Tuesday, August 31, 2021

BabelColour

One of my favorite twitter feeds is BabelColour by Stuart Humphryes where he takes old color photos and reprints them, sometimes with restoration but never colourised.  It's worth browsing through.  Some recent examples:


 

Monday, August 30, 2021

Tomorrow Never Knows

Revolver was released 55 years ago this month and its last track was Tomorrow Never Knows, a song unlike anything The Beatles had previously recorded and unlike anything we'd heard before.  For us teens it was an indication of where the band and music in general would be heading in the future.  Oddly enough, Tomorrow Never Knows was the first song recorded for the album back in April 1966.

The song featured many recording innovations discussed in the video below by Giles Martin, son of George Martin.  And don't miss the unusual repetitive drumming by Ringo which must have been difficult to maintain for three minutes.


COVID + 17

With the Delta variant on the loose, Covid is now global.  As mentioned in the last report South and Southeast Asia, a region only lightly touched by the virus for over a year has, since early summer, become a hot spot.  Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Myanmar are each averaging the equivalent of 1,000 to 3,000 deaths a day in the U.S.  For reference the seven-day average for deaths in the U.S. peaked at 3,500 in mid-January 2021 and is currently at 1,060.

Two months ago I felt we were past the worst of covid but am no longer so optimistic.  Actually we are past the worst, I just thought things would continue to improve as they had since the spring.  Two months ago I wasn't wearing a mask when going into a store, now I am.  I know several vaccinated people who have recently got covid, though none ended up in the hospital.  

This piece from Charles Cooke at National Review sums it up, "The Bitter Truth: There's Still No Rhyme or Reason to Covid-19":

Two presidents. Fifty states. One-hundred-and-ninety-five countries. A multitude of different approaches. And still, there’s no rhyme or reason to this pandemic.

A few days ago, the New York Times ran an excellent piece on the terrible spike in Florida. “Even a state that made a major push for vaccinations . . . can be crushed by the Delta variant,” the paper observed, while noting that “Florida ranks 21st among states and Washington, D.C., in giving people of all ages at least one shot.” Indeed, the Times noted, nobody is quite sure why this is happening. “Exactly why the state has been so hard-hit,” it concluded, “remains an elusive question” — not least because “other states with comparable vaccine coverage have a small fraction of Florida’s hospitalization rate.”

Many of the Times’s readers were frightfully upset by this blunt assessment of the facts.

For months, many in the press have banged on and on and on about Florida’s governor and then been shocked to learn that, even after a terrible spike — a spike that, mercifully, is beginning to fade — Florida’s record remains better than those of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, and Illinois; that the number of children who have died in Florida (per capita) is not only exactly in line with the national average, but around five times lower than D.C.’s number, and just over half of New York’s; that, far from lagging behind, Florida’s vaccination rate is above the national average; and that, despite having a disproportionately old population, Florida sits in the bottom half for deaths among senior citizens. The state of Louisiana, which seems to get hit around the same time as Florida each time there is a wave of COVID-19 infections, currently boasts many policies that Florida does not — among them, an ongoing indoor mask mandate that applies even to the vaccinated, a statewide school-mask mandate for all students over the age of five, and, in the city of New Orleans, a system of vaccine passports. Despite this, Louisiana’s death rate is the fourth worst in the nation, while Florida — which has a much older population (as of 2020, Florida has the largest senior population in the union; Louisiana’s is 42nd) — sits in 20th place. What gives?

The uncomfortable truth is that, beyond developing, encouraging, and providing inoculation, there’s not much that any government can do to guarantee success — and, even when it does what it can, a lot of people are going to resist for reasons bad and good.  

Given how polarized we are at present, one can easily comprehend why, in its early days, so many political obsessives thought it might be efficacious to use the pandemic as a stick. But now? Eighteen months in? It’s beyond time for them to shut the hell up.

Covid is a virus and it's going to do it's virus thing.  Get vaccinated (isn't it great it became available so quickly?), take reasonable precautions, and hope for the best.  Johns Hopkins maintains a data base of opening and closing decisions by each state along with case trends.  I can't make out much of a connection between those decisions and the disease outcomes.

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The case against masking children in school.  Matt Shapiro is pretty objective in my view and sets out the reasons for his position.

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Simpson's Paradox strikes again!  How what looks like lower vaccine efficacy in an amalgamated population can be deceptive.

 


 

Simpson's Paradox (about which I wrote several years ago) is when a top line result looks very different from its individual components because of ratio differences between those components.  Here's another recent example related to Covid.  A couple of months ago I noticed that Florida's covid mortality rate was about 10% higher than California's but when I looked in more detail I discovered the death rate in each individual age group was higher in California than in Florida!  What drove the top line difference was that Florida has a much older population than California.

Sunday, August 29, 2021

Fight On!

 

(Yes, this is a satire account)

The Curse

"The curse laid on our politics is of fundamentally intellectual people who view human society as a problem to be solved, once, finally and for good and forever and for all places and times, and not as an endless process of living together as best we can from one day to the next" 

- The End Times



Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Diversity

Diversity in itself is not our strength.   The Western philosophy and values that allow for Diversity, that was the root of our strength.   Western culture was what made us a coherent people regardless of race, or creed, or origin.   That’s what made us coherent.   And the belief in the supremacy of that Western culture propelled  our exceptionalism.  

- Samuel Huntington

End Of The Line

Goodbye Charlie Watts; you were always so cool amid the chaos.  All Down The Line from a 2008 concert filmed by Martin Scorsese.

Friday, August 13, 2021

The Year Of The French

 "Our life has been a house with the door bolted and the shutters fastened tight"

In late August 1798, three French warships sailed into a harbor on the coast of Mayo, a poor isolated country in the northwest of Ireland.  About a thousand soldiers disembarked under the command of General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, an illiterate trader of animal skins from the Vosges who rose in the tumult of the French Revolution and brutally suppressed the Vendee uprising.

The expedition fulfilled the wishes of many Irish exiles who had pleaded with the French Directory for an invasion to liberate the island from the British (an earlier expedition in 1796 by a large French invasion force thwarted by ill winds off the south coast of Ireland).  

Humbert's first landing was to be followed by a second, larger fleet carrying several thousand French soldiers, a fleet that never arrived.

Attracting a crew of a couple of thousand Irish, mostly peasants or landless and armed primarily with pikes, Humbert embarked on an 18-day campaign into the island at first winning unexpected success in battle before Lord Cornwallis captured Humbert and his French and massacred most of the Irish.

Humbert had been too late and landed in the wrong place.  A much larger Irish revolt erupted in May in the south of the island with its organizers, the Society of United Irishmen, counting on French support which did not arrive before the revolt was ultimately suppressed by the British in July with much brutality on both sides and between Catholics and Protestants.

It was these events that led 1798 to be referred to by Gaelic speakers as The Year of the French.

The tale of the Mayo uprising, of those caught up in it, Catholic and Protestant alike and the long sordid history of Britain in Ireland is the subject of Thomas Flanagan's magnificent novel, The Year of the French.  Published in 1979 and recipient of multiple awards, I read it in the 1980s and just completed rereading the book.  This is not a military narrative, rather a beautifully and poetically written story of the people caught up in the events.  Many of the characters are those prominent in the uprising and its suppression, most of whom died in its course or were executed after (the captured Humbert was exchanged and resumed his military career, fell out with Napoleon and emigrated to America, setting himself up in New Orleans, where in January 1815 he encouraged the French community to assist the American army in resisting the British attack, and carried a rifle at the Battle of New Orleans for which he received the thanks of General Andrew Jackson).

We also meet invented characters such as the itinerant Gaelic poet, schoolmaster and drunk Owen MacCarthy who, though ambivalent, finds himself entangled in the uprising.

Flanagan portrays all his characters in full and with sympathy or at least understanding and makes us understand the course of Irish history that led to this tragedy and of the conflicting motivations of all parties.  What some were fighting for was never quite clear and for others it was a romantic vision of Ireland detached for reality.  For a thoughtful exposition on the themes of the novel and the inherent conflicts among the rebels read this piece.  

And, above all, we have Flanagan's lovely writing.

The author's view of the events can be seen in the conclusion of one of his narrators, a Protestant minister in Killala, prisoner of the rebels during the uprising, whose life is saved by Ferdy McDonnell, the Catholic leader of the militia in town.  The minister after reflecting on his reading of Gibbon who makes the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:

"Each cause and reason is locked securely into place.  And over all the mighty drama presides the awesome authority of Gibbon's splendid language, his unimpassioned rationality . . . Great was Rome and catastrophic was its fall, but great too is the energy of the historian's mind, the cool deliberation of his judgment.

But then!  We put the volume upon the table, and go out for a stroll in the garden or to visit a sick parishioner or perhaps only to pare our nails, and doubt seeps in . . .  Perhaps it had not been like that at all.  Perhaps all had been chaos, chance, ill-luck, perhaps even Providence . . .  Perhaps it is not Rome that we have seen, but Gibbon's imagination bestowed capriciously upon the past . . ."

The words at the top of the post are uttered by Ferdy McDonnell as he ends a discussion with the minister and are proceeded by this comment from the minister, "It was as though he hated history itself".   It is this tortured history, from which there seems no escape, that Flanagan makes us feel in our bones.

Thomas Flanagan was an American professor of literature and The Year of the French his first novel, published when he was 56.  He went on to write two more volumes, both concerning Irish history, The Tenants of Time about the Fenian uprising of the 1870s and The End of the Hunt regarding the Irish War of Independence in 1920-21.  Both are fine books though neither rises quite to the literary and evocative heights of The Year of the French.


Saturday, August 7, 2021

Hang Time

Super 70s Sports reminded me today of this spectacular play by Dr J (Julius Erving) in the 1980 NBA playoffs.  Dr J was the first player I saw who seemed to be able to hang and move in the air (the second and last was Michael Jordan).  This play was one of his most memorable carried out against the Los Angeles Lakers with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as one of the defenders.



 

Below is a video clip showing the play from several angles as well as the reminiscences of several of the other players.

And, in one thing leading to another it reminds me of another NBA moment from the 80s, this one shocking - when Larry Bird and Dr J (who was noted as a gentleman on the court) got into a fight with each attempting to strangle the other.  This occurred towards the end of J's career and at the height of Bird's, when Larry was demolishing J on the court and taunting him at the same time (Bird was a master trash talker), leading to the Doctor finally exploding.  As Bill Simmons wrote, "It was like seeing the Easter Bunny trying to strangle Santa Clause".

Amazon.com: Photo of Larry Bird & Julius Erving Fighting: Books

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Miami Brothers In The Arms Of Vice

From the second season of Miami Vice, a show I watched very infrequently.  Closing scene of the episode Out Where The Buses Don't Run.  The show often featured popular music, but not just short clips which was the usual TV approach, instead playing long excerpts of mood-making music with very little dialogue.  Here it is one of my all-time favorites, Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits when Crockett and Tubbs investigate an abandoned warehouse.  

Everyone in this scene is a Miami cop. At the beginning is Edward James Olmos, Crockett and Tubbs' supervisor.  Next up is Bruce McGill, also known for playing D Day in Animal House and Secretary of War Edward Stanton in Lincoln, and finally David Strathairn, Eddie Cicotte in Eight Men Out, the Jason Bourne movies, Secretary of State William Seward in Lincoln, while appearing in about a million other films.

Miami Vice featured an innovative color and style palette imposed by director Michael Mann, who also employed a lot of shots not seen on TV before that are now standard in movies and cable.  See, for instance, the close up of the moving wheel on Crockett's car and the shot where the car accelerates away from the camera.

Consequences

On the evening of August 4, 1789 the newly assembled National Assembly of France voted to abolish the "privileges" of nobility.  Formed in the turmoil of the early days of the French Revolution, the Assembly represented all of the estates (Nobility/Religious/Bourgeois) of the country.  The proposal was introduced by the Vicomte de Noailles, a member of the nobility.  Noailles had served under the Marquis de Lafayette during the American Revolution and negotiated the formalities for the surrender of Lord Cornwallis' army at Yorktown.

Count Mirabeau, one of the early leaders of the Revolution and an advocate for establishment of a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Britain, denounced the elimination of privileges as the victory of the "theorists" who had nothing practical to offer the people.

Within a few years most of the nobility who agreed that night to give up their privileges were executed, imprisoned, or in exile.  Noailles escaped to America, returning to France after Napoleon took power in 1799.  Other members of his family were not so fortunate.  His wife was guillotined in 1794 along with her mother and paternal grandmother.  Her sister was spared at the last minute due to the intervention of U.S. Minister to France James Monroe, but only after she witnessed the beheadings of her family.

The privileges given up by the nobility in 1789 were real, though the delusions of the theorists eventually led to an orgy of mass murder and chaos resulting in the eventual seizure of power by Napoleon.  In today's world even the "privileges" being so easily tossed about as an epithet only exist in the minds of the "theorists" who increasingly control our institutions.

Sunday, August 1, 2021

Baptise Me

The virtuoso guitar playing and redemptive vision of Robert Randolph.