When leaders don’t lead

Donald Trump loves to boast that he’s a decisive leader. But most of that self-image comes from him thinking that sending out a tweet about something is equivalent to having actually done something. In reality many of those tweet message were false, irrelevant to any substantive issue, impossible to carry out, or were slow-walked or even contradicted by his advisors and members of his administration. But no matter, in his mind, and the minds of his supporters, he has ‘acted’ like a strong and forceful leader. But such smoke and mirrors can only be taken so far and the big problem for him is the coronavirus because that is something that cannot be controlled by tweets and here Trump’s indecisiveness and lack of action are increasingly manifest.
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Film review: Chasing Coral (2017)

I recently watched the above documentary that dealt with how the warming of the oceans is killing off the coral reefs all over the world. The filmmakers developed time-lapse cameras that they could place on the ocean floor to show how when temperatures rise even slightly, first the reefs get bleached white and then develop brown fibrous attachments all over them, giving them the look of ghostly apparitions. They focus a lot on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
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Normal body temperature

The pandemic has made everyone aware of the need to monitor their body temperature to see if they might be carrying the virus. I wrote earlier about how my ‘normal’ body temperature when I have no symptoms of anything is much lower than the canonical value of 98.6F, which makes it hard to determine how to use my body temperature to determine if I am sick or if I have returned to normal after being sick. This article explains that there is a huge amount of variation because a multiplicity of factors affect the temperature.
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Why the virus is resurging in the US

This article describes how California went from being lauded for the way it controlled the outbreak to now being one of the states where there is a resurgence.

The Newsom administration’s four-phase plan to reopen slowly, while encouraging Californians to remain vigilant about wearing face coverings and maintaining distance to stop the spread of disease seemed “perfectly good and smart”, [Dr Bob Wachter, who chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco] said.

“But what I think we didn’t get right was the national political scene,” he said. California, despite its reputation as a progressive state, wasn’t immune to a growing conservative movement that rejects face masks as muzzles on independence and vilifies public health officials as enemies of the people.
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Even Fox News is having a hard time with nutty Republican congresspersons

Even Fox News host Neil Cavuto is having a hard time dealing with the idiocy of Trump-supporting Republican congresspeople like Andy Biggs of Arizona who are angry that the infectious disease specialists on the Coronavirus Task Force like Anthony Fauci and Dobroah Birx, who are issuing warnings about the need to take measures to combat the resurgence, are contradicting Trump’s relentless and evidence-free upbeat assertions about how well things are going. Biggs says that Fauci and Birx don’t know what they are talking about because they do not deal directly with patients and should be fired and the Task Force dismantled.

He is saying these things just as Arizona is one the states experiencing the worst rise in cases, when it needs all the best expert advice it can get.

A solution to the pandemic?

H. L. Mencken famously wrote that, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong”. That serves as a warning to anyone who thinks they have come up with a solution to a problem that has defied the best efforts of experts in the field. I come across such ‘solutions’ all the time from people who think they have solved a complex problem in physics. These are usually those who have done just a smattering of reading in that field,
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“No shirt, no shoes, no masks – no service”

The above sign, without the mask requirement, is commonly found posted at the entrance to many business establishments in the US and has been so for a long time. As far as I am aware, it has not caused any controversy and shirtless or shoeless people have not threatened the businesses with lawsuits. And yet, because mask wearing has been made into a culture war issue by Donald Trump, we now have the bizarre spectacle of people doing just that. Take this case:

Hugo’s Tacos, a beloved LA chain, announced Sunday that it was temporarily closing both its taco stands after its employees reported increasing harassment from customers who refused to wear masks during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The harassment – ranging from racial slurs to food and objects being thrown at employees – “has taken a toll” on staff, CEO and part-owner Bill Kohne told BuzzFeed News. Kohne said he wants to give his employees a break as the company works toward solutions to better protect them.

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TV review: Opiods, Inc

The investigate public TV program Frontline just released an episode with the above title that looked at how the company Insys Therapeutics deliberately set out to make people addicted to its formulation of the powerful pain killing drug based on fentanyl so that it could make huge profits. Because it is such a powerful addictive (100 times as strong as morphine), the drug is only meant to treat the excruciating pain experienced by certain types of cancer patients but the company, under the direction of its founder John Kapoor, pushed its sales team to bribe doctors to prescribe much more widely and in much larger doses than recommended, resulting in huge profits. Naturally, Wall Street investors did not look too closely at a company that was giving them huge returns on their investments.
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The Loch Ness Monster still does not exist

In my book The Great Paradox of Science: Why its conclusions can be relied upon even though they cannot be proven (that I hope all readers of this blog have bought!) I discuss in some detail the nature of scientific logic that enables us to arrive at very firm conclusions about so many things despite never having absolute certainty. This is particularly important in the case of assertions about the non-existence of any entity. Believers in things for which there is no positive evidence (such as gods and ghosts) point to this lack of proof to suggest that it is reasonable to believe in their existence.

My book argues that that argument is invalid and that in science we can quite confidently assert in the non-existence of some things (and have done so in the case of the aether and phlogiston for example) and that same logic can be extended to assert the non-existence of other things.
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John Oliver on the prison scandal

At the best of times, the state of US prisons are a scandal but what is happening during the pandemic is unconscionable, with inmates kept in conditions that guarantee that almost all of them will be exposed to the virus. John Oliver examines the problem and provides some common-sense steps that could be taken to ameliorate the situation but of course they are not being done because being seen as soft on criminals is seen by many politicians as a electoral death sentence, even though there is no way to confine the virus to just the prison population.