Wrong Precautions (redux)

I’ve never before gone straight back with a redux treatment of a blog post. More typically, it takes more than a year before revisiting a given topic, sometimes several years. This time, supplemental information came immediately, though I’ve delayed writing about it. To wit, a Danish study published November 18, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine indicates our face mask precautions against the Coronavirus may be ineffective:

Our results suggest that the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect, mask recommendations were not among those measures, and community use of masks was uncommon. Yet, the findings were inconclusive and cannot definitively exclude a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection of mask wearers in such a setting. It is important to emphasize that this trial did not address the effects of masks as source control or as protection in settings where social distancing and other public health measures are not in effect.

The important phrase there is “did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance,” which is followed by the caveat that the study was partial and so is inconclusive. To say something is statistically insignificant means that results do not exceed the calculated margin of error or randomness. A fair bit of commentary follows the published study, which I have not reviewed.

We’re largely resorting to conventional wisdom with respect to mask wearing. Most businesses and public venues (if open at all) have adopted the mask mandate out of conformity and despite wildly conflicting reports of their utility. Compared to locking down all nonessential social and economic activity, however, I remain resigned to their adoption even though I’m suspicious (as any cynic or skeptic should be) that they don’t work — at least not after the virus is running loose. There is, however, another component worth considering, namely, the need to been seen doing something, not nothing, to address the pandemic. Some rather bluntly call that virtue signalling, such as the pathologist at this link.

In the week since publication of the Danish study and the pathologist’s opinion (note the entirely misleading title), there has been a deluge of additional information, editorials, and protests (no more links, sorry) calling into question recommendations from health organizations and responses by politicians. Principled and unprincipled dissent was already underway since May 2020, which is growing with each month hardship persists. Of particular note is the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mandate that religious services be restricted to no more than 10 people in red zones and no more than 25 in orange zones. Score one for the Bill of Rights being upheld even in a time of crisis.

Wrong Precautions

I’ve mentioned the precautionary principle several times, most notably here. Little of our approach to precautions has changed in the two years since that blog post. At the same time, climate change and Mother Nature batter us aggressively. Eventualities remain predictable. Different precautions are being undertaken with respect to the pandemic currently gripping the planet. Arguably, the pandemic is either a subset of Mother Nature’s fury or, if the virus was created in a lab, a self-inflicted wound. Proper pandemic precautions have been confounded by undermining of authority, misinformation, lack of coordination, and politically biased narratives. I’m as confused as the next poor sap. However, low-cost precautions such as wearing masks are entirely acceptable, notwithstanding refusals of many Americans to cooperate after authorities muddied the question of their effectiveness so completely. More significant precautions such as lockdowns and business shutdowns have morphed into received wisdom among government bodies yet are questioned widely as being a cure worse than the disease, not to mention administrative overreach (conspiratorial conjecture withheld).

Now comes evidence published in the New England Journal of Medicine on November 11, 2020, that costly isolation is flatly ineffective at stemming infection rates. Here are the results and conclusions from the abstract of the published study:

Results
A total of 1848 recruits volunteered to participate in the study; within 2 days after arrival on campus, 16 (0.9%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, 15 of whom were asymptomatic. An additional 35 participants (1.9%) tested positive on day 7 or on day 14. Five of the 51 participants (9.8%) who tested positive at any time had symptoms in the week before a positive qPCR test. Of the recruits who declined to participate in the study, 26 (1.7%) of the 1554 recruits with available qPCR results tested positive on day 14. No SARS-CoV-2 infections were identified through clinical qPCR testing performed as a result of daily symptom monitoring. Analysis of 36 SARS-CoV-2 genomes obtained from 32 participants revealed six transmission clusters among 18 participants. Epidemiologic analysis supported multiple local transmission events, including transmission between roommates and among recruits within the same platoon.
Conclusions
Among Marine Corps recruits, approximately 2% who had previously had negative results for SARS-CoV-2 at the beginning of supervised quarantine, and less than 2% of recruits with unknown previous status, tested positive by day 14. Most recruits who tested positive were asymptomatic, and no infections were detected through daily symptom monitoring. Transmission clusters occurred within platoons.

So an initial 0.9% tested positive, then an additional 1.9%. This total 2.8% compares to 1.7% in the control group (tested but not isolated as part of the study). Perhaps the experimental and control groups are a bit small (1848 and 1554, respectively), and it’s not clear why the experimental group infection rate is higher than that of the control group, but the evidence points to the uselessness of trying to limit the spread of the virus by quarantining and/or isolation. Once the virus is present in a population, it spreads despite precautions.

A mantra is circulating that we should “trust the science.” Are these results to be trusted? Can we call off all the lockdowns and closures? It’s been at least eight months that the virus has been raging throughout the U.S. Although there might be some instances of isolated populations with no infection, the wider population has by now been exposed. Moreover, some individuals who self-isolated effectively may not have been exposed, but in all likelihood, most of us have been. Accordingly, renewed lockdowns, school and business closures, and destruction of entire industries are a pretense of control we never really had. Their costs are enormous and ongoing. A stay-at-home order (advisory, if you prefer) just went into effect for the City of Chicago on November 16, 2020. My anecdotal observation is that most Chicagoans are ignoring it and going about their business similar to summer and fall months. It’s nothing like the ghost town effect of March and April 2020. I daresay they may well be correct to reject the received wisdom of our civic leaders.

Medieval Pilgrimage

Listening to the recording shown at left, my mind drifted to various cinematic treatments of Medievalism, including The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Chronicles of Narnia, and too many others to cite. Other associations also came tumbling out of memory, including my review of The Hobbit (the book, not the movie, though I reviewed both) and a previous blog post called “What’s Missing.” That post was a rumination on community and meaning lost in modern technocratic societies. In light of fetishization of the Medieval Period, including for example the popularity of Renaissance Faires, there seems to be more to say about what’s missing.

The Llibre Vermell de Montserrat (English: Red Book of Montserrat), known as such because of its 19th-century binding and its being held the Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia (a region of Spain), is a collection of devotional texts also containing late Medieval songs. The Wikipedia article indicates that the monastery also holds the shrine of the Virgin of Montserrat, a major site of pilgrimage at the time the Red Book was compiled. Accordingly, its songs and dances were probably intended for pilgrims to the shrine and were part of a well-developed oral folk tradition. The 14th-century manuscript does not identify authors or composers. Furthermore, it predates modern musical notation, so performances and recordings today are reconstructions.

The music on the recording fuses sacred and secular (folk) elements and strongly suggests communal participation. In contrast, the modern concert hall has become the scene of rigid propriety. Audience members try to sit in stone silence (notwithstanding inevitable cell phone interruptions) while performers demonstrate their, um, emotionless professionalism. Live concerts of popular musics (multiple genres) instead feature audiences dancing and singing along, creating an organic experience that transforms the concertgoer into a participant situated in the middle of the flow rather than at the distant receiving end. Middle ground, such as when symphony orchestras perform film or video game music, often draws untutored audiences who may want to participate and in doing so frankly offend others trained to be still.

Is there cultural connection between pilgrimages, processions, and parades? The first is plainly religious is motivation, such as visits to Catholic shrines, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, or Mecca. Processions are more ceremonial and may not be religious in orientation. A wedding procession is a good example. Parades are more nearly civil in character, unless one insists on nationalism (e.g., Independence Day in the U.S., Bastille Day in France, Victory Day in Russia) being civil religions. The sense of devotion, sacrifice, and hardship associated with pilgrimage, historical or modern, contrasts with the party atmosphere of a parade, where Carnival, Mardi Gras, and Día de Muertos in particular invite licentious participation. Typical U.S. holiday parades (e.g., Independence Day, Thanksgiving) feature spectators arrayed lazily along the streets. There is even a subgenre of march form (used in band concerts) called a “patrol” that employs a broad crescendo-diminuendo (getting louder then fading away) to depict a military column as it marches by.

I suspect that modern processions and parades are weak echos of pilgrimage, a gradual transformation of one thing into something else. Yet the call of the open road (a/k/a wanderlust) resurfaces periodically even when not specifically religious in motivation. The great westward migration of Europeans to North American and then Americans across the untamed frontiers attests to that venturing spirit. In literature, Jack London’s memoir The Road (1907) describes the hobo life hopping trains in the 1890s, while Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) tells of traveling across America by car. Another expression of wanderlust was penned by forgotten American poet Vachel Lindsay in his self-published War Bulletin #3 (1909):

Let us enter the great offices and shut the desk lids and cut the telephone wires. Let us see that the skyscrapers are empty and locked, and the keys thrown into the river. Let us break up the cities. Let us send men on a great migration: set free, purged of the commerce-made manners and fat prosperity of America; ragged with the beggar’s pride, starving with the crusader’s fervor. Better to die of plague on the highroad seeing the angels, than live on iron streets playing checkers with dollars ever and ever.

Lindsay invites his readers to embrace a life better lived traversing the landscape in a voyage of self-discovery. His version lacks the religious orientation of pilgrimage, but like the Medieval cultures depicted in film and music from the period, possesses tremendous appeal for modern Westerners starved of meaning that arises naturally out of tradition.

Twist and Shout

I learned (quickly for once) that Emporis has awarded its annual prize, the 2019 skyscraper of the year, to the Lakhta Center in St. Petersburg, Russia. Although I have blogged quite a bit about skyscrapers and possessed passing familiarity with the name Emporis, I didn’t know buildings actually received awards. In fact, I had suggested that architects held a silent sweepstakes no one actually wins except perhaps in preposterous prestige points for being the tallest building du jour. Guess I was wrong.

Anyway, the Lakhta Center is plenty tall (1,516 ft., more than three times the height of any other building in St. Petersburg) but not a challenger in the international supertall category. Not even in the (current) top ten. But it does feature a version of the twisting design (blogged about here), an apparent antidote to the dreaded box.

So the Lakhta Center can twist, but it can’t exactly shout from the rooftop about its award (since it’s a spire and has no roof). Meanwhile, I remain puzzled that these projects continue to be funded and get built in an era of increasing desperation among peoples who can’t feed, clothe, and house themselves. Tent cities and homeless encampments stand in stark contrast to gleaming skyscrapers. Indeed, if the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that demand for prime office and/or hotel and condo space in a supertall building is cratering with more of the workforce telecommuting instead of working on site and travelers staying home. I’ve expected these massive, multiyear, multibillion-dollar projects to be abandoned any time now. Yet they continue to move forward, and at no modest pace. My shouts aren’t being heard, either.

Approaching Our Minsky Moment

/rant on

Remember all those folks in the weeks and days preceding election day on November 4, 2020, who were buying guns, ammo, and other provisions in preparation for civil breakdown? (No one known personally, of course, and gawd no not actually any of us, either; just them other others who don’t read blogs or anything else.) Well, maybe they were correct adopting the precautionary principal (notably absent from a host of other perils besetting us). But as of this writing, nothing remotely resembling widespread disruption — feared by some, hotly anticipated by others — has developed. But wait! There’s still time. Considering Americans were set up by both political parties to distrust the outcome of the presidential race no matter which candidate claimed to have prevailed, we now face weeks or months of legal challenges and impatient formation of agitators (again, both sides) demanding their candidate be declared the winner (now, dammit!) by the courts instead of either official ballot-counters or the liberal-biased MSM. To say our institutions have failed us, and further, that political operatives all the way up to the sitting president have been openly fomenting violence in the streets, is a statement of the obvious.

Among my concerns more pressing than who gets to sit in the big chair, however, is the whipsawing stock market. Although no longer an accurate proxy of overall economic health or asset valuation, the stock market’s thoroughly irrational daily reaction to every rumor of, say, a vaccine for the raging coronavirus, or resumption of full economic activity and profitability despite widespread joblessness, renewed lockdowns, and a massive wave of homelessness in the offing due to bankruptcies, evictions, and foreclosures, none of this bodes well for the short-term future and maintenance of, oh, I dunno, supply lines to grocery stores. Indeed, I suspect we are rapidly approaching our very own Minsky Moment, which Wikipedia describes as “a sudden, major collapse of asset values which marks the end of the growth phase of a cycle in credit markets or business activity” [underlying links omitted]. This is another prospective event (overdue, actually) for which the set-up has been long prepared. Conspiratorial types call it “the great reset” — something quite different from a debt jubilee.

For lazy thinkers, rhyming comparisons with the past frequently resort to calling someone a Nazi (or the new Hitler) or reminding everyone of U.S. chattel slavery. At the risk of being accused of similar stupidity, I suggest that we’re not on the eve of a 1929-style market crash and ensuing second great depression (though those could well happen, too, bread lines having already formed in 2020) but are instead poised at the precipice of hyperinflation and intense humiliation akin to the Weimar Republic in 1933 or so. American humiliation will result from recognition that the U.S. is now a failed state and doesn’t even pretend anymore to look after its citizens or the commonweal. Look no further than the two preposterous presidential candidates, neither of whom made any campaign promises to improve the lives of average Americans. Rather, the state has been captured by kleptocrats. Accordingly, no more American exceptionalism and no more lying to ourselves how we’re the model for the rest of the world to admire and emulate.

Like Germany in the 1930s, the U.S. has also suffered military defeats and stagnation (perhaps by design) and currently demonstrates a marked inability to manage itself economically, politically, or culturally. Indeed, the American people may well be ungovernable at this point, nourished on a thin gruel of rugged individualism that forestalls our coming together to address adversity effectively. The possibility of another faux-populist savior arising out of necessity only to lead us over the edge (see the Great Man Theory of history) seems eerily likely, though the specific form that descent into madness would take is unclear. Recent history already indicates a deeply divided American citizenry having lost its collective mind but not yet having gone fully apeshit, flinging feces and destroying what remains of economically ravaged communities for the sheer sport of it. (I’ve never understood vandalism.) That’s what everyone was preparing for with emergency guns, ammo, and provisions. How narrowly we escaped catastrophe (or merely delayed it) should be clear in the fullness of time.

/rant off

Offered Without Comment 07

What a doomer (finance only) U.S. presidential candidate might have said to voters if the truth were told, according to Egon von Greyerz (Britishisms noted):

Our nation is bankrupt. We cannot make ends meet and we need to eliminate Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security and Defence totally to balance the budget. That will save us $3 trillion which almost covers the 2020 deficit.

The problem is that we expect a bigger deficit next year. Covid is paralysing major parts of the country and will be very costly. It will also have permanent negative effects. In addition, we expect major problems in the insolvent financial system. This will necessitate the printing of further trillions of dollars or even tens of trillions.

But as we print these dollars, we get an ever bigger problem. The value of the dollar will fall precipitously and we will need to print and borrow even more. That will create a vicious circle with a lower dollar, bigger deficits and bigger debts plus inflation.

So these are the facts. I am obviously very sorry to present these to you but I am certain that there can be no other outcome.

I sincerely hope that you will elect me on this platform. After all, I am the only presidential candidate in history who has told his people the truth and the real state of the nation.

And please don’t believe the fake promises of the other candidate. A liar doesn’t deserve to be president.

Finally, I promise to do my best to manage the coming disorderly collapse of the USA to the best of my ability.

Divide and Conquer

I might have thought that the phrase divide and conquer originated in the writings of Sun Tzu or perhaps during the Colonial Period when so many Western European powers mobilized to claim their share of the New World. Not so. This link indicates that, beyond its more immediate association with Julius Caesar (Latin: divide et impera), the basic strategy is observed throughout antiquity. The article goes on to discuss Narcissism, Politics, and Psychopathy found in the employ of divide-and-conquer strategies, often in business competition. Knowing that our information environment is polluted with mis- and disinformation, especially online, I struggle awarding too much authority to some dude with a website, but that dude at least provides 24 footnotes (some of which are other Internet resources). This blanket suspicion applies to this dude (me), as well.

I also read (can’t remember where, otherwise I would provide a hyperlink — the online equivalent of a footnote) that Americans’ rather unique, ongoing, dysfunctional relationship with racism is an effective divide-and-conquer strategy deployed to keep the races (a sociological category, not a biological one) constantly preoccupied with each other rather than uniting against the true scourge: the owners and rulers (plus the military, technocrats, and managerial class that enable them). The historical illustration below shows how that hierarchy breaks down:

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If the proportions were more statistically accurate, that bottom layer would be much, much broader, more like the 99% vs. the infamous 1% brought to acute awareness by the Occupy Movement. The specific distributions are probably impossible to determine, but it’s fair to say that the downtrodden masses are increasing in number as wealth inequality skews continuously and disproportionately to the benefit of the top quintile and higher. Is it really any question that those occupying the upper layers seek to keep balanced on top of the confection like an ill-fated Jenga wedding cake? Or that the bottom layer is foundational?

If class warfare is the underlying structural conflict truly at work in socioeconomic struggles plaguing the United States, race warfare is the bait to displace attention and blame for whatever befalls the masses. It’s divide and conquer, baby, and we’re falling for it like brawlers in a bar fight who don’t know why we’re fighting. (Meanwhile, someone just emptied the till.) On top, add the pandemic keeping people apart and largely unable to communicate meaningfully (read: face-to-face). As the U.S. election draws to a close, the major division among the American people is misunderstood primarily as red/blue (with associated Democratic and Republican memes, since neither has bothered to present a coherent political platform). Other false dichotomies are at work, no doubt. So when election results are contested next week, expect to see lines drawn incorrectly between groups that are suffering equally at the hands of a different, hidden-in-plain-sight group only too happy to set off bar fights while keeping the focus off themselves. It’s a proven strategy.