Got Nothing to do with the COVID - get nerdy

 Join Zooniverse and starting looking for planets with Planet Hunters TESS.

Three Paths

One of my least favorite sportscasters of all time routinely spewed all sorts of claims about what was going to happen in the game, then inevitably told us how it worked out like he said.  Of course, if your prediction is that team A is going win, lose, or there will be a draw, you are never wrong; but your predictions don't carry a lot of weight.  For my own part, I made a lot of predictions about Trump just as he took office like:  Trump's a destroyer and all he can do is tear stuff apart, Trump thinks lying is his magic power because he knows it disorients other people, Trump is inherently dishonest because he thinks that his edge in business, and Putin has something on Trump, probably related to debts, so he is going to sell us out.  (Mostly I think this turned out to be true) 

At the moment, I do not feel I can make an accurate prediction about what is going to happening, but I think there are three possible paths with respect to our democracy.  We reached a historical moment where a sitting President (Trump) used the power of his position and the help of multiple broadcasting networks to attempt to overthrow a duly elected new President (Biden).  We were fortunate to avoid having the Vice President and various other members of Congress assassinated.   Rather than recoil in horror about the situation, the majority of Republicans (at least in polling) and their elected officials have aligned with the President.  

As broader background, I will repeat an anecdote and recap various things I have read or heard on the news recently.

"CEOs are like mob bosses"

Over the last decade I have been close or part of the sale of a couple of companies.  In each cases, the CEO was switched out in short order and all the management was replaced with "friends" of the new CEO.  Some of these people were qualified and some were disastrously unqualified.  I was talking with another senior officer at another company and he dropped the prophetic line that "CEOs are like mob bosses, the always bring in their friends to have their back."

Trump mostly dumped anyone who was not a yes man at the national level and kept his family close.  At the state level, Trump purged many state GOPs of the old school Republicans and replaced them Trumpists.  This is why Wyoming and Arizona and trying to cancel their own elected officials.  The GOP of just four years ago has literally been taken over and replaced with friends of Trump.

This is probably not the full mind of all traditional GOP voters, but a large majority are already pre-disposed to Fox/Trump/Evangelical Nationalist view points at this point.  

What this means is that the old GOP is either dead forever or not coming back for a very long time.  The GOP is not a big tent party any more and it has gravitated towards a violent race-oriented nationalism.  Of course, if you have been fed a diet of grievances, and the demonization of Democrats, other races, other countries, other religions, and government in general; it is much easier to listen to the hate than it is to think about getting along with your neighbors.

If I had to make a prediction about this, it would be that the GOP will continued to shed some portion of voters over to independents and find it very hard to grow any more.  In particular, the college educated suburban voters who were alright with things so long as they were not a target themselves and it was not too blatant could let it slip.  Those people drove Biden to victory even though Trump turned out new GOP voters.  The GOP has so highly delineated itself they will not be able to turn around.  Not sure what this means to Liz Cheney in the short term.  Still - Trump turned out a big surge in GOP voters - it was just smaller than the big surge in Democratic voters.  I just do not believe these people will turn out if Trump is not on the ticket (like GA giving us to Democratic Senators).

A not so difficult prediction is that the GOP will continue to focus on further anti-democratic methods like voter suppression techniques such as restricting who can vote, how you can vote, and implementing more severe gerrymandering.   (Though hard to see how you could gerrymander states like NC more severely).  Without the original gerrymander of the Senate through the Electoral College and gerrymandering in general, the Democratic would have easily controlled the House, Senate, and the Presidency in this last election and would have more power at the state level.

Anti-democratic tendencies have been built into the GOP strategy for years now, because they had turned inward for so long.  Trumpism will not make this better.

Confronting Cult Members only Strengthens their Beliefs

A number of posts have been written about the difficulty on reaching individuals such as diehard QAnon believers.  Individuals so strongly identify with their group that being confronted about their beliefs they will only close down even more.  If you doubt them, then you are simply part of the broader conspiracy against them.  Or something like that.

If you hope for them to get better, your best approach may be able to get them to relate to you on human terms, outside of anything in their main belief set where they cannot tolerate disagreement.  One of the best things, if it is possible, is to remove or limit their ability to hear more reinforcing information.  Without constant feeding, people are able to return to a standard set of reference (e.g. facts, friends, and family) and move away from the cult/conspiracy beliefs.  So, there is no quick fix for the state of the GOP, and, they have to be treated like snowflakes to avoid triggering their violent leanings.  Reinstating the voter protections, anti-gerrymandering rules, and getting social media magnets to purge the worst is probably what we can do.

If you doubt that the rightwing has a strong cult-like presence, you need not look further than their extreme intolerance of anybody that has a different view point.  Just watch Liz Cheney getting treated like an apostate because she is a Republican questioning Trump's behavior, the sometimes violent (verbal or physical) response to having to wear a mask in stores, the burning desire of so many to "own the libs."  Irony will never be dead when a Republican talks about "cancel culture" at the same time the call other Republicans RINOs or seek to cancel a fair election.

In short, the GOP has very many strong cult like characteristics.  I realize this is not all Republicans, the majority of them still believe the last Presidential election was corrupt.  It was fair and you know that because even with all the power the Presidency, the Trumps lawyers literally never brought forth any evidence in court.  The reason was that lying in court gets you in legal trouble.  Another reason to think that a systematic corruption of the voting machinery across the many different states and voting is monumentally difficult, especially when all states have lots of rules and mechanisms to ensure the vote is counted.  One systematic attempt at voter fraud I know of in this era took place in NC and naturally involved a Republican and it did not go well.  That kind of voter fraud is hard. 

There are other ways to sway the vote, like robocalls and giving out false voting information which are hard to trace.  The best way to do steal an election is through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

QAnon is a Fascist Organization 

Fascism is a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.  Mirriam-Webster.

QAnon is focused on implementation of a Trump lead autocracy that posited the violent overthrow of the left.  I would not profess to the know all of the details because it seems to bind together racial and religious stereotypes.  It is pretty easy to see what white nationalists and Christian nationalist groups are looking to recruit from the QAnon ranks, they actually may have a more coherent world view. 

Trump hardly seems to have started QAnon, but he was more than willing to fan the flames and eventually like the fuse on January 6th.  Trump spent four years trying to implement himself as a dictator and a large number of Republicans seem totally OK with that.   

Control of the narrative is crucial fascist governments.  QAnon and the broader rightwing news industry have effectively been able to dictate a narrative to the right.

Three Paths  

Barring a single prediction, there seem like three paths:

Fascism Wins:  Democracy takes willing participants.  It does not require a majority to overthrow a democracy.  It is possible that enough people will simply give up on democracy and for them to have enough power.

Paralysis Wins:  There is enough division in the country that it is does not coalesce one side or the other.  In this path, the United States will continue to weaken as international force and will remain a tale of two countries.  It will also be weakened economically.   I do not think this is sustainable forever, so it would like go one way of the other.

Progressivism Wins:  Democrats, engaged independents, and some Republicans respond to COVID and other issues by competently leading the nation and using government to rebuild the country.  This leads to a marginalization of Trumpism which slowly fades.

If I had to bet, it would be half paralysis and half progressivism, but it might well be any of these.

[12 Feb 2021] I made some editorial fixes to this.  I think the country would mostly like to be center right and the reason I do not see us going there is that the so-called RINOs that represent that area have been too marginalized by the GOP.   Independents and conservative democrats will not organizing themselves in group capable to seizing that political space.

Biden Day 1, Extraordinary Evidence

Random bits

Michigan beat Maryland handily yesterday (19 January 2021) in basketball.  The Michigan Women's basketball team is also a top 10 team and currently undefeated.  Go Blue.

I worked less than 10 hours today, but it was still a long day.  

Biden Inauguration

This evening I watched the presidential election and it was struck by what a different vision of the United States it was.  The only positive about the 'rona is that the evening broadcast was it allowed for a highly polished virtual celebration in the evening.  My son probably could see the fireworks in DC, so I am a bit jealous about that.  The production was very much in line with the Democratic convention but smoother and more studded with A list stars.   I would not be surprised to see this repeated in the future.

This Digby's Hullabaloo post a nice piecing together of key snippets of the actual inauguration.  The Amanda Gorman poem was my favorite part.

The evening "concert" is such a different vision of America than the January 6th siege crowd that it is hard to think they co-exist ... if we did not all know a Qanon fan boy or girl and realize that Fox probably didn't cover it at all.

Extraordinary Evidence

In the run up to 2016 my brother-in-law's wife's father, an evangelical, trying to get into a discussion about the secret cabal controlling everything.  It was straight up Protocol of the Elder's of Zion stuff (racist hate-justifying bunk).  Given his age I tried to basically say I did not really for that kind of conspiracy theory stuff and we have not spoken too much since then.  Suffice to day he believed that "Trump was going to be a game changer."   Admittedly, he was right about that. 

To the old man's point, I did posit that there was also the impact of money and control of the media that did give people a lot of control of the narrative which allowed them to control people's beliefs.  I had in mind Fox and the highly funded bubble it had created; and how that provided enormous control of people's beliefs.  The January 6th coup attempt was the ultimate metastasis of the the right wing bubble.  The US may yet fall to a right wing fascist regime, but it was averted for now.

The Qanon stuff is one I've never quite understood. In the beginning Fox very craftily shaped the narrative about what was going on and intermixed it with factual reporting.  That selective reporting and messaging about intent is very potent. On the surface, the Qanon conspiracy requires accepting very extreme beliefs that are pretty out of the range of common sense explanations of events.  When I hear those kind of things, my first reaction the easiest explanation is usually the correct one.  Common sense frequently rules - even in complex modeling situations.  It always brings back Carl Sagan's position on aliens:  extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.   Show me a captured Bigfoot, show me live alien, otherwise kindly don't try to kill me or people like me.  Find a better hobby.

After Trump won, I was asked what I thought about Trump.  It was January 2016 and I said, Trump is a destroyer.  HIs gig is contradicting everyone else, lying, and seizing on the fact that most people are not used to dealing with that all of the time.   Of course, I also had a boss that did the same stuff and I was forced to quit my job to get away from it.  I was proven profoundly correct.  

I did get a "smart" response that "sometimes you have to destroy stuff to make it better."

I guess that could be true if the problem is a group of people trying to overthrow the government in a coup who also believe in racial purity and killing everyone else.  

Our government is more like a bridge across a river that allows people to get together and supports all sorts of positive benefits.  If you destroy the bridge, all you are left with is nothing.  Terrorists blow up bridges.  Trump was really nothing more than a terrorist who spent 4 years trying to tear about our nation.   But, you watch enough Fox and Newsmax, and there you go.

Today was so much about the believing in a common good and the value a functional government.  Of course, I'd like to be hopeful, but much of the mechanics of the the last 30 years of the right have not changed just because Trump inspired extremists attempted a coup.  (Of course, there was no real Qanon seizure of power and Trump isn't some kind of secret genius spy.  You'd have to provide some pretty extraordinary evidence for that when a lying sociopathic grifter is the common sense explanation.  I'm pretty thankful for that since I'm a Democrat and I'd hate to be killed in part of some societal purge).  

But may be, just may be, we will see some discussions of policy and compromise in the coming year.  You know, the kind of thing you'd expect in a democracy.

Everyone stay safe.

PS - There was some talk about CA pulling a hold on a lot of Moderna COVID vaccines.  That seemed to disappear, but it was simultaneously good see epidemiologic principles of tracking in use and bad to hear about a potential issue with one of the vaccines.   I'll have to research it a bit more I guess. 

Howdy World

I hope everyone is doing well.  With some luck I managed to get the email back for this blogger account.  That makes 8 years.  A lot happens in 8 years... my last post was about Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign against Barack. 

It is a little bit like getting back in touch with a High School friend.   So much time has past that you can't help but be curious to see how they have fared.  

I analyze data for drug companies, devices, diagnostics, and similar such stuff.  I've been meaning to do this on Facebook, but I kind of  boycott Facebook because it is used to spread lies and hate messages for the profit of Mark Z.   So, ah, no.

So my public service work is to point out that when the FDA approves something it publishes a summary basis of approval or a summary of safety and effectiveness.  They have varying levels of details and often results will be included in the labeling materials for a product.  The FDA is kind of picky about what makes it into a label, so typically you can look for publications with the main study results for clinical trials.

The work done on clinical trials is regulated.  The study sites that participate in studies can be audited and sanctioned if they are not following rules well enough.  If you work on trials in the US, the government can show up and audit you.  If you happen to be involved in the analysis of data for a pivotal clinical trial for publicly traded company and it looks like there is suspicious trading, the government can ask you to share the names of everyone who knew the results before they become publicly shared.  I'll skip the other rules that are in place to make sure what the FDA is getting honest data and honestly reporting the results, but the point is ... the information the FDA is providing goes through a lot more vetting and rigorous protection than most of the stuff that shows up on the web.  Especially the dark web and internet chat boards.

In my work, I have worked on many approved products and in all of them the FDA's summary documents replicated the analyses tables that were provided to them.  There was never anything going on.  The same goes for publications in medical journals of the study results.

The Moderna Vaccine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) is here.

Skip right to Page 20 - it covers the study disposition.  This covers the number of subjects who entered the study, were randomized, and if they completed the study.  This includes more than 30,000 subjects.  A per-protocol population was defined and included 27,000 subjects.  A per-protocol population typically excludes subjects who deviate from the planned study assessments in some significant way.

If you look at Page 29, the results of an interim analysis of the per-protocol population was completed.  This is interesting because the confirmed cases was quite low when in both arms (5 cases in 13,934 person years in the vaccine arm and 90 in 13,883 person years).  This surprised me as I expected the rates would be higher.  When Moderna reports a 94.5% vaccine efficacy they are talking about the reduction in this rate of cases).  The rate in person years is dependent upon exposure in the populations and the comparison assumes that people getting randomly exposed is similar in the groups.  Note this is a blinded trial, so participants will not know what they received.  

The final analysis was 11/13,914 and 185/13,883.   If you ever had a statistics class you will know a p-value is hovering around.  A p-value says how likely the relative difference is to occur by chance.  The p-value for this comparison was <0.0001.  That means the 11 vs 185 events would happen by chance is less than that 1 in 10,000.  Here is a link to a John Hopkins site that at mortality in COVID infected individuals.  Much of this appears higher than 1 in 100 in many countries.  Given that many people who are not symptomatic likely do not get tested, the actual mortality must be lower.  

Is it safe?  There are clearly more events and higher grade events when subjects were solicited for them and more injection site reactions.  Serious related events and deaths were similar in both arms, so from 30,000' it looks safe in terms of the most serious results by not without some additional risk of an event. Assessing risk benefit is something you should do with your doctor if you are concerned.

If you ever really want to find out for yourself what a drug, biologic or device looks like, start with fda. gov and work out from there.

Stay safe.