At the Arb Café...

You can talk all night...



... and do any shopping you might have through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"Frankly, I would call it forcible imprisoning of people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights, in my opinion."

"It's breaking people's freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country. What the f---. Excuse me. Outrage. Outrage.... If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great and they should be able to. But to say they cannot leave their house and that they will be arrested if they do, that's fascist. That is not democratic — this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom."

Said Elon Musk, quoted at Business Insider.

Very windy in Madison today...

A classic view from the Heights:

"Covid-19 lives in the shadow of the most vexing virus we’ve ever faced: H.I.V. After nearly 40 years of work..."

"... here is what we have to show for our vaccine efforts: a few Phase 3 clinical trials, one of which actually made the disease worse, and another with a success rate of just 30 percent. Researchers say they don’t expect a successful H.I.V. vaccine until 2030 or later, putting the timeline at around 50 years. That’s unlikely to be the case for Covid-19, because, as opposed to H.I.V., it doesn’t appear to mutate significantly and exists within a family of familiar respiratory viruses. Even still, any delay will be difficult to bear. But the history of H.I.V. offers a glimmer of hope for how life could continue even without a vaccine. Researchers developed a litany of antiviral drugs that lowered the death rate and improved health outcomes for people living with AIDS. Today’s drugs can lower the viral load in an H.I.V.-positive person so the virus can’t be transmitted through sex. Therapeutic drugs, rather than vaccines, might likewise change the fight against Covid-19.... Combine that with rigorous testing and contact tracing — where infected patients are identified and their recent contacts notified and quarantined — and the future starts looking a little brighter.... If all those things come together, life might return to normal long before a vaccine is ready to shoot into your arm."

From "How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?" (NYT). The article examines many things that could be done to speed up the development and distribution of a vaccine (with the best possible result arriving in the middle to end of next year).

"Despite the growing uproar from many of his progressive supporters over the sexual assault allegation leveled against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden..."

"... Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has remained quiet on the matter in recent days. The only time Sanders mentioned the allegation against Biden was earlier this month during an interview with CBS, in which the Vermont lawmaker asserted that 'any woman who feels that she was assaulted has every right in the world to stand up and make her claims.' But Sanders added... 'I think that she has the right to make her claims and get a public hearing and the public will make their own conclusions about it... I just don't know enough about it to comment further".... Sanders, who just days before that interview endorsed Biden’s White House bid upon dropping out of the race, has not publicly commented on the matter since. Fox News has reached out on multiple occasions to Sanders campaign officials and political aides, and has yet to receive a response."

From "Sanders keeps quiet on Biden sexual assault allegation despite uproar from supporters, ex-aides" (Fox News).

Also in the news this morning: "Biden reaches deal to let Sanders keep hundreds of delegates" (AP).

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has agreed to let former primary rival Bernie Sanders keep hundreds of delegates he would otherwise forfeit by dropping out of the presidential race in a deal designed to avoid the bitter feelings that marred the party in 2016 and helped lead to Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Under party rules, Sanders should lose about one-third of the delegates he’s won in primaries and caucuses as the process moves ahead... The rules say those delegates should be Biden supporters, as he is the only candidate still actively seeking the party’s nomination....

In some ways, the delegate count is a moot point....

Is it a moot point? At any moment, Joe Biden could have a genuine or faked health crisis and become unavailable. Isn't that what plenty of Democrats want? If that happens, who gets to be the nominee? Maybe some people think it should be whoever Biden picks as his VP, even if that is a person who hasn't participated in any of the primaries and caucuses, who never had to debate. But there's good reason to think that if Biden becomes unavailable, the candidate should be the person who clearly came in second — in 2020 and in 2016 — Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is keeping himself clean on the Tara Reade allegations, and he's continuing to acquire delegates. Is he not thinking of somehow getting the nomination? I assume there are other Democrats who are looking for a path to the nomination and not conceding that Joe Biden owns it. So it's right for Sanders to plot a win.

"Can The Dow Jones Today Nail Its Best Month In 45 Years?"

Asks Investor's Business Daily:

Wednesday's gain left the Dow Jones today, on the last day of April, sitting on its best month of the century. Actually, it's the century's best month for the Dow, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500.

In fact, the Dow's 12.4% advance so far in April puts it on track for its best month since a 14.2% surge in January 1975. That's a 45-year record. The Nasdaq is toiling away at its biggest monthly advance since February 2000. That was a 19.2% spike, preceded by a 22% Santa Claus rally in December 1999. The S&P 500 has rebounded 13.7% in April. That beats everything going back to its 16.3% rebound rally in October 1974.

So strange... in this lockdown month.

"As an activist, it can be very easy to develop a black and white view of the world: things are clearly wrong or clearly right."

"Harvey Weinstein’s decades of rape were clearly wrong. Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assaults were clearly wrong. Brett Kavanaugh’s actions, told consistently over decades by his victim (and supported by her polygraph results), were clearly wrong. So were Matt Lauer’s, Bill Cosby’s and so many others. As we started holding politicians and business leaders and celebrities around the world accountable for their actions, it was easy to sort things into their respective buckets: this is wrong, this is right. Holding people accountable for their actions was not only right, it was just. Except it’s not always so easy, and living in the gray areas is something we’re trying to figure out in the world of social media. But here’s something social media doesn’t afford us–nuance. The world is gray. And as uncomfortable as that makes people, gray is where the real change happens. Black and white is easy... Gray is where the conversations which continue to swirl around powerful men get started.... It’s not up to women to admonish or absolve perpetrators, or be regarded as complicit when we don’t denounce them. Nothing makes this clearer than the women who are still supporting Joe Biden even with these accusations. Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren have all endorsed Biden and like me, continue to support him.... This is the shitty position we are in as women....  Believing women was never about 'Believe all women no matter what they say,' it was about changing the culture of NOT believing women by default.... I hope you’ll meet me in the gray to talk and to help us both find the way out."

From "Alyssa Milano On Why She Still Supports Joe Biden & How She Would Advise Him About Tara Reade Allegations – Guest Column" (Deadline).

If "Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assaults were clearly wrong" — alleged — then why can't you say "Joe Biden’s alleged sexual assaults were clearly wrong"? It's black and white at the allegation level. But then, you didn't say "Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged actions." You said "Brett Kavanaugh’s actions." You can get out of the grayness whenever you want just by saying "alleged." I don't know what motivated you to give Trump the "alleged." Maybe some editor worried about a defamation lawsuit and inserted that after you wrote it.

Anyway, grayness. Yes, real life as grayness to it. Let's be mature and fair and realistic. But don't confuse the grayness that is the uncertainty about what happened with the grayness about whether something is right or wrong. Tara Reade alleges that Joe Biden did something that Alyssa Milano — and all those other Democratic women she names — should have absolutely no hesitation to say is clearly wrong. The grayness is at the level of evidence. Who should be believed?

What do you do when someone on your side, on whom you've staked your party's success, is accused? You want to believe your guy! That's one way out of the grayness, and that looks like the way you have chosen. Why not be black-and-white honest that's what you and Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren are all doing?

You say "Black and white is easy," but it's not, because you are still choosing what to call black and white and you are still smudging it into gray to suit your political preferences. That looks black and white to me.

"Man Who Killed and Ate the Spirit Raccoon," "Spirit Horses on Horse Hill," "Flying Skull," "Big Beaver," "Girl Whose Lover Went to War"...

... "Rattlesnake Myth," "Wakanda Loses Lake," "Wakanda Annoyed by Rabbit," "Thunderbird Roost," and "Girl Who Married a Sky Man" — Native American myths named on this map of Lake Mendota, drawn in 1948 by a student of a University of Wisconsin professor, to go with his booklet "Lake Mendota Indian Legends."

I first saw the map at "Daily diversion: See how Madison's lakes changed changed since 19th century, in photos" (Wisconsin State Journal).

And here's the booklet!

Lake Mendota was called Wonk-sheck-ho-mik-la — "the lake where the Indian lies."



"Manitou" = a spirit.

Lake Mendota this morning at dawn...

Biden's frustrating campaign by podcast.

I was listening to the NYT "Daily" podcast this morning. The episode is called "Biden's Campaign of Isolation." Because of the lockdown, Biden can't do any of the conventional campaign activities, and his main idea seems to be this podcast. But is anyone listening? I love podcasts, but not all podcasts. I need to hear a voice that's got something podcasty about it. The host of "The Daily," Michael Barbaro has it.  Obviously, Joe Rogan has it. You can name some others. I enjoy Scott Adams. Marc Maron. Etc.

That special quality could be a lot of different things, but it's not going to be a politician carefully shaping his message around the goal of getting elected. That's so unappetizing.

But listening to "The Daily," I heard some snippets of Biden's podcast, specifically his interview with Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and they were talking about — I think they were talking about — the very subject I was just saying I wanted to hear more talk about. Here's what I wrote 3 days ago:

Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?

Shouldn't the Democrats be saying this? Where's Joe Biden?

I know how to listen to the Biden podcast with Inslee, but I'm not motivated to the point where I'm going to do that, partly because I value my time and hate to give a speaker control over it and partly because as a blogger, I need text. But I will read, because I can scan it at my own speed, and because I can copy and paste. I don't have to do my own transcription to write about it. So where is the transcript?! I can see one transcript at Joe Biden's podcast page — it happens to be with Ron Klain — but I can't find the Inslee transcription.

Did Biden embrace a Green New Deal approach to emergence from the lockdown? I can't believe I'm supposed to slog through a podcast to understand. So frustrating!

"You humiliated yourself with your ludicrous run for president last year, and every time you open your mouth now, Andrew Cuomo runs over and drops a stick of dynamite in it to remind you who’s boss."

Writes John Podhoretz in "Bill de Blasio’s new low: blaming the Jews" (NY Post).

The headline refers to De Blasio's harsh reaction to a specific event: a large gathering of Jewish mourners that took place in Brooklyn. De Blasio blamed those Jews for that one thing that they did. The headline makes it sound as though de Blasio had engaged in classic anti-Semitism, blaming Jews in general for things that go wrong.

For example, during the Black Plague in the 1300s, Jews got blamed and murdered on the theory that they were causing the disease. I don't think de Blasio is much good as a mayor and he should never have joined the overcrowded Democratic presidential race, but it's awful to characterize him as "blaming the Jews."

Podhoretz writes:

There’s no way to read your tweet from Tuesday night in an exculpatory fashion. Here it is: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

Now, there really is something stupid about that tweet. De Blasio refers to the "Jewish community" when he meant the Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, and they are a small proportion of the much larger set of Jewish residents in New York City. Podhoretz writes that there are 1.2 million Jews in NYC. I had to look up the number of Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, who are not even 10% of the total who belong to "the Jewish community" in New York.

But maybe Podhoretz is seeing into de Blasio soul. Why did he get so mad at the Jews who came out onto the street in mourning? Why did that provoke him into posturing about a strong show of police force? Why did he look at one Jewish community and see "the Jewish community"?

And what a terrible visualization — Cuomo sticking dynamite into de Blasio's open mouth. Where does that violent imagery come from?

At the Springtime Café...

... you can talk all night.

"There are only different hellish ways to adapt to a pandemic and save both lives and livelihoods. I raise Sweden..."

"... not because I think it has found the magic balance — it is way too soon to tell — but because I think we should be debating all the different ways and costs of acquiring immunity. When I look across America, though, and see governors partly lifting lockdowns — because they feel their people just can’t take it anymore for economic or psychological reasons, even though their populations have little or no immunity — I worry we may end up developing more herd immunity but in a painful, deadly, costly, uncoordinated way that still leaves room for the coronavirus to strike hard again and overwhelm hospitals.... Herd immunity 'has historically been nature’s way of ending pandemics,' added Dr. David Katz, the public health physician.... 'We need to bend with her forces...' That means a designed strategy, based on risk profiles, of phasing back to work those least vulnerable, so we gradually cultivate the protection of herd immunity — 'while concentrating our health services and social services on protecting those most vulnerable' until we can sound the all-clear."

From "Is Sweden Doing It Right?/The Swedes aren’t battling the coronavirus with broad lockdowns" by Thomas Friedman (in the NYT).

You'll have to take my word that this was my theory all along.

I didn't want to cast aspersions on a particular individual on this blog, so I never wrote it on the internet, but I said it out loud around the house. This was always my theory: "Woman Who Blamed Trump after Giving Her Husband Fish-Tank Cleaner Now Under Investigation for Murder" (National Review).

Top-floor sun.

(From yesterday, at 6:15 a.m.)

(And if you're enjoying this blog, please consider supporting it by using the Althouse Portal to Amazon when you're doing your shopping.)

"It’s a Bayesian thing. Part of Bayesian reasoning is to think like a Bayesian; another part is to assess other people’s conclusions as if they are Bayesians..."

"... and use this to deduce their priors. I’m not saying that other researchers are Bayesian—indeed I’m not always so Bayesian myself—rather, I’m arguing that looking at inferences from this implicit Bayesian perspective can be helpful, in the same way that economists can look at people’s decisions and deduce their implicit utilities. It’s a Neumann thing: again, you won’t learn people’s 'true priors' any more than you’ll learn their 'true utilities'—or, for that matter, any more than a test will reveal students’ 'true abilities'—but it’s a baseline."

From "Reverse-engineering priors in coronavirus discourse" by Andrew (at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science,) via "What’s the Deal With Bayesian Statistics?" by Kevin Drum (at Mother Jones).

Both of these posts went up yesterday, that is, 2 days after I said, "Shouldn't we talk about Bayes theorem?" I'm not saying I caused that. I'm just saying maybe you should use Bayesian reasoning to figure out if I did. I will stand back and say, this is not my field. I'm only here to encourage it.

"Confused by This Anti-Joe Biden Meme? The Creator Says You Just Don’t Get the Joke."

"Before being censored by Twitter, the way the image was shared blurred the line between parody and misinformation"  — by Ali Breland (in Mother Jones) — about this image created by Brad Troemel:



It's a great satire, but unfortunately, many people who were sharing it took it to be an actual ad from the Biden campaign.

“The DNC and the Biden campaign are the ones responsible for your familiarity with this type of messaging, because they’re the ones who have been fucking campaigning on it,” Troemel [said]. “This image wouldn’t be shared if it wasn’t so believable.”...

Jennifer Grygiel, a communications professor at Syracuse University who specializes in social media and memes, [said] “He seems to want to cross his arms and say that everyone is so stupid,” Grygiel said on the phone, skeptically. “He may claim that he’s helping democracy, but he’s lost control of his art.”

"The best and surest way to beat Trump is to... give all the disaffected Republicans, conservatives and independents only one alternative to Trump."

"Giving them a conservative alternative might be ideologically satisfying, but it increases the likelihood that Trump can pull off another narrow win In the past several months, I’ve been approached about running as a conservative independent in the general election. I’ve had people suggest that I run as a Libertarian. My answer has always been the same: No. Because I won’t do anything that might help Trump win.... I know how committed Justin is to the founding ideals of liberty and limited government. When this is over, I’ll gladly join him in fighting for those principles again. If he wants, I’ll join him in starting a new political party. Right now, our only job is ridding the White House of an authoritarian con man. The last thing we need is a third-party candidate. Not this year, congressman."

From "You can’t win, Justin Amash. You can only help Trump get reelected/We both came in with the tea party wave. Reelecting this president isn’t the way to go out," by Joe Walsh (WaPo). This Joe Walsh is a former member of Congress and the author of a book called "F*ck Silence: Calling Trump Out for the Cultish, Moronic, Authoritarian Con Man He Is." He's not the Joe Walsh doing the guitar solo in "Hotel California" (the best guitar solo of all time according to a 1998 poll of readers of Guitarist magazine).

"The last thing we need is a third-party candidate. Not this year...." You could say that... or you could say the opposite. This is THE year for a 3rd-party candidate. This is the ONE time the 3rd-party candidate can actually win. Biden is a terrible candidate — way too old and seemingly mentally debilitated and burdened with a late-breaking sex-assault allegation. And Trump is very divisive and very, very weird.

And why would Amash necessarily hurt Biden? Why wouldn't he hurt Trump, which would help Biden?

From the comments over there: "Don't believe a word of this article. Amash won't draw anything among Democrat voters. He's a hard right conservative. Walsh was recruited to write this by the GOP for the same reason the Mafia sends your best friend to kill you."