Sunday, March 15, 2020

Bartleby the Scrivener to Helicopter Governors, "I would prefer not to."

Clark Whelton, "Say Your Prayers and Take Your Chances: Remembering the 1957 Asian flu pandemic"
Surrounded by amulets of the coronavirus crisis, I stare out my window at a city that may or may not be on the verge of disaster. To my right is a case of canned pasta. To my left are cartons of corned-beef hash from New Jersey and bottled water from Maine. I’m ready for whatever comes.

Except, I’m not ready. In fact, even at my advanced 80-something age, I find the whole COVID-19 panic to be strange and troubling. I’ve lived through epidemics before, but they didn’t crash the stock market, wreck a booming economy, and shut down international travel. They didn’t stop the St. Patrick’s Day parade or the NCAA basketball tournament, and they didn’t drop the curtain on Broadway shows. Will these extreme measures have any real effect on the spread of COVID-19 in New York, or America? We’re about to find out.

My first encounter with a global pandemic came in October 1957, when I spent a week in my college infirmary with a case of the H2N2 virus, known at the time by the politically incorrect name of “Asian flu.” My fever spiked to 105, and I was sicker than I’d ever been. The infirmary quickly filled with other cases, though some ailing students toughed it out in their dorm rooms with aspirin and orange juice. The college itself did not close, and the surrounding town did not impose restrictions on public gatherings. The day that I was discharged from the infirmary, I played in an intercollegiate soccer game, which drew a big crowd.

It’s not that Asian flu—the second influenza pandemic of the twentieth century—wasn’t a serious disease. Worldwide, this flu strain killed somewhere between 1 and 2 million people. More than 100,000 died in the U.S. alone. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, governors did not call out the National Guard, and political panic-mongers did not blame it all on President Eisenhower. College sports events were not cancelled, planes and trains continued to run, and Americans did not regard one another with fear and suspicion, touching elbows instead of hands. We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.

Today, I look back and wonder if an oblivious America faced the 1957 plague with a kind of clueless folly. Why weren’t we more active in fighting this contagion? Could stricter quarantine procedures have reduced the rate of infection and lowered the death toll? In short, why weren’t we more afraid?

It’s hard to answer that question without explaining what it was like to grow up in an age of infectious illness. My mother once showed me a list of the contagious diseases she survived before the age of 20. On the list were the usual childhood illnesses, along with deadly afflictions like typhoid fever, pneumonia, diphtheria (it killed her older brother), scarlet fever, and the lethal 1918–19 Spanish flu, which took more than 50 million lives around the world.

For those who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four. Polio took a heavy annual toll, leaving thousands of people (mostly children) paralyzed or dead. There were no vaccines. Growing up meant running an unavoidable gauntlet of infectious disease. For college students in 1957, the Asian flu was a familiar hurdle on the road to adulthood. For everyone older, the flu was a familiar foe. There was no possibility of working at home. You had to go out and face the danger.

Today, thanks to vaccines, fewer and fewer people remember what it was like to survive a succession of childhood diseases. Is the unfamiliar threat of serious sickness making us more afraid of COVID-19 than we need to be? Does a society that relies more on politics than faith now find itself in an uncomfortable bind, unable to lecture, browbeat, intimidate, or evade the incorrect behavior of a dangerous microbe?

When the coronavirus finally runs its course, one of the most important tasks for health-care officials will be to determine whether the preventive measures we’re taking today were effective. Did deploying the National Guard save lives, or did it simply expose the soldiers to an infection that, in the end, could not be stopped? Did we pay too high a price for tanking our economy and disrupting our society?

Or did we get it right, acting quickly and decisively to slow the virus, shutting down possible pathways of infection? By comparing the 2020 data with information from 1957, we’ll also be able to find out if the strange people who lived in that distant year—and I remember them well—could have done more to reduce the death toll of the Asian flu. The more answers we get, and the sooner we get them, the better it will be for everyone. When the curtain goes up on Broadway again, somewhere in a faraway continent to be named later, we can be sure that new viruses will be waiting in the wings.

36 comments:

  1. So, what you're saying (by posting this) is that you'd prefer mass graves to an overabundance of caution?

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  2. I'd prefer to live a day in freedom then die, then live 50 years in a totalitarian police state.

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  3. Your view that a democratically elected competent government that provides needed services and steps in when there is an emergency -- is "a totalitarian police state" -- is NUTS. And your view that rightwing authoritarianism is "freedom" is also NUTS.

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  4. I am 100 percent willing to live in a IMAGINARY "totalitarian police state" in exchange for competent government that provides needed services. If your delusions caused you to kill yourself (rather than live in an IMAGINARY "totalitarian police state") that also wouldn't bother me too much. I'd think it a shame that you didn't receive the psychiatric help you obviously desperately need, but I certainly wouldn't be broken up over it.

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  5. You've already tried your coup d'état and LOST!

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  6. We tried to STOP Dotard's coup and lost. All is not forgiven, however. Dotard will be held accountable. #TrumpCrimesCommission

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  7. When you cheat it isn't a legitimate win. The Dotard/Putin "win" wasn't legitimate due to the cheating. And this cheating was more than the "normal" republican voter suppression. btw, impeachment is Constitutional, but that didn't stop you from labeling it a "coup".

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  8. lol. Prove that he cheated. Produce EVIDENCE, not allegation from a secret or anonymous source.

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  9. WHOS vote reflects the cheat? Name the voters. who were fooled/ tricked/ cheated.

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  10. My source regarding how the election was stolen is investigative journalist Greg Palast. People were fooled and tricked, but the largest contributing factor that lead to Dotard "winning" concerns those who were cheated out of their vote. btw, my other source would be Robert Muller. He wrote a report that details collusion between Dotard and Russia. The evidence HAS been produced.

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  11. Muellers team dropped their case against the Russian troll farm. Turns out, they had NO evidence at all.

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  12. btw - I thought you said that the Russians tipped the election scales. How did THEY cause states to purge their voter rolls ala "Operation Crosscheck"? Did Putin strong arm some Governors, or did he just use kompromat? lol!

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  13. They dropped the case because the defendants were "taking advantage of the discovery process to potentially harm US national security... while also ignoring court-issued subpoenas". Your "Turns out, they had NO evidence at all" is bullshit. The downside of prosecuting outweighed any upside.

    And the republicans have been cheating by fraudulently knocking voters off the rolls for some time (how gwb "won" when he ran against Al Gore). This has nothing to do with Putin. The Putin assist was in ADDITION to the regular "GOP" cheating.

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  14. Their "discovery" would reveal the entire deep state Muh Russia hoax? Imagine that...

    Quantify the two. What % was voter suppression, and what % was voter misdirection? Got any numbers? No, numbers aren't the tools of innumerate boobs...

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  15. 1% lie = 100% 'Fake News' lie in the purist Democrat playbook.

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  16. I can't give you unknowable percentages. There was no poll of the electorate asking them why they voted the way they did. Not that, if such a poll were even possible, every voter would be truthful. Or be aware of things that effected their vote subconsciously. Your stupid "innumerate boob" insult aside, I do know the voter suppression was the MUCH greater of the two. People who based their vote on Russian information was small, but enough to put Dotard over the top. It was the combination of the two that gave Dotard the "win".

    The defendants in the dropped case were using discovery NOT to reveal a hoax. They KNOW there was no hoax. What they wanted was info regarding "U.S. government... efforts to detect and deter foreign election interference". This info would help them best target their current election interference efforts.

    btw, it is Dotard who is an innumerate boob.

    Quote: During expansive remarks on Fox News host Sean Hannity's program [Dotard said] "Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch..." [end quote]

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  17. You have no numbers, you have no proof. All you have is an opinion.

    And if charging the Russians avails them of the option to use the courts for discovery, how wise was the Mueller Team in charging the Russians? Especially since the same team couldn't even provide CLASSIFIED intelligence proving Russian interference to our OWN Congressional investigators...

    Intelligence agencies report on capabilities, not actualities. That the Russians COULD have interfered in 2016 doesn't PROVE (beyond a reasonable doubt) that they did. And Mueller and his team has NO EVIDENCE that they did. NONE. ZIP. Not even computer forensics performed under a legally valid official chain of custody.

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  18. Shakespeare, "Hamlet" (Act IV, Sc. iv)

    A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
    And ever three parts coward, I do not know
    Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
    Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
    To do't.


    All four don't prove the deed performed. They just make for an interesting intelligence report.

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  19. CrowdStrike provided the evidence of the DNC hack by Russia. Twitter identified Russian bots is evidence. Facebook ads paid for in rubles is evidence. Manfort's cigar bar meeting with Putin's stooge to hand off Dotard campaign internal polling is evidence. As for numbers, see the Greg Palast article I linked to earlier. It lays out Dotard's margin of victory in the states that secured his "win" compared to the number of people who were booted off the voter rolls. All FACTS that prove the election was stolen. That the perpetrators got away with it doesn't make the factual allegations "opinion".

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  20. Crowdstrike provided a redacted report, the original of which was never presented to government officials.

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  21. They couldn't produce an unredacted version for the Court, and then admitted that they had no access to an unredacted version, that they never received one from Crowdstrike.

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  22. According to your linked article, the redacted material concerns what the DNC did to remediate the attack and what they are doing going forward to harden their servers. I'm sure the FBI was fine with not getting that info. Given that it isn't their business or concern.

    Quote: "No redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors".

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  23. The FBI is fine with leaving the DNC vulnerable to future Russian hacks? Who knew?

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  24. Yes. Because they know the DNC isn't fine with it. Why they brought in CrowdStrike.

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  25. lol, they brought in CrowdStrike to blame Russians for Hillary homegrown server problem and give her indiscretion the "cover" it needed in the midst of an election.

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  26. LOL. That is your imaginary Putin-constructed narrative. The truth is that the RNC server was also hacked. It isn't widely known because Russia didn't pass that data off to Julian Assange to "leak" to help Dotard "win" the election.

    Report: Russian Hackers Had RNC Data But Didn't Release It (excerpt) As the CIA concludes that Russia tried to help Donald Trump win the presidential election, intelligence officials have released one more intriguing detail: Russian hackers had dirt on the Republican National Committee but never released it... [end excerpt]

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  27. btw, Hillary's "homegrown" server (her personal server located in her home) and the DNC server are different servers. They are two different issues. It seems you are confused.

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  28. Nope. It's called a "red herring". Use one to distract from the other.

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