Officially a COVID banner year in 2021

"Congrats" to COVID anti-vaxxers, AND to public health wingnuts including everybody from Trumpists to Glenn Greenwald! Coronavirus has killed more people in the US this year than last year.

Meanwhile, the wingnuts continue to seek out fake vaccine cards, driving the price of them up and getting more people arrested for peddling them, rather than just getting a fucking shot. And, smuggled ivermectin (maybe it's fake, too?) is also on the rise, rather than just getting a fucking shot.

Also, the first link's overall US death toll seems to be at least 20,000 low, per Worldometers.

And, speaking of, its graphs are worth noting. (They're not link-postable pictures, sorry.) Both daily cases and daily deaths

Don't read Adam Tooze

This is an extended version of my Goodreads review of his new book "Shutdown," along with an essay of his I found at Noema Magazine about how China dodged the early post-USSR Russian implosion.

Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Problematic and troubling technocratic narrative

The "problematic and troubling" is NOT about the material in the narrative. It's not about "all shall bow before Xi Jinping." Rather, the narrative itself (including Tooze's take on China and COVID) is what's problematic and troubling. And, like British new leftist Perry Anderson's take on Tooze's "Crashed," I speak from several degrees to his left, albeit here in America, not the UK. But, I'm not close to a Trumpist, contra other low reviewers.

A deeply problematic book.

By page 11, Tooze is describing Dems’ Green New Deal as though it were pristine and unsullied, rather than a watered-down ripoff of the Green Party’s original. If a centrist mag like Atlantic or a left-center (but moving a bit more left) site like TNR (can’t remember which one) could report this, why can’t Tooze have it?

Especially since he doubles down on this story. And does so mulitiple times.

Probably because it would spoil his narrative.

The narrative? With a plasticine definition of “neoliberalism,” the main narrative by page 30 seems to be that neoliberalism can stretch to fit anything, just as much as his definition of it. The ergo that comes from that is that, if neoliberalism got anything wrong before, a better version of it will fix things in the future.

Also by page 30, he downplays the more baleful parts of neoliberalism in the west (inequality gap grows) and globally (increased climate change by carbon and other pollution being exported to places with less regulation and increased exploitation of workers, especially minorities like China’s Uyghurs).

In other words, we’ve got a book written by a technocratic neoliberal celebrating the “pragmatic” work of most central banks and using that pragmatism to underpin his plasticine.

Other problems, some bigger, arise after that.

The first and foremost is Tooze’s assumption that China controlled COVID as well as it claimed it controlled it. Even before he makes this claim / accepts this assertion, he’s undercut it by talking about Chinese restrictions on COVID-related information leaving the country. (As I write up this review, per Worldometers, China claims less than 5K COVID deaths, a number that’s laughable. It reports fewer total cases than Rwanda, also laughable.) We also have good evidence that larger nations of East Asia, like Vietnam, haven’t controlled COVID as well as they have claimed, or as their reflexively anti-American parroters in the West have claimed. Then, there’s the related vaccine issue. China’s is worse than anything developed in the West. And, the most Westernized Asian nation, Japan, was a flop on distributing Western vaccines.

In the last full chapter of the book, Tooze really jumps the shark, with his claims about efficaciousness of the Chinese and Russian vaccines.

Sinopharm has much less study than Western vaccines. Plenty of news stories note this. They also note that inactivated virus vaccines may have less potency than mRNA or adenovirus jabs. Tooze ignores all of this. He also ignores that China had reported only relatively limited clinical trial data.

Sputnik V? Production problems. It’s why WHO never approved it. And, its clinical trial data was so bad to leave open the question of data manipulation.

Also ignored.

Now, more details on some of this only came out after Tooze's book, but some of this information was out there last year, or at the start of this. And, if he didn't have a chance to know of this, he shouldn't have made the claims he did. (Amazon has a pub date of Sept. 7, 2021, to be precise, so that largely removes even that excuse.)

And, on this, with me already seeing this as a three-star book, it fell to two stars.

There was one final failure in the conclusion. Tooze talks about the “huge East-West gradient” in dealing with COVID. Of course, he bases this on accepting Chinese data, or lack if it, at face value, and ditto for Vietnam and some other nations. At the same time, he ignores the clusterfuck response of one major East Asian nation, Japan. He also ignores that at least one “Western” nation, New Zealand, did generally quite well.

Beyond all of this, some of his tangents, like Middle Eastern rivalries becoming more exacerbates, aren’t really even tangentially connected to COVID.

If this is a “grand narrative,” which he calls it, then it’s a dime-novel version of one.

And, at that point, before getting to the conclusion of my original review, I want to talke about his Noema piece. It ties with his intellectual dishonesty about China expressed repeatedly throughout "Shutdown." I call it intellectual dishonesty because a professor at Columbia who writes for international public and foreign policy magazines knows the truth about China issues (and should know the truth about things like the Green New Deal).

The piece is all about how China, in the late 1980s, avoided Russia's implosion at the end of the USSR and start of the new Russian Federation. And, yes, China may have had good leadership and smart economists, but the amount of difference in their situations, HUGE differences, is all omitted by Tooze.

First, China was a member of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank since 1980, when the membership it had since 1945 was stripped from the Republic of China and given to the People's Republic. Remember that James Earl Carter, arguably our first neoliberal president, was in the White House then and not St. Ronald of Reagan. Russia didn't get membership in either organzation until 1992.

Ditto on most-favored-nation status. Russia didn't get that until 1992, either. And, in all three cases, US strings were attached that weren't for China. Again, Tooze knows all this. And, given that Noema started out of a partnership with the WaPost and Puff Hoes, the turd-polishing of China, and the shin-kicking of Russia, shouldn't be surprising. Bipartisan foreign policy establishmentarian par for the course. I don't recognize all the names on the editorial board, but I see enough. Walter Isaacson, writer of crappy modern history books and bios and Aspen Institute "guru"; Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn; Fareed Zakaria of Beltway media; Pico Iyer; and Puff Hoes founder Arianna Huffington. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times etc.

And with that, I not only recommend against reading this book, but as with select other authors, I recommend against reading Tooze in the future, period. His lack of engagement with COVID facts, especially vis-a-vis Beijing, is troubling.

View all my reviews

Coronavirus week 78B: Odds and ends on vax mandates, firewalls

Texas schools have already had more COVID cases this school year than all of the previous one. That was already the case late last month; the weekly case numbers are declining, but still higher than they were the last week in August and the first week in September.

The state has crossed the 50 percent mark on people fully vaccinated. My wingnut county is approaching the one-third mark. Hispanic vax rates are technically lower than for Whites, but it's only 1 percentage point, and most of the state's counties with the HIGHEST vax rates are in the Valley!

Havana Ted / Cancun Ted is now trying to own the libs by touting his love for antivax NBA players.

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American, Alaska and Jet Blue have joined United in vaccine mandates among major and semi-major airlines. The NYT explains United's reasoning, noting that, as a major international carrier, with pilots and flight attendants, this moved beyond being a US issue. (It would also cover ground personnel outside the US, re international vaccine mandates.) Jet Blue and Alaska say it will be by Dec. 8, which is a Biden Administration deadline for federal contractors, and all the major airlines are just that. American has released no deadline, but obviously, it will be by then. Meanwhile, per the first link, Delta and Southwest are sitting on their asses. Delta is charging unvaccinated employees higher insurance premiums; Southworst, as far as I know, is doing nothing, even though their rash COVID-related flight cancellations one-two months ago nearly fucked up the end of my vacation. Also per that first link, Delta said it's "evaluating Biden's order." Southwest said the same, per NPR. In both cases, pilots unions are pushing back.

But, Southwest now says it too will meet the Dec. 8 deadline.

UPdate on that! On Sunday, Oct. 8, per Twitter, Southworst was having to scrub shitloads of flights the whole weekend. Official PR aside, word on the tarmac from some is a sickout by its pilots protesting the mandate. Southwest has a pilots union separate from most other major airlines, and it's been hardnosed in a variety of often good ways. That said, some Twitterati, especially as rumors of a sympathy strike by air traffic controllers bubbled up, said remember St. Ronald of Reagan and PATCO. That also said, SWAPA says its pilots are NOT doing an official OR unofficial sickout.

OTOH, remember that unions can spout PR bullshit just like corporations.

Per this story, the pilots are claiming that the National Railway Act, which governs union-management issues on airlines as well as railroads, requires negotiations. That cuts BOTH WAYS. Southwest's pilots have shown about zero interest in negotiating. See the NLRB's explainer, first bullet point.

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Speaking of deltas, the delta variant has broken through New Zealand's firewall. No surprise, really. International supply chains are being affected in part by COVID surges in Vietnam, touted largely by reflexive anti-Americanists as a COVID miracle last fall and this spring.

Coronavirus week 78A: Wrongly preparing for the next "big one"

At the Atlantic, Ed Yong encourages "us," that is, US policy makers, public health officials, and others, to look ahead to the next pandemic, since "we" have botched doing that before. Without saying the words "national healthcare," he says addressing its current state is high on the list. Sleepy Joe Biden, albeit being hamstrung by a split Senate with Sinister Kyrsten Sinema on the dole from drug companies, has done nothing about this. He can't hide behind her anyway, as he told Dems a year ago he'd do nothing.

Yong adds that what Status Quo Joe IS funding is "magic bullet" stuff that Merika loves but, that because it's not the unsexy basics of public health, is wrong. He notes that Robert Koch's rightly praised work on germ theory has allowed magic-bullet loving Merika to focus on the wrong stuff with medical cover.

Finally, as Biden touts infrastructure, the infrastructure of university departments, offices for city, county and state agencies, and other infrastructure aspects of public health are themselves crumbling, Yong says.

In turn, this isn't surprising, either.

America loves to build big, flashy shit. Trump was the epitome of that, but not alone.

America does NOT like to do the unsexy work of maintaining things. Or fund it.

Add in that wingnuts' attacks related to COVID have primarily focused on public health issues, and the problem is complete.

Top blogging for September: Afghanistan, COVID pieces still ride high, plus a blast from the Bill Nye past

Again, this is the list of the most popular posts DURING the last month. Not all were written IN the past month.

No. 1 is an old post from 2014 that's gotten new popularity (and I don't think due to bot-related action). It's about who won the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate. I told atheists Gnu and old alike that Bill Nye the Attention Whore (more accurate moniker for him) did NOT win.

(You can see the Ken Ham photoshopping at the link. I wanted to display another piece of mine instead, about another religious wingnut.)

No. 2 is from the start of the month, telling ESPN's David Schoefield and others to go light on the Shohei Ohtani superlatives about this season because it's only one season, there's the GOAT year of Walter Johnson, consider Babe Ruth (and how the BoSox, pre-sale to the Yankees already) were shifting him off the mound, and more. (I'll have further thoughts after the season is over.)

No. 3 is from the latter half of September, and courtesy an Arkansas hospital CEO, I punk pro-lifers and others, re religious exemptions to COVID vaccines based on fetal stem cell concerns.

No. 4 is also from just a couple of weeks ago and also COVID-related. It's about how Rolling Stone semi-screwed a pooch, but more, got unwittingly screwed by a doctor making an unsubstantiated claim, but how Drew Holden then made unsubstantiated claims of his own in the name of COVID-resistant wingnuttery and trying to own the libs. Dr. Jason McElyea has apparently still not caveated what Rolling Stone picked up from his comments to Oklahoma teevee.

No. 5? Also from last month, about how former Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn likely lied in claiming the Taliban made a no-strings-attached, conditions-free offer to surrender Osama bin Laden. (And, that doesn't totally shock me.)

No. 6? Refuting a shitload of COVID misinformation.

No. 7? My supportive take on Douglas Rushkoff, a left-liberal foe of tech-neoliberals, saying we need Basic Assets even more than Basic Income.

No. 8, like No. 5, challenged Counterpunch Afghanistan claims. In this case, I rejected the claims of Alex's younger brother Patrick (and the framing behind them) that the Taliban were undisputed masters of Afghanistan now.

No. 9? Back to the coronavirus. I called out Sam Husseini for engaging in horseshoe theory leftist misstatements about WIV and the reality of what gain of function is, and is not.

No. 10? For Labor Day, as federal job benefits expired in states still participating, I wondered about the longer-term future of former restaurant and retail workers who refused to go back to crappy workplaces.

Lab meat ain't happening

This great longform piece explains why commercial lab meat, cultured meat, whatever term you use, is NOT coming to your dinner plate at an affordable price by 2030 and probably by 2050.

I had long been somewhat skeptical of energy costs. Related to that, I've been skeptical of environmental benefits, especially climate change ones, assuming the electricity for this wouldn't all be renewable by any means. 

This story doesn't focus on that.

Instead, it looks at the processing sterility issue, which was No. 2 on my skepticism list.

To explain? To grow lab meat, you've got to have a clean room. As in, not just generically clean, but something on the approximately level of cleanness as a computer chip manufacturing clean room.

Just one problem. Computer chips are light and small.

Sides of beef are not.

Joe Fassler's take is that this not only is VERY likely not "scalable" to the size needed for economies of scale to cause major price drops, but that it pretty much may not be that scalable period.

All it takes is one scare of hamburgers being contaminated with lab e coli, even though this happens all the time in the regular hamburger sales world, to sink it, right?

As for the economies of scale issue, look at how much more "fake meat" costs than the real thing, and also note how it's limited still to just burgers and sausage at this time.

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So, the "Impossible Burger" and siblings?

No, not so much.

First, for various reasons, they're still a lot more pricey than meat, though not so much to be not at all in the commercial ballpark.

Second, it's LESS HEALTHY. Yes, you read that right. Impossible itself has as much saturated fat as beef and much more sodium. That offsets the advantage of no cholesterol. Plus, it IS a processed food, and per that link, at least as of two years ago, and contra the PR fellating of Genetic Literacy Project, not all ingredients had been independently tested.

Third, and also per that piece, the energy inputs for faked meat, while not nearly as high as lab meat, could well be higher than for actual beef, and certainly higher than, for say, grass-fed beef.

The real answer?

Per that old commercial: "Eat less beef."

You don't have to be a vegetarian. But, if everybody in the US cut their beef and pork eating by one half, poultry by one third, and fish stayed even so as not to overfish, that would be a huge change right there, and one a lot less pricey than faked meat, let alone lab meat.

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Update, Oct. 21: The LA Times tries to pretend lab meat is just around the corner, or just around the corner by 2030. Core Brown needs to read what I read.