage noted, “Senate Democrats repeated the move during breaks for the rest of Mr. Bush’s presidency, and Mr. Bush did not try to make any further recess appointments.”
President Barack Obama proved to be even more overreaching than Bush. In 2012, while the Senate was holding a pro forma session, Obama went ahead and made four purported recess appointments, including the addition of three members to the National Labor Relations Board. The unseemly act of making recess appointments when the Senate was not actually in recess earned Obama a 9-0 rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court. “In our view,” declared Justice Stephen Breyer in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, “the pro forma sessions count as sessions, not as periods of recess.” Therefore, “We hold that, for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says it is.”
Breyer’s Noel Canning opinion also anticipated the Trump scenario. The Recess Appointment Clause, Breyer wrote, “gives the President (if he has enough allies in Congress) a way to force a recess.”
Here’s what that might mean in the present context: Assume that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) likes the sound of Trump’s scheme to bypass the Senate in order to have a free hand to make recess appointments. So long as McConnell and his allies are willing to abdicate the Senate’s “advice and consent” role, McConnell could, theoretically, engineer an adjournment battle with the Democratic-controlled House, thus paving the way for Trump to step in. But as Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) correctly pointed out on Twitter, “Without one chamber participating in this improper scheme, [Trump’s] action would be unconstitutional.”
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If any politician is looking for a lesson on how not to deal with the coronavirus crisis, they would do well to look at Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). Even if you have zero sympathy with the people who violated basic social distancing rules yesterday to protest Whitmer’s new stay-at-home-order, you should at least understand that her policy was bound to spark an ugly blowback.
The spread of coronavirus represents a massive failure of public health authorities, but Americans everywhere—including in Michigan, where I live—have thus far willingly complied with their edicts. It has been amazing to see just how completely American society has transformed itself in three short weeks: Businesses that have been deemed non-essential have shut down, laying off millions of workers. The ones that are still operating are letting their employees telecommute from home. Grocery stores have become thinly populated because shoppers are limiting their trips. Every store near me has erected spit barriers between cashiers and shoppers and some are disinfecting every single cart before use. The vast majority of shoppers wear masks (regardless of whether local laws mandate this or not), sanitize their hands a gazillion times before touching items, and refrain from unloading their carts when someone else is checking out. Drivers wipe down pumps and steering wheels. Park visitors maintain a scrupulous six-foot distance.
Most local lockdowns have their share of nuttiness (for example, in Florida and D.C., you can walk through parks but not sit down) and excesses (a Philadelphia man was handcuffed for playing with his daughter in an empty softball field). But so long as the ratio of good sense to nonsense is relatively high, for the most part Americans have gone along. Irate residents and partisans seeking to exploit these measures for political gain have been marginalized.
But that changed in Michigan with Whitmer’s new executive order that not only extended the state’s shelter-in-place mandate till the end of the month—something most everyone had expected and accepted—but added arguably the country’s most draconian and nonsensical provisions.
Even as neighboring Indiana and Ohio are relaxing their orders and the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency guidelines are classifying more industries as “essential” so that they can reopen and minimize the economic hit from the shutdown, Whitmore has gone the other way on the pretext that Michigan has the third-highest share of coronavirus cases in the country.
She ordered big box stores to stop selling paint, carpets, and other home-improvement material not considered essential, though as Reason’s Billy Binion reported, she does allow lottery ticket sales, probably because the proceeds go to the state’s K-12 funds.
She shut down lawn-care services. Contender’s Tree and Lawn Specialist Inc., a company that purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars of fertilizer and other supplies had to stop spraying its plants in the middle of spring season, risking its entire crop. (Michigan’s gardening industry, with an estimated retail value of $580 million to $700 million and 9,000 employees, faces a complete loss this year if it isn’t able to operate soon.)
In addition to large gatherings, she also barred families that don’t share a home from getting together, preventing one man from seeing his girlfriend of 14 years because she doesn’t live with him.
She forbade families from traveling to their vacation cottages in northern Michigan, a popular springtime activity in Michigan. She shut down golf courses and prohibited motorized boats, although non-motorized ones are allowed, for some reason.
This is arbitrary and irrational micromanagement that has understandably irritated many residents.
What’s more, Whitmer has decreed that violations will count as misdemeanors punishable by up to a $1,000 civil fine. Criminal penalties are also on the table, should prosecutors choose to pursue that. Meanwhile, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has gone full China and is encouraging employees to rat out their bosses and call the police if they try to open up shop in violation of the lockdown.
What’s so outrageous about all this is that the new businesses and activities that Whitmer is targeting can all be safely conducted while adhering to strict social distancing rules. But Whitmer’s theory apparently is that anything beyond absolutely essential conduct jeopardizes frontline workers. This is the precautionary principle on steroids. It considers even an infinitesimal increase in secondary risk as unacceptable, a mindset that could justify stopping virtually any activity anytime.
That’s why this order has disrupted the political equilibrium in support of her efforts. To date, hardly any legal challenges have been filed against any stay-at-home orders. But Whitmer’s new order has already prompted four Michigan residents, including the guy who can’t see his girlfriend, and Contender’s, the landscaping company, to sue her for violating their right to free association and perpetrating an uncompensated regulatory taking. More lawsuits might well be underway.
A Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantining—whose very name suggests that it isn’t opposed to reasonable quarantining—gained steam with over 282,000 members. Four Michigan sheriffs have declared that they won’t enforce parts of Whitmer’s executive order that they view as unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, Operation Gridlock, which was mounted by the Michigan Conservative Coalition inviting motorists to drive to Lansing, the state’s capital, and shut down its roads, elicited a massive response Wednesday. Thousands of Michigan residents heeded the call and created an hours-long traffic snarl.
Although the motorists adhered to the social distancing rules as they were advised, the protest also brought out a lot of nasty gun-toting thugs onto the streets. Michigan Proud Boys, a supremacist outfit, blocked the intersection around a hospital. Not only did they ignore safety guidelines, exposing themselves and others to the virus just when Michigan was beginning to flatten the curve, they also waved Confederate flags and chanted “lock her up.”
This is horrifying and indefensible.
However, Whitmer ought to take the pushback from responsible protesters seriously. She needs to use the minimal force necessary—not the maximum possible—to maintain public buy-in. If she is seen as too power-hungry, she will lose legitimacy. Instead of defeating coronavirus, she’ll spark civil unrest.
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Protesters take over streets around Michigan State Capitol. Even as polls show a majority of Americans are reluctant to resume business as usual, residents of some states have started publicly pushing back against stay-at-home and social-distancing orders. Cities in Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio have all seen organized protests in the past week.
In Michigan—where state leaders aren’t just determining which businesses can stay open but what particular goods they can sell, and where some sheriffs have declared that they won’t enforce the rules—people participated yesterday in an “Operation Gridlock” protest organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund. The organizers stressed to protesters (which Politicoputs in the “hundreds” and NBC News in the “thousands”) that they should remain in their cars, but many didn’t listen.
The demonstration may have backfired if the goal was actually getting the state government to reconsider its rules. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a TV interview afterward that “this is the kind of behavior that extends the needs for stay-at-home orders.”
Then again, a substantial number of Michigan residents had no problem defying that order yesterday.
That Michigan is one of the first places seeing substantial pushback against state stay-at-home orders is no random occurrence. Whitmer has instituted one of the nation’s most severe stay-at-home policies, banning everything from the sale of paint to the use of motor-powered boats (but not canoes) while the state-run lottery remains “essential.” The whole mess highlights the sadly symbiotic relationship between authorities taking things too far and people (some reasonably and strategically, some carelessly and imprudently) reacting in ways that provoke more draconian policies.
Americans have proven quite willing to play along with social-distancing directives when these directives are narrowly tailored to stopping the spread of COVID-19. If there’s a lesson from Michigan for other states, it’s that imposing overly-strict rules or trying to sneak pet policy transformations into precautionary measures will provoke backlash that makes public health goals even more difficult to reach. If state and local leaders want their people to consent to COVID-19 emergency measures and be partners in public health, rather than antagonists, they should look to Whitmer’s examples as what not to do.
“The absolutist nature of the country’s shutdown and the economic rescue package have democratic consent—enacted by a bipartisan roster of governors and overwhelming votes in Congress—but it was the kind of consent achieved by warning would-be dissenters, Are you serious? There is no choice!” writes John F. Harris at Politico today. “Many people concluded that for now there is nothing to do but suck it up. It won’t be surprising if some of those people eventually have an intense desire to spit out.”
FREE MINDS
Puerto Rico criminalizes misinformation. A new law makes it a crime “to transmit or allow the transmission” of any “false information with the intention of creating confusion, panic, or public hysteria, with regards to any proclamation or executive order declaring an emergency, disaster or curfew.” Breaking the law can lead to six months in jail and a fine of $5,000.
“This doesn’t just violate the Constitution, it makes it more difficult for journalists to cover the pandemic as it unfolds,” points out Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
A lack of solid information isn’t the same thing as misinformation, but criminalizing speech the government feels is inaccurate (and costs money to respond to) is only going to result in less information being spread. “Fake news” laws tend to do collateral damage to non-fake news reporting as reporters in the middle of unfolding events opt to self-censor, rather than run the risk of being prosecuted. This won’t withstand a Constitutional challenge, but until the law is blocked, everyone in Puerto Rico will have to make do with a little less First Amendment.
FREE MARKETS
Do you make more money now than you did 10 years ago? The average answer to that depends on where you live, according to a new analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. Using IRS data, TRAC found that “some counties saw a doubling of average adjusted gross incomes while taxpayers in other counties experienced” sharped decreases:
For the U.S. as a whole, the average adjusted gross income (AGI) reported on a return grew by $16,735, from $55,361 for returns filed during 2008 to $72,096 for those filed in 2018. This translates into a growth rate, not adjusting for inflation, of 30.2 percent.
Individual counties, however, often experienced quite different changes during this same period. The range in dollar change in a county’s respective AGI was as high as $123,096 all the way down to a decline in AGI of -$71,059. In fact, 69 out of the 3,146 counties in the nation experienced a decline in reported AGI. The change in percentage terms in AGI ranged from a low of -93.7 percent to an increase of 290.4 percent…
If states don’t start taking measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in prisons and jails, “worst-case model estimates predict that almost two-thirds of hospital beds in Louisiana (8,000 of 12,000) and Georgia (14,000 of 23,000), two-fifths in California (28,000 of 65,000), and more than three-quarters in the most vulnerable state, Arkansas (7,000 of 9,000), will be required by prisoners between 14 and 22 days from now,” reportsThe Appeal.
“It’s not the politicians who have the power to reopen America, or at least the parts that are now closed. It’s individuals, families, businesses, and religious congregations,” writes Ira Stoll.
Relatedly, from the Cato Institute’s David Boaz: Data shows Americans are “mostly staying home because we decided to—we as individuals, and businesses, and civil society.”
For COVID-19 patients, “the chronic condition with the strongest association with critical illness was obesity,” according to a new draft paper.
New York has made wearing masks in public mandatory:
#BREAKING: I am issuing an Executive Order today that all people MUST wear a mask or face covering in public in situations where social distancing is not possible.
A Facebook post from Maryland’s Taneytown Police Department reminded the community to “please remember to put pants on before leaving the house to check your mailbox. You know who you are. This is your final warning.”
A Liberty University student is suing the school for its response to COVID-19, alleging that Liberty U. President Jerry Falwell only kept it “open” so as not to have to refund student fees for housing, meals, and amenities. “The university’s statement that it is ‘open’ is an illusion being put forth to try to keep money that should be returned to students and their families,” the lawsuit says.
“If we are going to have 60,000 deaths with people not leaving their homes for more than a month, the number of deaths obviously would have been higher—much higher—if everyone had gone about business as usual,” writes Rich Lowry in “The Absurd Case Against the Coronavirus Lockdown.”
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From Liberty v. The Sun, a decision by the UK Independent Press Standards Organisation Complaint Committee handed down Mar. 24; as best I can tell, the IPSO is an industry self-regulatory organization, but one that was set up in part as a result of governmental processes.
[1.] Amanda Liberty complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that The Sun breached Clause 12 (Discrimination) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in an article headlined “‘Goops! it’s my highs & lows of 2019” published on 18 December 2019.
[2.] The article was a columnist’s annual “awards” page, rounding up notable stories and events from 2019. It focussed on people or events she considered to be hypocritical or worthy of derision – for example it awarded prizes to the “Eco Hypocrite Of The Year (aka Hotly Contested Hot Air Award)” and “Nancy Doolally-o Award For Services To Delusion”. The columnist awarded the “Dagenham Award (Two Stops Past Barking)” to a woman named and pictured as having married a chandelier-style light fitting. It said that she was an “objectum sexual” and asked whether she was “Dim & Dimmer?”
[3.] The article also appeared online in the same form with the headline “[NAMED COLUMNIST] My annual award winners from Eco Hypocrite to Virtue Signaller Of The Year”.
[4.] The complainant was the woman named and pictured as having married a chandelier. She said that her sexual orientation is an attraction to objects, described in an academic paper as “objectum sexual”. She said that by awarding her the “Dagenham Award”, as a result of her relationship with a chandelier, as well as positing whether she was “Dim & Dimmer” the article was pejorative to her sexual orientation in breach of Clause 12. She also raised concerns that the article referred to a chandelier style light fitting, when in fact, she was in a relationship, not a marriage, with a chandelier.
[5.] The publication did not accept that the terms of Clause 12 were engaged. It said that it did not doubt that the complainant’s attraction to chandeliers was genuine, however it said that sexual orientation in the context of Clause 12 covered people who were attracted to people of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both. It noted that this was the definition of sexual orientation given by the Equality Act 2010, and used by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Stonewall – for example, the complainant was not legally able to marry the chandelier and it would not be legally discriminatory to prevent such a marriage. It was not aware of any reputable definition of sexual orientation which included objectum sexual. For these reasons, the publication said that Clause 12 did not cover attraction to objects.
[6.] The publication also noted that the complainant had already put extensive details of her attraction to objects in the public domain via previous interviews and article. It said that just as the complainant had exercised her freedom of expression in speaking about her then engagement to the chandelier, the columnist was entitled to comment on it.
Relevant Code Provisions
[7.] Clause 12 (Discrimination)
[i] The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s, race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.
[ii] Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story.
Findings of the Committee
[8.] The Committee recognised that the complainant found the article to be offensive and upsetting. However, it was mindful that the Code does not cover issues of taste and offence; newspapers are free to publish information as they see fit as long as the Editors’ Code is not otherwise breached.
In determining whether the terms of Clause 12 were engaged, the Committee took into account the Equality Act 2010 which defines sexual orientation as a person’s sexual orientation towards persons of the same sex, persons of the opposite sex or persons of either sex. The Committee considered that Clause 12 provides protection to individuals in relation to their sexual orientation towards other persons and not to objects.
As such, the complainant’s attraction to an object did not fall within the definition of sexual orientation as provided by Clause 12 and the terms of Clause 12 were not engaged….
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Today, I’m going to try to show you how and why we know that in the case of a pandemic like the one we’re in, surrounded by doubts and uncertainties, there are still a series of measures that we can and, more importantly, must take. But also, how these measures are hardly ever taken, and if they are, not in the correct fashion. This has to date led us into a ton of preventable misery and death. If only we would listen. And there’s still more we can do to prevent more mayhem, there is at every step of the process.
It took me a while to get this together. But in the end I wound up with the only COVID19 analysis that makes sense. It doesn’t leave much room for discussion, at least not in the steps needed to be taken in order to tame the virus (I despise the war analogies everyone uses, taming sounds much better). How to fill in those steps once they have -kind of- been taken is another matter.
I’ve been reading up on this for a while, adding -much- more stuff as I went along (this will be a long essay), and at some point realized that the coronavirus is an issue you can’t leave to epidemiologists and virologists, because there are far too many unknowns for them to create a working model, and without such a model they are lost. These fine people are not good at 10-dimensional chess, even if they like you to think otherwise.
These people are useful for the knowledge they possess of past epidemics, not for predicting what will happen in the next one, certainly not if it’s caused by a virus which they -and we- simply don’t know enough about to build a reliable model. In that case, you need to step back and apply more basic principles. Lucky for us, those exist.
This leads us into a territory that is not familiar to epidemiologists and virologists. Since a virus, and a pandemic, like the one we’re in the middle of, is linked to so many different facets and factors, and so many uncertainties, it takes us into the territory of risk management, assessment, engineering, and from there eventually pretty seamlessly into complex systems.
If you can’t know what will happen next because you can’t oversee the multitude of variables involved, and there are no models that can do so either, the best -only- thing you can do is to halt the growing complexity as soon as you are able to, in order to create a situation, an environment, which the epidemiologists and virologists DO recognize, and can work with.
That is the point where they come in, not before. At present, they are asked to do things beyond their knowledge. And, typical human trait, they don’t tend to acknowledge that. Well, there’s a second reason: some actually think they do understand. The outcome is the same: we- and they- are led astray, away from science and into “scientism” (more on that in a moment).
Which would be fine if this concerned just a hobby, or even if it was only an academic paper left to discuss in classrooms and web forums. But we are talking about 10s of 1000s of deaths, 100s of 1000s of gravely ill people, and in the wake of that an economy as much in need of assisted breathing as the human patients involved.
Lucky for us, we have people who DO understand these things. Unlucky for us, our “leadership” doesn’t listen to them. They think that an epidemiologist or two, three, should be enough. But neither the “leaders” nor the epidemiologists understand the limits every single scientific field has. They don’t understand what happens when scientists venture out of their chosen field. And most of all, they don’t understand what complex systems are.
Please note that the above also means that any and all virus modeling going forward should be taken with an ocean full of salt. We get new examples every day of “qualities” of the virus that are not in any models. Where the virus originated, asymptomatic patients, re-infection, huge discrepancies in ‘modeled’ numbers predicted vs factual ones, Asians vs whites, blacks vs whites, men vs women, smokers vs non-smokers, chloroquine (non-)effectiveness, contagiousness, the list goes on for miles.
There is a way to leave those discussions, based on, we must admit, far too little verifiable information, leaving us groping in the pitchblack, behind for now.
Most people who read a site like the Automatic Earth, where finance is a main topic, will know who Nassim Nicholas Taleb is, for instance because he wrote The Black Swan before the 2008 financial crisis. Or because a hedge fund he advises recently announced a 6,000%+ gain in “virustime”. But Taleb is also, and more interesting for this essay, “distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering”.
For much of his coverage of COVID19, Taleb has been co-operating with Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex System Institute, and Joseph Norman, a postdoctoral researcher at the same New England Complex System Institute. That means “real scientists”, just not from where you might expect. Which in turn means they can help the other guys get out of the ditch they’re in.
I’ll refer to “Taleb” here, nice and short, but that often means his co-operators too. Key terminology you’ll find, and need, is “asymmetry”, “precautionary principle” (“first do no harm”, which is close to the Hippocratic Oath’s “to abstain from doing harm”), and perhaps also “convexity” (a term from the finance world that depicts a relation between interest rates and bond duration).
First, here are a few bits from a piece the three wrote on January 26, to get you familiar with some of the ideas. These are ground rules for approaching a pandemic such as this one, but they are also ground rules for -any- other problems with too many unknown variables.
This is crucial because it denotes that if you have a disease that is both contagious and deadly, you don’t -have to- first wait and (build a model to) see how deadly and contagious it is, as an epidemiologist is wont to do, you can act right off the bat. Of course the scientists at the WHO and various government know this basic stuff, but they still haven’t acted accordingly. On January 26 and after, the ground rules were ignored.
So then you’re forced into the next basic steps. Still -mostly- not an epic disaster, but surely an unnecessary -and potentially deadly- risk. Taleb doesn’t take prisoners, and labels the WHO “criminally incompetent”. And I fully agree: they get paid billions a year to be the world’s ears and eyes in case a new disease pops up somewhere, and they have still let it happen. Here’s that first bit:
General Precautionary Principle : The general (non-naive) precautionary principle [3] delineates conditions where actions must be taken to reduce risk of ruin, and traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used. These are ruin problems where, over time, exposure to tail events leads to a certain eventual extinction. While there is a very high probability for humanity surviving a single such event, over time, there is eventually zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events. While repeated risks can be taken by individuals with a limited life expectancy, ruin exposures must never be taken at the systemic and collective level. In technical terms, the precautionary principle applies when traditional statistical averages are invalid because risks are not ergodic.
Spreading rate : Historically based estimates of spreading rates for pandemics in general, and for the current one in particular, underestimate the rate of spread because of the rapid increases in transportation connectivity over recent years. This means that expectations of the extent of harm are underestimates both because events are inherently fat tailed, and because the tail is becoming fatter as connectivity increases. Global connectivity is at an all-time high, with China one of the most globally connected societies. Fundamentally, viral contagion events depend on the interaction of agents in physical space, and with the forward-looking uncertainty that novel outbreaks necessarily carry, reducing connectivity temporarily to slow flows of potentially contagious individuals is the only approach that is robust against misestimations in the properties of a virus or other pathogen.
Asymmetric Uncertainty : Properties of the virus that are uncertain will have substantial impact on whether policies implemented are effective. For instance, whether contagious asymptomatic carriers exist. These uncertainties make it unclear whether measures such as temperature screening at major ports will have the desired impact. Practically all the uncertainty tends to make the problem potentially worse, not better, as these processes are convex to uncertainty.
Conclusion : Standard individual-scale policy approaches such as isolation, contact tracing and monitoring are rapidly (computationally) overwhelmed in the face of mass infection, and thus also cannot be relied upon to stop a pandemic. Multiscale population approaches including drastically pruning contact networks using collective boundaries and social behavior change, and community self-monitoring, are essential. Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.
It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail do so will eventually cost everything—if not from this event, then one in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large. But policy- and decision-makers must act swiftly and avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to “paranoia,” or the converse a belief that nothing can be done.
As you can see, that already contains the next steps in case the initial response is warped (it has been). An expensive failure, but not necessarily an all too fatal one yet. Missing the next steps as well, though, turns this into a whole other story, and one that must be familiar to you, because you’re living it.
Yaneer Bar-Yam on March 23 gave it another try when he wrote in USA Today that “We Need An Immediate Five-Week National Lockdown To Defeat Coronavirus In America”. We know how that went (I don’t really have space to include that piece). According to this little graph I picked up last week, the US is barely 50% locked down. And that’s not going to cut it.
Two days after Yaneer Bar-Yam’s USA Today article, Taleb and Bar-Yam had a piece in the Guardian, which focused on the UK situation. And guess what? Nobody listened, again. You have to understand, these guys are perceived by the “science crowd” in “epidemic land”, who demand to be seen as the ultimate authorities on the topic, as big threats to their perceived power.
The last thing the “science crowd” want is for a bunch of complex systems guys, who they don’t understand anyway, to upstage them. And granted, the headline alone is ample threat to the UK government’s scientific advisers. But that attitude leads to more entirely preventable deaths; as I said above, the epidemiology etc. crowd simply lack the knowledge that the risk engineers do have, and which could help them prevent those deaths.
Something related, before I forget: I’ve been following Nassim Taleb’s opinions on genetically modified organisms (GMO) for a long time, because in that field, too, he applies the same ground rules that he does vis-a-vis the virus. First, precautionary principle (do no harm), and in the wake of that, asymmetry (asymmetric risk). In “Monsanto’s GMO field”, just like with deadly viruses, the risks when something goes wrong are devastating. If you get that wrong, you’re literally talking potential extinction.
And that makes any “normal” cost/benefit analysis obsolete. If you get the preliminary risk assessment wrong, the consequences are so far-reaching that your only realistic option is extreme carefulness (precautionary principle). Ergo: you don’t allow GMO crops until you’re 100% sure they have zero negative impacts on human health. What Monsanto does is use “scientists” who declare that no negative effect has been found so far, so it must be okay.
Taleb asserts that that is not science, but “scientism”. It is obvious that the negative effects can take decades to show, but if they do, things have probably become irreversible (all corn contains GMO traces). In other words, the burden of proof MUST lie with Monsanto; you can’t demand that everybody else proves their GMO crops are harmful. On the one hand, Monsanto gets to make a profit, while on the other billions of human lives can get lost. That’s the asymmetry Taleb is talking about.
Labeling any such deliberation, any such cost-benefit analysis, scientific, is an affront to any- and everybody’s intelligence. There are things that you cannot afford to take risks with. Mankind, the animal kingdom, the planet, are some of these things. You can’t argue that a lockdown might cost jobs if and when a non-lockdown will cost lives; you can’t argue for measures that kill people.
The only thing we can really do is to apply those measures that best mitigate job losses, not the ones that keep jobs but mitigate loss of life. It’s not even an actual choice; it’s a false dichotomy, because the risk of consciously allowing people to continue to infect others who may then die, which you could have prevented from happening, is so much greater than the loss of a job. The risk is asymmetric. A job is not a life.
It’s nuts to argue that we should allow someone to die because his/her neighbor might lose their job or because his/her neighbor beats his wife. In case someone loses their job, a government can issue a bailout or even a UBI. That they don’t do that and/or not properly, is another matter. But not one that justifies murder.
And you can’t take the conscious risk of letting people die because someone married an abusive person either. Yaneer Bar-Yam wrote some good stuff on community efforts with regards to COVID19, to be found at the New England Complex System Institute site, which might help in that regard. But you can’t aim for letting a deadly virus spread in order to prevent joblessness, loneliness or poor -life- choices.
Back to Taleb and Bar-Yam’s March 25 piece in the Guardian. I have a hard time selecting only some of it, a general problem with well-written essays.
When, along with applied systems scientist Dr Joe Norman, we first reacted to coronavirus on 25 January with the publication of an academic note urging caution, the virus had reportedly infected fewer than 2,000 people worldwide and fewer than 60 people were dead. That number need not have been so high [..] Our research did not use any complicated model with a vast number of variables, no more than someone watching an avalanche heading in their direction calls for complicated statistical models to see if they need to get out of the way.
We called for a simple exercise of the precautionary principle in a domain where it mattered: interconnected complex systems have some attributes that allow some things to cascade out of control, delivering extreme outcomes. Enact robust measures that would have been, at the time, of small cost: constrain mobility. Immediately. Later, we invoked a rapid investment in preparedness: tests, hospital capacity, means to treat patients. Just in case, you know. Things can happen. The error in the UK is on two levels. Modelling and policymaking.
First, at the modelling level, the government relied at all stages on epidemiological models that were designed to show us roughly what happens when a preselected set of actions are made, and not what we should make happen, and how. The modellers use hypotheses/assumptions, which they then feed into models, and use to draw conclusions and make policy recommendations.
Critically, they do not produce an error rate. What if these assumptions are wrong? Have they been tested? The answer is often no. [..] Risk management – like wisdom – requires robustness in models. But if we base our pandemic response plans on flawed academic models, people die. And they will.
This was the case with the disastrous “herd immunity” thesis. The idea behind herd immunity was that the outbreak would stop if enough people got sick and gained immunity. Once a critical mass of young people gained immunity, so the epidemiological modellers told us, vulnerable populations (old and sick people) would be protected. Of course, this idea was nothing more than a dressed-up version of the “just do nothing” approach.
Individuals and scientists around the world immediately pointed out the obvious flaws: there’s no way to ensure only young people get infected; you need 60-70% of the population to be infected and recover to have a shot at herd immunity, and there aren’t that many young and healthy people in the UK, or anywhere. Moreover, many young people have severe cases of the disease, overloading healthcare systems, and a not-so-small number of them die. It is not a free ride.
This doesn’t even include the possibility, already suspected in some cases, of recurrence of the disease. Immunity may not even be reliable for this virus. Worse, it did not take into account that the duration of hospitalisation can be lengthier than they think, or that one can incur a shortage of hospital beds.
[..] No 10 appears to be enamoured with “scientism” – things that have the cosmetic attributes of science but without its rigour. [..] Social science is in a “replication crisis”, where less than half the results replicate (under exact same conditions), less than a tenth can be taken seriously, and less than a hundredth translate into the real world. So what is called “evidence-based” methods have a dire track record and are pretty much evidence-free.
[..] when one deals with deep uncertainty, both governance and precaution require us to hedge for the worst. While risk-taking is a business that is left to individuals, collective safety and systemic risk are the business of the state. Failing that mandate of prudence by gambling with the lives of citizens is a professional wrongdoing that extends beyond academic mistake; it is a violation of the ethics of governing. The obvious policy left now is a lockdown, with overactive testing and contact tracing: follow the evidence from China and South Korea rather than thousands of error-prone computer codes.
If that’s not sufficient, here’s Taleb in a March 31 Bloomberg interview. Please watch:
And just in case it’s still not clear, I have collected a series of Taleb tweets that should make his position that much clearer. That is, after we failed to halt the virus while we could, thanks to China, the WHO and your own government, in that order, mass mask wearing is inevitable -because not doing so involves an asymmetric risk: even the worst mask reduces infection rates by 30%, and if both people involved in an interaction wear one, that may be 90%.
In that same vein, you need mass testing. And reliable testing, which is still not a given. These are things that people like to question, but those people are in the wrong time capsule. The proper time for that was December in China, and perhaps January in Europe and the US. Not now. Now you can only save what you can save, and that inevitably means taking measures that appear drastic. But which will look walk-in-the-park-ish compared to what follows if you don’t take them.
Tweets first; please do read them all.
Note: Fat Tony is Taleb’s best friend and alter ego, and there’s controversy about whether he actually exists. For what it’s worth, I agree with Fat Tony that we don’t need a conspiray theory to explain COVID19, we have a virus that is deadly and highly contagious, and 1000s of scientists and politicians who have no idea what they do.
Those are all the basic ingredients you need for absolute mayhem. Not that all theories, whether it’s glyphosate or 5G, China lab or US lab, intential release or not, are necessarily wrong or baseless, but because in the face of a virus that doesn’t need any of these things to replicate the way COVID19 has, you need to come up with very solid proof. And I have seen none, just plenty theories.
Fat Tony don’t believe much in conspiracy theories.
Why?
The “geniuses” at the top have proven time and time again they’re too stupid to pull anyting that elaborate off… https://t.co/q9DllGX7IJ
This is the strongest statistical association I’ve seen w/ respect to the virus. Wear a mask, mandate others to wear masks, & remember that @WHO is criminally incompetent. To repeat:@WHO is criminally incompetent.
Rightwing sociopathic quacks like @BjornLomborg: are ALWAYS on the wrong side of things precautionary, (including climate).
Saying “no worse than the flu” was ignorant 3 months ago; saying it after data from the past few weeks is outright malfeasance.@Twitter blocks fakenews. https://t.co/ENVjCWG00P
and… the NYT and science journos and ignorant “evidence based” epidemiologists who can’t read absence of evidence got us here.
Don’t blame mayors who shut down cities, blame misinformation about masks and mobility. Blame the New York Times.
MASKS
One comment about masks and nonlinearities that these imbeciles are not getting.
Reducing exposure to viruses by 30% thanks to an “imperfect” mask does not mean reducing risk of contracting the disease by just 30%. By convexity, it must be more than 30%, can even be 95%.
Friends, another robust question to get the convexity.
How many people contracted COVID while wearing surgical masks? How many w/N95? How many with cowboy scarves?
(Assume for now homogeneity. We are looking for convexity, not measurement).
We need to get the probability of getting sick at different concentration of droplets.
We could probably back it up (or get a handle on the convexity) from country data (Czech republic).
Intuition: reduction of 70% of particles is yuuuge: home masks should work. Plus if 2-way! pic.twitter.com/Fd4nQ8Pxmr
I don’t know about you, but where I am right now, Holland, there are no masks available on a grand scale. There is so little testing going on in large parts of the West that even medical personnel often go without testing. I would love to be tested, if only so I know I either can or can’t infect people, but who am I to take away a test from a nurse, even if I could?
And this happens 3+ months after all our governments should have made testing and masks for everyone their no. 1 priority. And that was onnly after they failed to crush the curve when they could have.
Donald Trump was talking over the weekend about the “biggest decision of his life”, referring to the moment the US economy could be re-opened. Trump, as well as all the other “leaders”, even if their science advisers don’t like it one bit, or maybe because of it, should contact Nassim Taleb and the risks scientists he works with, within the next 5 minutes.
What is happening right now is not because all the epidemiologists and virologists around the world are wrong, but because they’re asked to make decisons and construct models about something they don’t know nearly enough about.
Call Taleb, Donald, Emmanuel, Shinzo, Angela et al. If you care enough about the lives of your people. I see a lot of rational-looking measures today, in all the lockdown variations, but I also see many countries and states clamoring for peaks to be called, and subsequent calls galore for less stringent lockdown measures. Decisions prone to be taken by politicians and epidemiologists who are -way- out of their league.
Please be careful. Call Taleb. You have nothing -more- to lose.
