Althouse: At the Tuesday Night Café...

October 13, 2020

At the Tuesday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

That's the western view, showing fall colors, at 7:18 a.m. Here's the eastern view at 7:01, pre-dawn. Sunrise was at 7:10.

59 comments:

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: feel-good videos du jour:

Amy's Smile

POC Pro-Tip re: Raciss Cops; 10/13/20, 8:32 PM
America’s Politico said...: What will everyone do when Dems take over the WH and Senate on Nov. 3? Is the front page story written already?

PS: I will be very rich as my clients will pay my Political consultant fees.; 10/13/20, 8:33 PM
Mark said...: The ObamaCare case. Let's consider the possibilities. The lower court struck it down. So, if the Supreme Court rules -

9-0 - ACB's vote/participation is irrelevant.
8-1 - ACB irrelevant.
7-2 - ACB irrelevant.
6-3 - ACB irrelevant.
5-4 to affirm lower court - ACB irrelevant
4-4 with ACB recusing - lower court ruling stands, which means that ObamaCare is found to be unconstitutional.

ACB is only a factor in the case if the four "conservatives" vote to affirm, the "liberals" (including Roberts) vote to reverse, and ACB also votes to reverse.

In other words, the Dems NEED Amy Coney Barrett to sit on the ObamaCare case.; 10/13/20, 8:34 PM
JZ said...: Judge Barrett is smart, disciplined and easy on the eyes.; 10/13/20, 8:35 PM
Yancey Ward said...: My COVID spreadsheets are linked below. I have added a few new graphs to the US data sheet at the end- they are self-explanatory. The main new one is a normalized view of "New Cases"- normalized to testing levels. One can, of course, sense this in the daily positive trends, but visually it makes better sense to apply a normalization factor to new cases- the factor is what new cases look like using 500,000 tests/day- it shows the outbreak in Spring was much larger and intense than the one in June-August, and it also probably helps explain the fact that deaths were much more muted in the Summer even with the much larger number of confirmed cases. Additionally, the newly rising cases are explained almost 95% by the increases in tests/day, and almost all of this is the repeated testing of college students in pretty much every state.

US COVID Data
Individual State COVID Data; 10/13/20, 8:42 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: for REX fans, hes back.

https://nitter.net/IMPERATORREX4; 10/13/20, 8:42 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: Parrots and Falcons and Jailbirds! Oh my!!

did POTUS really retweet this??

https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/058/871/420/original/8013f0fafac02fa5.png?1602596470; 10/13/20, 8:49 PM
320Busdriver said...: I switched browsers to duck duck go. It gave me a warning when I came to your site that "Google owns blogger so we can't block trackers here"
We've had some really disturbing coincidences around our search and ads served.; 10/13/20, 8:52 PM
Mark said...: So explain to me why it is "offensive and outdated" to speak of sexual preference, or to suggest that gay is a choice.

Are they saying that no one would ever choose or prefer to be gay? That they are gay only because they are forced to be against their will?; 10/13/20, 9:17 PM
Ann Althouse said...: What does it mean to block trackers?; 10/13/20, 9:17 PM
Mark said...: What will everyone do when Dems take over the WH and Senate on Nov. 3?

Go out and buy adult diapers and endure the shame of being unable to control their bowels because they are permanently and hugely gaped by being totally and repeatedly f*cked in the *ss forever by idiot voters?; 10/13/20, 9:20 PM
Mark said...: Go outside right NOW and look up to the south and see the spectacular bright and large red/orange Mars up in the sky.; 10/13/20, 9:23 PM
320Busdriver said...: The DDG browser does not store your search history so it has nothing to sell to advertisers who want to serve ads in the browser. They also don’t collect or share personal data. Seems to work well so far. I’ve just started using it.; 10/13/20, 9:32 PM
narciso said...: Dont know

https://mobile.twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1315669937269202944; 10/13/20, 9:36 PM
320Busdriver said...: I see I can add DDG search to Safari. I downloaded the browser from the App Store. I use my iPad for 99% of my internet nowadays. Great photos this AM by the way! I walked Mr poodle at 7 and saw some of the same scenery here to the east of you.; 10/13/20, 9:41 PM
Jon Ericson said...: Good Morning!; 10/13/20, 9:45 PM
Big Mike said...: In other words, the Dems NEED Amy Coney Barrett to sit on the ObamaCare case.

@Mark, well don't tell them. Brains that have exploded are tough to clean up.; 10/13/20, 9:59 PM
historyDoc said...: Can't help but notice that Yancey is starting more of his posts with "oh for fuck sake...".

I think we are all getting more irritable, from lockdowns, election nonsense, and other general BS.

Thank you Yancey for expressing succintly what I am thinking.; 10/13/20, 10:08 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: Still not an unattractive picture of ACB to be found anywhere. Photogenic in the extreme! This is entertaining because it is certain to be annoying to people one would like to see annoyed.; 10/13/20, 10:10 PM
Bay Area Guy said...: The best pollster in America, Richard Baris (young pollster from Florida) sez Pennsylvania is Biden + 2 --- within the margin of error.

It all hinges on Penn. We got any Pennsylvanniacs here? My mom's side of the family is from Penn. No, not Philly. Western Penn.

These folks are coal-miners, union guys, hunters, and Democrats. They say the Pledge of Allegiance, proudly. I went to a family reunion there 20 years ago. They held it at a local American Legion Hall in Salzburg, PA. Lotta beer, lotta Cheez Wiz on crackers.

You ever see the Deer Hunter with Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep and Chris Walken? That was practically a documentary. That's them.

These folks are gonna vote Trump on 11.3.; 10/13/20, 10:28 PM
Readering said...: Unmasking trending.; 10/13/20, 10:33 PM
rightguy said...: The pre-sunrise pic is one of the best ever.; 10/13/20, 11:20 PM
Joe Smith said...: "What does it mean to block trackers?"

@AA

Not an IT expert, but when you search something in Google or use Chrome as a browser, by default Google 'tracks' everything you search and everywhere you visit.

Then they can tailor advertising to things that their algorithms think you'll be drawn to so you will click on that ad.

Google isn't a search company, it's an advertising company.

The only way to avoid it is to use privacy mode with most browsers, or go through a VPN so that your browsing is anonymized to a certain extent...; 10/13/20, 11:33 PM
daskol said...: Cross site tracking cookies. The things websites put in your browser cache so that they can tell what other websites visit. It's an important way google monetizes its product, you.; 10/13/20, 11:42 PM
Yancey Ward said...: Get ready for double face diaper mandates. We have lost our fucking minds.; 10/13/20, 11:42 PM
Ken B said...: Predictions:
Althouse will slam the attacks on how ACB dressed.
Althouse will repent her attacks on how the asteroid scientist dressed, in light of the first prediction.

KIDDING. Althouse will never repent attacking a man for wearing a shirt a woman gave him.; 10/13/20, 11:43 PM
Ken B said...: On trackers
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-you-should-know-about-web-tracking-and-how-it-affects-your-online-privacy-42935355525/; 10/13/20, 11:50 PM
BUMBLE BEE said...: ACB is beating up those dem senators pretty badly. With their presidential ticket they have no choice but to cheat.; 10/14/20, 5:16 AM
rehajm said...: What does it mean to block trackers

Trackers monitor which websites you visit and help develop dossiers on you and your preferences. Google is the nosiest.

Blockers have been third party add ons to browsers but the latest versions of Safari have blockers built in...; 10/14/20, 5:19 AM
rehajm said...: You have multiple dossiers about tour internet behavior that are sold to advertisers and other parties...including political strategists. When the politicians pivot, their narratives are crafted with that data about us...; 10/14/20, 5:24 AM
Marcus Bressler said...: I have a "sexual preference". But I prefer not to talk about it here.

THEOLDMAN

So, Webster's Dictionary made that term offensive in usage basically overnight? That's why I don't trust most "dictionaries". Ever since they tried to make "myriad" a noun; 10/14/20, 5:37 AM
rehajm said...: This is how you do it before skyping into a hearing **in the same building**. Makes total sense.; 10/14/20, 5:40 AM
rehajm said...: “How many of you have been unable to hug your grandkids in the last seven months? I’ve got six of them,” Joe Biden says "Two of them are my deceased son’s boys they live – children, a boy and a girl – they live not far from me…I bribe them with Häagen-Dazs bars.”

The audit says he has seven.; 10/14/20, 5:52 AM
tim maguire said...: America’s Politico said...What will everyone do when Dems take over the WH and Senate on Nov. 3? Is the front page story written already?

I’m quite sure it has. The real question is, if Trump wins, how many newspapers will accidentally run it anyway?; 10/14/20, 5:57 AM
tim maguire said...: Blogger Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...did POTUS really retweet this??

https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/058/871/420/original/8013f0fafac02fa5.png?1602596470

I hope not. And given that it is a screen shot and not a link to his tweet, he almost certainly didn’t.; 10/14/20, 6:08 AM
rehajm said...: As recently as last month, Webster’s Dictionary included a definition of “preference” as “orientation” or “sexual preference.” TODAY they changed it and added the word “offensive."; 10/14/20, 7:12 AM
320Busdriver said...: Hunters laptop.......

Oh boy!; 10/14/20, 7:12 AM
tim in vermont said...: @narciso, What’s sort of weird about that link is that France was almost as high as Sweden at the start, and yet it’s right back up there. If the theory is that lockdowns earlier caused more disease now because the human ‘underbrush' had been burned, and some level of immunity had developed, it should play out in France too. Same with Belgium, after all, lockdown is as lockdown does. Isn’t the real point the number of people who contracted COVID in each country, not some laws written on paper which may or may not be observed. The claim that the policies were "100% wrong” is ridiculous, or at least not proven by that graph.

The English have a joke about the French that the way the French deal with all of the laws their government makes is to simply ignore them. I have seen this myself in that country, where I worked for a short while. Let me just say that the laws against smoking in various public places were completely ignored.

The reason I keep criticizing these “studies” that purport to show that lockdowns don’t work is because we want to believe it so badly. It’s the classic case of “isn’t it pretty to think so.” We should lift the lockdowns with our eyes fully open to what we are really doing, not deceiving ourselves that it’s without cost. Lockdowns cost too, and nobody should be deceived about that either. Everybody wants easy choices so they pretend that their preferred policy is really the one that doesn’t cost any lives.

Plus let’s wait until flu season is well underway before declaring victory for any particular prediction.; 10/14/20, 7:21 AM
rehajm said...: NYT leaked Trump’s taxes but is immediately attacking a whistleblower when it’s Hunter Biden; 10/14/20, 7:34 AM
rhhardin said...: It's breast awareness month again. This year there are no parades.; 10/14/20, 7:35 AM
Jersey Fled said...: According to a Hong Kong study (not yet peer review) 94% of covid infections were transmitted in an indoor setting.

Remember that next time you see a Biden rally with all 15 or 20 attendees sitting outdoors in their little circles wearing masks.; 10/14/20, 7:45 AM
wildswan said...: I tried to use an ad blocker awhile back but many sites including this one would not load. You can specify "don't block on Site X" but "do block on other sites" but all that happens (to me) is that "the internet" becomes very slow accessing anything. I went to Google privacy settings and specified "show me generic content" which supposedly means Google now does not assist me by showing me things I would be interested in based on my searches. And I erase cookies and browser content and local storage etc. all the time, five or six times a day. But I have seen ads pop up based on my grocery purchases, on my word documents and on words used in site comments by other commenters. It's too bad we can't topple our internet histories but we can't, not yet anyhow - no matter what the man says. There's no free internet. How could there be?

PS Google just did a popup asking me if I wanted to update my privacy settings. See?; 10/14/20, 8:39 AM
wildswan said...: If we can send soldiers to risk their lives for our freedom surely we older folks can take the risk that would come with ending lockdowns for the sake of the young people, their livelihoods and their freedom.; 10/14/20, 8:43 AM
wildswan said...: If we can send soldiers to risk their lives for our freedom surely we older folks can take the risk that would come with ending lockdowns for the sake of the young people, their livelihoods and their freedom.; 10/14/20, 8:43 AM
bagoh20 said...: Thanks for the great work Yancey.

I assume that the fatality rate averaging about 2.6% is still deaths with Covid rather than from Covid, which would only be 6% of that 2.6% according to the CDC, which works out to about 99.84% survival after contracting Covid, which matches up with the CDC's number. If we only knew this before we lost our minds.; 10/14/20, 8:56 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: lovely.; 10/14/20, 9:27 AM
tim in vermont said...: "94% of covid infections were transmitted in an indoor setting.”

Yep. That’s probably why the hot states where people seek air conditioning were hit hard over the summer. UV kills the virus on surfaces, and there is plenty of UV outside, even on cloudy days, and the movement of the air dilutes any airborne virus extremely quickly, not to mention that it gets killed in the air by the UV. I still wear a mask when I am walking around Boston, where I am right now, because it doesn’t cost much effort, there is the 6%, and it doesn’t bother me if low IQ people are judging me about it. Anyway, this morning I sat at a sidewalk table and ate a bagel and drank my coffee as people walked by, many unmasked. I am not too worried about it outside.

I have travelled a lot during this, I have been in every state on the Eastern Seaboard except Rhode Island, Maine, and NewYorkachussets (Connecticut) and what I have noticed is that where the virus has not hit hard, people don’t wear masks, regardless of how blue the state is (Vermont), and where the virus has hit hard, people do wear masks, regardless of how red the state is (Florida). That’s why this report that most of the people who have contracted COVID wore masks doesn’t mean anything except that masks are not bulletproof protection, which nobody ever claimed, where COVID infections are high, people wear masks.; 10/14/20, 9:38 AM
narciso said...: they are needlessly crushing economies, the livelihoods of millions, that's why one compares not one data point but a cluster of them.; 10/14/20, 9:45 AM
tim in vermont said...: "about 2.6% is still deaths with Covid rather than from Covid, “

The way you resolve problems like this in math class is to find a third equation so that you can disentangle the numbers. Math is hard, I know. Nevertheless, that third equation is excess deaths, which line up pretty well with the reported COVID deaths. Unless your contention is that the lockdowns have caused many more deaths than COVID, if so, it would be interesting to see your numbers. Or are you going by “feelz”?

I agree with Yancey that the spring numbers of cases were way under reported, almost certainly due to lack of testing, and that the case fatality rate is therefore lower than we believed at the time, we will never know exactly because nobody is going to do an experiment of treating the disease the same way we did in April to compare with today’s numbers. The problem with COVID is that it is so infectious that even with a low CFR, it’s going to kill more people than a similarly deadly flu in terms of CFR.

But yes, the lockdowns were harmful overkill. Other less costly methods could have achieved the same results. It’s just that you guys oppose those too. What a strange hill to let your credibility die on. What a strange position going into an election that people over fifty (they can still vote, and vote in large numbers, BTW) are expendable.; 10/14/20, 9:54 AM
mockturtle said...: Look into Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and his Great Reset. You will see how the Covid pandemic fits neatly into this agenda. If anyone is still seeing the Covid pandemic as an incidental health concern unrelated to global economics they need to take their blinders off. There is an excellent explanation of the agenda here: Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset. It is also available on video. A view of the future many of us will be glad to miss.; 10/14/20, 9:57 AM
buwaya said...: Europe is suffering from an excess of testing, it is giving a negative value as it frightens the people and public officials unnecessarily. So it is the US, to a lesser degree.

There is an explosion of cases, which are actually just positive detections, not active illness, all over Europe.

But there is no corresponding significant increase of people becoming ill, or dying.

There are an awful lot of non-dangerous cases being found, much more so than during the height of this thing, as there was far less testing going on.

I think this is because the lockdowns reduced spread (see, it worked!) among people who can "take it", and that would have provided herd immunity. There is therefore a lesser degree of herd immunity in Europe than there should have been had they all gone the Swedish route.

The gold standard of death counts, as I have mentioned often, is civil mortality records.

Lets take Spain. Spain and France show the same pattern of testing, positives detection and death -

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

This is Spain's last mortality report (a pdf).

Situación a 06 de octubre de 2020

That is, if one overlays the case reporting vs the track of actual mortality, since August say, there is no corresponding increase in mortality. Overall mortality is normal.

Also regions that were spared, relatively, are still spared. Naples and Sevilla are still fine.

Now, the US pattern is different. In many ways it is more like that of Mexico or Brazil. In these places Covid seems to burn through one region (or population center) after another in some sort of sequence. Right now it seems to be hitting the US Upper Midwest.; 10/14/20, 10:17 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: The top photo reminds me of this artist. I think she's WI.; 10/14/20, 10:17 AM
buwaya said...: " is to find a third equation so that you can disentangle the numbers."

Civil records mortality is exactly that check on medical information. This was used in Spain and France to recheck their numbers and "find" the deaths that were occurring outside the medical system. Quite a big deal several months ago.; 10/14/20, 10:21 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Yeah, Tim, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, the UK, and Italy should have had mask mandates- if they did, no second wave, right?; 10/14/20, 12:11 PM
tim in vermont said...: Pre-dawn is always cooler than the “money shot” sunrise, IMHO.; 10/14/20, 1:04 PM
tim in vermont said...: "if they did, no second wave, right?”

No, what I said was that the graph narciso posted didn’t prove anything, because the cited countries that were claimed to prove that shutdowns didn’t work had almost as high an incidence of COVID as Sweden, and yet still they are experiencing a second wave. So that study proved nothing. The majority of the countries that started low were still low, only Sweden, of the countries that started high ended low.

You guys always want certainty and answers in black and white in a complex situation, like small children who can’t handle ambiguity.

Here is an interesting study though that seems to demonstrate that cloth masks are all but worthless and you should be using the medical ones.

The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI (Influenza Like Illnesses) statistically significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth masks group compared with the medical masks group. Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577

I look for the stuff that goes to disprove my position. This is the Steve McIntyre credo, "always look the most critically at the stuff you want to believe." Of course other studies based on actual physical experiments have shown that medical masks, the simple kind that comes in 50 packs, is far more effective against coronaviruses than they are against flu viruses.

Why is it so hard for you to hold a complicated thought with many different aspects in your head to the point that you always have to invent some simplified words to put in my mouth imagining that you have really gotten off some devastating riposte.

But to answer your question, mask mandates are far lest costly and intrusive than shutdowns, and should be the go to response, along with public education, whereas now the shutdowns seem to be the preferred solution of governments. A disinterested person might ask themselves why you are so opposed to the less harmful alternative to the thing which you hate the most, the shutdowns?; 10/14/20, 1:39 PM
tim in vermont said...: Emails published by the New York Post Wednesday morning show that contrary to Joe Biden’s claims that he never talked business with his son, Hunter Biden, “or with anyone else,” the vice president at the time was indeed introduced to Ukrainian Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi by Hunter. Hunter Biden was raking in upwards of $50,000 a month in excess compensation for serving on the board of Burisma while his father served as the “public face” of the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine.

Leads to this from Facebook.

“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners,” wrote Facebook spokesperson and former Democratic staffer Andy Stone. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”

Jeezum Crow.

It would be simple enough for a reporter to ask Biden to go on the record as to whether the email is authentic as it appears to be. Which of course will not be done.; 10/14/20, 1:48 PM
tim in vermont said...: Now Twitter won’t even let you DM the story, much lest post it.

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2020/10/14/social-disease-59/; 10/14/20, 1:49 PM
tim in vermont said...: The Post's primary Twitter account (@nypost) has also been locked because the Hunter Biden stories violate its rules against "distribution of hacked material," per email we received from Twitter; 10/14/20, 3:45 PM