If you want to talk about it, please do so in comments to this post.
Month: October 2020 Page 2 of 4
So, American excess deaths as of October 3rd, were at 299,028. By today they are well over 300,000. In a population of 328 million, the US is at about .1%. The final number of deaths is hard to determine, because the course of the US epidemic is being determined by human decisions, and there’s some question of what Biden would do, as well as the matter of how effective the first vaccines would be. While the percentage seems small, it is more than all US war casualties since WWII.
Of, I think, greater concern to most people is the Covid damage phenomenon. For example, a recent study of 100 Covid survivors found 78 had heart damage (and the heart isn’t the only organ it damages.) There are going to very long and significant knock-ons. Current total cases are over 8 million. Assume 16 million by the end, and that 78% rate, and you’re looking at twelve and a half million people with heart issues they wouldn’t otherwise have had. Many of those people are young.
Opening universities has been a huge problem. Wisconsin’s cases, for one data point, are now more than half concentrated at universities. Data on schools is harder to find, but the UK data indicates a lot of infections, with them split about evenly between primary and secondary schools. Reopening schools and universities was a huge wrong doing (I originally called it a mistake, but I think decision makers understood the consequences.)
The reports I have are that the financial sector in England has not re-opened physically: the “City” is empty. The same pattern seems to exist in the US: the commons have been made to go back to work and their children to school, most of the elites still work from home. Watch what they do, not what they make you do.
In my own residence of Ontario cases started rising over 6 weeks ago, and the government waited till they exceeded the first peak to put in restrictions less onerous than at the first peak, while children are at school and most ordinary people working. We reopened too soon, and re-shutdown too late and meanwhile supports from the government have been cut back.
As other countries have proved, following epidemiology 101 can indeed break the back of the epidemic (there are packed pool parties in Shanghai, New Zealand is fine, etc…) However, the way Covid has been handled in the US, Canada, Britain and probably elsewhere where I haven’t dug up the data has made the rich richer. The rich have access to on the spot testing with results in 5 minutes and are tested every day. They work from home. Covid has been a huge windfall for them. (This is why I wonder if Biden will really change much, his donors are getting rich too.)
So we wait for vaccines, wonder how much they will cost and how many of us will get Covid. Most will survive at this point, but not unscathed. Tens of millions will be ruined economically.
This epidemic should have been mostly over by summer, with occasional outbreaks dealt with by local shutdowns. Instead it will crank on till sometime next year.
The reason, again, is that the rich and powerful are mostly not at risk (if they do get it due to bad luck, or like Trump, due to extremely stupid behaviour, they get care not available even to normal people in the hospital); are making a lot of money and are gaining control over a larger percentage of the population.
If you’re rich and not very very unlucky, Covid has been a huge blessing. The rest of us can just wait for vaccines.
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Luis Arce is in power after a victory too large to pretend it didn’t happen. Last year, when the coup happened, I wasn’t sure if it was real or not, a call I got wrong (it was a coup). This is very good news. The election results were so clear that the coup leaders could not pretend otherwise, and a campaign of violence and intimidation, plus exile of Morales, failed. (Note that this is only barely a case of “democracy worked”, since a lot of people died, were beaten and so on fighting the coup.)
I will suggest that Bolivia will be best served by prosecuting those involved in the coup, and systematically (though carefully) expunging right wing ideologues from the military and the police so they are not willing, in the future, to back coups. As long as military and paramilitary forces are right wing, the country will always be ripe for coups and outside interference.
It is, nonetheless, an excellent sign that no attempt to retain power thru further force was used after all the intimidation failed.
I note, also, that the coup leaders were essentially fascist Christians. A warning for other nations.
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by Tony Wikrent
VOTE!
See something? Report voter suppression and obstacles to voting.
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-8-20]
The Epidemic
Steps for Reducing COVID Transmission
[GoogleDoc) Cyrus Maher [UCSF, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-20]
Lambert Strether’s intro: “This is the must-read for the week. It’s not only a review of the literature, it’s packed with useful, pragmatic information, and very simply and clearly written. Slide 11: Aerosol FTW; slide 20: the “Swiss Cheese” model; plus a series of slides on preventing exposure, reducing exposure, and improving your odds if you are exposed starting at slide 24; see especially slide 48. (Caveat lector: There is a pitch to enroll in UCSF’s clinical trial.)”
[Pro Publica, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-20]
Lambert Strether notes: “ the first real explanation, nine months after the fact, of the CDC Covid testing debacle* (originally blamed on contractors, IIRC). My preference for coverage priorities would be: 1) Neoliberal hollowing out; 2) the testing debacle; and 3) political interference, because the first two corrode the clout of the CDC and lead to the third, and this article reverses that order, but it’s nevertheless very good. NOTE * Casting doubt on the ability of the PMC to regulate itself, exactly like the ObamaCare MarketPlace launch debacle. PMC professional associations also have this issue.”
Strategic Political Economy
How Deep Will the Depression Get? – Paul Jay interview of Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth
[thenanalysis.news, October 8, 2020, via comments on Ian Welsh 10-12-20]
…do the elites get it? Yeah, they absolutely get it. And let me give you a couple of examples. They get it, and they think they’re going to be able to weather the storm…. But the idea was in their minds that the biggest companies, the Googles, the Facebook’s, the Buydo’s, the Alibaba’s had become so big that they were like the East India Company now. They are sort of sovereign international states that float above the nation-state, . . . and that they actually kind of formed their own consensus… these corporations now have so much control and big tech does have way more control even than big finance did because it can actually influence our behavioral patterns because of surveillance, capitalism, and algorithmic behavioral manipulation….
Feel free to use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
So, I was going to write a state of play economics article today, but I can’t. Well, I could, but the article I originally intended would take a couple days of work, because I’d have to construct my own inflation indexes.
It’s reached the point where I completely don’t believe the American inflation numbers. I can’t use them. They’re in cuckoo-fantasy land. That means I can’t use the inflation adjusted wage numbers or price numbers, which means that to compare wages and their actual purchasing power I either need my own index or I need to take raw data and do compare and contrast series. I might do that one day, out of sheer cussedness, despite the work.
A good example of how broken price indexes (and thus inflation is) is the inflation in automobile prices. You will be relieved, and perhaps amazed, to know that automobile prices are flat for the last 20+ years.
This is based on hedonic adjustment: you see, cars are just that much better now, so all the nominal sticker prices increases haven’t actually happened because you’re getting more car now.
Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but if you don’t have a car you can’t drive one where you need to go. Something similar is done to computers, but my computer today is not much better than the one I had 20 years ago. Really, it is only better at pretty graphics, in every other way it is effectively as good at web surfing, word processing, spread-sheets and so on as it was then. In many ways I could argue it is less functional, it works less well than that computer did.
The truth is that for decades the prices of everything that matters: transportation, housing, health care and food has been rising in the prices actually paid by most people and rising faster than most people’s wages. But when you look at a real wage chart it shows that wages are rising faster than inflation.
This is wonderland-level bullshit. It is fantasyland “emperor has no clothes” mass pretense.
Meanwhile places like the Fed and Treasury are basing policy on these numbers. “Oh, we need higher inflation” they squeal as the ignore the massive inflation in every part of the economy where a seller has pricing power or where they themselves have created a bubble. “We’ll use rent equivalent as a proxy for housing prices” they spewed as the housing bubble went its merry-way, because “the economy behaves as if it were what we want it to be!”
So I go thru these numbers over at FRED and I can’t use half of them. They’re just lalaland garbage, completely disconnected from reality on the ground.
Then you’ll have some reporter ask a politicians “so what does a banana cost” and they have no idea, because they don’t do their own shopping and haven’t in thirty years.
Lalaland. More delusional than the Red Queen or the Mad Hatter.
There are many ways that elites are completely disconnected from the consequences of their decisions, and one of them is that the systems designed to report to them conditions are so broken and corrupted that they are providing completely erroneous feedback, “inequality’s high, sure, but honest, most people’s wages are actually rising after inflation so it’s just not that big a deal.”
BULLSHIT. Absolute bullshit.
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Like most writers, I came to writing through reading, and most of that reading was fiction, usually novels.
So, like most writers who write something else, I also wrote a novel. And as is usually the case with first novels, it was bad.
It took me some time to figure out why it was bad. It wasn’t the writing at the word, paragraph, or scene level. The conversations were fine, there was tension, the characters had character, and so on. Each scene on its own was usually at least decent, sometimes there were very good.
But the whole was unsatisfying. Beta readers told me this, though they couldn’t tell me why, but I could feel it myself. I’d felt it when I was writing it, most noticeably when I felt I had to keep writing after the plot was over, because some story-sense, built from reading thousands of novels, told me I hadn’t actually finished.
So I put it aside for a year or so, re-read it, and investigated. It turned out most of the problems were structural, and the most useful book I found on basic story structure was by Larry Brooks. I’ve read many similar books since, and while there are more complete books — maybe even technically “better” books, but none are as clearly written as Brooks’.
Of course, all such structure is something you can throw out later if you want. But as with all such rule-breaking, you first have to internalize why the rules exist and what they do.
Brooks’s book is about more than structure, and if you’re interested in the topic I recommend it. But I felt a synopsis of the structure was worth it even for people who will never write a fictional word, because what’s eerie is that once one reads stories this way, it pops up everywhere. Movies, TV shows, almost all novels. Our society has a specific narrative backbone, and it’s damn near universal in our story-telling. This isn’t an all-times, all-places backbone (the traditional Japanese novel, for example, does things differently), but within our society, it’s everywhere.
This is so much the case that when I recognize the first plot point (explained in a bit) now, I’ll check the page or word count or running time of the show. It’s supposed to come at 25 percent, and it’s almost always within one percent of that.
We think in stories, they structure our brain at least as much, and perhaps more than the other way around, so how stories are structured matters.
The standard story structure, per Brooks, has four acts (others use three, with the second twice as long, it’s the same thing.)
It has the following key moments:
ACT I
The first act is where you set up stakes. You introduce your main characters and you introduce the world they live in before it it is changed at the end of the first scene. This is where the author tries to get you to care about the character, so that when things change, you want to go along for the ride. Fail to introduce the stakes properly, and all the problems later on won’t matter. In my novel, a lot of the emotional stakes were based on a threat to the protagonist’s family, but I didn’t introduce them well, so why would readers care?
The other thing is that, in terms of character or world change, this shows the world as it was before things went bad. Perhaps your protagonist is a doctor who thinks her job is great, her life is great, everything is great. That’s all going to change, but seeing what she had before she realizes her husband is cheating and the hospital is harvesting organs matters: What does she want back? What does she begin fighting for?
The Opening Scene
In the first scene, something that matters happens, and it’s usually something which will have huge consequences later. This can be dramatic; perhaps the protagonist is fired, or finds out their spouse wants a divorce. Or, it can be minor; the boss wants them to go on a business trip or the spouse says, “Perhaps we should try couple’s therapy.” At the start, it’s not clear how much this will matter, how it will matter or why.
The Hooking Moment
This often happens in the first scene. In the first novel of the Expanse series it is a woman locked in a closet as her crewmates are experimented on and turned into biological body horrors, for example. It is the, “What’s this story about?” moment. For a movie like “Top Gun,” it’s just a scene of cool fighter jets. For “Mulan,” it is the Great Wall being scaled by enemies. For our doctor, it might be noticing that all the autopsies on her healthy ER patients are done by the same doctor, and wasn’t she laughing with the doctor’s husband, their heads very close together?
This is supposed to be within the first 20 pages of a novel or so.
An Optional Inciting Incident
This is where the protagonist becomes involved. Our doctor goes to the morgue to check on a patient who was the daughter of a friend and who she thought would survive that car accident, and the body is already gone. She finds two other bodies already gone. She remembers other patients she thought would live, finds out their bodies had been removed quickly too. She decides to investigate, but still thinks it’s probably some administrative snafu or at worse, someone covering their ass.
The First Plot Point
This is where, because of action the hero takes, everything changes. In “Thelma and Louise,” this is when they decide to make a run for Mexico. It’s not when Louise kills the would-be rapist, it is when they decide what to do in reaction to that killing. It’s a completely different story if they go to the police and say, “That guy tried to rape her, so I shot him, shit.”
With our doctor, this is when, after bringing up her initial findings with her supervisor and being given a story and told the supervisor will handle it, she chooses instead to follow the truck leaving the hospital after her next accident victim dies when they shouldn’t have. And she saw the driver talking to her husband.
The first plot point is where the protagonist chooses to leave the old world. If the doctor just dropped it, she could keep her marriage and labouring under the assumption that she was doing good at the hospital. She could keep her life. But because she doesn’t drop it, she will probably lose everything. All she has to say is, “This is not my problem.”
ACT II
Act 2 is where the protagonist does all the reactive things one would do. If you know of a crime, you go to the police (or have a damn good reason not to). You tell your boss. You file for UI. You play the game by the rules, expecting the rules to work.
You are reactive and it doesn’t work, but you do the reasonable things, including trying to hand off responsibility to the authorities, which is what reasonable people do.
The First Pinch Point
This is just a scene where you see the antagonistic force in full fury. If it were a book or movie about a storm, you might see another ship smashed and sunk by the storm, see the victims screaming for help and be able to do nothing for them. Sometimes, we see this through the protagonist’s eyes (often as they hide, unseen by the villain and helpless to intervene); other times we may see it through the villain’s eyes or the eyes of a victim. Sometimes the protagonist is the victim, as the enemy forecloses on their business, buys their mortgage, and forces them out of the house, even as the husband says, while he clings to the villain’s arm, “She’s promised to be a good mother to our children.”
The more awesome or hateful the villain, the greater the stakes, the more the reader or viewer cares, so long as you don’t push into melodrama.
The Midpoint
Brooks’ definition is when “new information enters the story squarely the middle of it that changes the contextual experience and understanding of the hero, reader, or both.”
This is when you find out what wasn’t known before. The hospital isn’t just selling body parts, your husband is involved because his mother has a rare disease that requires transplants every year, and without them she’ll die. (Robin Cook’s Coma is a different version of the organ stealing story, as an aside.)
The midpoint in “Thelma and Louise” is when their money is stolen and Thelma robs a store to get more money. Up until then, everything was reversible. Killing a rapist is something they might get off on, but the robbery? No.
You can see the definition of the midpoint as information which is a bit slippery. Thelma’s money is stolen, that’s information, but how she reacts to it is what matters. They’re criminals now.
Third Act
In general terms, the first act is “who / what things were,” the second act is “reacting to the new world by doing all the expected things,” and the third act is “going on the offensive after all the usual things don’t work.”
Going to the cops and hospital authorities didn’t work, our doctor will have to try something else. The protagonist overcomes a lot of their issues at this point, and starts acting in ways that might actually succeed. If fear was an issue, the protagonist starts acting brave. If lack of initiative was the issue, the protagonist stops waiting for other people to act. If lack of planning was the issue, they plan. If not accepting help was the problem, they go get help.
A Second Pinch Point
As with the first pinch point, this just shows how dangerous the antagonist is. Perhaps the antagonist gave the mother-in-law the disease in order to secure her husband’s cooperation. Now, he gives it to one of their daughters.
A Second Plot Point
As with the first, this is new (and final) information injected into the story. No new information or characters will be introduced. The Titanic sinks, the cops have Thelma and Louise surrounded, our doctor finds proof that the villain has been infecting the loved ones of those whose cooperation he needs.
The Fourth Act
This is the shortest act. The rule is that we gain no new information or characters who matter. If the character has a flaw, she either overcomes it and wins, or fails to overcome it and loses. (You can die and win, of course.) The protagonist is the catalyst; their decisions drive the climax. This doesn’t mean they necessarily “wield the blade,” but if someone else does, it is because the hero made it possible. If the police swoop in, it is because the hero convinced them. If someone else kills the villain, it is because the hero made it possible for them do do so, and so on.
The Final Resolution Scene or Scenes
Whatever is the most important point, it is resolved. The ship survives the storm to stagger into port, or it tragically goes down. In “Titanic,” Jack sacrifices his life to save Rose. In “Thelma and Louise,” having finally become free and brave, they decide they’d rather die free than be arrested — and if they are going to die, it will be by their own hands. Our doctor shows those who were blackmailed to cooperate with the organ harvesting by their loved one’s diseases the proof, and they form a vigilante mob to take down the villain.
Note that character growth isn’t always “good.” Perhaps our doctor’s psychological issue was a need to always play by the rules, trust the law, and never hurt anyone, and it is only when she decides that she is the law and is willing to whip up a lynch mob that she can win.
Concluding Remarks
This is pretty different from what I usually write about on this blog, so hopefully readers found it useful. I will suggest that it’s more political than it seems, and that it’s worth looking for this story structure in the fiction you consume, of whatever kind. Then look for it in the narratives given to you about politicians and public figures.
The world doesn’t actually operate this way, but we often feel that it does or should. Often, that is used to manipulate us, but stories can also be a source of great power if one takes a role and plays it well, one will find others fall into their roles.
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I was in my 20s when I learned that the human body is capable of experiencing far more pain than pleasure, for far longer periods. I spent three months in the hospital, days screaming, weeks in pain, throwing up multiple times a day, crippled, and unable to move.
Recovery took years, and for months at a time I was in pain, near-crippled. The simplest movement would often occasion agonizing pain.
Earth isn’t hell, precisely. That’s a misunderstanding.
It is the human body, the vehicle through which we experience Earth, which makes this world Hell.
This isn’t to say pleasure and happiness and all the good stuff isn’t real, it surely is, but it is a pale shadow of the suffering that the human body can impose upon its resident consciousness.
People will say things like, “Pain exists to let you know there’s a problem,” but that’s a very partial explanation, so partial it’s wrong; you can experience pain so severe it is crippling, rendering it impossible to do anything to reduce the pain or address the underlying problem. If pain were strictly utilitarian, it would cut out far below, “Scream until you’re hoarse and don’t move at all.”
The human condition is, thus, biased towards evil. We have much more capacity to suffer than we do to experience pleasure and the pain we can experience is far greater than any possible justification.
There are those who take advantage of this. Civilization was built on it: The cruelties that various kings and governments have imposed, the tortures, are legendary. Civilization “domesticated” humans, but what is meant by that is similar to what we mean when we say we broke a horse. A small group of humans banded together, formed strong ties to each other, and then used unimaginable cruelty to force everyone else to do what they said, or else.
And they meant the “or else.”
(Christopher Columbus, having dogs chew the intestines of still-alive natives who didn’t bring him enough gold is the sort of thing we’re talking about. Or the Tudor habit of burning people’s intestines while they were still alive, and watching. Or various Chinese routine judicial punishment tortures.)
The human body has much more ability to experience hell than heaven, and some humans have taken advantage of that to rule in Hell, over the rest of us, using the most fiendish evil imaginable. If there is somewhat less of this today than thousands or hundreds of years ago it is only because, like a wild horse who now “willingly” carries a human on its back, we, too, have been domesticated; broken.
Our entire society, though more subtle than, “burn their intestines while they’re alive,” is based on nothing more or less than the fear of dying in poverty or homeless if one doesn’t do whatever various bosses (masters) tell us to do. This is, in the first world, nowhere more true than the heart of our modern civilization, the United States, with its record-setting incarceration rates and routine police theft, violence, and brutality — even as homeless people’s tents are destroyed.
This is, however, a choice. Oh, we (probably) don’t choose to live in human bodies. But how we treat each other, and what we tolerate from our elites, well, that’s a choice. The human body can experience good, and even a lot of it, if we organized our society around that instead of using terror to break entire civilizations.
The human body means that Hell is easier to experience here than Heaven is.
But both are our within our grasp, we have simply chosen the easy path.
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