Month: December 2021

A reader brought to my attention a CDC study of COVID-19 from late October that compared the mortality rate of vaccinated people vs. unvaccinated people. However, this study didn't do the usual boring thing and investigate deaths from COVID. It investigated deaths from non-COVID causes. Surprisingly, it turned out that mortality from non-COVID causes was way lower for people who had been vaccinated with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines:

The standardized mortality rate from non-COVID causes was about 0.35 for vaccinated people vs. 1.11 for non-vaccinated people. This disparity held for all age groups, all races and ethnicities, and for both men and women. The disparity was biggest among the Black community: the unvaccinated mortality rate was more than 4x that of the vaccinated.

I am suspicious of these results, but not because I have any specific objections to the data gathering or the statistical analysis. Somebody with access to the raw data would have to comment on that.

However, I'm routinely suspicious of studies that show gigantic results. I mean, if these vaccines had some odd property that reduced your mortality rate by 10% or 20% or so, I might buy it. But 3x or more? That's beyond belief.

There's also this: I couldn't find any critiques of this study. Why? If these results are real, every medical researcher in the world should be gobsmacked. Money should be pouring into research labs that want to investigate what's going on. But that doesn't seem to be the case. These results were reported fairly widely when the study came out, but the mainstream press mostly ignored it and after that it disappeared. This makes no sense.

If this study is true, it's yet another great reason to get vaccinated—and to get happily boosted every year. But I would hold on for some independent confirmation before I started celebrating.

Congratulations to Freddie deBoer for the headline of the year:

Perhaps High School is Not Always a Relentlessly Brutal Nietzschean Hellscape

The rest of his post is here, and it's about high school in real life vs. how it's portrayed in movies. I agree with Freddie completely except that I don't care about movie portrayals, which I expect to be over the top for dramatic and comedic reasons.

However, the problem he addresses is actually worse on the internet. Virtually every essay about high school portrays it as, um, something of a relentlessly brutal hellscape of depression, bullying, social media torment, and endless angst about not fitting in. Why? I assume it's for two reasons. First, sensitive writer types—i.e., the kind who are likely to write essays about their high school experience—are also likely to have had bad experiences in high school. Second, people who have bad experiences about anything are far more likely to write about it than people who had good experiences. How much of an audience is there for "I Went to an Urban High School and It Was Fine"?

There may be no area with a greater chasm between myth and reality than modern high school. I'm willing to bet that at least 95% of all students have a fairly normal high school experience: they take classes; they play sports; they get good grades and bad; they break up with various boyfriends and girlfriends; and they experience teen angst just like teens have forever. Then they graduate and either get jobs or go on to college.

The other 5% have terrible experiences, just about as you'd expect. But that's all. Mostly it's just an ordinary part of growing up.

Now middle school is a whole different story. I've always wondered how school districts are able to attract anyone to teach middle school. Does anyone know?

POSTSCRIPT: Just for the record, I'm talking here about regular old high school as experienced by Millennials and younger generations, not high school during the COVID era. That's obviously a whole different subject.

I got this email a few hours ago:

Really? Subaru knows when my tire pressure light is on? What else do they know?

E.O. Wilson died yesterday. He was a expert on ants, beloved by . . .

Yeah, yeah. It so happens that Wilson was an expert on ants, but his real fame comes from the final chapter of his 1975 book, Sociobiology, titled "Man." The book is generally about the way evolution and natural selection affect the genetic underpinnings of animal behavior, and for 26 chapters everything was fine. Vertebrates? Sure. Birds? No problem. Carnivores? Such big teeth. Nonhuman primates? They're so fascinating. Man?

Hold on there. Roughly speaking, everyone agreed at the time that genes affect physical development in all living creatures. And everyone agreed that genes affect behavior in all living creatures—except. h. sapiens. Here's what this looks like:

Wilson filled in that top left square with a big Yes—i.e., genes do affect human behavior and human cognitive traits—and liberals went ballistic. Why? Because this was only a few years after Arthur Jensen had published his (in)famous article suggesting that the measured IQ difference between Black and white people was due mostly to genetic factors. This, needless to say, set the liberal community on fire and made it hypersensitive toward any research that might be construed as aiding and abetting racists. Sociobiology fit squarely in that category.

So in the same way that Darwin's opponents in the 19th century insisted for religious reasons that mankind couldn't be a product of evolution, liberals in the 20th century insisted for idealistic reasons that the behavior of mankind couldn't be a product of evolution. This was not liberalism's finest moment, and it's Exhibit 1 for anyone who wants to demonstrate that liberals don't always follow the science when it's inconvenient for them.

The resulting fight lasted decades and, yes, it included an incident in which some protesters dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson's head. If you're interested, the definitive work on the sociobiology wars is Defenders of the Truth, by Ullica Segerstråle, a historian of science and professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In fact, it's so definitive that I'm tempted to say that if you haven't read it you shouldn't even pretend to know much about how this all went down.

In the end, of course, Wilson was vindicated. Natural selection affects the evolution of the human body. The brain is part of the human body. And the brain is the source of behavioral and cognitive behavior. Therefore, natural selection affects cognitive behavior in humans. Even Darwin knew this—though it took another century before we understood the genetic mechanism underlying it all.

This is just the simplified version, but don't worry. The more complicated version vindicates Wilson too. Nobody today seriously denies that both genes and environment affect both human behavior and human cognitive traits. It's only a matter of how much each matters.

If you want to avoid the stigma of sociobiology, you can call it evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, that's developed something of a stigma of its own, so calling it behavioral ecology is probably your best bet. And don't worry: whatever you call it, there's nothing in the field that claims Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. It's perfectly safe to believe the science without accepting racist views of intelligence.

Just in case you've missed it—and you probably have—the current kerfuffle on progressive Twitter is about whether you can fight inflation by breaking up monopolies. I guess Joe Biden started it, by suggesting that he would do just that. Then Larry Summers, bête noire of the progressive econo-Twittersphere, chimed in to say this was stupid. Not only that, he said, but literally no serious economist holds this view. Then the PET fought back because they hate Larry Summers, blah blah, blah.

This is kind of dumb on two levels. First, even the PET would agree that this has nothing to do with fighting inflation over the next six months. So who cares? Biden was just engaged in political puffery.

Second, the whole problem that progressives have with modern, Borkian antitrust law is that it's based almost entirely on "consumer welfare." That is, if you can show that consumers benefit from a merger—for example, by offering them lower prices—then the merger should be approved. This narrow interpretation makes it almost impossible to fight a merger since corporations can almost always demonstrate this. If you could demonstrate that the merger results in higher prices then it would be easy to fight them. But that's vanishingly unlikely, as progressives know all too well.

Meh.

I'm late to Festivus, but here's something from the new editor of National Review Online:

It is ironic that as much as progressives like to talk about the need to protect democracy, they are awfully quick to jump toward doing things unilaterally when they don’t have the votes to pass their agenda. https://t.co/FhsMvcah7g

— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) December 27, 2021

Oh ffs. This tweet was a response to progressives who have urged President Biden to issue executive orders to implement as much of the BBB bill as he can. As Klein knows perfectly well, this is entirely democratic as long as the orders comply with federal statutes. If there's a dispute about this, courts will settle it, just as the Constitution sets out. So:

• Democratic: Signing legal executive orders and allowing courts to adjudicate them.
• Not democratic: Trying to overthrow the results of a legal election. Passing legislation designed to allow state legislatures to overthrow the results of a legal election.

Are we, once and for all, clear about this?

A few months ago I was up in LA at sunrise and then had a few hours to kill before my next stop. So I drove over to Caltech to see if they had finished refurbishing the pond in front of the Library Formerly Named After Robert A. Millikan.

And they had! So I took some bright, morning pictures and then launched the drone to take some pictures from up high. This is a case where I'd say the ground level picture is quite a bit better.

In case you're wondering, Robert Millikan may have been a Nobel Prize winner and the man who put Caltech on the map, but he was also affiliated with the eugenics movement in the 20s and 30s. For that reason, his name was removed from the main library earlier this year and it was renamed Caltech Hall, which is sort of an odd name for a library, don't you think? My old dorm, Ruddock House, also got a new name for the same reason, and is now Grant D. Venerable House. It's hard to argue with the logic of naming the house after Caltech's first Black graduate—who was also a writer for the California Tech—but "Venerable House" sure is going to be the butt of hundreds of obvious jokes. Oh well.

I'll keep my griping short today. Here is the Wall Street Journal on holiday shopping:

American consumers spent at a brisk pace over the shopping season, as an early rush to stores amid worries about supply and delivery problems muted the effects of a Covid-19 surge that disrupted some businesses and crimped spending before Christmas.

U.S. retail sales rose 8.5% between Nov. 1 and Christmas Eve compared with the same period last year....That is the strongest growth in 17 years.

Just stop it. This gives the impression of a strong surge in holiday spending, but adjusted for inflation it's an increase over last year of only 1.7%. That's very much not the strongest spending in 17 years. It's the strongest spending since . . . last year. And 2018. And 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

If you scroll down to the 7th paragraph, there's an acknowledgment that "Some of the rising sales were due to higher prices." But that's it.

Come on, folks. You can do better than this.

Last night, knowing nothing about it, I watched Don't Look Up. This morning I learned that it was meant to be an allegory about climate change denialism.

That never occurred to me while I was watching it. I mean, it's obviously an allegory about Donald Trump and COVID-19 denialism, right? Meryl Streep is plainly Trump. Jonah Hill is Don Jr. The Oglethorpe character is Fauci. Mindy and Dibiaski represent the entire scientific community. Isherwell is—oh, anybody who's on the denier gravy train, I suppose. Tucker Carlson. Scott Atlas. Ted Nugent. Whatever. The film even has its own MAGA hats.

The parallels were so pronounced that I never gave them a second thought. After all, the movie was about a threat that was both obvious and imminent, which fits COVID but not climate change.

Am I the only one who went into the movie blind and misconstrued its origins? Or did the script slowly change over time and become increasingly inspired by all the COVID nonsense taking place during 2020? I can certainly see how that could happen. COVID denialism is a lot wackier than climate denialism and provides an almost irresistible source of material for a broad satire like Don't Look Up. If you're working on the script over the course of 2020, how could you stop yourself from using it?

As you can see, everyone had a joyous and festive Christmas here at Casa Drum.