Phase IV

Thanks in part to Operation Warp Speed - and due credit to Trump for getting that done - we have nearly two dozen vaccine candidates in Phase III. That's faster than anything done before, especially given that some of these are new biology. But passing Phase III might not mean we have an effective vaccine for the virus in question.

Given that, many people who should be getting the vaccine - the antimask libertarians - won't be. Frankly I'd not blame them.

Randall Parker proposes a Challenge Trial, judging which of these candidates is best at fighting the virus where it counts most - at the upper respiratory tract. That would be Phase IV.

Don't kill yourself

I've been involved in American elections for some time now. I was pretty intense in 2004, that everyone not elect Kerry. In 2008 ditto against Obama. In 2016 I had someone to vote for as well as one against. On the side of indifference, in 2012 nobody was on the ballot so I voted accordingly. This year is more like 1996, or 2000. We should vote, but.

My first recommendation is not to kill yourself on Wednesday.

My second might be to note where the two candidates aren't all that different. We can add that we're headed for travel-restrictions no matter what. Except that that stance might drive you to the rope too.

More salient is that a fiscal crisis is on its way, and some aggression by China, and maybe a West Coast earthquake. Europe seems headed for an identity crisis. Either President, and we can add Harris, would handle these events-dear-boy about the same. They don't challenge the ideology like the CoVID nonresponse has challenged (and discredited) libertarianism.

The Democrats would raise taxes, and maybe "give" us Medicare For All. The latter isn't as likely as it looks; the parties just like that issue to run on. As for tax hikes, feh. Higher income just creates more smug rich white people.

The Democrats are better on Big Tech than is Jim Jordan and, above him, that orange haired carney.

There's the antifa riots but what have the Republicans done on those? If you don't like Moloch, consider the same cartoon with Trump and Pence tossing old people to the fire.

I do, on balance, have a preference. But I am not killing myself over it. You shouldn't either.

THE L 11/4 PM: I'm taking it. Vox Day thinks Trump is going to "fight" this. But then, VD was touting TRUMPSLIDE the last four years.

King Elon

Elon means to rule the Red Planet. He's read his Moldbug.

That doesn't stop an Earth government from founding its own, dependent government; but Elon's city won't be one of them. As noted I doubt [highly] that Elon, nor anyone else, can found a central Martian government. Although whoever installs a tethering station at Phobos will dominate the routes in and out. Ditto the Libration Points around Earth especially ELL2 and SEL2.

I'd honestly want a base on the Moon's far side before wasting this much fuel to get loads off Earth direct to Mars. Or even something on Antarctica's dry vales. But hey.

Jonah Gottschalk at The Federalist submits some questions to the Lord Protector. Gottschalk expects some of the Martian cities will want Earth-based allies.

60% all good!

Next on the LOCKDOWN reading list - David Roberts, Devil's Gate. It serves, somewhat self-consciously so, as prequel to Will Bagley's classic Blood of the Prophets. I bought Roberts sometime after May 2009 at one of the [several] Half Price Books down in Houston but I didn't read it. Past-Self did schlep it up here, with Honda for my handcart, so I owe it to him to read it now.

Part of LDS legend - the term is fair - is the handcart migration 1856-on. The LDS church considers a pious hegira, this self-transport of newly-minted Mormons to the Madînat of the Great Salt Lake. Hundreds died en route, clustered late 1856 ("late" means something up here in the Rockies!). As one with a decent head for numbers, I must record this as about twice the number as died at the Mountain Meadows the next year. Roberts is here to conduct the handcarters' autopsy.

Roberts treats the migration as piecemeal, each headed by a leader - like the (gentile) Donner Party. Ellsworth and McArthur led the first two, English and Scottish respectively. These were separate parties but traveled more-or-less beside each other, in a bit of a marathon race. The third party, Bunker's, followed behind and was Welsh. As in, Cymraeg: few there spoke English and of the Welshmen, few could write. Two more followed these. We'll get to them. (Literally: I haven't yet started Chapter Five.)

Roberts is hostile to the adventure and no friend to the LDS. He relies on "Apostate" literature and on Bagley; his takes on Joseph Smith come from Brodie. Brigham Young as of 2008 didn't have a modern biographer worthy of the title (Arrington may be a good man - pdf - but his biography is gawdawful; as for 2012 Turner ... pdf) so Roberts defaults to Werner's 1925 bio of him.

What was going on in the late 1850s was a crisis in Utah. American politicians were making noise about crushing "polygamy" which meant LDS. A whole party was rising, the Republicans, to excommunicate this (with slavery) as a relic of barbarism, which it is. The Republicans were no joke and were good to sweep the North in 1856. President / caliph Brigham Young needed more population and he needed them loyal.

To increase the people, Young called hegira. But although Utah was self-sufficient, Utah had no money out East to hire oxen for the trip. So Young made a cold calculation: handcarts. Schlep it yo' self!

From what I read, this was 60% successful. The first three companies got through. If those were all there were, Roberts would have no book, and we could let the hagiographers take the W. Let's concentrate on that 60% for now (not least because this is where I paused).

Traveling the Great Plains to the Wasatch was hard. There were no roads. The people in between were (1) "Lamanite" tribes and (2) American settlers. The first-nations had no particular quarrel with the Mormons, but also didn't much trust them. The Americans thought of the Mormons as fools. Neither intermediary provided a lot of help to the Mormons, even if they could, which they usually couldn't, being not exactly rich themselves.

Usually carrying freight meant oxen. Ox-carts carry food. Handcarts couldn't carry a lot of that. Young figured this out and shipped out some carts with extra flour, to meet the first two caravans and maybe the third (the third was, as mentioned, poorly documented). As for the handcarts, these were built in the tentcity "Florence" from the local trees. So they were green. You want seasoned wood for a cart like this, if not steel. The handcarts only got worse as the vans kept passing.

Then there was sanitation. Typhus and "mountain fever" came with the lice and ticks. Cholera also followed along. "Diarrhea" and "dysentery" hit the Mormon vans as surely as it hit the Oregon Trail's. And the mhaggrayé weren't Central Asian camel lords; they were working class Britons and Danes. Often women, children, and oldsters and, yes, for nineteenth century workers, over 50 years old is an oldster.

This meant that fatality rates were... high. Even in the first three vans, they were (conservatively) something like 7%. Earlier (oxcart) vans tended more to 4%.

Now: I am not here (yet) to say that the experiment was a failure. 4%, 7%, even 10% fatality is something of a rounding-error for Oregon Trail. Roberts' own first chapter notes a sixty-odd death toll in one trip at sea before that ship even landed at New York. And Young had good reason to bulk up his empire. This "experiment" got the job done... 60% with the low(ish)-level fatalities.

I am here, for now, to suggest that the first three handcart-vans' best-scenario 7% fatalities are still very high and that more could have been done in advance, not just the emergency supply of rations sent out. Lowering those earlier rates would assuredly have taught some lessons, at least; to lower the rates for the later vans.

MEANWHILE 11/8: September 1856, to assure loyalty, Young sparked a "Reformation" to burn over the Utahns, like he'd seen in New England and New York back in his (and Smith's) youth. By this point the Willie and Martin companies, and Hodgett and Hunt, were already somewhere in Nebraska Territory. Roberts associates the Reformation with the disaster; this might not be fair, since the disaster was in gestation already.

Fall back

Strange morning; I got up with the sun streaming in, but the phone and this computer told me it was still in the 7/8 AM range. Lunch at 11:30 AM according to the downstairs clock. Went out to read a book, got through quite a bit of it, 1:37 PM according to 'phone. But the sun was more westerly than I expected.

So no: apparently I was out for an hour longer than I thought I was.

Nice that we have auto-correcting clocks on our devices these decades.

I feel sorry for the B'nai Shalit this weekend

I don't think I'm the only one trolling Twitter for keyword "shalit" today. I hope the venerable Gene, in retirement, isn't anywhere near the place. I did find this tweet, by @AvivShalit, from last night:

I got pulled over by a very nervous cop this morning.
Legitimately pulled over for infractions.
He goes: I know what you did, just tell me the truth, and I won't give you a ticket, just the truth.
I'm like, yeah I messed up and tried to correct the problem.
He then took off.

Sounds like something Jeffery Goldberg @TheAtlantic is hoping for. Synchronicity! (- per Auster.)

No, Aviv is probably No Relation..

The blogosphere's legendarium

The Blogosphere as a culture came out of The New Republic in the 1990s.

The Internet - HTTP websites and NNTP UseNet - was a university phenomenon; through the 1990s, personal bandwidth was slow, and information was had from websites. Pyra came out with Blogger and Blogspot in 2000-01. After 9/11, by which time home bandwidth was comparable to today's, came a demand for just-in-time reporting. One of those "bloggers" who offered that was Andrew Sullivan erstwhile editor of TNR.

1990s TNR had a publisher, whose job it is to fire directors, or editors as the case may be. That publisher was Marty Peretz. Peretz was a liberal... sort of. He supported the Zionist project and held a, lets call it psychometric, view on race. It was Peretz who commissioned Sullivan to run The Bell Curve excerpts in his pages; which sparked a newsroom revolt, among the doctrinaire liberals. Not among those liberals was Ruth Shalit sister of conservative Wendy. Shalit had other reasons to keep shtum.

Shalit had been hired by Michael Kinsley, Sullivan's precedecessor. (Kinsley was, instinctually, hostile to conservatives; I see Peretz' hand in this hire.) Shalit under Kinsley had written a nasty hit-piece against Washington Post for "affirmative-action" hiring, questionable on its merits at the time and since understood as meritless. Sullivan kept Shalit around anyway. And then Sullivan hired... Stephen Glass. (Sabrina Erdely was in that network too.) Peretz knocked Sullivan out before Glass showed his full power-level. One more editor later (Michael Kelly intervened), Charles Lane got rid of Shalit and Glass, both. Sullivan meanwhile showed his rawmusl arse on the 1990s version of Grindr, which paradoxically perhaps served to distract from his Problematic tenure at TNR.

For a strong contingent of Early Adopters, Sullivan was our leader. He was considered flawed but honest and interesting. Sullivan's TNR was, you could say, our Bible: also flawed, because less honest - but more interesting. We knew about Shalit. We knew more about the more-dramatic Glass. We figured Sullivan's main sin was "failure in judgement". But this isn't a blogpost about Sullivan, directly. This post is about the deep media lore which Sullivan brought with him, to us.

[I'll post some epilogoi here:

[TNR under Franklin Foer would go on to post Beauchamp's worthless mindthoughts on Iraq. TNR serves a niche market now, albeit a more discerning one since Foer.

[As Mickey Kaus points out, there are worse out there. At Buzzfeed.

[The Atlantic is Buzzfeed-tier at this point: running Sullivan (him again) on Palin's uterus, running Williamson off ... totally, and this and lately this. Talk about serial lapses in judgement. Shadi Hamid is still good; he should write elsewhere. Ed Yong likewise deserves, but also needs, better.]

To return to the main blog: for us in the 2000s, Glass and Shalit were cautionary tales. The more-liberal Glass became "Steve Glass" doing paralegal work in California and staying out of the media. The more-conservative Shalit made her apology-tour, got married... and returned to the media, under her new name Barrett with "S." for her middle initial. It is not going well.

Shalit is no longer a cautionary tale. She is now another example like on The Wire of some sociopath failing upward due to her connexions. But it was always thus. Nice to be her.