Life is that time you played
What started out as hide-and-seek
Then someone added Nerf guns
Secret bases, boys-vee-girls
And finally a rope swing and a dare
Water so cold it warmed the after-swimming air.
Treats meant to last the week eaten then and there.
Nothing ever tasted so sweet.
No one saw the June sun duck below the trees behind the river line.
Well past supper time!
On legs sore from running you nonetheless peeled
Across the fields
To a half-meant ‘sorry momma’, and a half-cold spaghetti meal.
Life is the buzzing sound
From music played too loud
And the noise of the college crowd.
That lingers still in ears and on your clothes
All down September’s rain-painted side-walk home,
Reminds you of that second pint,
The little smile she bore you
Sideways, mid sentence to her friends,
That might – just might – some future night, blossom into much, much more.
Life is those endless minutes waiting, anticipating
The breaking of the swept and polished order of long-kept
Knick-knacks, unmoved since last They stormed the door;
That in two violent minutes of shedding little coats and mittens triggered
More noise than needles make in all the winter weeks of knitting new ones, one size bigger.
Then They finally appear, you find
Little faces so filled with Now and so in likeness of Their parent-child, standing, smiling just behind,
It calls to mind, every school lunch prepared, every memory shared
and all those times bygone.
This rich reward, this weekend chaos, is the reason why you struggle on.
Life is never ‘staying safe’,
Waiting, clutching to existence,
Until every living risk fades to nothing.
Un petit mot pour te souhaiter une bonne année 2021. J’espère que tu as passé des bonnes fetes, et que le Père Noel a été généreux comme il faut.
Nous, c’est assez tranquille ici. Daphné a beaucoup apprécié le temps, surtout le fait qu’elle a pu rejoindre ses grand-parents. Elle a eu de la part de Père Noel un chateau fort de Duplo et aussi une poupée, qu’elle a appellée “Gala”.
Ta soeur Anna est resté a Dublin, elle bosse beaucoup pour l’université, mais elle a pu aussi voir ses copines et copains un petit peu. Je lui avais offert des bottes de “UGG” comme cadeau de Noel (ca sont des bottes a mon avis assez moches, mais apparemment très comfortable).
Et maintenant, on va avoir de la neige! J’espère que tu puisse aller dans le parc pour construire un bonhomme.
L’école recommence (et pour toi, et pour Daphné) après-demain – donc profitons des vacances encore quelques jours! Apres, j’espère qu’on puisse retourner, peu a peu, a la normale, après cette longue période de COVID, dont on a tous marre maintenant.
Je te donne tous les câlins possibles et je pense fort a toi, comme toujours.
Imagine an apple that has been drawn two different ways. The first is a mere illustration, an outline in black and white, one which lacks detail. Simple, yes. Yet it perfectly expresses the essence of the fruit – like the logo of a certain computer company.
The second drawing attempts to render the apple as true to life as possible, with colour, texture and background: all the details the human eye supplies to the brain when confronted with the real thing. But imagine the artist lacks the high degree of skill to deliver on this photographic promise. Let’s say the colour is wrong, the hue of the light rings false, the texture is not sufficiently apple-y.
When we put these two pictures side by side, we ‘see’ a better apple in the illustration. By providing us only with an idea, it allows our imagination to fill in the other details. The second, on the other hand, jars in our brains. It bothers us, despite the effort that might have gone into its crafting. Less is sometimes more.
In ‘The Pillars of the Earth’, Ken Follett has tried for more. A lot more. His portrayal of medieval life in the south west of England is very detailed. We eat, sleep, travel and even copulate with the stonemasons, monks and earls who populate his pages. It is obvious to the reader that he has meticulously researched his subject. But that is precisely the problem – the reader is too aware of the research. At times it feels like we are reading his notes and not his fiction. It is too studied, and therefore rings false.
There are also a number of structural problems, again due to the high level of ambition. It’s damn nigh impossible to sustain over three generations and as many cathedrals the strong plot dynamics for which Follett is known. There are lulls and the conclusion to one of the central plot threads is both contrived and unsatisfying. Follett also seems unsure whether to write Aliena, one of the central characters, as a fierce female protagonist, or as a weeping damsel in distress. In the end, he tries a bit of both, and for me it simply doesn’t work. This I found particularly disappointing, given how well he rendered the characters in the other novel of his I read (“Night Over Water”).
That said, the opening is strong enough; the protagonists likeable enough and the villains loathsome enough to keep the reader hooked.
It’s just a pity he didn’t stick to mere illustration.
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical, and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e.the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 4th October 2020
To sign the declaration, follow this link (will be live later today): www.GBdeclaration.org
Bonjour mon cher fils! J’espere que tu profites bien des vacances (il a quand meme fait beau ce dernier temps, bien que un peu frais pour la saison).
Moi je dois encore travailler, mais ta soeur Daphne est deja parti en vacances avec ses grand-parents (J’etais un jour a la plage au Pays-Bas, magnifique!). Anna va venir a Bruxelles aujourd’hui et ensuite elle partira en France pour marcher dans les montagnes – tres, tres joli la-bas (il parait qu’il y a meme des loups!)
Je ne sais pas si tu pars en vacances, mais si c’est le cas, et bien j’espere de tout coeur que tu t’amuse bien. Peut-etre aller a la plage et manger une glace? Peut-etre faires des stages avec tes copains? Tu es devenu tres grand maintenant, donc, je suppose qu’il y a beaucoup d’activites possible pour toi (malgre le corona).
Et puis, pour Septembre, esperant qu’ils ne vont pas fermer les ecoles de nouveau. Ces mesures corona sont tres nuisibles pour nos enfants, qui ont bien le droit a une education libre des peurs et des craintes des vieux…
Take me back somehow
To when I dreamed I’d have
A better now than now.
Return me in place and mind
To those fledgling times when we were lax and preened,
So small we lodged ourselves between the cracks
Of that and this unchanged machine
In which we now have risen to be full-fledged cogs.
Take me back
To when my back impressed upon the chain-linked wire
Dangled legs all splayed, tired out
From too much tennis played,
And spent this one forgetless hour
Before a shower and off to watch a movie.
Return me even to those since-forgotten fears,
To the stoney months and years
Of want and doubt and grit and scree,
From which Nostalgia – liar that she is –
Pans out her precious golddust memories.
Take me back
And if you say it can’t be done
For pity’s sake,
Give my back the strength to carry on.
It happened the other day, while I was reading George du Maurier’s Trilby, that a young man asked me whether I read mainly fiction or non-fiction – his preference clearly being for the latter. I answered the former, and had to supress within me a slight sense of shame. Does the fiction reader not, after all, sunbathe in supercillious fantasy while lazing on the beach; whereas the non-fiction reader applies his mind to the ‘hard facts’?
Maybe it is engrained in us to think so. But the distinction is shallow and meaningless when you dig a little deeper. For one thing, if 2020 has anything to teach us, it is that the ‘hard facts’, even those that are as hard as rock, are so numerous and tiny that they give way to the cudgel of dogma and zealotry, like grains of sand on that very same beach. One eye-catching event, propelled by the right algorithms, can trump an entire discipline of rigorous empiricism.
Non-fiction can easily fall into the trap of pretending the ‘castle of truth’ which the author has built up is structurally sound. Fiction, as written from the perspective of the narrator, or better still, the third persons who inhabit the narration, harbours no such pretense of architectural stability. The reader knows that the truth on which a novel is based is a shifty one; changing with the tide and giving way to the footprints left by the author’s own biases, those of his characters and those of the reader.
In this respect, a book like ‘Trilby’ helps us gain perspective on the ‘truthiness’ of our own age. It places fantastical events in a historical and subjective context, and in doing so removes us from the fantastical context of our own time, allowing us to regard these as no less subjective and ephemeral.
At the time of its publication, ‘Trilby’ was a sensation – the ‘Da Vinci Code’ of its day. Upon reading it, it’s easy to see why. Borrowing with self-effacing openness from Thackery, Dickens and Dumas, this festival of vanity, a tale set in Two Cities, chronicles the adventures of three very British ‘musketeers of the brush’ (artists) and their acquaintance with the Anglo-Irish Parisian washerwoman of the title. The narrative is light and fun, rich in the tradition of turn-of-the-Century satirists like Wilde or Saki. The plot is compelling, though perhaps somewhat too linear for modern tastes.
Mostly though, I read it as an antidote to the irrationality and illiberalism of the dominant ‘Liberal’ world view. If we must inhabit sand castles in order to have a coherent frame of reference, let’s at least decorate them with the colourful seashells of funny, well-written Victorian prose.
I’m writing to you to express my concern about the medical consensus that has slowly formulated around the use of face masks in public settings as a measure to mitigate against the spread of COVID-19. I read your bmj article on the subject and was frankly alarmed at the arguments you used to back this position.
Having looked at the issue in some detail, it seems reasonably clear that there is at best, as you put it, ‘sparse and controversial’ evidence that face masks stop the spread of SARS-Cov-2 in the community setting.The fact that you nevertheless argue in favour of such measures, on the basis that you see them as essentially costless – “we have little to lose” – is deeply worrying.
Mandatory rules around the use of masks in public are far from costless. In the first instance, they have important and detrimental consequences on the hearing impaired, who rely on lip reading to understand and contextualise verbal meaning. More generally, facial expression is an intrinsic part of human interactions; physical barriers impede not only droplets of saliva, but also the visual appreciation of body language which is a large part of the context in which speech is delivered.
Second, there is the economic and environmental cost of mass production, dissemination and disposal of face masks. A single mask is of low cost, but multiplied by millions, it represents a not-insubstantial addition to our impact on the planet, and a related economic burden, particularly on the most vulnerable in our society.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the very act of mandating an accoutrement of this kind entails a system of state intervention and imposition on public life. The symbol value is strong; it is a mark of control, just as certain religions mandate the use of clothing to demarcate adherence to doctrine; just as military and law enforcement mandates the wearing of uniforms to instil discipline and diminish any instinct towards individualism which might threaten the goals of the collective.
Indeed, the very requirement to conform is a small – but persistent and deep – incision into our liberties. It lessens our individuality all the more to have the most expressive and personal part of our anatomy covered from view in public, and it allows the state and the medical establishment to dictate our behaviours, not – I repeat – on the basis of any substantiated scientific knowledge, but rather on the whim of a cadre of experts, who merely deem it possible that this measure could have a beneficial effect.
Apropos the beneficial effect: Your article was written in early April, when less was known about the shape and scale of the COVID threat. Though even at that stage the contours of the epidemic were crystallizing as less than apocalyptic, there was still some concern that COVID could carry with it an infection fatality rate of as high as 1-2%, with an infected population of 70 to 80% of the general population.
It is now amply clear to anyone who takes an honest look at the data that this worst case scenario is not only implausible, but in fact nearly impossible. In Belgium, where I live, almost all lockdown measures have been relaxed since early June – schools reopened, shops, bar and restaurants are full – all with no effect on new ICU admissions. Hospitals are almost completely empty.
Indeed, as some experts wisely predicted even at the time, populations would reach full exposure (Belgium, France, Northern Italy, most of the UK, New York) as the disease followed a classic gamma trajectory, with heavy left skewness; whereafter the rate of new infection would cease to be a major public health concern. The infection fatality rate will never exceed 0.01%, and is even lower when measured in quality adjusted life years.
As the evidence gathers, in fact, it becomes increasingly obvious that the lockdowns put in place had only marginal or no effect on the spread of the disease, and that to the extent they did anything, it has been only to slow the virus’ inevitable progression across the population.
In this context, your core argument for insisting on the use of face masks: “covid-19 is a serious illness that currently has no known treatment or vaccine and is spreading in an immune naive population. Deaths are rising steeply, and health systems are under strain.” appears much less compelling than it perhaps did in April.
Given the above, I would ask you to reconsider your position as expressed in the article, and work with your co-authors to publish a corrigium, in which you argue against the mandatory use of face masks in the community setting.
I have rarely felt so profoundly disappointed with the state of the rational world as I do these past few weeks. Perhaps it was my own cognitive dissonance at play, but if you had asked me a few short months ago, I would have rated our level of collective rationality as – overall – pretty high. Boy, was I wrong.
In fact, we live in a world in which the principles of scientific observation are disregarded, or else regarded selectively, in such a way as to concur with our collective feelings; in this case, collective hysteria. It is, as someone I know once put it, the essence of ‘policy-based evidence-making’. The clearest and most horrible example is the widespread use of the ‘number of cases’ statistic in the context of the COVID flare-up that struck in March/April (and has since gone away from almost all parts of the world). You won’t see a news report these days that doesn’t quote the ‘number of cases’, despite all honest epidimologists knowing the case count is a meaningless number: It tells you a little bit about the level of testing and nothing at all about the infection rate, for the strikingly obvious reason that the denominator is completely unknown.
See no evil, hear no evil, spit no droplets of evil
Another good example is the use of face masks. They are more than just ubiquitous, they are fashionable. While in a shop yesterday, I took the opportunity to engage the mouthless young woman behind the til in conversation. Did her employer insist she wear one? No, came the muffled response from where her mouth should have been, but she chose to, because it made her feel better. “Although I don’t really know if it does anything,” she added, almost apologetically.
That’s of course fine. In a free society, anyone should have the right to adorn their bodies with whatever tin foil armour they believe might protect them from their chosen alien invaders. The problem is when the use of such adornments becomes compulsory thoughout the ‘free’ world, as is now the case on public transport, on flights, in indoor spaces, and even on public streets.
A narrative built on a meta-study built on a not-so-randomised control trail
Let’s be perfectly clear: there is no evidence that face masks protect against the spread of viral infections in the community setting. And I say this after having spent some time reviewing, line by line, the extant literature that has been recently quoted by proponents of the practice. What is shocking is how disingenious the pro-mask campaign can be.
One good example of how bad some of these studies are is to be found in one NYC radomised control trial from 2010, in which 450 households in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood were studied, divided into three control groups: Group one was given ‘education’ only about how to reduce infection. The second group was given ‘education plus hand sanitizer’. The third group was given ‘education plus hand sanitizer plus face masks’, with instructions that the head of household should wear one if anyone displayed symptoms, as well as children over 3 and ‘if possible’ the sick elderly person in the household.
One bad virus multiplied by a nasty dose of Twitter rage and lo! we’re back to the Middle Ages
The study reports the characteristics of the three groups, which despite ‘randomisation’ show clearly that the group which received face masks had different socio-economic characteristics: 50.8% of the face mask adults had high school diplomas or better, as against only 40.2% for the ‘education only’ control group. Then, though admitting that the face mask group never really used the face masks anyway, the authors proceed to conclude that the face masks are effective in reducing transmission of influenza.
This, in turn, is one of a number of studies quoted in the metastudies, such as the May 22 2020 Annals of Internal Medicine review, which in turn is used by media sources to support the public narrative. Even if these studies are cautious not to lie (the May 22 metastudy includes the rather unambiguous statement that “No direct evidence indicates that public mask wearing protects either the wearer or others.”), the authors know it’s the headlines that grab the public attention. And theirs is unambiguous in its messaging: “Cloth Masks May Prevent Transmission of COVID-19”. Again, not a lie, but it’s also true that pulverised moondust mixed with elephant tusk may cure cancer. No evidence, mind you, but it may.
Unmasking the cover-up
A question is why, if I can discover all this in a few days’ reading as a lay person, the medical, scientific and political establishment is so keen on pushing the face mask narrative? I posit a couple of possible answers.
First, a benign suggestion: The shock which COVID hysteria caused in society is best managed by allowing for a gradual return to normal. Like the masked salesgirl I refer to above, people actually feel better, more secure, with the masks. The argument then goes that we, as a society, should all mask up – at least for a while – to help the shellshocked return to public life without undue fear.
Now a more malignant thought: What if the political forces, including state-associated virologists and medical experts, now know that they massively overreacted to the outbreak of COVID-19? Maybe they have figured out, well ahead of the public, that the lockdowns were mostly ineffective (coming weeks if not months after they could have made any difference), and the infection fatality rate may in fact be as low as 0.05%. They also realise that they have wreaked untold harm on the economies and societies whose management was entrusted to them. Reputations, maybe even careers, are at stake. The game is now one of making ‘unlocking’ seem gradual, complicated, drawn out; because if they went back to normal too quickly, questions might be raised about why exactly we were forced to give up a third of our economy and two thirds of our civil liberties.
Some books smack of polish. The prose is heavy with the weight of old creative writing classes or mimickry of past literary idols.
Sometimes the polish even drips and coagulates into globs at the bottom of the page. It’s as if we can smell the coffee from the Starbucks where the author sat, back in February of 1998, when she first read Hemingway and, looking out the window at the drab Seattle rain, dreamt of one day living in New York City and ‘being an author’. Or else we hear the writer’s impatient fingers upon the keyboard at his office in the community college’s English department, desperately trying to ‘find his voice’ the way he tells his students to, rather than just telling a story.
Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet is certainly not one of these books. The prose has no polish whatsoever. As a result, the writing is crude, almost to the point of distraction. Choppy. Fragments of sentences, running on. An attempt. An attempt to convey the protagonist’s panicked state of mind. A heavy-handed abuse of language. At least in my opinion.
But what Paulsen lacks in literary finesse, he more than makes up for with the quality of his story. The tale is a simple one – a teenage boy named Brian survives the crash of a single engine plane and must learn to live in the Canadian wilderness, with only the eponymous hatchet and the clothes on his back.
Like all great stories, Paulsen has no need to mimic other writers, or to worry about finding a voice. He simply tells Brian’s story, and that is more than enough for the reader to suspend disbelief; to join Brian in the woods, rejoicing with him over every little comfort, salivating at the taste of berries and fish in the starving boy’s mouth.
I understand completely why this book has become a favourite of high school English teachers. And as is the case with all good young adult fiction, it reads just as well, even if you are much older.
As with birth rates, we use data for 4 categories of countries from 1990 to 2015 (100 observations total). We have two explanatory variables, AGE and Y, where AGE is defined as the percentage of the population aged over 65 and Y is per capita GDP.
After eyeballing the scattergrams, we test the following functional form:
d = (minY^a)/Y^a * (1/AGE^g)
Where minY is the constant equal to the smallest value of Y in the series.
Logarithmic transformation gives:
ln(d) = ln(minY^a) – a*ln(Y) – g*ln(AGE)
which we test on the data using OLS. Here are the results:
Adjusted R square: 75.191
Intercept coefficient: 7.37384
t-Stat: 20.4011
Y coefficient: -1.01444
t-Stat: -13.1059
AGE coefficient: 2.0097
t-Stat: 11.5208
The estimated intercept is a good, but not perfect, approximation of ln(minY^a)
Here are the fitted against actual values of the scattergram for death rate against per capita GDP:
While the results are not as good as with the birth rates calculations, it is nevertheless a good enough fit and the explanatory variables have a strong enough confidence factor to be usable in our estimations.
We begin by examining the scatter of data for 100 observations of per capita GDP and per capita emissions for 4 categories of countries, over 25 years (1990 – 2015).
The scatter suggests a cubic functional form, so we test:
GHG = a + b*Y + c*Y^2 + d*Y^3
where GHG are per capita emissions of GHG, and Y is per capita GDP.
