Ed Suominen’s Shitty Little Blog

Thread

2022-11-10T17:37:00.001-08:00

Both town and country people talk to me a great deal. They really think of nothing except their fields and their bits of farms and investments. And look how the tables are turned! They fear the man they used to trust and love the man they used to dread.

—Roman Senator Cicero, writing of Julius Caesar.

The title of this little essay is simply “Thread” because that’s how I did most of my writing in the last couple of years. It also applies to what our Constitutional republic hangs by–a frail little thread of razor-thin majorities and judges with integrity–as we witness the slow, grinding ascent of fascism not only in this country but also around the world.

Hanging by a thread, in more ways than one

There are surely better descriptions for what I want to say today, but I’m trying not to spend as much time worrying about things like titles and footnotes anymore.¹ It was freeing not having them available on Twitter; I’d lean back in the recliner and tap away furiously on my iPad for an hour, one chunk of 240 characters after another. The results inspired 6,700 or so people to follow my Tweets.

Mostly, they were warnings about what a dangerous gamble it is to get yourself infected with the SARS-Cov-2 virus. There were expositions on probability theory, engineering analogies, and even a nose-only PAPR device I invented to go to the dentist and feel safe while people coughed in cubicles nearby. Some of them got seen by tens of thousands of people–occasionally more than a hundred thousand. I developed an online friendship of sorts with some of those people, and hope to keep in touch with them. It was fun while it lasted.

But the time for that feels mostly over now. Why? Not just because another narcissist billionaire is infecting yet another public gathering space with his grandiose and fragile ego. Certainly not because of the few pathetic trolls that tried their best to seem like they where the smart ones for making fun of a person urging caution against an airborne respiratory pathogen during the worst pandemic in a hundred years. They were kind of fun to toy with, actually.

What finally got me off Twitter, at least for a while, was the 2022 midterm election in my beloved battered country, the barely-United States of America. As of this writing, I remain among what must be a small number of people who still don’t know the result.

Seriously, I have no idea what happened. The acres of trees surrounding my home remain silent as to the outcome, as does my wife. She’s seen me enter this virtual monastery before. She respects the vow of silence about current events.

I was cloistered here for about a month after the 2016 election, unable to watch one of the worst human beings of a generation take a wrecking ball to the foundations of the country I love. Another visit was in 2020, for a week after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and the country found itself at the mercy of Mitch McConnell’s sense of fair play–entirely absent, of course.

The virtual monastery yesterday evening

It’s a way of giving myself space to process a historical event with an uncomfortably high probability of a disastrous outcome. (We’ve had a few of those lately.) And, as these photos from a walk in the woods yesterday evening demonstrate, it’s a beautiful place to be disconnected.²

What a rare thing it is to simply walk away from all sources of information about the madness of our world! Few are even inclined to try, and for most it’s nearly impossible anyhow. You’ll get some alert on your phone that you feel compelled to check, or Fox News will be playing on the TV somewhere you’d rather not see it, or a friend will ask you about what happened. And then–poof!–your ignorant bliss is gone.

Sadly, a lot of those information sources are easily disconnected for me now. The worst pandemic in a hundred years is still very much underway, contrary to the mass delusion that has taken over the entire world saying everything’s back to normal again. It’s deepened the social isolation of those of us who haven’t been persuaded to go around breathing a dangerous airborne pathogen with a proven track record of causing long-term damage to people’s bodies.

I’m not really looking forward to letting the world back in. There were no surprises upon my return from previous visits to the virtual monastery. Things turned out about as badly as I’d expected. The unpleasant reality is that there is simply no limit to how much the Republican Party will exploit every possible opportunity to seize and retain power.

Let me use this fleeting state of innocence to do a bit of reflection. I am deliberately not going to provide any references for what I say in the next several paragraphs. Another sad reality: Hardly anyone cares about what you put in the footnotes anyhow.³

Hell, hardly anyone even reads anymore beyond the bite-size chunks of social media. If you are one of those rare souls and like what you’re seeing here, please retweet or retoot of whatever and maybe there will be views of this to make it feel worthwhile doing again.

“The mountain is still green today.”

The election is an example of probability meeting reality. The ethereal “could be this, but maybe that” cloud of possibility represented by a random variable gets collapsed into a single established value. Nate Silver’s red and blue poll-analysis diagrams (to which I have not paid the slightest attention this time around) turn into a Congressional seating chart.

This happens on the quantum level everywhere and at every moment. Radioactive elements unleash particles when some wave function finally tunnels past a barrier of the improbable to escape its unstable home in an unwieldy mass of protons and neutrons that had been clumped together for seconds, years, even centuries. Photons end their journeys through space-time and land on surfaces that do not care about double-slit experiments but just get hot in the sun. The RNA of a virus fails to exactly preserve the original sequence of amino acids of its predecessor, switching things around or dropping something old or inserting something new and thus starts the next wave of a pandemic.

Still as they were–for one more season of a hundred

Randomness—which all ultimately traces back to the dice being thrown in a truly unpredictable way down at the subatomic level—is the engine driving the evolution that made us and all the life around us.

When you zoom out from quarks and photons and electron probability clouds, when the instability of interconnected systems amplifies countless tiny inputs in ways that we can’t possibly comprehend, big things happen sometimes and make other big things happen more often. That virus walks out of a lab in the nose of a careless worker or flies out of a cave in a bat (pick whichever scenario you prefer) and three years later tens of millions have had their lives changed or ended by it. An FBI director shoots his mouth off in front of the cameras days before a Presidential election and swings just enough votes in just the right places to infect the Oval Office and then the nation with a disease of cultish bigoted authoritarianism.

Probabilities become realities. Sometimes, the improbable nonetheless occurs, and then the random walk we are all on collectively lurches abruptly this way or that. A Supreme Court can collapse with the ceasing of a hubristic old woman’s heartbeat. Lingering disease becomes the commonplace and even accepted outcome of daily life visiting stores, restaurants, or friends. Democracies wither and die.

One day you’re waving at the neighbor guy, and ten years later he’s standing at the edge of a pit with a rifle pointed at your head. Do not delude yourself into thinking it will never happen again. It will, and in many parts of the world even now, is.⁴

I’ll know about the election outcome tomorrow or a day after. The trees aren’t talking, but I won’t stay this isolated for long. My wife or one of the kids will say something offhand, or I’ll see some email whose subject line breaks the news.

It’s fascinating, though, this not knowing. For me, personally, the photon is still going through both slits simultaneously; the wave function has not yet collapsed into a detection of this discrete outcome or that one.

As with most things that have potentially terrible outcomes, like a SARS-CoV-2 infection or marrying into a MAGA family, the probability of badness seems to follow a log-normal distribution. This is because our perception of how bad things are tends to be logarithmic rather than linear.

When your body can walk half as far as it did before you brought the virus home from that concert, it’s bad, but only being able to walk a fourth as far doesn’t seem four times worse. You move to the right, toward the long tail of the log-normal curve. You have to get quite a ways out there before you can rest assured that nothing so bad will happen to you.

Sitting down for an unmasked dinner at Denny’s probably won’t get you bedridden for the rest of your life; if it did, even a society as careless and stupid as ours would be taking this virus seriously. But it is happening, and for those it happens to, it’s the end of their life as they knew it. The log-normal curve is a tricky deceptive thing; it piles up the not-so-bad outcomes down on the left and fools us into thinking there’s no long tail out there to worry about.

Well, I’m sorry, but it’s there, and it grabs people and nations and even planets, and sometimes never lets go. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote in his immortal poem.

Beware the log-normal probability distribution

The happiest scenario A, not as likely as it would have been even ten years ago, is an uncontested loss by the party seeking to deny election results they don’t like, further dismantle the public commons and any semblance of environmental protections, roll back the last forty years of progress in women’s rights and stop people from loving and marrying consenting adults of whatever their preference.

Mitch McConnell would call Joe Biden and offer his congratulations, promising to respect the will of the people and work together with a solidified Democratic majority. A chastened Supreme Court realizes that it’s not an imperial star chamber and gets busy following precedent again.

Yeah, right.

———

In scenario B, the Democrats manage a convincing enough win. No Turkish grifters, anti-Semites, or brain-damaged serial cheaters manage to win high office. The GOP complains, Mitch remains a royal pain in the ass, but the health of our representative republic remains intact–perhaps stronger. Joe Biden might even decide to finally fire Rochelle Walensky now that he doesn’t have to pretend Covid is over.

This also feels unlikely. Sure, I hope it’s what happened, but there’s a lot more area under the curve to the right.

———

Scenario C is at the mode of our log-normal distribution, though not at the mean or even the median. If you were to ask what is the single most likely isolated outcome, that’s it, but, critically, it is not yet at the point where half of the time things will turn out better. It’s a narrow win or stalemate, where things aren’t really worse than they were before the election but we can sort of stumble along for a while. Maybe a Democrat with charisma, integrity, and a few decades of remaining life expectancy might win the Presidency in two years. Maybe.

But here is where I have some bad news to share, regardless of whatever news you might be wishing you could tell me right now, if you’ll excuse my abuse of the language: Things can get much more worse than they can get much more better.

Much better than now isn’t some paradise where everybody lives in blissful abundance and harmony. It’s just a functioning democracy where both sides respect the outcome of elections and aren’t trying to wreck the planet or other people’s lives. That doesn’t seem like much to ask, but we weren’t there the last time I looked at the news a couple of days ago.

This random walk we’re on now is as likely as not to take you to far worse places. And if you wind up there, you’ll be facing a whole new log-normal probability distribution that is centered on how bad things have become, complete with its own long tail farther to the right.

———

Scenario D is the Democrats winning, but not by much, and the GOP engaging in an all-out cold civil war of trying to cheat or bully their way to victory.

Pretty much the same probability is the scenario E, with the democrats losing–also not by much, but it doesn’t matter. The GOP will take any sort of victory as a massive mandate to tear down what’s left of the country and keep marching us on a random walk toward fascism. I wish I were more optimistic about that bunch, but I’m not.

———

Scenario F is the Democrats losing by a lot, and G is them losing by a little and the GOP being even worse about it than my wildest expectations.

Neither of these are things I choose to dwell on this evening. May I be proven a pessimist this time. I’ll take scenario B with all the humility it brings, and gladly.

Notes

Still, it feels irresponsible not to provide a few. The epigraph was quoted in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Simon Baker. “In Rome,” Baker says, “Caesar’s enemies were thrown into a fit of panic. They had hoped that the respectable classes in towns throughout Italy would rise up as one in defence of the republic against the invader. But as Caesar waged his blitzkrieg without significant opposition, they quickly realized that they had hopelessly misread the majority view.” Sounds all too familiar. ←
All but the first are from yesterday. You can click on any of them to see the high-resolution versions. ←
When I self-published my first book An Examination of the Pearl ten years ago, I was proud of how carefully it documented the historical and doctrinal problems with the fundamentalist Christian cult in which I was raised and spent the first 40 years of my life. But the rigor of providing footnotes and references and context for quotations now feels like a lost art. Many of the same people who complimented me on that and expressed relief at someone finally standing up to church authorities now seem eager for unconstitutional authoritarian rule of the whole damn country. ←
My pessimism in this department might be the result of generational memory. See, for example, In Memoriam: Kurt Stein written in honor of my uncle who was shot by firing squad for refusing to fight in Hitler’s army. ←

Long Covid Lament

2022-01-09T13:05:00.008-08:00

Now if real daylight such as I remember having seen in this world would only come again, but it is always twilight or just before morning, a promise of day that is never kept. What has become of the sun? That was the longest and loneliest night and yet it will not end and let the day come. Shall I ever see light again?

—Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1938) by Katherine Anne Porter, survivor, 1918 influenza.

An open letter to Michael Osterholm, epidemiologist. His weekly podcast The Osterholm Update is an excellent source of current Covid-19 information.

Dear Dr. Osterholm,

Having listened to your thoughtful and informative podcasts ever since they began, I’ve wanted to share my own beautiful place with you in the eight pictures below.¹ These acres of conifer forest surrounding my home here in the inland Pacific Northwest have long been a sanctuary for the bear and cougar and all the other wildlife whose tracks I see in the winter snow and the soft earth of spring. For the bald eagles and owls and hawks who soar high overhead.

Winter pictures taken last week.

The challenges of our time still intrude here, with more wildfires each summer and a local population that remains mostly unvaccinated, even now. But these woods have been my sanctuary, too, as I’ve walked and worked and meditated beneath big pines, fir, and larch that were just saplings during the influenza pandemic of 1918. They were here long before me, and I’m doing what I can to give them a chance at still standing after I’m gone.

None of these tracks was made by a human.

After hearing you talk about your work on tallgrass prairie restoration and continuing to ask for listeners to share their beautiful places, I figured you’d appreciate seeing these photos of mine. For many hours, I’ve listened to your voice in my earbuds while controlling noxious weeds, harvesting deadfall for firewood, and thinning the smaller trees that are too close together to thrive. Yours has been a comforting but also honest voice, keeping me informed without sugarcoating the bad news about each wave of new cases, without ego, without false promises. Thank you for the work you do.

———

I would like to be equally honest and continue with some words that are not intended for you to read on your podcast but for you to take into your heart as you inform the public each week about the dangers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

It’s about the devastating persistent symptoms that so many people are now enduring after their often mild acute infections. They gave it a name, Long Covid, to describe month after month of terrifying mental and physical limitations, of a fatigue that often goes far beyond just a sense of being tired all the time. Many of them experience this so-called fatigue as a relentless profound exhaustion that leaves them utterly spent after basic household tasks, or even getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. Their brains are fogged, their ears are ringing, their noses don’t work, their bodies have become prisons of pain and loss and disability.

This open letter is for them, to give voice to what they know all too well. And in hopes that our public health experts will finally start to talk about what has happened to them, and is happening right now to so many more.

For the people like PJ Morrison, who has been dealing with the aftermath of her Covid-19 infection for 22 months now. In the early stages, she felt “like her veins were on fire–pulsating and raised.” That has mostly quietened down, apart from those in her hands and ankles. “My feet and hands don’t work well now,” she says, and she can no longer dance or run or even put on a coat without help. She’s looking for the small wins where she can, like last month when she celebrated managing to get in and out of the bath unaided and six weeks earlier when she was finally able to walk without pain.²

Byn Always (that’s her real name, under which she’s written a couple of books) knows all too well about the limitations imposed by Long Covid. A doctor visit just sent her to bed to sleep for 33 of the 36 hours afterwards, “unable to even sit up for more than ten minutes while awake.” If she goes beyond her strict energy budget, she winds up with vocal tremors so severe that she can barely talk. The limitations extend beyond the physical realm; she used to love to read but now her brain fog gets in the way of that.

As with most long haulers I’ve corresponded with, it’s not just what Byn can’t do anymore, but also the many unwelcome sensations that impose themselves on her. She gets an “internal buzzing” and tinnitus that comes and goes, and her eyes sometimes hurt, feeling “like someone tried to jab them from my eye sockets all night.” She’s in her early 50s, a mother of five.³

Of course all this is affecting their ability to work, and that adds another level of emotional as well as economic pain. Marjorie Roberts says she and her fellow longhaulers “are being punished for contracting this awful virus which has changed our lives forever.” She’s been fighting for an unemployment hearing since April 2021, after contracting Covid in March 2020, “at my place of employment but was denied benefits.” She was told–undoubtedly by somebody who either does not know or care about the need for rest to avoid post-exertional malaise–that contracting Covid-19 was not a valid reason for her to resign. She now lives with disabling daily fatigue, as well as spots in her liver, nodules and sarcoidosis in her lungs, and the loss of seven teeth. She feels ignored and discarded.⁴

I could go on with quite a few more of these stories, just from people I’ve interacted with personally online, like Daria Oller, a physical therapist and athletic trainer who got sick on March 15, 2020 and went through a period when her post-exertional crashes left her unable to lift up her head, sometimes even to speak. She’s doing better, though “nothing like who I use to be” and now dealing with a significant setback from a recent reinfection. She’s 37.⁵

Like Denise Martin, 54, who was infected in April 2020 and then again in November of 2021–after being vaccinated. She’s retired after a 28-year nursing career and was already living with chronic illness before Covid came along. Never hospitalized, hers would have been classified as one of those “mild” cases, but she’s traumatized from the experience of struggling to breathe, and now struggles to even get out of bed.⁶

I’ve read firsthand accounts by hundreds of others.

Dr. Osterholm, you surely must know that this is not a rare thing. According to a meta-analysis of dozens of studies that was just released ahead of publication in Brain Behavior and Immunity, about a third of people are experiencing that symptom so innocuously labeled as “fatigue” three months after their Covid-19 diagnosis. Just over a fifth of them are exhibiting cognitive impairment at that point.⁷

These figures are disturbingly high, but they match what was already revealed by another multi-study review published in JAMA Network Open: Infectious Diseases back in October. There, the median prevalence for “fatigue or muscle weakness” was found to be around 38%, and around 17% for cognitive impairment. The authors determined the median prevalence of overall Post-Acute Sequelae of Covid-19 to be around 50%, a figure that changed little when looking at short, intermediate, and long-term time periods.⁸

The commonly accepted conservative estimate is that 10% of people with Covid-19 will go on to develop Long Covid.⁹ With 60 million reported cases in the U.S., even that much lower figure equates to several million of our fellow citizens now facing long-term consequences of having been infected. These are terrifying numbers. And as you often say when speaking about Covid-19 death statistics, they represent much more. They are loved ones and friends and actual human beings.

Before the snow, September 2021.

How can any epidemiologist not talk about this?¹⁰ Just from the aftermath of the Delta variant, we are very likely facing a national and global wave of largely hidden adversity and disability not seen in any of our lifetimes. And we just don’t know yet whether Omicron will result in less Long Covid, do we? Hopefully so, but as you like to say, hope is not a strategy.

———

Well, OK, but we have the vaccines, now, right? Still providing some decent protection against “severe disease” and death. Unfortunately, the studies are showing that Long Covid remains a significant risk even for infections that occur after vaccination.

You’ve acknowledged that these so-called “breakthrough” cases are not rare and have been warning for months about the danger of variants evading our vaccines. Well, Omicron has shown that your crystal ball isn’t quite as mud-covered as you modestly protest. It appears that those of us with all three shots of an mRNA vaccine still wind up about half as likely to be infected by this highly transmissible new variant as people who never got vaccinated.¹¹ That means a lot of breakthrough cases heading our way.

With those odds of being infected by the variant that is exploding across the country now, it seems that we really ought to be paying attention to how much risk of long-term sequelae a post-vaccination infection entails.

Let’s get one important thing out of the way: There are definitely fewer firsthand accounts on Twitter and Reddit from people who developed Long Covid from a post-vaccination infection. I’ve seen just a handful rather than hundreds. Two of them responded to an inquiry I posted on Twitter.¹²

One had her sense of smell and taste disturbed for three months, with the common “rotting flesh” scent and almost everything tasting and smelling awful. Things appear to be improving now.¹³ Another correspondent, a fit middle-aged man in Texas who’d gotten all three shots before he was infected, was “fatigued, fogged, no appetite, ear ringing and worried this won’t get better” for two weeks. He has started feeling better now in his third week, though the fatigue still hits him as the day progresses.¹⁴

I want to be respectful with the stories of these two people who have reached out to me. You don’t want to be infected by this nasty little pathogen if you can possibly help it, vaccinated or not, but these are not the kind of traumatic and disabling outcomes that Daria and Byn and Marjorie are living with. For them, vaccine protection is a cruel fiction, a life preserver that never made it into the water before some part of them drowned.

Unfortunately, the studies are leaving us with little room for complacency even when it comes to breakthrough cases. One published in The Lancet showed that the risk of symptoms lasting more than four weeks is approximately halved for those who were infected after a second vaccine dose.¹⁵ We are talking about long-term consequences of an infection, and I view that glass as half empty, not half full. The work being done by Dr. Maxime Taquet and his colleagues at the University of Oxford suggest that it’s mostly empty, with no statistically significant reduction in risk for developing many Long Covid symptoms six months after a breakthrough vs unvaccinated infection, and little reduction for almost all symptoms.¹⁶

Some studies have shown a modest protective effect, such as one posted just a few days ago by researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where both testing and vaccination rates are high.¹⁷ They found the usual disturbingly high occurence of people reporting a less than full recovery, about a third, with those “fully vaccinated . . . 36-73% less likely to report eight of the ten most commonly reported symptoms.” As with The Lancet study, the observed risk reduction was, in aggregate, about half.¹⁸ Doesn’t seem all that reassuring.

The individual symptoms are what stand out to me, though. Remember that little word “fatigue” that is plaguing and limiting the lives of people like Daria or even my Texan correspondent three weeks after his triple-vaxxed breakthrough case, both of them with more than half their lives ahead? It showed up at basically the same rate, vaccinated or not, for those in their age bracket, and around 40% as much overall. Same for the “loss of concentration” that’s keeping Byn from reading like she used to. Same for the “persistent muscle pain” that PJ understands all too well.¹⁹

Another study (still in pre-print, as with most of the research happening in this fast-changing area) of breakthrough cases recorded in the VA health system showed a similarly discouraging lack of risk reduction. It was not even statistically significant for symptom clusters labeled “Neurologic,” “Musculoskeletal,” “Mental Health,” “Kidney,” and “Gastrointestinal,” and barely so for our old friend “Fatigue.”²⁰

Do Look Up!

Why do your listeners never hear about any of this? It’s a question that honestly puzzles me. A person who has gotten their Covid-19 information exclusively from your podcast for the past year would be well served in many ways, but would not even know that Long Covid exists, much less what a significant threat it poses, even with the vaccines.

Dr. Osterholm, one of your strengths as a public health expert is your use of clear everyday analogies to describe difficult situations. As someone who has delighted at seeing big deep hoof tracks in these woods, I particularly liked how you told us a few weeks ago about the value of a good set of tires and brakes while driving down a country road where moose were likely to be crossing. It was a memorable way for you to warn us to be prepared for what’s coming with Omicron.

I’d like to suggest one more important piece of equipment: a pair of headlights. We can’t stop in time to avoid hitting something that we never see. A lot of people depend on you to let them know what is ahead. Considering the extreme risk we all face of being infected by this vaccine-evading variant, it seems we ought to be lighting the road ahead as brightly as possible.

With respect and appreciation,
Edwin A. Suominen
Triple-vaccinated, still uninfected, and worried

Notes

As with my other nature photography, I am releasing these photos under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. ←
PJ Morrison, Cork, Ireland. “Writer-Comedian-Poet–in a body that doesn’t work so well–needing humour & strength to escape those telling me “ah sure it’ll be grand,” https://twitter.com/wastelessme. ←
Byn’s Weird Brain, Midwestern USA. “Longcovid knocked me on my ass (early 2020 & counting) I don’t even know who I am anymore,” https://twitter.com/BynThereDoneTht. ←
Dr. Marjorie Roberts, Georgia, USA. “Mom, wife, veteran, covid-19 survivor, advocate,” https://twitter.com/DrMarjorieRobe1. ←
Daria Oller, PT, DPT, ATC, New Jersey. “Physical Therapist, Athletic Trainer, Tap Dancer, Runner, Burlesque Performer, Education Co-Director Long COVID Physio,” https://twitter.com/OnTapPhysio. ←
Denise Martin, Bristol, England. “Mental health campaigner. Retired mental health nurse. Ginger cat lover,” https://twitter.com/whatsdeedoing. ←
Ceban F, Ling S, Lui, LMW, et al. “Fatigue and Cognitive Impairment in Post-COVID-19 Syndrome: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity (2021 Dec 29), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2021.12.020. ←
Groff D, Sun A, Ssentongo A, et al. “Short-term and Long-term Rates of Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection A Systematic Review,” JAMA Network Open: Infectious Diseases (2021 Oct 13), https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2784918. ←
See, e.g., Dr. Nisreen Alwan’s Tweet of January 7 about the situation in the UK: “A reasonable conservative prevalence of LC (>3m) is 1 in 10 out of all those infected. This is based on updated ONS estimates in Sep 2021,” https://twitter.com/Dr2NisreenAlwan/status/1479566880197206022. ←
It’s been over a year since Episode 24 (“Long Haulers”), and it just doesn’t seem to get mentioned on the podcast anymore. ←
For Moderna, see Hung Fu Tseng, Bradley Ackerson, Yi Luo, et al. “Effectiveness of mRNA-1273 against SARS-CoV-2 omicron and delta variants” (2022 Jan 8), https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.07.22268919v1. The two doses most “fully vaccinated” people have has a VEI of around 30% at best (i.e., they have about 70% the risk of infection as someone unvaccinated), dropping to zero after six months. The third shot starts out above 60% VEI, dropping to 49% for those who received it on or before October 21, 2021.
These results are if anything optimistic compared to the findings of the UK Health Security Agency’s 31 December 2021 briefing, which shows a third shot of the Moderna (mRNA-1273) vaccine having an initial efficacy of around 60-75% against symptomatic infection. The efficacy (again, against symptomatic infection) with two shots of Pfizer (BNT162b2) drops to essentially zero after 20 weeks. With a third shot, it starts out at around 65% and drops to around 50% by the tenth week.
These are of course both pre-prints; Omicron appeared just six weeks ago. ←
My inquiry Tweet (with a thread of follow-up Tweets) was seen almost 25,000 times, yet resulted in just two reports of lingering symptoms after breakthrough infections that I was able to follow up on. This runs counter to my overall narrative, but must be discussed candidly. https://twitter.com/edsuom/status/1478058813873799169. ←
Lisa Joseph, https://twitter.com/LisaJos21457910. ←
https://twitter.com/WallStCrime. ←
Antonelli M, Penfold R, Merino J, et al. “Risk factors and disease profile of post-vaccination SARS-CoV-2 infection in UK users of the COVID Symptom Study app: a prospective, community-based, nested, case-control study,” The Lancet: Infectious Diseases (2021 Sept 1), https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00460-6. See esp. Figure 3. ←
Taquet M, Dercon Q, Harrison P, “Six-month sequelae of post-vaccination SARS-CoV-2 infection: a retrospective cohort study of 10,024 breakthrough infections” (2021 Nov 8), https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508. ←
Kuodi P, Gorelick Y, Zayyad H, et al. “Association between vaccination status and reported incidence of post-acute COVID-19 symptoms in Israel: a cross-sectional study of patients infected between March 2020 and November 2021” (2022 Jan 6), https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800. ←
As with all of these observational studies, the picture is a bit clouded by complicating factors. Participants were self-selected with a low survey response rate, few had ever been hospitalized, some of them had a third shot or were infected before vaccination, and no children were included. And the paper leaves the nature of their “adjusted regression model” so unclear that I am choosing to ignore the adjusted results.
“We adjusted for the difference in follow-up time and proportion of asymptomatic patients at the time of diagnosis between the groups. In addition, to take the anticipated age differences into account, the analysis was age-stratified and differences in the length of time from the beginning of symptoms to responding to the survey were adjusted for in the model.” Meaning what, exactly? ←
Table 3: “Crude and adjusted risk ratios for the most frequent post COVID symptoms among partially and fully vaccinated participants compared with unvaccinated ones.” ←
Ziyad Al-Aly, Benjamin Bowe, Yan Xie, “Long Covid after Breakthrough COVID-19: the post-acute sequelae of breakthrough COVID-19” (2021 Nov 15), https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1062160/v1. ←

Betrayal

2020-09-13T18:38:00.001-07:00

There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.

—Proverbs 6:16-19 (ESV)

Nineteen years ago last week, terrorists under the command of Osama bin Laden carried out an attack that resulted in the deaths of 2,977 Americans. I put a flag on my vehicle just like millions of my fellow citizens. All around were yellow ribbons and bumper stickers saying “United We Stand.”

On the Wednesday evening after the attack, I attended one of my conservative Laestadian church’s small-group Bible classes in a member’s home. We sat in prayer, asking God to give our leaders guidance and strength, and then dispensed with the regular topic to talk about what had just happened to our country.

I never imagined that a day would come, less than two decades later, when that country would look like the one I see now. That at least a third of my fellow citizens–including most if not all of the people I was sitting among that Wednesday evening–are supporting a man who has done nothing but betray them since he took office.

Let’s be very clear about this, dear believer: Donald J. Trump has betrayed you. He has violated all the Christian values you have taught to your children, that you claim to stand for: honesty, sexual fidelity, respect for officials, Christian love for one’s fellow man. Just look at the Bible verse quoted at the top of this essay; every word could be addressed to the man you voted for as President of the United States.

I mean, just look at these seven things the Bible–your Bible–calls “abominations” to God (Prov. 6:16-19). Look at those verses with those judgment-sharpened eyes of yours, believer, and see how much they fit this man you so steadfastedly champion. There are no more “haughty eyes,” than those of this narcissist who makes every single thing about himself and craves constant admiration. Is there really more of “a lying tongue” on the part of any public official? Does anyone else even come close to his thousands of provable lies? Is anyone else close to being such “a false witness who breathes out lies”?

If you keep reading, you will be able to see the “hands that shed innocent blood.” We have certainly seen the “heart that devises wicked plans” and “feet that make haste to run to evil,” many times over. (You might start with paying off porn stars for their silence about his adultery and continue from there to a whole disgusting list of cruelty and crimes.)

And there really is no doubt about his being someone “who sows discord among brothers,” is there? Seriously, you’re not going to try to claim that, after the thousands of thousands of insults and all the mocking and jeering? Just thinking about some of them is exhausting and sickening. You support even that?

There is a very real spiritual danger you face, dear believer, and I am not afraid to warn you of it even as an atheist who does not share your beliefs about sins or souls. You are headed straight for the cliff of irredeemable hypocrisy, where your words about morality mean nothing, where your faith without works is dead. It matters who you put into the highest office of the land. It matters to the entire nation, yes, and to me, but also to your soul. What have you become?

———

Now, we will have to gloss over a number of other betrayals. Not because they are anything less than stunning and disgusting, but simply because our attention spans are limited (mine, too, nowadays) and I want to show you how personal his betrayal really is–beyond just your beliefs, and beyond these awful things: He has of course also betrayed his oath of office, many times over, and the lives of our military members.

I wish I could help you understand–along with all but one Republican U.S. senator–how serious it was when he said, “Do me a favor, though?” to a foreign head of state before he would release foreign aid funds that had been authorized by Congress.¹ Or when he demanded that governors be nice to him before he would send much-needed Coronavirus aid to their states.² Or the way he is trying to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service because–as he said himself, on tape–he doesn’t like people voting by mail. Or when he just violated the Hatch Act by staging his Republican convention speech from the White House lawn–our White House?³ Do you like having government property trespassed on for use as a campaign prop? I sure don’t.

Regarding the lives of our military members–most recently, you may recall that those bounties put on their heads by Vladimir Putin was none of this President’s concern. And you do know what he thinks of those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, right? Suckers and losers, from John McCain to the thousands of honored dead whose graves he wouldn’t visit because the rain would mess up his hair.⁴

I wish there were a way to help you see how serious this all is. But let’s get personal again, this time with the betrayal of you and your life.

COVID-19 Chronology

As of September 12, by the reckoning of The New York Times, 193,551 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19. It’s very important for you to understand this one critical thing about Donald Trump: He has also betrayed you, by making you think COVID-19 is no big deal and masks are for liberal wimps, that you should pack together in a rally and dismiss the dangers of this virus. It’s your honorable service as a veteran of our armed forces. It’s your Christian soul that suffers from the sin of hypocrisy, supporting a man so flagrantly against every one of your values.

Please, would you just stop defending him at every turn for a moment–just this once–and consider how deep that betrayal really is? If so, keep reading.

———

Below is a timeline of things said and done (or not done) by this President about the virus, in chronological order.⁵ Each image represents one 9/11 worth of American deaths (2,977) that occurred from COVID-19 during the time between those statements.⁶ Quotes in red are things he said in private to Bob Woodward.

January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

February 7: “It goes through air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You know, the touch, you don’t have to touch things [to get it], right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus . . . .This is more deadly.”⁷

February 10: “I think the virus is going to be–it’s going to be fine.”

February 26: “This is a flu. This is like a flu.”

March 4: “Now, and this is just my hunch, and–but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild.”

March 7: “No, I’m not concerned at all.

March 19: I intended “to always play it down.”

March 30: “Stay calm, it will go away. You know it–you know it is going away, and it will go away, and we’re going to have a great victory.”

April 1: “They [governors] have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.’”

April 7: “So, you know, things are happening. It’s a–it’s–I haven’t seen bad. I’ve not seen bad.”

April 9: A reporter asked, could Trump’s coronavirus response have been better? “I couldn’t have done it any better.”

April 23: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that . . . . So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn’t been checked but you’re gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way . . .”

April 29: “It’s gonna go away, this is going to go away.”

May 8: “This is going to go away without a vaccine. It is going to go away. We are not going to see it again.”

June 15: “At some point this stuff goes away and it’s going away.”

June 23: “It’s going away.” Trump held a rally on this day in Phoenix, and one in Oklahoma three days earlier at which he “joked” that testing should be slowed down and then said he really doesn’t joke. He was reportedly “furious” about the low attendance of 6,200 as reported by the Tulsa fire department. And yet that small number of people gathered close together, never seeing the “Do Not Sit Here, Please” stickers that had been removed by his campaign staffers beforehand, still managed to spread the virus.⁸

July 7: “I think we are in a good place.”

July 28: Dr. Anthony Fauci has “got this high approval rating. So why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect–and the administration – with respect to the virus?” (Well, one hint might be that it took until July 11 for Trump to finally demonstrate the faintest hint of leadership on the virus when he wore a mask for the first time.⁹ And that faded fast; on Sept. 3, he was mocking Joe Biden for wearing a mask and claiming his doing so indicated psychiatric issues.¹⁰ This is our President talking like this.)

August 5: “It will go away like things go away”

Notes

Much respect to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for showing some backbone and principle when he voted to hear witnesses, when he voted to convict Trump for crimes for which the evidence was overwhelming, and when he speaks out against Trump–all as the lone member of Congress (as far as I know, certainly the lone member of the Senate) from his entire party to do so. ←
“Trump commits to helping blue states fight the coronavirus if their governors are nice to him,” Vox, March 25, 2020. The article quotes Trump from an appearance on Fox News: “It’s a two-way street. They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.’” ←
Seriously, just look it up. It’s all there for you with a simple web search, if you move past your usual right-wing safe media sources to see what’s actually going on. You may also come across a story about Trump deep-sixing the plans Jared Kushner came up for him to address the COVID-19 pandemic because, well, it was only (then) blue states who were getting hit. Gotta love all that “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” from our nation’s chief executive, huh?
Please, look some stuff up about all this, honestly and openly, OK? It’s our country, and you need to be worrying about it, too. ←
“Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’,” by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, September 3, 2020. This article will horrify you if you just allow yourself to read it. Please go ahead; the country needs you to become informed about this man, and your refusal to do so would not make any of what he’s done any less true. ←
The items in the listing were selected and (except as otherwise indicated) copied from a comprehensive timeline table provided by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX32) on his web site. ←
The image of the North face of the South Tower is a reduced-resolution thumbnail of one by Robert on Flickr: UA Flight 175 hits WTC south tower 9-11 edit.jpeg, CC BY-SA 2.0. To figure out where to insert the 65 copies of that image (65 x 2,977 = 193,505; close enough) in the timeline, I used the then-latest version of the file us.csv made freely available to the public by The New York Times with some basic arithmetic. Overall, the distribution of images I chose has the effect of rounding to the nearest image’s worth of deaths in between Trump statements. ←
“Trump acknowledged seriousness of COVID-19 privately to Bob Woodward in early February”, Thomson Reuters, September 9, 2020. The subheading under the article’s headline is, “Biden blasts Trump on latest revelation, calls it ‘a life and death betrayal’.” It ain’t just me saying this. ←
Wikipedia, 2020 Trump Tulsa rally. One person who very plausibly died as a result of that gathering was Herman Cain, a prominent Republican leader who “tested negative for the virus immediately before entering the rally,” tested positive nine days later, was hospitalized two days after that, and died on July 30. ←
“Trump wears mask in public for first time during visit to Walter Reed,” Politico July 12, 2020. ←
“Trump mocks Biden for wearing mask: ‘Did you ever see a man that likes a mask as much as him?’”, CNN, September 3, 2020. “Speaking to a largely mask-less crowd in Pennsylvania, Trump asked his supporters if they know ‘a man that likes a mask as much’ as Biden. ‘It gives him a feeling of security,’ the President said. ‘If I was a psychiatrist, I’d say this guy has some big issues.’” I wonder if any of the people he said this to in front of Air Force One will feel at all betrayed if they get sick with COVID-19? ←

Balancing Harms

2020-07-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

Why our teenagers won’t be on their high school campus this fall.

Since early March, I’ve been watching the relentless spread of SARS-COV-2 throughout the United States with morbid fascination and a grim determination not to expose myself or my family to this novel virus that looked plenty dangerous even without its full effects being understood. Now that we are learning more about the long-term suffering and damage it can do with the COVID-19 disease it causes–in younger people as well as those my age and older–this determination has not wavered.¹ There is nothing more important in my life right now than protecting my family and my own body from this virus.

We’ve been holed up on our rural property with only occasional trips to get curbside pickup or have open-air driveway visits with friends. During these long months of quarantine, I’ve combined my technical background in signal processing and programming with a long-standing interest in math and data modeling to get myself a uniquely clear view into the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic.² Yes, that’s a bold claim, but there is a lot of work and I think some pretty informative results to back it up.

Modeling the Spread of COVID-19

This work was to develop a nonlinear mathematical model for the number of reported cases of the disease that fits remarkably closely to what we’ve seen for the past eleven weeks in the U.S. as the curve flattened and then started heading upward again.³ For my own personal interests, I’ve applied the model to reported case data from my own Washington State and the most populous county out here in Eastern Washington where I live. For some context, I’ve also used it to consider how badly things are going in neighboring Idaho, and to stare at the dumpster fires raging in states like Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas.

This plot shows what’s happened during May, June, and now half of July in the U.S. overall, and how well the model fits with the cases reported for each of the past 79 days. The data is generously provided to the public by the New York Times, based on reports from state and local health agencies.⁴ I hope you will understand from these plots why I dared to see myself as having having a uniquely clear view of our pandemic-documentary version of American Horror Story.

U.S. Reported COVID-19 cases vs days elapsed since 1/22

The upper subplot shows the number of reported cases for the entire U.S. since the first of May. There are two curves plotting cumulative case numbers on a logarithmic scale vs the number of days that have elapsed since the first case was reported in this country back on January 22.

The blue curve shows what was actually reported, according to the New York Times data. The red one shows what my model expects was reported for each day in the past, looking backwards from the most recent date (to which it is fixed as an anchor point) with its ten model parameters fitted to the data. The largest error between what the data and the model’s fit to it is just 2.2%, way back on May 11 when there was just over a third as many cases as now.⁵

Under the Hood

You can skip this section if you don’t love math. Your loss.

The skinny subplot below the big one shows the error between the model’s expectations and reality.⁶ What you want to see in such a residual plot is a relatively even distribution of modeling error vs the amount being modeled. This one looks about as good as you could ask for, especially when you consider the significance of normality p of 0.38

That means that the “leftovers” from modeling the past data are not much different from what you would get from normally-distributed random noise.⁷ Because it’s impossible to model noise, you can have some confidence that the model is accounting for most everything but randomness when it is nearly as probable as not that your residuals would look this random if it were indeed just noise causing the error.

It may be more instructive to consider the opposite case, if there were low p value for the non-normality statistic. Say, 0.02 instead of the actual 0.38. That low p value would indicate that re-running 50 experiments (obviously not possible with a natural experiment like the one we are running with worst pandemic in a century) would get you residuals that distinct from normal random error only once on average. That would be a pretty good indication that your model isn’t accounting for some noteworthy phenomenon.⁸ But that’s definitely not what’s happening here with the fit of this model to reported cases of COVID-19 in the United States, at least not as of July 16.

So my “logistic growth with multiple growth regimes model” is accounting for what we see in the data. It is a naive curve-fitting model that does not assume anything beyond the following:

The number of reported cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. is following a logistic growth model with L (the ultimate upper limit) fixed at 1/4 of the U.S. population,⁹
but with three separate growth regimes (3 parameters) having smooth transitions between them (4 parameters),
and with a sinusoidal component that imposes a weekly variation (2 parameters) on the current growth rate for each day,
plus, finally, with a fixed number of new cases per day (1 parameter), to allow the model to only account for reported cases on or after May 1.

The best-fit curve has an artificially high initial growth rate r1 of 4.8966 (nearly 500% per day!), which the differential evolution algorithm arrives at because it isn’t actually looking at numbers before May 1. It just wants to fit the data between May 1 and now as closely as possible, and it found the way to do that was to jack up the growth rate for all those unseen days. It’s doing it’s job, and that’s fine; we don’t care about that earlier growth rate for this analysis, just what is happening now.

Following the model forward,¹⁰ we soon transition to a relatively sedate growth rate r2 of 1%. The transition occurs over a 32-day window (e.g., the time it takes for half the smooth transition between growth rates) defined by s1 that is centered on Feb. 6, (16 days after the first U.S. case), defined by t1. Then the red-state governors reopen things followed by people living it up on Memorial Day weekend. And we wind up with a 5/30 midpoint between the second growth regime where the curve had been flattening nicely and our current scarier one r3 where SARS-COV-2 reminds us who it is with a 1.9% increase in cases per day.

Fortune Telling with Function Fitting

This model of mine is a naive empirical one, using a cool evolutionary algorithm to fit a curve to data. It’s a very elegant curve, constructed from a first-order differential equation with multiple growth rates and smooth transitions and weekly variation, though that doesn’t make it a basis for much extrapolation.

But it certainly does match up to what’s been happening. An error betwen modeled and actual values of 1% or less going back four weeks, and then 2.1% or less for another eight weeks–forever in pandemic time. That’s 79 data points fitted with just ten free parameters. As with a shoe, if the model fits, wear it.

It fits well enough that I will try out some extrapolation anyhow, despite having just acknowleged the limitations of the model for prophetical purposes. The following plot shows what the model is projecting for U.S. reported cases two weeks into the future.

U.S. Reported COVID-19 cases vs days elapsed since 1/22

The upper subplot of this plot shows how many reported U.S. cases the model projects under the assumption that the data will continue to reflect a 1.9% daily growth rate, with an 11% weekly variation imposed by reporting limitations over the weekends.¹¹ That is of course not an entirely safe assumption to make, no matter how closely the model fits to past data, and I have mostly limited my plots to just a couple weeks of extrapolation.¹²

The bottom two subplots show the new cases being reported each day, first as a percentage of the cumulative cases already reported as of that day and then (bottom subplot) as a simple number of new daily cases.

We have gotten jaded to the horror of this pandemic over the past several months, but take another look at that number in the upper right. It’s a big one: nearly five million people testing positive in August. And it’s increasing fast.

In the middle plot, we are seeing one fiftieth more being infected with each passing day, with weekly variation due to testing and people being off on weekends. And on the bottom plot, sixty thousand plus or minus new cases each and every day, all carrying the risk of a person losing their health and vigor for weeks if not months, in some possibly for a lifetime. Occasionally it’s a lifetime that the virus cuts short.

Yet people are complaining about wearing masks when they go in a store.

Dr. Anthony Fauci expressed the belief (or perhaps just hope) that the number of daily reported cases would never reach 100,000.¹³ I fully accept that Dr. Fauci has a wealth of knowledge and insight that is not reflected in my naive curve-fitting to the time-series data. But from what I’m seeing on that bottom red curve, it’s hard for me to see how we can avoid that grim milestone.

To do so, we would need a significantly lower daily growth rate during the coming weeks. It would have to go down enough to cause the value of parameter r3 to decrease, perhaps enough to justify yet another growth regime in the model and an additional three parameters. There is of course no way a naive model builder can know that in advance; this is nonlinear curve fitting with a modest and limited amount of extrapolation, not prophecy.

Track Record

This essay will not dwell on the model’s track record; I’ve done plenty of that in previous blog posts. I’ll just offer a couple of observations from back-testing the model, along with a long footnote about some reddit critics, and leave it at that.¹⁴

With data from the day before yesterday (7/16), the model projected that today’s New York Times cumulative cases number would have been 3,738,827, an increase of 149,338 over the two days. It was 3,719,110, an actual increase of 129,617. The model was pessimistic by 15%, or 7% off per day. It’s a naive curve-fitting model, and does not inform us whether this is because the weekly variation is increasing or the growth rate is settling back down, or there was just quite a bit of random variation in one direction.

With data from seven days ago (7/11), the model projected that today’s New York Times cumulative cases number would have been 3,703,746, an increase of 443,181 over the week. Again, it was 3,719,110 today. That error is too small to bother even worth trying to calculate. The projection was essentially perfect one week out.

State and Local

My own state of Washington was doing pretty well with this virus up until early June. Now things aren’t looking great at all, with not just the number of daily cases increasing each day, but also the rate of growth in daily cases. Here is what I’ve been calling the “Nightmare Plot” with the full set of information about the model’s fit to Washington’s reported case data along with a couple weeks of extrapolation into the end of July.

Washington State cases vs days elapsed since 1/22

I don’t actually expect that the long-term growth rate for reported COVID-19 cases in Washington State will settle at an absurd 33% per day, despite the model’s best fit assigning that value (0.32583) to the parameter r2. Something’s gotta give long before that happens, because no society can sustain having its population infected with a deadly virus at a reported rate that increases each day by a third of the total number of cases reported thus far.

The reason the curve fit can get away with such a high estimation of r2 is that it paired it with a very large value of t1, 271.65. That corresponds to an interim point of 272 days after January 22 that lies midway between the initial growth rate (nearly zero) and that crazy high final growth rate of nearly 33%. That’s October 20. I don’t believe things will continue increasing in Washington state until then, and neither should you. But it is useful to know that the best fit for the model parameters right now is one that projects a lot more cases, and a continued increase in how fast those cases are coming, for months ahead. That’s what would happen if the virus were allowed to progress as it has.

It can’t, of course. We won’t allow it to, whatever our politics or petty objections to wearing something on our face to protect other people. You can see why that growth rate will have to go back down–one way or the other–by humoring me with an extrapolation of the Washington State model through the end of August, when school is scheduled to start. This plot shows the percentage of Washington’s population that the model expects will have tested positive for COVID-19 on each day.

Percentage testing positive in Washington State vs days since 1/22

According to the model, cranking away on the data in its ignorance about anything people might do in response to the situation, or about whatever limitations there are on how many tests can be processed in a given day or week, we would be seeing 2% of the people in the entire state testing positive on August 25. That’s right around the time the kids would be heading back to campus.¹⁵

Assuming the continued accuracy of CDC Director Robert Redfield’s June 29 assessment that there are ten times as many actual cases as reported ones, one in every five citizens of Washington would have actually contracted COVID-19. Long before that, though, you would see masks everywhere even in the rural red eastern half of the state and Karen would finally shut the fuck up already. It’s actually started happening out here now, after months of opposition and denial.

The curve will flatten again, inevitably. This is the one bit of armchair epidemiology I will dare to offer, if you don’t also count my assigning 1/4 of the region’s population to model parameter L. The rest of my work is just looking carefully at data with a highly refined non-linear model that has reflected that data really well thus far and is pretty good at looking into the future a few days, perhaps even a week or two.¹⁶

Here’s the Nightmare Plot for Spokane County, by far the most populous one in Eastern Washington:

Spokane County (Eastern WA) cases vs days elapsed since 2/25

In this instance, we have the extreme periodic behavior of zero cases being reported each of the past two Saturdays (including today). But the model isn’t fooled; it mostly accounts for the periodicity by evolving its parameter aw to an unusually high value of 83% (0.83329). The residuals are fine, as normally distributed as would be expected from random Gaussian errors nearly half the time. And thus it can project with some confidence there will be well over a hundred newly reported cases this coming Tuesday and also on Wednesday. I am pretty confident that we (I live in a surrounding county, but Spokane County looms large) will be seeing four thousand reported cases (in a county of just over half a million) by early August.¹⁷

Finally, before going into the heavy parental decision that all this data was in service of, I will offer a Nightmare Plot for neighboring Kootenai County, Idaho. I expect the number of reported cases there to double in the next two weeks.

Kootenai County (North Idaho) cases vs days elapsed since 3/21

Hell No, They Won’t Go

I’ll repeat again that my only relevant expertise is in applying nonlinear mathematical models to time-series data.¹⁸ But, alongside my wife, I am still am entrusted with a decision that will affect some young people’s lives. Using this limited area of expertise along with a very comprehensive collection of data, we have decided that our high school kids will not be attending campus in person this fall, regardless of what precautions the school administrators take or what requirements they have. We just won’t do it.

How Many is Too Much?

The metric I have been using to assess how serious things are is 1% of the local or national population testing positive for COVID-19. Again relying on the view of CDC Director Robert Redfield (whose agency is now being shunned by the deranged racist narcissist in the White House) that there are ten times as many actual cases as reported,¹⁹ this equates to one tenth of the population that has thus far been infected.²⁰

This 1% threshold has already been reached nationally, around July 12. My modeling of Washington State, Spokane County (WA), and Kootenai County (ID) for the weeks ahead makes me believe that it will also be reached locally by the time my kids would be asked to return to campus this fall. Using Dr. Redfield’s 10:1 actual vs reported estimate, every tenth person will have been infected in the region around my kids’ high school.

Think about that number for a moment. One out of every ten residents of the most populous county in Eastern Washington, or indeed the entire state–will have had that virus growing inside their bodies. Imagine one finger on your two hands held up in front of you being a random person in your community who is or has been a host for SARS-COV-2.²¹

How Many Contagious People Around?

The thought of 10% of the national or local population having contracted COVID-19 is pretty scary, but how many of them will actually pose a danger to my kids and my wife and me? This is a tough question to ask, and the weakest link in my analysis. My wife and I had an important decision to make, and we’re pretty much on our own in the failed state that America has become, and all I have to work with is the reported cases plus whatever assumption I put on top of them.

Let’s first consider the time window of when people can spread the virus to others. In an article published in March and updated July 2, The Harvard Medical School says the

time from exposure to symptom onset (known as the incubation period) is thought to be three to 14 days, though symptoms typically appear within four or five days after exposure.

We know that a person with COVID-19 may be contagious 48 to 72 hours before starting to experience symptoms. Emerging research suggests that people may actually be most likely to spread the virus to others during the 48 hours before they start to experience symptoms.

The article provides little guidance about when infectiousness might end. “Most symptomatic carriers “will no longer be contagious by 10 days after symptoms resolve,” is the best I can find, wondering if this also applies to people whose symptoms last for weeks.

Assembling all these vague numbers together, I wind up with the assumption of a fuzzy, ill-defined “contagion window” extending out to ten days after exposure. I have no idea what the shape of that distribution would look like. Are there lots of people who you still wouldn’t want to be around more than ten days after they were exposed, or just a few? But to keep things simple, to limit the number of people testing positive who I will consider infectious, and to not be quite so alarmist, I’ll assume that the window extends from the exposure date (realistically, it’s probably the day after exposure at the earliest) to ten days after.

So when did all the thousands of people who tested positive on a given day actually get exposed to the virus and start that (highly uncertain) ten-day contagion window?

Unfortunately, the delay from when a person gets exposed until their exposure results in a reported case is variable, long, and may be getting longer as backlogs of tests pile up. In a scathing April 4 critique of the very kind of analysis I’ve attempted to do–by a person who knows a thing or two about modeling data–Nate Silver said he assumes

that there’s a delay of 15 days . . . between infection and the test results showing up in the data though if anything I suspect this is too generous, given the huge testing bottlenecks in places such as California.

I’ll go with his 15 day estimate. In doing so, I am mindful of his warning that the “number of reported COVID-19 cases is not a very useful indicator of anything unless you also know something about how tests are being conducted.” But I will go ahead and make the terribly simplistic yet perhaps still useful assumption that (1) the exposure resulting in a given day’s new daily cases occurred 15 days before that day, and (2) the window in which all those infected people were infectious to others was from 5-15 days before they became a reported case.

This means that you have to look forward 5-15 days along the red projected-cases curve to see how many people around you are infectious on any given day. What the projection does is to give you an idea as to how many of those as-yet uncounted people are out there being contagious right now.

In the U.S. overall, my model is projecting that we will go from yesterday’s 3.7 million reported cases (none of whom are still in that 5-15 day window) to around 4.8 million 15 days from now.²² That’s 1.1 million additional people testing positive, with most of them in that contagion window right now. I’m further assuming, with Dr. Redfield, that there are ten times as many people actually infected on each given day as what the reported case data shows, which means there are maybe 8-10 million Americans you really don’t want to be around at this time.

Nationally, with our current growth rate and my shaky assumptions, it appears that there are now three infectious people for every reported case. That’s a lot of virus walking around.

How about for Washington State? Simply multiplying by three the 2.2% figure I dared to extrapolate above for Washington on 8/27 would result in around 7% of the population being infectious then. That’s a lot. I’m skeptical of it, too.²³ So let’s (irresponsibly) project out the actual number of reported cases and then do the math like we just did for the U.S.

Ignorant of the likelihood that the curve will flatten between now and then, the model projects that 1% of Washington’s population will be testing positive on August 7, which is comparable to the situation now in the U.S. overall.²⁴ See the “Percentage testing positive” plot in the section above. Re-doing the plot with cumulative case numbers rather than percentages looks like this:

“No-flattening” long-term projection for reported cases in Washington State

To do a SWAG²⁵ for the percentage of Washington that is infectious on 8/7 with its projected 78,000 reported cases or so, let’s look forward 15 days to when the model has a business-as-usual projection of around 133,000 reported cases. That’s 55,000 additional cases. If most of those new cases appearing on 8/22 are infectious on 8/7, and if the 10x multipler for actual vs reported cases holds true, that’s perhaps nearly half a million Washingtonians capable of giving us COVID-19.

So, when it projects that 1% of my state’s citizens will be testing positive, assuming the virus is still on the rampage, my model tells me that around 6% of the state population will be capable of infecting me if I get too close. As I said before, I doubt if it will be growing as fast then as the model currently projects, but even half that would be too much.²⁶

And of course I could not resist doing the same irresponsible extrapolation for Spokane County:

“No-flattening” long-term projection for reported cases in Spokane County

The model projects around 2,200 new reported cases from 8/7 to 8/22. Ten times that would be around 4% of the county population actually infected, with most of them infectious to others.²⁷

What’s So Bad About 3%?

Imagine that there is indeed a 3% probability of any randomly selected person from the population around you being able to infect you with COVID-19 by coughing, talking, or even just breathing.

If you (or your school kid) encounters just 30 people randomly chosen from the population in a given day, you have only a 40% probability of avoiding any encounters with an infectious COVID-19 carrier. If you mingle in society and encounter a different set of people each day, your probability of avoiding proximity to a COVID-19 carrier go down dramatically each day. After a week, it’s practically impossible to remain free of any such encounters.

Hopefully those encounters are brief and separated by at least six feet (more space is better), with masks on everybody unless outdoors. That doesn’t sound like any sort of high school experience my kids would have this fall, whether attending under reasonable conditions or staying home. No dances, hugs, high fives, being the class clown or acerbic wit, band, etc.

So they will just stay home regardless and wait for our national folly to play itself out. Hopefully before or at least by the time we reach 5% of Americans reported as infected and probably half actually, we will have some herd immunity going and Spring Quarter will look safe.²⁸

If it reopens, each of the students attending our kids’ high school will have a terrifyingly high probability of being exposed at some point through their day to someone infected by COVID-19. This presents an individual and family risk that my wife and I will not ask our kids to bear.

The Ethical Dimension

There is an ethical dimension to this as well. Admittedly, it is a small and secondary part of my considerations because, like you, I consider my health and that of my own family of paramount importance.

But here it is: Do I want to participate in an activity whose existence poses a serious health risk to a teacher, janitor, teacher’s assistant, or administrative employee? A person already underpaid and unappreciated who probably feels compelled to enter that building full of people whose skills in risk assessment and decision-making will not fully develop for a few years yet?

That person may be decades older than the students talking loudly in their classrooms²⁹ or the kids whose bathrooms they are tasked with cleaning. And they may have little choice but to put their bodies at risk for simple economic survival, including, ironically, being able to keep the very health insurance they rely on to keep from going bankrupt if they get sick. They don’t have the luxury my kids have (though they hate it) of sitting home with both parents there.

It is an upside of having older parents that perhaps balances the increased risk we have, but worthless if we don’t make use of it. So we will continue staying home and staying vigilant, and thus deny this virus one small set of hosts to travel with.

Ironically, the parents that this effects most may be teachers with kids in school themselves.³⁰ People in other professions and trades have to figure something out for their kids to be home for two months every summer here in most places in the U.S. But teachers have long enjoyed the perk of summers off, and so haven’t needed to make child care plans for the summers. When they go back to work, their kids go back to school. Well, maybe not this time, if they are in a reopening school district and decide not to subject their kids (and thus, indirectly, themselves) to the risk of infection.

The Decision: A Balance of Harms

Our decision will affect our kids’ future. There are serious consequences to them either way. On one side, this avoids subjecting them to an unacceptably high risk of catching a virus whose likelihood of causing months of illness and disability, long-term damage, and even death is only now being appreciated.³¹ Or (especially regarding the possibility of death) of passing it on to the two people they love most on earth.

On the other side is the sober realization that these teenagers of ours are going to miss out on much of the activities and flirtations and friendship intimacies of the years we remember from when we were them.³² There’s just no substitute for that experience in “remote learning,” whose name it seems to me refers as much to the likelihood of learning occurring as to the physical distance.

This decision is a balance of harms. It was difficult to make, but allowing our kids back onto their high school campus this fall imposes an individual and family risk on them that they cannot be asked to bear.

There are three times as many people who have been infected across the U.S. as there were at the beginning of May. Now the spread of the virus is growing twice as fast as it was then. Yet the general public and its elected officials (far more so in the GOP and its Dear Leader but to some extent true of both parties) have been acting like re-opening everything is simply inevitable no matter how many refrigerated morgue trucks a hospital needs to have stationed outside, no matter how many millions of people young and old wind up with permanent damage to their lungs, kidneys, hearts, and even their brains.³³ No matter how many weeks of suffering many millions have to endure, each successive day growing with the fear and dread of being one of the unlucky long-term sick. Nope, we have to get things re-opened again, no matter what.

Again, I recognize that my wife and I are privileged in not having to leave the house every day for work. But the fact that in-person reopenings of various types are pretty much economic necessities in our dog-eat-dog unfettered capitalism does not make me want to participate in them if I can help it. That’s mostly from a desire for preservation of self and family, but to a small extent to not participate in the mass delusion that everything will be OK.

Notes

This essay isn’t intended to be a collection of scary links, but it’s worthwhile to consider the view of an ICU doctor last week that his patients have gone from having an average age of around 65 to “between 25 to 35, 45 years old” (“Miami Hospital ICU Doctor: New Influx Of Patients Is Younger Than Before,” NPR, July 13. ←
The technical details of the modeling are covered later in this essay. I had spent much of my Python coding time in the past two years working on a free, open-source software project that models power MOSFET devices using Python and a freely available underlying simulation tool called Ngspice. Then a deadly pandemic happened, my family went into a no-nonsense quarantine for months, and frankly it became a bit difficult to concentrate on something as removed from practical life as that. Instead, I took the same nonlinear modeling tools I developed for the simulation project and applied them to time-series data on reported COVID-19 cases. This essay with its plots is the culmination of that effort. ←
The model is implemented in an example file covid19.py that is part of my ADE Python package. It’s free software; with the right software skills, you can install it and try it out for yourself. ←
Earlier I was using data from The Johns Hopkins University, but have switched to the New York Times data both for the detail it offers as well as its simple and open licensing terms, which are co-extensive with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license, plus this:
“In general, we are making this data publicly available for broad, noncommercial public use including by medical and public health researchers, policymakers, analysts and local news media.”
“If you use this data, you must attribute it to ‘The New York Times’ in any publication. If you would like a more expanded description of the data, you could say ‘Data from The New York Times, based on reports from state and local health agencies.’” ←
Some of the states and counties I’ve looked at fit well enough to their datasets without all ten parameters used in the national model, and thus have simpler models. Washington State, Spokane County, and Kootenai County have only two growth regimes, seven parameters instead of ten. The AICc metric was used to determine what parameters “earned their keep” and remained in the model. They only do if they result in a lower (better) AICc score. ←
A square-root transform is applied to both the modeled and actual new-case numbers to arrive at the residuals. Then the sum of squared error (SSE) is computed by squaring each residual value and adding them up. The purpose of the transform is to lessen the disproportionate impact of later, higher numbers on the curve fit. ←
The “normal” or Gaussian probability distribution describes many events in nature, from the noise you hear on a radio to the variation in people’s heights. It is what you eventually wind up with when you look at enough related phenomena together, even if the underlying probability distributions of each one are not normal. ←
For some reason, a p of 0.05 is the standard for many statistical tests. So, on that basis, the residuals are well within the acceptable range of normality. ←
This value of L is the largest number of people the state/county population expected to be reported as infected. According to Wikipedia, the lowest estimate for COVID-19 herd immunity of actual (not just reported) cases is 50%.
But there will always be more actual cases than reported. As mentioned in the essay, on June 25 CDC director Robert Redfield indicated there are 10 times as many actual cases as reported. That would reduce a 50% herd-immunity value of L to 0.05 times population. But the 10x ratio could change as the number of cases increases and testing could increase to the point where nearly every American has been tested.
To be conservative about the modeling and hopefully avoid inserting too many shaky assumptions into it, I’ve fixed L at 0.25 times the region’s population. This limits the increase in reported cases (regardless of the growth regime) as the number approaches 1/4 of the state or county’s total population.
It actually doesn’t matter much. At this point in the pandemic, L has almost no impact yet; all of the regions I’ve looked at still have reported case numbers that are single-digit percentages of their populations. ←
The curve fitting algorithm actually follows the model backward from the latest day’s data, to which it fixed its cumulative case result. It does this by backwards-integrating a first-order differential equation xd(t,x) whose gory details are shown in the upper left part of the first plot. Applied mathematics in all its glory, and it works. ←
The exact parameters are shown in the lower right of the first set of subplots, with the third growth regime’s daily rate r3 equal to 0.18863 and the weekly variation aw equal to 0.11354. ←
Extrapolating a nonlinear model is not something to be done lightly even if the underlying phenomena are well understood and predictable. In the case of America’s COVID-19 pandemic, there are a couple of known unknowns (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld) worth mentioning in addition to all the unknown unknowns.
The curve could flatten again if those states whose citizens and governors have not been taking this virus seriously might finally start to do so when enough of the people around them get sick and they see a lot of those people staying sick for a long time, or even dying. A second less comforting possibility is that we may soon see the effects of Trump’s stated desire not to have the reported numbers increase quite so fast (“Slow the testing down, please!”), and of his latest move to keep data from reaching the CDC. Doesn’t it seem that a federal agency named “The Center for Disease Control and Prevention” should be informed about just how many cases there currently are of a pandemic affecting millions of Americans? ←
Norah O’Donnel: “Dr. Fauci, do you still think that we could reach 100,000 infections a day?” Fauci: “You know, Norah, I don’t think we will. I hope not. It is conceivable that if we don’t get good control over the current outbreak and we keep spreading into other regions of the country, we could reach 100,000” (CBS News, “Fauci says he doesn’t like ‘to be pitted against the president’ after multiple attacks from the White House,” July 16. ←
Posting about this modeling work of mine on the r/Coronavirus subreddit has resulted in a lot of page views, which has been appreciated since the goal of the writer is after all to be read, and this seems like something important to share. It also results in a few critical comments each time, some of which have actually been helpful in guiding me toward more statistically rigorous modeling. I am finally reminded of the public health official in Argentina who took me to task back in April about not providing any statistical tests about the model’s residuals. It was a valid criticism which I accepted and responded to, and the official gracefully acknowledged frustration and fears about the virus in their country.
Some of the critical comments have just been exasperating snark from people who consider themselves far above something so naive as fitting data to a curve and daring to claim that the curve means something when it fits very well. A recent interloper gazed down from his high horse to proclaim that I am trying to model sampling error with my weekly-variation component. I tried unsuccessfully to point out that my effort here is to model reported cases, not to imagine some expertise about an unknown number of actual cases of infection out there, hidden in the unreported masses. If the time series of case reports has a periodicity to it, as it obviously does for the U.S. overall and also more than half the states and counties I’ve examined, then that is what I’m modeling more faithfully by adding a periodic component. I predict the reported cases will increase by not much more tomorrow–perhaps even less–than they did today, because the periodic component to the rate at which cases are reported reaches the trough of its wave tomorrow. That says nothing about how cases are “actually” increasing, nor do I ask it to.
The same inquisitor muttered something about basis functions and suggested I look into learning about the Fourier series. (I’m an electrical engineer with expertise and a dozen patents related to signal processing; I’ve heard of the Fourier series, thanks.) How silly of me to think that there is anything special about fitting a ten-parameter combination of any functions to within 2.1% over 70+ data points. Why, he (we can all guess it was probably a “he,” can’t we?) could pull off that same trick with just about anything. I suggested it was absurd for him to claim that ten free parameters of a Fourier series (five terms with a real and imaginary component apiece, though I’d forgotten about the DC component) would accomplish the same thing, and he made some assertion that he managed it with seven, presumably seven components. No plots or code or anything was provided, of course. And even if he could, he would find the innate periodicity of the Fourier series bringing his case numbers right back to the simple linear increase of the zero-frequency DC component, back and forth in an absurd roller coaster totally unrelated to the problem at hand as his modeled cases come in faster and then slower and then faster again.
I’ll post this on reddit like my other essays about this model. But this time I think I’ll pass on any further schooling from the boy geniuses there who remember a few textbook cases and fancy terminology but offer no relevant work of their own for comparison. ←
Update 7/23: If I kept updating these blog posts with each new day’s data, I’d never stop. But given how sensitive such a long extrapolation is to changes in recent data, I do feel compelled to offer this link to a plot updated with 7/22 data that shows 1.3% of the state testing positive on August 25 instead of 2%. There is just a hint of flattening showing up in the curve. ←
For the Washington State data, the model has been a bit less accurate than for the U.S. as a whole. With 7/16 data, it projected 48,001 reported cases today when there were actually 47,563, an error of 34% (16% per day) in the projected vs actual increase from 46,268.
With data from seven days ago, it projected there would be 46,950 reported cases today. Again, there were 47,563. That’s an actual increase of 6,237, compared to a projected increase of 5,624. The error was around 11% for the week, or around 1.5% per day. ←
Admittedly, the model starts to deviate quite a bit from what happened when it looks back more than three weeks. It goes from a worst-case modeled vs actual error of 6.9% on 7/11 to 12.8% on 6/28, 14.5% a week earlier, and 21.9% a week before that. There was an obviously artificial glitch in test results being released around 6/27-6/28, which the model will only approach as it smooths its errors over the whole interval of interest.
Update 7/23: A Nightmare Plot for Spokane County updated with 7/22 data is here. The model projects 4,000 reported cases on August 4. ←
I hope this modeling work gives people some insights about the situation we face here in the U.S. But please note this critical disclaimer: First, I disclaim everything that the New York Times does. I’m pretty sure their lawyers had good reason for putting that stuff in there, so I’m going to repeat it. Except think “Ed Suominen” when you are reading “The New York Times”:
“The New York Times has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information. However, the database may contain typographic errors or inaccuracies and may not be complete or current at any given time. Licensees further agree to assume all liability for any claims that may arise from or relate in any way to their use of the database and to hold The New York Times Company harmless from any such claims.”
Second, I know very little about biology, beyond a layman’s fascination with it and the way everything evolved. (Including this virus!) I do have some experience with modeling, including using the ADE package of which this COVID-19 modeling is a demonstration file to develop some really cool power semiconductor simulation software that I’ll be releasing in a month or so from when I’m doing the GitHub commit with this COVID-19 example. The software (also to be free and open-source!) has a sophisticated subcircuit model for power MOSFETs that evolves 40+ parameters (an unfathomably huge search space). And it does so with this very package whose example you are now reading.
So–yes, this is still a disclaimer–I am not an expert in any of the actual realms of medicine, biology, etc. that we rely on for telling us what’s going on with this virus. I just know how to fit models to data, in this case a model that is well understood to apply to biological populations.
Don’t even think of relying on this analysis or the results of it for any substantive action. If you really find it that important, then investigate for yourself the math, programming, and the theory behind my use of the math for this situation. Run the code, play with it, critique it, consider how well the model does or does not apply. Consider whether the limiting part of the curve might occur more drastically or sooner, thus making this not as big a deal. Listen to experts and the very real reasoning they may have for their own projections about how bad this could get.
Seriously, experts know stuff. That’s what they do. One of them I recommend paying attention to is Dr. Osterholm at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP). His interview in the July 1 podcast episode Viral Gravity is sobering but informative and, as we’ve seen in the nearly three weeks since, has been quite accurate about how serious the situation is. ←
Washington Post, “CDC chief says coronavirus cases may be 10 times higher than reported,” June 25. ←
There’s nothing magic about my 1% threshold for reported cases, i.e., 10% of the population actually infected. It is just easy to picture 1/10 of a population. That’s one of your digits from both hands. The Romans understood the power of that concept; “decimation” referred to the Roman Army’s practice of brutally killing every tenth man in a legion to terrorize and punish insubordination. ←
I have just the finger in mind when it comes to the “leadership” of our current president in this crisis, but that’s another blog post entirely. ←
Update 7/23: This projection is unchanged. Here is the Nightmare Plot for the U.S. overall, updated with data through 7/22. ←
Update 7/23: With today’s updated data and the 1.3% figure it now projects for 8/27, the 3:1 multiple would yield 4.2% of the population being infectious. Still more than the 3% figure discussed in the main text. ←
Update 7/23: Now projected as 0.92%. Close enough. ←
Acronym for “scientific wild-ass guess,” an old term of endearment used by engineers who know full well how many shaky assumptions are involved with many a technical endeavor. ←
Update 7/23: The projection updated with 7/22 data now looks like this: around 70,000 cases on 8/7, and around 94,000 on 8/22. The increase is projected to be 24,000 rather than 55,000. So, with all the other assumptions kept the same, we would be looking at 3.1% of Washingtonians capable of infecting you on 8/22. Not as much, but the discussion of 3% still applies. ←
Update 7/23: With 7/22 data, the “no-flattening” long-term projection for Spokane County is for around 2,000 new reported cases, just a bit less than previously projected. ←
There will hopefully be a vaccine early in 2021 but when and for whom? At the rate things are going now, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to 50% infected before one becomes available for everyone in my family. ←
“[L]oud speech can emit thousands of oral fluid droplets per second . . . there is a substantial probability that normal speaking causes airborne virus transmission in confined environments.” Stadnytskyi, Bax, et al., “The airborne lifetime of small speech droplets and their potential importance in SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 2020. ←
Rebecca Martinson, a public school teacher in Washington State, explains her decision to not return to class, no matter what, in this thoughtful essay, “Please Don’t Make Me Risk Getting Covid-19 to Teach Your Child,” New York Times, July 18.
She writes, “My school district and school haven’t ruled out asking us return to in-person teaching in the fall. As careful and proactive as the administration has been when it comes to exploring plans to return to the classroom, nothing I have heard reassures me that I can safely teach in person.” After listing off all the sacrifices teachers have had to make for their students and careers, she says that it “isn’t fair to ask me to be part of a massive, unnecessary science experiment. I am not a human research subject. I will not do it.” ←
The danger of this virus to young people has been downplayed. It is frustrating how little statistical data seems to be available on this, but there is a significant minority of even younger people who suffer for months with the aftermath of a Covid19 infection. As high a figure as 5% has been tossed around, but with little statistical support. That is understandable, given that 2/3 of the number of Americans reported as infected have lived through less than six weeks of their positive test result. The majority of “long haulers” have yet to be. ←
Admittedly, we never were quite like them. Unlike these poor kids, we never had to suffer the downers of a deranged narcissist bigot wannabe authoritarian as president, a deadly pandemic, and an emerging economic depression all at once. ←
“COVID-19: Severe brain damage possible even with mild symptoms,” Deutsche Welle. ←

Coming Through in Waves

2020-04-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying

—Roger Waters, Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd, 1980)

Update, 4/20/20: Rather than dwell on the accuracy or lack of same in the model’s projections anymore–as if this were some kind of grand chess match where the Knights and Bishops don’t actually trample and lance each other–I will just offer the latest Nightmare Plot with a few observations. The one-million mark has received yet another delay, of one day to 4/28, and the model still projects 1.5M reported cases sometime in the second week of May, probably toward the end of that week. The curve continues to fit past data uncannily well even if it has shortcomings with extrapolations more than a few days out.

Most importantly, I am starting to question the wisdom of continuing these updates of a “reported cases” statistic that I’ve begun to suspect is being influenced by delayed and limited testing as much or more as repression of the virus. I do not want to participate in drawing attention to any flattening of a curve if what is pushing it down is a disconnect–whether due to cold political calculations or incompetence–between what that curve actually shows and the actual magnitude of this national and global crisis. Perhaps in Hollywood it doesn’t matter if the curves are real, but this is an important one indeed.

In my previous post a little over a week ago, I summarized the “logistic growth with growth-regime transition” model I’ve developed for reported cases of Covid-19 and offered–with many disclaimers that I include now as well–a few projections:

three quarters of a million cases one week from today, and over a million the week after that. The model’s projection–both now and as it stood on 4/5–is that there will be around a million and a half Americans–one in every two hundred–reporting infection with Covid-19 in early May, with the number still climbing faster every day.

The exact projection for one week from 4/10 (to a degree of precision only useful for evaluating past performance) was 758,921 reported cases in the U.S. On 4/17, there were 699,706. The model was 29% pessimistic about the week’s increase. Instead of 262,386 more cases, there were “only” 203,171.

This works out to a (geometric) average of 3.7% per day. In other words, if the model were that pessimistic every day, projecting 3.7% more than the number of cases that actually were reported and without updating its parameters to try to do better the next day, we would wind up with this much of an error.

That doesn’t seem very far off to me.

With its parameters evolved to fit today’s data (4/19), the model is projecting that the million-case mark will be reached by 4/27, a few days later than it expected a week ago. As far as its projection of 1.5M cases goes, it expects that sometime in the second week of May. Perhaps not quite “early May,” but there’s good reason to use imprecise language when making projections.¹

Here’s the latest Nightmare Plot. As always, you can click on it to see the important details.

April 19, 2020: Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since 1/22

Testing, Testing . . .

Unfortunately, I’m starting to wonder if this modeling of reported cases may be doing more harm than good. The comments in the next few paragraphs are from a layman in the relevant fields of biology, medicine, what’s actually going on with this supremely fucked-up White House, etc. But I think it’s time to discuss reported vs actual cases of Covid-19 in the United States.

The fact that the numbers of daily new cases have fairly suddenly hit a ceiling of around 30,000 for about a week now make me suspicious that my model has become one for how fast we’re able to get people tested, and not for a realistic metric of how many people are infected. If the places doing the testing are unable or unwilling to process more than a certain number per day, of course that is going to result in a flattened curve.

Meanwhile, the numbers of actual infections and sick people waiting for their positive test result may be continuing to soar, unseen by all but victims’ frantic families and, when they finally give up on dealing with it at home, medical personnel who may not be testing even symptomatic patients. The testing backlog may grow and grow, and plots like mine will make it look like everything’s under control because the number of reported cases isn’t rising much at all.

But that can only go on for so long. Eventually, if there is indeed an explosion of actual cases that’s hidden behind the reported-cases curve, it will become obvious to millions of Americans that we’re actually fucked and this thing is going to kill a lot of people. It’s already certain that it will kill many more Americans–perhaps more per capita, too–than citizens of any other country.

I wonder about the armed lunkheads now doing protests agitated by shadowy right-wing groups at the encouragement of their cult leader² who clearly doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his hold on power. What would their slow little minds do with that undeniable reality after making fools of themselves and infecting themselves, their families, and friends? What sort of toxic dangerous bullshit will their hero be spewing then to cover yet another embarassment he couldn’t possibly bring himself to face up to like a man, after a long pathetic lifetime of dodging one failure after another?

Track Record

Now, let’s go back to the neat little fantasyland of reported cases, because that’s all I am really qualified to deal with at this point. (I may switch to reported deaths soon; that seems harder to hide.)

In case you’re curious about how the model has been doing with more recent projections of what today’s number would be, here are a few.

On 4/18 (yesterday), the model projected 763,369 cases. There were 759,086. The model was pessimistic by 16% about the number of new cases there would be today.

The previous day, 4/17, the model projected 759,553 cases today, an error (in the increase) of 0.8% for the two days. It was on the pessimistic side–as if that matters with such a small error.

On 4/16, the model projected that there would be 752,522 cases today. The error in the increase (optimistic that time) was 12.4%. But that was over the course of three days, a time interval when the number of reported cases increased nearly sixty thousand. The (geometric) mean error per day was 4%.

———

It may be worth considering some other projections to other dates. The model’s next-day projection on 4/16 was for there to be 696,432 cases on 4/17, which was too optimistic by 10%. The previous day, 4/15, the model projected 689,026 cases on 4/17, an average daily error (in the increase) of 9.7%, also on the optimistic side. And on 4/14, when there were 605,193 cases, the model was projecting 679,654 on 4/17, an average daily error of 8.3%, again only counting the projected vs actual increase and not the absolute number of cases, again on the optimistic side.

Those errors are the result of some bigger new-case numbers coming in than would have been expected had the data conformed to the gradual decrease in growth rate that the model had evolved its parameters to fit each day. Each time a new day’s Johns Hopkins data came in, the parameters got changed to better fit the curve, and that resulted in next-day projections that wound up being lower than what actually happened.

What happened is at least in part that the official U.S. case counts began to “include both confirmed and probable cases and deaths.”³ It doesn’t seem that many states have as yet switched to this new reporting protocol, but it surely has and will continue to increase the numbers my model sees from the Johns Hopkins data.

There was a point where the model’s projection for how many cases there would be on 4/17 ceased to be optimistic and landed pretty much right on. That was 4/12, with 555,313 cases, before those larger numbers started showing up this past week. Then the model projected 701,642 cases on 4/17. That projected increase was off by +1.3%, or an average of 0.3% per day. (It was pessmistic, but by so little it hardly seems worth mentioning which way it was off.)

So, what did the model say about today–one week later–with its parameters evolved to data from 4/12? Its projection was that we would be seeing 755,274 reported cases in the United States today. Again, there were 759,086. That’s an error in the projected (199,961) vs actual (203,773) increase of 1.9%, or 0.3% per day.

I think that counts as a successful, if horrific, extrapolation.

The Sky is the Limit

With data from a couple days ago (4/17), I thought of the Futurama TV show and how Professor Farnsworth often announces some challenging and arguably terrible development by saying, “Good news, everyone!” I was tempted to say the same about the scatter plot of values vs SSE for the model parameter L.

As you may recall, L and r are parameters for the conventional logistic growth component of the model. L is the maximum number of possible cases, which at worst case is limited by the country’s population. The other parameter r is the initial exponential growth rate, before any curve-flattening becomes apparent.

Well, for the first time I was seeing the hints of a possible range for L, and hence a projection by the model of an ultimate worst-case number of U.S. reported cases. That was the “good” part of the “Good news” cackled by a goggle-eyed cartoon character. The challenging and arguably terrible part was that this faint preliminary outline of a range for L, the maximum number of U.S. reported cases ever, seemed to be anywhere from 50 to 200 million.⁴

Unfortunately, even that bit of good news is no longer apparent in the scatter plot for L. Indeed, the best fit combination of parameters after nearly 22,000 simulation runs, has its value of L pretty much at the whole U.S. population. That’s basically right at the upper limit of the parameter range.

We might take a long time to get there, says the model with its parameters evolved to the data for the past week or so, but we will go very high indeed before we’re done.

I won’t include such outlandish projections in the Nightmare Plot, though, because too much can and will change between now and then. Like, say, the President of the United States tweeting out calls for insurrection against their state governments⁵ and convincing his cult followers to go out and act like it’s just no big deal that three quarters of a million⁶ of their fellow citizens have now contracted a virus that has killed nearly half as many as those who are officially listed as “recovered.”⁷

Looking Back vs Forward

Or, Why you should perhaps consider taking this model seriously

It’s been an interesting experience posting these updates to the r/Coronavirus subreddit. Each posting gets this information to a few thousand people, so it still seems worthwhile to continue doing so. Better yet, I have gotten some valuable constructive criticism, sprinkled in between a few stupid lazy insults. Some of that criticism has resulted in direct improvements, such as the inclusion of a normality test on the residuals. (Turns out they are about as normal as it gets, with a p value of over 0.9.) And some of the comments are just plain funny, like this one from “derphurr” regarding my April 10 blog post:

To be fair I’ve been following your numbers from the beginning post. Your 1M cases date has been moving outwards every week/ updated graph.

It might be like fusion energy, it is technically possible we never get there.

Unfortunately, I think the model will beat fusion. (The classic line is “Fusion energy is 30 years away and always will be.”) Its current projection for a million U.S. cases is just a few days later than it was when that comment was made: April 27 rather than April 23.

Another redditor “chalion” from Argentina quoted this from the 4/10 blog post: “On 4/3, the projection was for there to be just over 600,000 cases today, compared to the 496,535 we have had reported at this point in the U.S. Quite a bit off, but remember, that was looking forward a full week.”

Admitting it was harsh (and later graciously apologizing for that), he or she then offered this critique of my extrapolations:

It’s a model that can’t predict a week by a large margin. Clearly it isn’t working. Its just adjusting it daily to past data but says nothing about the future.

He isn’t making a model of the epidemic, it’s making a tool to find a curve close to the current data. Its good and interesting but I don’t think it’s a model of the evolution of this thing.

I responded, and he or she did in kind (very reasonably), and I’ll quote that exchange for you. But first let me observe that the critique of the 4/3 projection remains valid. The model was expecting a little more than twice as many cases as have been reported thus far. The curve flattened a lot more since then. I won’t complain about that at all, even if it somewhat proves the model’s limitations, at least for extrapolations more than a few days out.

Here’s what I said in response:

You raise some interesting points. I don’t think your assessment in that last paragraph is unfair.

This would only be a model of the epidemic under the assumption that the reported cases will continue to increase in the fashion they have for the past two weeks. If they do, then it will have modeled the epidemic. If they don’t, then something else has occurred to cause the numbers to change, in a way that the model failed to incorporate.

Updating the parameters to fit the new situation is a natural way to continue the process of evolving them. This doesn’t change what the model predicted with the previous parameters. If the model is within 8% of the next day’s number of new cases, I don’t see that as having no predictive value, as “not working.” It seems to me it works quite well for short-term projections.

As far as its alleged inability to predict one week out (from 4/3), the error of its projecting 346,635 new cases rather than the 220,949 that actually got reported between 4/3 and 4/10 is considerable, 56%. I would just ask that the magnitude of that actual increase be considered, too, when passing judgment: the number of cases nearly doubled (1.8x) in that time. It was projecting the number to increase by 2.26x. Not by, say, extrapolating straight out from the 13.5% daily increase that had happened the previous two days and projecting 2.4x. The model was moving the curve, and in the right direction, just not as much as the data then indicated it would.

I’ve decided to take seriously your harshly-worded comment and give it the detailed response it deserves. You do make some good points, and there’s definitely room for humility with the longer-term performance of this model thus far. I’m glad you at least thought it was good and interesting in its own way, and I’d like it to be looked at seriously as an approach for something we both at least agree it works for, fitting a curve close to data of this Covid-19 U.S. epidemic thus far, even if we part company when it comes to extrapolating from that fit.

I will continue to ask for a bit of forbearance about even the large inaccuracy from 4/2 to today. We are still dealing with largely exponential growth, and even the actual reported numbers have been exploding. The model was projecting that we’d have a bit more than 6x as many cases today as we did then, and what we have is around 2.8x as many. If the model had kept on extrapolating that 13.5% daily increase we were having then, seventeen days ago, it would have projected 8.6x as many. It was accounting for some of the curve-flattening that happened, but not enough.

Now, here’s what my interlocutor, who was watching this two months ago as an employee of Argentina’s Ministry of Health, said in response to that:

Yes. I have to agree with you. You are right in every point you make. Even when you describe my wording as harsh. I’m sorry for that.

I’m trying the same as you, modelling Covid19 in my country (Argentina) and I don’t think my results are better than yours. Maybe that was that frustration talking.

I will look at yours model in more detail tomorrow and try to make constructive criticism and not what I did

Keep the effort. And thanks for your thoughtful answer.

Thank you, sir or madam, for the gracious words and also for reminding me about the very real limitations of extrapolating a curve that’s been fitted to time-series data. As a gesture of appreciation, I ran the model on Argentina’s data today and you can see the plot here. I can see why your modeling efforts have gotten you frustrated; my model doesn’t fit what’s been (officially) happening in your country that well either, with a fat-tailed residual distribution that is unlikely (p=0.039) to be normal random variation. Maybe it’s all the jumps in the time-series data for your country, which fortunately still has a tiny number of cases per capita.

Now, even if it’s true that the model is only fitting close to current data and can’t be trusted for what it says will happen in the future,⁸ I do think it’s done a damn fine job of characterizing what’s happened thus far, at least in the U.S. Just take a glance at that plot above (the top subplot) and the percentage errors in what it’s fitted to the past month of daily data, with just six parameters.

The best fit is essentially a perfect one going back nearly a week. Then it has errors in the single digit percentages for more than another week, for all of April and the last few days of March.

The error between modeled and actual reported cases doesn’t reach 20% until you go back to 3/14. That’s a long time ago, in pandemic time. The number of cases has multiplied 278 times since then. It almost certainly has one more doubling left to go. If there isn’t some new level of curve flattening that my model can’t anticipate with its best fit to today’s data, there will be more doublings to come.⁹ Meanwhile, the deranged narcissist in the White House is pushing to get everybody out there infecting each other again.

Hang on, my fellow citizens of the world’s newest and biggest failed state. I think we may be in for a long and bumpy ride.

Notes

The data has been coming in pretty much as expected, and these projections are the same as they have been for the past two days. ←
“A trio of far-right, pro-gun provocateurs is behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests around the country, offering the latest illustration that some seemingly organic demonstrations are being engineered by a network of conservative activists.
“The Facebook groups target Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, and they appear to be the work of Ben Dorr, the political director of a group called ‘Minnesota Gun Rights,’ and his siblings, Christopher and Aaron. By Sunday, the groups had roughly 200,000 members combined, and they continued to expand quickly, days after President Trump endorsed such protests by suggesting citizens should ‘liberate’ their states.” Washington Post, “Pro-gun activists using Facebook groups to push anti-quarantine protests,” 4/19/20. ←
This is explained in some detail on the Worldometer COVID-19 site. ←
You can take a look for yourself at the scatter plot of L values vs SSE, after 100 generations of evolution to 4/17 Johns Hopkins data. Members of the final population are shown in red, while earlier, replaced individuals from earlier generations are shown in blue. Most of the individuals who–as will likely be the case for many a Trump fan gathered with fellow idiots to protest the sensible pandemic response of his governor–have been displaced by natural selection have low enough fitness (high SSE) that they are not included in this plot. ←
Not by accident, I live in one of those blue states that actually has its shit together. We have been seeing around 1% new vs total cases per day, which is a fifth of the national average. Here’s what our non-idiot governor, for whom I will be honored to cast a vote (by mail, duh) in November, had to say today:
“The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to “liberate” states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.
“The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies even while his own administration says the virus is real and is deadly, and that we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted.
“Just yesterday, the president stood alongside White House officials and public health experts and said science would guide his plan for easing restrictions. The White House released a sensible plan laying out many of the guidelines that I agree are essential to follow, as we work to resume economic activity. Trump slowly read his script and said the plan was based on ‘hard, verifiable data’ and was done ‘in consultation with scientists, experts and medical professionals across government.’
“Less than 24 hours later, the president is off the rails. He’s not quoting scientists and doctors but spewing dangerous, anti-democratic rhetoric.
“We appreciate our continued communication with the vice president, Dr. Birx, Admiral Polowczyk, Admiral Giroir and others in the federal government, but their work is undermined by the president’s irresponsible statements.
“I hope someday we can look at today’s meltdown as something to be pitied, rather than condemned. But we don’t have that luxury today. There is too much at stake.
“The president’s call to action today threatens to undermine his own goal of recovery by further delaying the ability of states to amend current interventions in a safe, evidence-based way. His words are likely to cause COVID-19 infections to spike in places where social distancing is working — and if infections are increasing in those places, that will further postpone the 14 days of decline that his own guidance says is necessary before modifying any interventions.
“I hope political leaders of all sorts will speak out firmly against the president’s calls for rebellion. Americans need to work together to protect each other. It’s the only way to slow the spread of this deadly virus and get us on the road to recovery.” ←
And that’s only the number with serious enough symptoms to get their infection confirmed by a test, which remain difficult to get in many parts of the country. ←
According to the Worldometer on 4/19 at 7:36 PM Pacific time, there have been 40,555 deaths from Covid-19 and 71,012 recovered, with hundreds of thousands of people fighting for their lives right now. Many of them will not make it. But sure, assholes, go hang out at the beach with the crowd. ←
Even I would advise caution about looking to its projections more than a week or so out. ←
I’m just a layman about such things, but I understand that the onset of Summer in the U.S. is one such possibility, with warmer temperatures that kill off the virus faster on surfaces. Sure hope so, but then we have Autumn to look forward to, and the example of the 1918 Influenza with its deadly second wave. ←

Marching Towards a Million

2020-04-10T19:40:00.000-07:00

[T]he feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren’t deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us.

—Robert Burton. On Being Certain

Update, 4/12: The curve is continuing to flatten a bit more than the model is able to extrapolate from having its six parameters fitted to the data as it stands each day. (I certainly have no objection to things coming in on the low side, even if it reveals some room for further possible improvement in the model, or just some random-walk stochastic behavior that simply can’t be chased via curve fitting and extrapolation, even with more model parameters.) There’s not been enough of a difference to go through this post and do a bunch of edits, so I’ve just added a few footnotes and this link to the latest version of the Nightmare Plot. Don’t get complacent now, OK?

For just over a week now, I’ve been running and re-running the “logistic growth with growth-regime transition” model I’ve developed for reported cases of Covid-19, evolving populations of individuals whose digital DNA consist of six parameters for that model:

xd(t, x) = r*x*(1-x/L) * flatten(t) + b
flatten(t) = 0.5*rf*(1-tanh(1.1*(t-t0)/th))-rf+1

Two of the parameters, L and r, are for the conventional logistic growth component of the model. L is the maximum number of possible cases, which at worst case is limited by the country’s population. The other parameter r is the initial exponential growth rate, before any curve-flattening becomes apparent.

The “growth-regime transition” component of the model, implemented by flatten(t), has three parameters of its own: There is a fractional reduction rf in growth rate at the conclusion of a lower-growth (flattened curve) regime. My modification to the conventional logistic-growth model uses the tanh function to smoothly transition from the original growth rate r to a lower “flattened” growth rate r*rf over a time interval th (in days). The transition interval is defined as the middle half of the full transition between growth rates, i.e., from still 75% of old vs new down to 25%. The midpoint of the transition is defined by the third parameter t0, in days after 1/22/20.

Finally, a very small constant number of new cases per day is included as a sixth parameter b. This does manage to “earn its keep” in the model by more flexibly allowing the mean of the residuals to be zeroed out.

Here is what the model is saying today, with Johns Hopkins data from this evening (4/10, click here for the latest one with 4/12 data).

April 10, 2020: Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since 1/22

Extrapolating forward (admittedly a perilous enterprise, as I’ve said before with endlessly repeated disclaimers and caveats, applicable yet again here), the model is projecting three quarters of a million cases¹ one week from today, and over a million the week after that.² The model’s projection–both now and as it stood on 4/5–is that there will be around a million and a half Americans–one in every two hundred–reporting infection with Covid-19 in early May, with the number still climbing faster every day.³

The curve is bending downward a bit, yes, but things still look pretty grim.

Past Performance

You’ve probably heard the phrase “past performance does not indicate future results,” and that’s true if something happens (as it often does) that’s not accounted for by the model. Life is messy and complicated, and that includes pandemics. But shitty performance does tell you not to bother looking any further. And that’s definitely not what’s been happening with my little model.

With parameters evolved to yesterday’s Johns Hopkins data (4/9), it had projected today’s increase in the number of cumulative cases to be 32,920 instead of the 35,098 new cases that actually got reported today. That was off by about 6%. (I calculate the error from the projected vs actual increase from the most recent known value, because the model is anchored to that point and can only be given credit or blame for what it projects from that last known point.)

With data from the day before yesterday (4/8), it projected yesterday’s number of new cases at 32,385. There were 32,305 new cases yesterday, an error of 0.2%.

And with data from 4/7, the model evolved to parameters that had it projecting 30,849 new cases the next day. There were 30,849 new cases on 4/8, a 6% error.

On 4/5, the model projected 32,346 vs the 32,133 that there were on 4/6, an error of just 0.7%.

The model of course does a little worse when it looks further ahead. You’d expect that of any naive model (i.e., not theoretically informed, beyond “the growth rate is going down”) of data from six empirically-optimized parameters being extrapolated with exponential growth. And it’s certainly not anything I’m ashamed of.

On 4/3, the projection was for there to be just over 600,000 cases today, compared to the 496,535 we have had reported at this point in the U.S. Quite a bit off, but remember, that was looking forward a full week.

On 4/5, it was for there to be 510,425 cases today, a total error of less than 8%, again with the error measured from the projected vs actual increase, not the absolute number.⁴ On 4/7, the model projected there would be 486,367 cases as of today, and that was off (in the increase) by 10%.⁵

Evolution in Action

(In more ways than one, unfortunately.)

I’ve been wanting to write a little about the whole process of computer evolution that I use to fit the model’s six parameters to the time-series data. It begins with a population of 240 simulated organisms (not a virus!), digital “individuals” whose randomly chosen⁶ DNA consists of the values of those six parameters, within predefined bounds.

After working on this model for over a week, I’ve refined each of those bounds to a reasonable range of possible values. Updating those ranges as the model makes sometimes failed attempts to find a convincing best fit is my sole remaining human-engineering activity, now that the model is designed and the code implementing it is working.

Each of those 240 individuals is given a chance to show how fit its DNA is by running a backwards integration of the model from the last known data point. The model, you may recall from reading my previous blog post is for the number of new cases each day, not the cumulative number of total cases ever.

The model is a differential equation; xd(t,x), not x(t). So, to have it project the cumulative number of cases x(t), I integrate the differential equation forward or backward from a fixed point represented by the most recent known number of cases, a point to which it is anchored.⁷

The modeled number of reported cases is compared to the actual number that were reported, for each day going back what is now a full five weeks’ worth of data.⁸

The fitness of each individual is measured as the sum of the squared errors (SSE) between each day’s modeled number of reported cases (the value that the model would expect, being integrated backwards) vs. the number of cases there actually were as of that date. The two figures are compared only after they have had a square-root transform applied to them. This limits how much more recent, larger numbers of new daily cases weigh in the fitness calculation vs earlier ones.

Then evolution gets underway, with each population member getting challenged by an individual, which gets spawned from combinations of not two but four population members. These mutant offspring have the model run with their parameters through the integration and SSE calculation. If they are better (lower SSE) than whichever population member is being challenged in its turn, they replace it. When all members of the population have received their challenge, possibly having been replaced, evolution proceeds to the next generation.

The whole spawning process is worth a moment of technical discussion. Differential evolution uses an interesting⁹ sort of mathematical equivalent to some kind of alien four-way sex to create challengers. The trial individual is formed from “crossover” between the a “target” (a rough DE equivalent of a mother) and a “donor” individual (closest thing it has to a father). The donor is formed from the vector sum of a base individual and a scaled vector difference between two randomly chosen other individuals that are distinct from each other and both the target and base individuals.

That is hard to follow in print, but this equation might help. The many-tentacled alien infant we want from this tangled act is ic, the individual challenging:

id = ib + F*(i0 - i1)
ic = crossover(it, id)

The crossover consists of giving each parameter of the donor individual a chance (usually a very good chance) to appear in the challenger, as opposed to using the target’s parameter. Basically, think of a higher number as being more for paternal rather than maternal inheritance. The default value used by my program (apologies for what is becoming an awkward analogy) is 0.7.

I refine the parameter bounds as needed and sit back while my ade Python package (of which this whole Covid-19 modeling is a single example file covid19.py) had 75 generations of these simulated individuals spawn and fight it out on a virtual Darwinian savanna. The software dispatches SSE-calculating jobs asynchronously to worker Python interpeters across the timeslots of my six-core CPU. It takes about two minutes. The software produces a plot with the model’s curves in red and what actually happened in blue. It’s what I’ve been calling the Nightmare Plot.

Singing in the Apocalypse

The Nightmare Plot really is horrifying when you think about what those numbers represent. Their relentless upward march–slowing but by no means stopping–is making everyone’s life suck including my own. The novelty of this whole apocalyptic survival thing is starting to wear off just a bit, even for me.

Maybe I’m a terrible person, but dammit I can’t help experiencing a bit of pride, too. This “little model that could” is proving to be the no-pay, no-fame, no-acceptance academic-mathematical equivalent of, say, some college undergraduate inventing an optimal radio receiver frequency arrangement, now in use by the circuitry of your smartphone, as part of an independent senior project he decided to work on weekend after weekend a quarter century ago. (This hypothetical individual never was much for working in groups.)

So, take it or leave it, folks, you’ve got yourself a six-parameter mathematical model for the number of reported cases of Covid-19. It was never “published” in some elite-accepted overpriced package of specialty information. It wasn’t part of any network of peer reviewers. (Like the aforementioned loner radio geek, I’ve never been one for playing in groups.)

But it does appear to work.

———

A friend of mine told me today that he is selfishly rather enjoying this whole situation. He now has lots of time to learn things on his own that he’s been wanting to work on, time for “driving out to pretty places to take pictures and go for walks in the woods.”

He’d rather be back doing what he does in person. But, he admits, there are upsides.

I assured him that it’s 100% OK to enjoy those upsides, even as I admitted my own feeling of finding it a little weird to derive satisfaction from successfully modeling these awful numbers. But I had the benefit of receiving yesterday some reassurance in this area, as I was talking about this very topic with a friend of mine whose life’s work revolves around how people think and feel about things.

He told me he can’t be as helpful to others in his profession if he isn’t taking care of himself, and that means enjoying life in spite of or even at times because of what is otherwise a horrible situation. Of course he’d rather not be in it, nor would I or you, dear reader with a delicate pair of lungs of your own. But he is, and you are, and I am, and so let’s take what good there is to be had.

Smile and sing and laugh, and take pride in the work that you now have. Even through the Apocalypse.

Notes

With data updated as of 4/12, the projection is now 700,000 by 4/17. A bit lower, and the curve is continuing to flatten, but not by much.
The careful reader may notice that I always refer to “reported U.S. cases” or some alternate variation and wording. I will repeat yet again that I have no expertise in biology, medicine, or the spread of infectious disease, and so I try not to speculate on how many of our fellow citizens have actually gotten infected with this thing without it ever being reported. Again, I’m just a retired engineer who has spent years constructing nonlinear models of mostly electronic things and believes this one is a pretty well grounded for doing the following, and only the following: predicting what will happen if the data continues as it has recently, especially as it has in the past two weeks. ←
With data updated as of 4/12, the projection is now for a bit less than 900,000 cases by 4/24. One redditor cleverly observed that my modeling’s million-case projections have been like those for fusion energy. (The saying is that fusion is 30 years away and always will be.) I won’t dispute that observation at this point; each day’s new data for the past week or so has pushed that projection outward a bit, though never making it look any more implausible to reach eventually. ←
Let’s call it mid-May now, given the recent additional curve flattening (4/12 data). ←
Although the difference between computing the error is less with such a large increase from the 4/5 last-known number of 337,072. In case you really want to know, the absolute error from the model projecting forward five days was 2.8%. ←
The actual number of cases as of 4/12 from Johns Hopkins’ daily data was 555,313, an increase of 58,778. On 4/10, the model was projecting 567,306 cases, or a projected increase of 70,771. The error in the increase was 20% over the two-day interval, or 10% per day. Not as good as previous days’ next-day predictive performance, but not terrible, either. And since there will always be an error when extrapolating from a curve fit to data having a random component, I’m happy the data is lower than projected and not higher, because I have my own delicate pair of lungs that I’ve grown fond of, too. ←
Actually, they’re not quite chosen with uniform randomness: The default is to set up the initial population using a Latin hypercube. That way you get initialize pseudorandom parameter values, but with minimal clustering. You want the six-dimensional search space to be explored as fully as possible. ←
This is known as an “initial value problem,” the initial value here being the last known number of cases. You can go either direction in time from the initial value. For fitting the model parameters, my algorithm goes backwards from the most recent data. To extrapolate forward and make projections, it goes forward from the same “initial value.” ←
Reported cases numbers before March 5 are omitted from both the curve fitting and plots. The modeled (red) curve deviates from the historical data when you go earlier, and I’m not sure a good fit that far back in the history of this thing is relevant to what’s happening now. ←
You claim you wouldn’t find alien four-way procreative sex interesting? Well, I don’t believe you. ←

Portrait of a Pandemic

2020-04-06T11:46:00.001-07:00

Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Update, 4/8, 5:45 PM PDT: With the latest data from Johns Hopkins, the latest NightMare Plot is not different enough from the one originally included with this post to warrant editing the post at all. I’m not going to run the numbers again for all the countries here, but of course was curious as to how things are looking in my own. The answer: still not good, even though the curve is continuing to bend downward slightly.¹ Today’s 429,052 cases was 10% below what the model projected (three days ago!) that today’s number would be. (That error is in terms of the projected increase, which was 30% rather than the actual 27%.) The model still projects reaching the half-million mark around April 10 and a million cases by month end.

A model I’ve developed for naively fitting to the number of new cases of Covid-19 each day modifies the widely-accepted logistic growth model with a smooth growth-regime transition. It has been closely tracking the dramatic spread of the virus in the United States and other heavily affected countries while accounting for the “flattening of the curve” that is becoming apparent to a varying extent in each of those countries.

The modified model scales the reproduction parameter r by a hyperbolic tangent function of time, with a midpoint time t0 and a half-transition time th. (All time-based parameters are in units of days.) The scaling begins near 1.0 (full traditional r reproduction rate) and transitions to some lower fractional value rf as social distancing and lockdowns force the virus into a lower-growth regime that approaches an effective rate of rf•r.

The population-limited parameter L of the logistic growth model remains, though it is still not nearly as consequential or well-defined in the curves of most countries as the curve-flattening effect of rf.² Finally, there is a very small constant term b, a fixed number of new cases per day. That is mostly included to zero out the mean of the residuals so that I could get decent goodness-of-fit indicators for the model.

The result is a logistic growth model that incorporates the “flattening of the curve” now apparent even in U.S. data by effecting a smooth transition from the original uncontrolled growth rate to a later, lower one:

xd(t, x) = r*x*(1-x/L) * flatten(t) + b
flatten(t) = 0.5*rf*(1-tanh(1.1*(t-t0)/th))-rf+1

For details, development history, context, and disclaimers, see my series of previous Covid-19 blog posts, starting with the most recent one on April 2.³

Below are projections from the model for various countries, based on Johns Hopkins data from last evening, April 5. I will start with my own mess of a country, not just because I am a citizen of it but because it now has the most cases of Covid-19 on the planet and almost surely will continue to as this nightmare continues.

The United States of America

Extrapolating from its remarkably close fit with data going back more than two weeks now, the model is projecting half a million cases⁴ by April 10 and a million cases by the end of the month. The residuals (errors between how closely the model fitted to past data versus what the data actually was) are of a completely normal distribution.

Kenneth Regan, professor of mathematics at SUNY Buffalo, suggested that it would be useful to monitor the ratio of new cases reported on a given day to all cases under treatment that day. The idea is that it would reveal progress in a way that is more resistant to issues like how good the reporting is or how widespread the testing is, and that it would show when the data starts to show a peak.⁵

Although I don’t have data for a number of all cases under treatment on a given day, I’ve tried to implement the spirit of Professor Regan’s idea with a fourth subplot at the bottom of what I’ve been calling the Nightmare Plot, showing how large each day’s new cases are as a percentage of the cumulative number of cases ever reported by that date. It’s an instructive additional visualization, and the suggestion was much appreciated. And as you can see, that metric has been tracking since since 3/19 to within a few percent of what the model expected it would have been. Thankfully, that red curve is heading steadily downward.

The Nightmare Plot: United States of America, 4/5/20 data

As with any extrapolation from time-series data without reference to underlying theory or events, the model isn’t making perfect projections. With parameters evolved to data from the day before yesterday (4/4) when there were 308,850 U.S. reported cases, the model projected 346,464 cases yesterday. Thankfully, it was pessimistic by 33%; there are “only” 337,072 total (cumulative) cases being reported in last evening’s Johns Hopkins data.

Wait a minute, you might be thinking, the difference between 346,464 and 337,072 seems like a lot less than 33%. True. It’s only 2.8%. But that would give the model too much credit, because it was extrapolating from a fixed, known number that was 91.6% of yesterday’s actual number of cases. The model only gets credit (or blame) for its projected increase from that point, which it said would be 37,614 but actually was 28,222.

This error is a welcome departure from the previous few days when the model had been making dire next-day projections that were uncomfortably close to what actually happened. With data from a day earlier (4/3) when there were 275,586 cases, the model projected there would be 311,138 the day before yesterday (4/4). That represented an error (again, considering only the increase) of 6.9% (also on the pessimistic side). With the data available on 4/2, the model projected that the 243,453 cases that day would become 275,799 on 4/3, an error of just 0.66% in the expected increase.⁶ That one felt a little spooky.

When you are modeling numbers that represent hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens getting very sick, you want reality to come in below your projections. I have been hoping for some evidence that the curve is bending downward, and finally it is here. Not by much; that Nightmare Plot still goes to well over a million cases before the month is over.

But I’ll take it. I’m in a much better mood than when I was freaking out over the numbers being so close to my projections for a couple days in a row. The model has been just a bit pessimistic and required some updates to its parameters to better track reduced growth, and that might continue to happen as the days progress and people finally take this thing seriously. Down, curve, down!

———

And with that good mood, I will allow myself some pride in how closely my modification to the logistic growth model is tracking to many more data points than one might expect from its six parameters. Look at that top subplot: There is no more than 8% error between what the model is fitting to the data and what the data actually has been for the past twelve days, going back to 3/24. In that span of time, the numbers being modeled have increased by a factor of six. The 4/4 data fitted the model to within a 5% error going just as many days into the past (back to 3/23). It was pretty much the same with data from the day before, with a comparably low level of errors going back to 3/22.

My evolutionary curve-fitting algorithm does two things to counter the effect of the more recent values (much larger than earlier ones due to exponential growth) having a disproportionate amount of weight. First, the model is for the number of new cases each day, not the cumulative number of total cases ever. It is a differential equation xd(t,x), not x(t). So, to have it project the cumulative number of cases x(t), I integrate the differential equation forward or backward from a fixed point represented by the most recent known number of cases, a point that it is anchored to.⁷ The number of new daily cases is increasing dramatically, but not quite as dramatically as the cumulative number of cases. So that helps keep the emphasis from being quite as much on more recent data.

Second, I apply a square-root transform to both the modeled and actual new-case numbers before computing the sum of squared error (SSE) between them and then evolving the parameters for minimum SSE. The 28,222 new cases we had yesterday had four times as much influence on the curve fit as the 6,421 new cases we had on 3/17, not sixteen times as much.

Despite these efforts, the algorithm is still going to fit recent data more closely, and that fit has been very close indeed, with just 1% maximum error over the past six days. Think about it; for nearly a week as the number of cases has more than doubled, the model stays within 1% of what actually happened as it traces its smooth growth curve backwards in time.

Due to its emphasis on fitting to later data points, the model strays a bit more, percentage-wise, as we peer into the ancient history of early March. But I’m certainly not ashamed of it expecting a little less than half the 217 cases we had one month ago as it looks further backwards from the harsh reality of over a thousand times as many cases now.⁸ Imagine you were looking at this blog post back then and there was a model telling you that there would be “only” 150,000 cases today. Would you now be upset that it somehow failed to convey the magnitude of the situation to you? I didn’t think so.

———

So, what is making me happier now, with numbers still climbing exponentially and no leveling-off in sight on the right side of that Nightmare Plot? I am hearing the whisper of encouraging things in the combination of six parameters that my software has evolved for the model based on yesterday’s data. The curve is indeed flattening a little bit, despite the stupidity of a lot of Republican governors, nutjob pastors, and spring-break partiers.

Let’s take a quick look at those parameters for ourselves.

USA, 4/5: Final, former, and failed parameter values vs sum of squared error

Each of these six subplots shows the values of one model parameter versus the sum of squared error (SSE) between modeled values and actual values going back just over four weeks. The subplots are zoomed in so that small SSE differences are evident between members of the final population (red dots) and parameter values that had once been part of the population over the course of the 75 generations of evolution (blue dots). Also shown (small black dots) are unsuccessful challengers that never made it into any population, but whose failed parameter combinations are instructive for showing how SSE varies with parameter values.

These plots make it clear that there are some well-defined ranges for all of the model parameters except L, the maximum number of possible cases, which at worst case is limited by the country’s population. The reason L isn’t better defined is that there is still no evidence in the time-series data of a fixed upper limit to the ultimate number of U.S. cases. The best we can infer from the distribution of L values in the upper-left subplot is that the fit starts to become less plausible if we assume an ultimate upper limit of less than 20 million cases.

Another model parameter that is more of a useful nuisance is b, a very small constant number of new cases per day. With every single model I’ve tried thus far, including this latest and hopefully final one, the parameter evolution favors smaller and smaller values of b tending toward zero. That’s evident in the upper right subplot. This parameter does its job of zeroing-out the mean (average) of the residuals (second subplot from the top in the Nightmare Plot) but that’s pretty much it.

Now onto the really interesting parameters. First, of course, is our old standby r, the initial reproduction or growth rate before any curve-flattening or (eventually) population-limiting begins to take effect. In the U.S., the model says that the number of cases was increasing by around 45% per day for a couple weeks after the first modeled date of 3/5. Looking again at the top of the Nightmare Plot, you can see that the model was assuming too high of a growth rate back then. The blue line was increasing exponentially (which appears as a straight line on a logarithmic plot), but at less than 45% per day. The curve-fitting algorithm tolerated this error as it fiddled with the parameter values to get its remarkably close fit to the data later on.

And when it got that remarkably close fit is when we approached the 61-62 days after 1/22/20 that evolved as an optimal value of parameter t0. That happened around March 23. Over the span of a week either direction from that date (th of around 14 days), the growth rate transitioned halfway from its initial 45% per day down to a post-flattening growth rate that’s lower by an impressive 90%. As you can see at the bottom of the Nightmare Plot, the number of reported cases increased by 8.4% yesterday, and that growth rate is expected to continue dropping, though more slowly now.⁹

For a deadly virus that is right now killing thousands of my fellow citizens, a 90% drop in growth rate seems like good news indeed, even as the escalating numbers will likely continue to stress us all out for the rest of April and probably beyond.

Now let’s take a quick look at Nightmare Plots for other countries that have been impacted by Covid-19. In some of them, the model has problems fitting to the data. I’ve extended the curve-fitting interval for each country as far back as possible without allowing clearly implausible pauses and jumps in reported-case numbers to mess everything up. There’s no avoiding such pauses and jumps that have occurred more recently, like France’s sudden discovery of more than a quarter of its cases on 4/4 alone, but the differential evolution algorithm and the model do their best with what they have to work with.

I will leave you with final thought to consider as you scroll down and look through how everybody else is doing outside the U.S. None of these other countries–not even Iran with its contemptible mullahs–is being run by anyone so utterly incompetent as our failed trust-fund game show host with his obvious cognitive limitations, profound ignorance, contempt for science and sound public policy, and pathological narcissism that drives every single thing he does. Let’s please not make that mistake again, OK?

Spain

The second-most impacted country behind the good old US of A is Spain with its 126,168 reported cases yesterday.

With parameters evolved to data from a day earlier when there were 119,199 cases, the model projected 127,844 cases on 4/4. The model overestimated the increase by 24%. That’s not as impressive as the model’s fit with recent data: No more than 2% error going back to 3/29, and no more than an astoundingly low 7% going all the way back to March 15. The residuals are indistinguishable from completely random Gaussian noise.

Spain has flattened that curve pretty well recently and the projected numbers don’t look too bad, perhaps doubling over the next month.

Please note that Spain had 500 cases to our 402 back on March 7, when Donald Trump responded as follows to a reporter’s question about whether he was “concerned that the virus is getting closer to the White House and D.C.”: No, I’m not concerned at all. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.

Well, if “a great job” means not getting people tested, telling his followers to carry on as usual and causing sycophant Southern Republican governors to delay action until the magnitude of the problem became obvious even to them, and now bullying states about getting the life-saving equipment they need as our numbers are now nearly three times larger and headed for probably at least six times larger over the next month, sure, what a fine and excellent job you’ve done, you fucking moron.

Italy

The model follows a modest recent flattening of the curve, half of which occurred over a one-week interval centered on 3/24. The plot shows that there was also some very slight flattening around 3/15 and 3/12. As the noted group of epidemiologists Pink Floyd observed, “You are only coming through in waves.”

The residuals are not significantly non-normal, though they definitely “fan out” with higher predicted numbers of new daily cases. The effect of this can be seen in the upper subplot, where the model does not track earlier cases that well with their little waves of increasing and then decreasing growth rates.

The constant b evolves to an unusually high range here, reflecting a best-fit solution based on a fairly limited recent data set. The model’s simplistic assumption of a constant 600 new cases per day still works even for the first date shown (3/13). The data modeled and shown doesn’t go back earlier in March because there were large discontinuities before then that provide a questionable basis for curve-fitting.

Italy has had a very difficult time with overtaxed hospitals and lots of people dying. But at least their new cases have been significantly slowing down, as shown in the bottom subplot. Even though they can expect to wind up with several times more of their citizens ultimately reported as infected by Covid-19, it looks like they are at least in the latter stages of having slowed down their rate of growth.

Germany

Germany’s curve is quite impressive, with a significant degree of flattening. Look at this value of rf!

Germany, 4/5 data: Values of parameter rf vs SSE

In addition to demonstrating how much better it is for a country to elect an accomplished scientist as one’s leader rather than a failed casino owner spouting absolute lunacy¹⁰ about Covid-19 just six weeks ago, this plot shows that the parameter L doesn’t seem to be contributing much to the model. The curve flattening is entirely a result of the growth-regime transition, nearly to zero.

France

There’s been some jarring discontinuities in France’s data recently, so the model is not doing very well with it. The residuals are definitely not Gaussian random variation, which you can see just by looking at the right side of the residuals subplot, in addition to the essentially zero p value.

The projection is included in the interest of fairness, to make sure that non-impressive results are shown as well. If there is anything definite to be taken away from France’s Nightmare Plot, it’s that they are definitely not out of the woods yet.

Iran

Iran has been surfing waves of infection for weeks now. Just look at the periodicity in the upper subplot and the residuals plot below it! Despite that, there is no significant evidence of non-normality in the residuals. What I don’t like about the way the parameters have evolved is how much they focus on an abrupt growth-regime transition back in early March. It’s completely artificial to assume that the growth rate would drop by half over the course of a single day, and yet that’s what the model sees and so there it went.

This is the price one pays for doing naive modeling of time-series data. You make no assumptions about the underlying events or theory, and you get what you get. As the other plots show, that often works amazingly well, and it might still be working well here, but I’m a little suspicious about any projections for Iran’s future cases. If for no other reason than that having so many waves of infection means that they can expect more totally unpredictable waves in the future. So, perhaps three times as many cases in a month as now, if nothing else weird happens? Or maybe twice or half as many at that?

United Kingdom

Another instance of an artificially abrupt transition to a lower-growth regime, with one important difference. In the UK, the values of L in the final population have a nicely bounded range, and it’s got a pretty low upper end, well below the country’s population of 67.9 million. The rf parameter is also well-defined, but relatively modest; the model is doing much of its work with conventional logistic-growth behavior.

UK, 4/5 data: Values of parameter L vs SSE

Looks good to me, even if I’m not inuiting any such population upper limit just looking at the UK’s numbers thus far. Maybe the evolution of model parameters over 75 generations is seeing something my eye isn’t. I hope so.

South Korea

These residuals are definitely not normal variation. That’s probably because the model spends so much time tracking the very small increases that have occurred in the past month. Unlike us, the South Koreans knew what they were doing, and did it fast. There’s no further slowdown in growth rate ahead, but it is tiny at this point. Looking good!

Singapore

Singapore had a relatively bad day yesterday, with an abrupt jump of nearly twice as many new cases as in previous days. But their numbers of daily cases are still small.

The residuals are normal, but I’m not convinced that there has been any growth-regime transition like the model shows in the bottom subplot, though. It just doesn’t look right. And the model’s deviation from older data gives me pause.

Still, a projection of perhaps 10,000 total cases by early next month doesn’t seem too bad to me, even if it winds up being several times that for some reason the model can’t possibly account for right now.

Finland

Finally, little Finland, included not because it has been severely impacted by Covid-19 but because it’s the land of some of my ancestors and some of my friends. The model isn’t tracking Finland’s data particularly well, with residuals that don’t appear at all to be normal random variation. You don’t need the small p value to see that; just look at the discontinuities in the number of reported cases in the top subplot, and the huge momentary spike in new reported cases on 4/4.

The model projects less than 10,000 cases by May, but I honestly don’t think that projection is worth a whole lot right now. If the data comes down in the next couple days, it might be worth looking at again. Meanwhile, Finns will continue practicing the kind of social distancing they always have, long before anyone ever heard of Coronavirus.

Notes

Even worse as far as the state of our fracturing Republic is concerned. I have no models or data for we may be seeing in the weeks and months ahead during any summertime reprieve we may get from the virus, when there will be no such reprieve from the deranged narcissist and his jackbooted thugs in his cabinet, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and gerrymandered GOP fiefdoms like Wisconsin.
What will this loathsome cult of corruption and idiot-worship that mutated out of the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt do after November 4–regardless of which way the electoral college votes after whatever passes for elections in the swing states–if virus cases are rebounding like it’s 1918 all over again with economic conditions more like it’s 1929? I hope if there are sides to be taken, fellow citizen, you will be found on the side of our beloved Constitution. The sacred founding text of a nation that has been under attack for decades, by this President and his predecessors–with its first, second, fourth, and fifth Amendments and a rich history of case law from many decades of carefully reasoned decisions in between times (unfortunately including our own) when the Supreme Court allowed its political colors to show underneath those somber black robes. ←
Every parameter in a model should “earn its keep” by having its own robust independent effect on fitness of the curve to the data. Of all the six parameters, L is the least compelling to keep. Its role in limiting the ultimate pervasiveness of the virus is currently being overshadowed by the growth-reduction aspect of the model. But I’m leaving it in for now, looking for signs of its eventual emergence, because it ultimately will serve a purpose as the pandemic finally heads into end stage. ←
The full history of posts, going backward in time, is: Modeling a Slightly Flattening COVID-19 Curve (4/2), Into the Rapids (3/25), Pandemic (3/22), and the original Applying the Logistic Growth Model to Covid-19 (3/19). ←
Throughout this blog post “cases” refers to the number of Covid-19 cases reported for the particular country under discussion, as provided by the data freely released to the public by Johns Hopkins University. See their Terms of Use, which I have adopted as my own with of course a suitable change in names.
I will repeat yet again that I have no expertise in biology, medicine, or the spread of infectious disease, and so I try not to speculate on how many people have actually gotten infected with this thing without it ever being reported. Again, I’m just a retired engineer who has spent years constructing nonlinear models of mostly electronic things and believes this one is a pretty well grounded for doing the following, and only the following: predicting what will happen if the data continues as it has recently, especially as it has in the past two weeks. ←
Thanks to my dear friend and former boss Louis J. Hoffman for conveying this suggestion back to me from Prof. Regan, along with permission to give him credit for it. ←
It was on the pessimistic side, as the model almost always has been, but by such a small amount in that case as to hardly seem worth mentioning. If you are curious, the model was extrapolating the 4/3 data out to a projected 350,510 cases yesterday. Pessimistic again, but not by much: 14% over two days when the actual increase was nearly a hundred thousand cases. ←
This is known as an “initial value problem,” the initial value here being the last known number of cases. You can go either direction in time from the initial value. For fitting the model parameters, my algorithm goes backwards from the most recent data. To extrapolate forward and make projections, it goes forward from the same “initial value.” ←
The model anchors to the most recent known data point, which for this discussion is last evening’s Johns Hopkins data (4/5) with its 337,072 U.S. reported cases. Remember, the model’s differential equation xd(t,x) is for the expected number of new cases each day, not the cumulative number of cases x(t). So, to have it project the cumulative number of cases, I integrate the differential equation forward or backward from that last fixed point.
To have it integrating that differential equation backwards a full month and winding up in the same neighborhood with the mere 217 cases we had then, shrinking its backwards projections by more than a thousand in the process, seems pretty remarkable to me. ←
In my previous post, I wrote “in praise of the hyperbolic tangent function” for nonlinear modeling, and how I’ve used it for electronic circuit simulation. Turns out that tanh( . . .) is also quite useful for gradually transitioning from initially unrestrained exponential growth to a lower-growth regime resulting from social distancing and quarantine. ←
By the last week of February, “he criticized CNN and MSNBC for ‘panicking markets.’ He said at a South Carolina rally falsely that ‘the Democrat policy of open borders’ had brought the virus into the country. He lashed out at ‘Do Nothing Democrat comrades.’ He tweeted about ‘Cryin’ Chuck Schumer,’ mocking Schumer for arguing that Trump should be more aggressive in fighting the virus. The next week, Trump would blame an Obama administration regulation for slowing the production of test kits. There was no truth to the charge.”
“Throughout late February, Trump also continued to claim the situation was improving. On Feb. 26, he said: ‘We’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.’ On Feb. 27, he predicted: ‘It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle it will disappear.’ On Feb. 29, he said a vaccine would be available ‘very quickly’ and ‘very rapidly’ and praised his administration’s actions as ‘the most aggressive taken by any country.’ None of these claims were true.” David Leonhardt, A Complete List of Trump’s Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus, The New York Times (March 15, 2020). ←

Modeling a Slightly Flattening COVID-19 Curve

2020-04-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

—Donald J. Trump (March 9, 2020)

And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.

—Donald J. Trump (March 10, 2020)

TL;DR: A modification to the logistic growth model that provides a smooth transition to a lower-growth regime is fitting the data for U.S. reported cases obtained on April 2 from Johns Hopkins University with errors of less than 5% each day for the past week, and less than 14% for the week earlier. It indicates that there will be around 275,000 U.S. reported cases tomorrow, around 311,000 the day after that, and half a million in a week from now (4/9). According to the model’s projections (which must be treated with caution as for any extrapolation), with exponential growth tempered by “flattening of the curve” proceeding as it has been, the million-case mark will be reached in mid-April. The projection is for a couple million reported U.S. cases by the end of the month. See the Nightmare Plot and all my Covid-19 blog posts for some important development history, context, disclaimer, and even a few thoughts about putting this thing into perspective.

Update, 4/3/20: The exact projection was that there would be 275,799 U.S. reported cases today if the numbers continued as they have for the past two weeks. Today’s number was 275,586. I see no need to update anything else in this blog post, but if you really want to see the latest version of the Nightmare plot, it is here. There has not been even a 0.1% error between the model and the actual numbers for the past three days.

Over the past two weeks, what began as a simple new usage example to include with my free, open-source evolutionary parameter-finding software wound up turning into something of a ghoulish personal challenge: to identify a statistically plausible mathematical model that would fit decently with the exploding numbers of reported Covid-19 cases in my beloved but increasingly broken country, the United States of America.

I’ve made lots of refinements to the code and its underlying modeling over that time, and discussed that along with some projections (accompanied by important disclaimers, which also apply here) along the way in my blog posts of March 19, March 22, and March 25. Along the way, I tried several different approaches to modeling this thing: the logistic growth model, the power law with exponential decay, and even a linear combination of the two, always accompanied by a small linear term.

What increasingly intrigued and frustrated me, though, was the inability of any of those models to deal with a slight “flattening of the curve” that has become apparent in the U.S. national numbers of recent days. Fitting the logistic growth model xd(t,x)=x*r*(1-x/L) to the data resulted in an unrealistically low value of L, because that’s the best such a simple model could do with the recent reduction in growth. The power-law model with exponential decay¹ xd(t)=a*(t-ts)^n*exp(-(t-ts)/t0) provided interesting results that didn’t seem unrealistic and that proved pretty accurate at predicting the next few days’ reported case numbers. But there was no evidence of any realistic value being found for ts to implement the “decay” part of the model, and so the values beyond just a few days out had a very wide span of uncertainty.

I tried a linear combination of the two models, but that meant a lot of degrees of freedom. The combined model valiantly tried fitting itself with all its parameters to an anomaly in the US reported case data from 3/16 to 3/18, and offered me even less confidence than usual for making extrapolations.

But today an idea occurred to me to try, and it worked. The result is a logistic growth model that does a smooth transition from an earlier growth rate to a later, lower one:

xd(t, x) = r*x*(1-x/L) * flatten(t) + b
flatten(t) = 0.5*rf*(1-tanh(1.1*(t-t0)/th))-rf+1

There are six parameters:

L is the maximum number of possible cases, which at worst case is limited by the country’s population.

r is the initial exponential growth rate, before any curve-flattening becomes apparent.

rf is the fractional reduction in growth rate at the conclusion of the lower-growth (flattened curve) regime.

th is the time interval (in days) over which the middle half of a smooth transition occurs from the original higher-growth behavior to a fully flattened curve with the lower “flattened” growth rate r*rf.

t0 is the time (in days after 1/22/20) at the middle of the transition from regular logistic-growth behavior to a fully flattened curve.

b is a very small constant number of new cases per day. This is mostly there to zero out the mean of the residuals so that I could get decent goodness-of-fit indicators for the model.²

———

Here is the result, my latest (and perhaps last?) revision to what I’ve been calling the Nightmare Plot. The image was produced by the latest commit of covid19.py Python script using data released this evening from Johns Hopkins University. It’s an important image, so go ahead and click on it to see it with full resolution, or even download it if you want.

April 2, 2020: Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since 1/22

Extrapolating forward (admittedly a perilous enterprise, but I’m curious and so are you), the model is projecting half a million cases one week from today, and over a million the week after that. The end of April is looking pretty scary indeed, with the potential for one in every hundred Americans to be reporting infection with Covid-19³ and the numbers still continuing to climb.

Logistic Growth with Growth-Regime Transition

If it weren’t for the terrifying reality of what is represented by the numbers it spits out, I would be delighted with the beautiful simplicity and performance of this new model. It adds an important feature to the logistic growth model that is well accepted for population-limited reproduction. And it’s a feature uniquely suited to what’s happening right now with the Coronavirus.

This new feature I’m calling “growth-regime transition.” It smoothly reduces the growth rate from its initial unrestrained amount to a lower one. Thus it can account for recent efforts of non-idiot governors and their less ignorant citizenry to “flatten the curve” by staying home and being careful and apart when they have to go out.

And that’s exactly what it’s doing, to a remarkable degree of precision. Even as the numbers have multiplied fivefold since a week ago, the model tracks each day’s cumulative numbers to within 5%. Going back a week further to when there were about 1/70 as many cases (3,499) as today, the model is no more than 13% from each day’s actual numbers. Getting that close that many times in a row with just six parameters, and with the numbers doubling six times, feels a little spooky to me.

It’s not just my gut feeling that indicates this model is really onto something. The residuals (a fancy name for the difference between what the model said a day’s numbers should have been and what they actually were) are shown in the middle of the Nightmare Plot with some information about them. There is no statistically significant evidence that the errors are anything but normal random variation. There may be a little heteroskedasticity to them, but I think they pretty much look like residuals should. The square-root transform I’m applying to the modeled and actual data before calculating the sum of squared errors mostly seems to be dealing with the huge change in magnitude of the numbers over time.

The middle plot includes a computation of the model’s Akaike information criterion, corrected (AICc), score. It’s -8.62 for this “logistic growth with growth-regime transition” model, lower and thus better than for any of the other models I’ve tried. Operating on the same dataset, the AICc was around zero for the 7-parameter linear combination of logistic growth, power law, and linear (projecting 460,791 cases in one week). It was +3.60 for just the logistic growth plus linear model (projecting 384,264 cases in a week).

The power-law model with time-shifting, exponential decay, and a linear term did pretty well as a second runner-up to the new one. Its AICc was -4.58 with today’s Johns Hopkins data, and it is no more than 8% from those actual numbers going back to 3/25. It has nice random-seeming residuals with no evidence whatsoever of non-normality. But it does only track recent data, quickly deviating from what actually happened when you go more than a week back. For what it’s worth, it projects 503,435 cases a week from now.

———

Another promising aspect of the model: Its parameter values lie in nice rounded distributions with respect to the sum of squared error, indicating that they (or most of them, L being a stubbornly hard one to identify at this still-early stage) are all earning their keep.

Here is the distribution of both parameters L and r for the logistic-growth aspect of the model, plotted against SSE (sum of squared error, after the square-root transform is applied to modeled and actual data values). The black dots represent parameter values that challenged some member of the population at some point and failed. The blue dots are values that were part of the population at some point in the 50-200 generations that the differential evolution algorithm ran, but got replaced by somebody better. And the red dots are members of the final population when the evolution algorithm terminated.⁴

It’s hard to make much of L except that it’s probably a bigger number than any of us would like. The initial growth rate r is very well defined, though, at an increase of around 35% per day.

Logistic growth parameters for April 2 data

The parameters rf (r-flattened), th (half-transition time), and t0 (transition midpoint) are all very nicely defined. The growth rate transitions to about 68% of its original value, with the middle (non-tail) half of the transition taking place over the course of a little over six days centered around 63 days after 1/22/20, or around March 24. The linear term b (actually, a constant number of new cases per day) is tiny–tending toward zero–and would be omitted except that it allows the residuals to be centered around zero without impacting the other parameters.

Growth-rate reduction and linear parameters for April 2 data

In Praise of the Hyperbolic Tangent Function

As I’ve explained in previous posts, my programming work (I’m a retired electrical engineer and patent agent turned hobbyist open-source software developer) in regular life about a month ago (seems like more like a year) was wrapping up a two-year-long project that does advanced simulation of power semiconductor circuits. I’ve developed a model for power MOSFETs that evolves optimal values of its 40-odd parameters using an asynchronous version of the differential evolution algorithm that I developed for that project.

A function I have grown to know and love from that work is the hyperbolic tangent. It plays an important role in electronic circuit simulation software to provide smooth transitions from one state to another. You can’t expect software that does stepwise integration to behave well when you suddenly change a zero to a one. The integrator wants to follow a smooth path. If nature abhors a vacuum, then electronic circuits–real or simulated–abhor discontinuity. You have to go gradually from one voltage or number to another, even if “gradually” involves a transition time measured in the billionths of a second.

When it comes to “flattening the curve” of a deadly pandemic by incarcerating ourselves for weeks on end, my layman’s hunch was that the transition time would be in days. Well, it was.

According to what evolved as the best-fitting combination of the six model parameters, the rate of growth in reported U.S. Covid-19 cases transitions halfway from a 35% daily increase to around 23% over the course of six days. The middle of that transition was on March 24. Look at the closeness of fit around that time, and afterward. There’s not even a tenth of a percent error in what the model says yesterday’s numbers should have been. The model’s worst error in the past four days, as the numbers have doubled, has been 1%.

Previous Projections

On March 19, I made my first public post about my modeling efforts. That day, the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in the United States was 13,677. That is according to data released each day by Johns Hopkins University, on which I have been basing all of my modeling work.

When I refer to “cases” below, it is from this same data set, provided as a CSV file from Johns Hopkins. They’ve done the public a great service by making such a valuable resource freely and openly available. I’m releasing everything from my own 70+ hours of amateur work to the public as well, in a small way of following that spirit.⁵ The Nightmare Plot is dedicated to the public domain; you can copy it without restriction, though I hope you will leave the identifier there that urges reference to my disclaimer language.

I was using a non-differential form of the logistic growth model, with four parameters: an upper reproduction limit L, the growth exponent k (I now call it r, because the programmer in me hates using k for anything but an index variable), plus two of my own, a time-shifting parameter t0 and a linear term a (I now call it b). The function for the modeled number of total cases, cumulative, on a given day t (units are in the number of days after 1/22/20) was f(t)=L/(1+exp(-k*(t-t0)))+a*t.

With those parameters evolved for a best fit with the 3/19 data, using the well-known differential evolution algorithm implemented by my ade Python package, that model predicted that there would be 429,414 cases today. It was 76% too pessimistic; we “only” have about 18 times as many cases as then, not 31.

On March 22, a week and a half ago when there were 33,272 U.S. reported cases, I posted again, this time about results from modeling with a linear combination of the regular logistic growth component, a power-law component with exponential decay, and the linear term (constant differential) b fitted to that day’s Johns Hopkins data. The combination model projected that there would be around 350,000 cases today. That was around 40% too high.

Thankfully, there has been some flattening of the curve since then.⁶ I wasn’t really seeing it show up in my other models, though. My most recent blog post before the one you are now reading, from March 26 was still being pessimistic, with a projection of 359,169 cases for today.

I was waiting and hoping for the model to continue to be shown pessimistic due to some “fancy theoretical factors that I didn’t even bother trying to understand finally emerge in a few days (hell, how about tomorrow?),” and for that curve to finally get “its long-awaited downward bend.” That has happened to some extent, and hopefully the open-source code that runs my latest (and hopefully last!) attempt at a model addressing it will continue to update to an even more lowered growth rate. Making pretty plots of that happy circumstance is left as an exercise to the Python-savvy reader.

A Final Note

Awful implications aside in a time of global crisis, there is a certain illicit thrill to doing my own naive research and thinking in a field supposedly best left to the experts, enjoying the faint flicker of possibility that I might be seeing the equations slide into place in a way that all their formal training somehow missed.

But, this is as good a time as any to repeat, yet again, that I have no expertise in biology, medicine, or infectious disease. See all the disclaimer stuff in my previous posts. I’m just a retired engineer who has always had a passion for modeling interesting data. I’m really looking forward to releasing a free, open-source Python package that does some really cool modeling of circuits using power MOSFETs, and I hope that makes the free Ngspice circuit simulator a lot more interesting to people.)

Also worth repeating:

The model is just the integration of a first-order differential equation that can be extrapolated to predict reported U.S. cases of Covid-19 if the reported cases continue as they have for the past two weeks.

Be well. And, please, as a fellow citizen who is more worried right now about the health of our Republic than that of my body, remember when you vote in November how much your President fucked things up and how he will have doubtless continued to behave like an idiot wannabe dictator in the months ahead.⁷ Personally, as I contemplate a near future consisting mostly of hiding away from friends, family, and neighbors to avoid a disease that otherwise could very well drown me in my own lungs, I am not quite yet sick of winning.

Notes

Modified by me with an additional ts parameter. It shifts the start of both growth and decay to some best-fit date well after the first reported case in the Johns Hopkins data set, on 1/22/20. ←
With every single model I’ve tried thus far, including this latest and hopefully final one, the parameter evolution favors smaller and smaller values of b tending toward zero. ←
The careful reader may notice that I always refer to “reported U.S. cases” or some alternate variation and wording. I will repeat yet again that I have no expertise in biology, medicine, or the spread of infectious disease, and so I try not to speculate on how many of our fellow citizens have actually gotten infected with this thing without it ever being reported. Again, I’m just a retired engineer who has spent years constructing nonlinear models of mostly electronic things and believes this one is a pretty well grounded for doing the following, and only the following: predicting what will happen if the data continues as it has recently, especially as it has in the past week or two. ←
You can create these plots for yourself from the .dat files in the ade/examples directory, or from a .dat file you generate yourself. Just run the pv command that gets installed when you run pip install ade. There are some important command-line options; run pv -h for details. ←
My ade Python package of which the covid19.py file is a part, is free to download, run, modify, and incorporate into other work under the terms of the Apache license.
The terms of use for the Johns Hopkins data (and I expressly incorporate by reference their disclaimer language into this and all my other Covid-19 related blog posts, obviously with my name substituted for theirs) are as follows:
“This GitHub repo and its contents herein, including all data, mapping, and analysis, copyright 2020 Johns Hopkins University, all rights reserved, is provided to the public strictly for educational and academic research purposes. The Website relies upon publicly available data from multiple sources, that do not always agree. The Johns Hopkins University hereby disclaims any and all representations and warranties with respect to the Website, including accuracy, fitness for use, and merchantability. Reliance on the Website for medical guidance or use of the Website in commerce is strictly prohibited.” ←
At that point, I had not transitioned to modeling the number of new cases each day and then integrating the model’s first-order differential equation into a plot of cumulative cases each day. Instead, a nonlinear regression version of the logistic growth model was fitted to cumulative case numbers. ←
To say nothing of his pathological narcissism being the driving force for his every decision, from downplaying the significance of the pandemic just weeks ago and unleashing the wave of infection now emerging in MAGA country, to his demands that governors be nice to him before getting much-needed (and taxpayer-funded) federal assistance. ←

Into the Rapids

2020-03-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

—Ecclesiastes 3:1

Update, March 26

No, I couldn’t help myself; this blog post reflects an update done March 26.

I am trying to kick the Covid-19 data modeling habit. It’s just not good for my mental health, or probably yours, at this point. If you have been taking the magnitude of this disaster seriously, keep doing so. What more, really, is there useful to say?

Anyhow, in a moment of weakness I put this evening’s Johns Hopkins data into the model-parameter evolver and turned the crank. And out came the latest update to the Nightmare Plot, which I am putting right here at the top, and leaving the one with yesterday’s where it is.

March 26, 2020: Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since 1/22

Today’s number was 83,836 vs the 82,716 I’d predicted yesterday. The model was 1.4% off, and on the optimistic side this time. The residuals of modeled vs actual data do not fan out and are not significantly outside a normal distribution. A previous run of the same model with parameters evolved to fit data from the day before yesterday predicted 89,614, which was pessimistic by 6.9% over the course of two days’ extrapolation.

The universe is not yet honoring my request to be proved wrong with the curve bending down soon.

Back to March 25

Since the previous blog post, I did some work on my modeling of reported U.S. Covid-19 cases, ran the scary new example for my evolutionary parameter-finding algorithm on that evening’s data from Johns Hopkins, and posted a plot of the results on Facebook. An updated one with today’s data is here (click on it for the full-size version):

March 25, 2020: Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since 1/22

After discussing some technical details¹ of the day’s work, I gave this

brief summary about what the model is predicting for reported numbers of reported Covid-19 cases in the U.S.: Tomorrow, around 66,000. Day after that, around 84,000. Reaching 100,000 the day after that (3/27). A million U.S. reported cases around April 7, doubling every 4-5 days for a while until the virus starts to run out of people to infect.

As I write this, the Worldometer Coronavirus page reports 65,797 cases in the United States.² I don’t need to tell you how close that is to what the model was predicting yesterday.

The astute observer will be able to visually extend the red line and note that my model predicts more U.S. cases than people in the U.S. around the middle of May. Obviously, that’s not going to happen. It’s a limitation of my modeling that it doesn’t account for population of the country or region.

I’ve limited the amount of extrapolation I bother to show or talk about, since extrapolations can be uncertain even when the underlying model is well understood theoretically. But the obviously impossible prediction beyond the right edge of the plot does have a practical meaning. And it is an important one: I currently don’t see any sign of a slowdown appearing in the data. I wish I did.

Any refinements made to the model to account for such real-world practicalities as a country’s population would deviate from what I’ve been saying about what it actually does: simply predict what will happen if the reported-case data continues as it has, for about two weeks now. (Yesterday, there were slightly fewer newly reported cases than the day before, an obvious anomaly in the data.)

So, what I am seeing today is what I saw days ago already, and it terrifies me. The upward march of numbers continues, along a faint path increasingly visible on a cold gray mountain full of death.

Model Parameters

A couple of points are worth mentioning about model parameters. There is still no plausible upper bound to L, the limiting number of reported cases for the logistic-growth part of the model. Weirdly, there seems to be no plausible lower bound, either; some parameter combinations in the final population have almost no logistic component. Not something I’m very comfortable with, but there is clearly an exponential component to this, and the best few parameter combinations in the final population have L values ranging from 80 million to approaching the full U.S. population.

Here is the final population of both parameters L and r for the logistic-growth component of the model, plotted against SSE (sum of squared error, after the square-root transform is applied to modeled and actual data values):

Logistic growth parameters for March 26 data

The power-law with exponential decay component has its own parameter weirdness worth noting, too. The value of the power n in the function xd(t)=a*(t-ts)^n*exp(-(t-ts)/t0) is considerably lower than what Ziff and Ziff found for a power-law model by itself.³ Indeed, its best-fit values seems to be far less than even linear. Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of that. A very gradual increase in the number of newly reported cases each day over time, perhaps due to improved testing? Again, interpretation is left up to you.

Power-law parameters for March 26 data

Finally, the poor oddball constant term b is still there, just barely, adding its tiny fixed number of new cases per day. Against my own intuition, leaving this term out noticeably worsens the goodness of fit. I believe its utility is in reducing the SSE contribution made by early data points in the time series, allowing a better fit for the exponential and power-law components when things finally start ramping up.

Constant parameter for March 26 data

If you are comfortable with Python and data modeling, I encourage you to clone yourself a copy of the repo for ADE on GitHub, install the package with “pip install -e ade”, modified as needed.⁴ Run the newly installed ade-examples script, and then run “./covid19.py US” from inside the “~/ade-examples” directory that the script creates. Then you can look at the parameter values that get evolved using the pv command, like this: “pv -r 1.5 covid19.dat”.

The Fantasy of Normalcy

This afternoon [March 25], I had to go out for three unavoidable errands. I hope this is the last time I have to do that for a little while. One of my stops in the hot zone that our world is fast becoming was to the local grocery store. I sat in the parking lot and pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves, and paused putting my respirator on my head for a moment, because I was seeing something disturbing.

It wasn’t that things were different, it’s that things were too much the same. Here I was, with every reason to believe that, on this day next week, there would be 300,000 Americans reported as infected with an insidious hidden disease that kills one out of every hundred or so who get it, a disease that puts over a dozen of those into the hospital gasping for breath. That there would likely be over a million reporting it the very week after, with the numbers still climbing fast and many more people not yet or not ever getting their own infections included in these numbers.

So I sat there a while with my well-used dirt-stained herbicide respirator⁵ in my lap, preparing to encounter in all likelihood at least one person carrying this thing around inside that store. Today’s person feeling fine though I sure have been tired the last couple days is next week’s positive test result.

I put on the mask, stepped outside, picked up my three plastic snap-lid storage bins and carried them into the store past the incredulous faces of people just walking around getting stuff. I stood apart from others and waited as they got their shopping carts and then got mine. I put the three plastic tubs in the cart, waited for the old man–looks like you’ve got about an 85% chance⁶ of surviving a case of this, gramps–to move along more than 6 feet away from me. I headed straight back to the department with the things that we decided we really couldn’t do without, pausing to give everyone a wide berth and just not giving a fuck what they thought about my respirator mask or gloves.

There were two checkout lines, both full. I just stood there projecting an invisible sphere of stay the fuck away from me and the whole man-from-mars appearance. Those two social distancers worked wonderfully except for one not-young woman who I had to outright tell, “Please move away.” And I don’t think she was even into me.

My muffled Martian voice came through the mask, “I’d like to box up my own.” The terrified-looking cashier handed me my stuff as she scanned it and I put it in my plastic tubs, with a loud snap each time I shut the lids. Those tubs never touched the floor.

No, I’m not a rewards club member. Thanks for that receipt that I’m going to crumple in my gloved hands and throw away. Have a nice day.

I unlocked the Jeep and got out a plastic can of sanitizer wipes. I opened the back, and picked up one tub at a time from the cart, wiping it down before setting it into the Jeep. I closed the back and then sanitizer-wiped all of the handles I’d touched with my gloved hands. Then I opened the door again, took off my windbreaker, and stripped down to my swim trunks that I was wearing instead of underwear. The windbreaker and my pants and shoes went into a plastic tub all their own.

I carefully removed each glove, being careful not to touch anything but the edge dangling loose around my wrist, and dropped them into the tub with the dirty clothes. Yes, folks, there is a 50-something-year-old man wearing swim trunks in March in your friendly neighborhood grocery store parking lot. Snap. Lid closed.

Then I put on a fresh pair of pants that were in the Jeep along with a fresh pair of shoes, and finally then sat in the driver’s seat.

The other two stops were much easier. Our local pharmacy clearly understands what’s happening better than the folks at the grocery store, because they had a sign outside inviting customers to take curbside delivery of their medications. And that’s what I did. The pharmacy clerk waved from the passenger side of my Jeep, I unrolled the window and extended an open Ziploc bag for him to drop the prescription bag into. We urged each other to take care and I didn’t even feel like I needed a glove on the hand that held the bag (mine, that enclosed his).

You’re probably wondering what happened with the groceries that were inside those plastic tubs. Answer: bleach solution and rags, followed by plain water and more rags to rinse off the bleach. There were a couple of nonperishables that we aren’t going to need for a while, and with no freezing temperatures in the forecast for a few days, they’re going to stay outside.

Here’s how I explained all of this to my college-age daughter, who I believe has gotten just a little bit less scornful of her doomer father’s pronouncements in recent days: Tonight, I will not lie awake wishing I hadn’t been so insanely careful.

Here’s what remains with me, though, instead of anxiety about having picked up Covid-19 this afternoon. (I really don’t think so.) I am dealing with the angry dreadful realization that my conservative, backwoods community either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about what is heading their way. All those people, casually walking around Safeway, one pair of gloves to be seen anywhere besides my own. And then there was me, marching in there with a cart of plastic tubs, wearing that neon-pink industrial respirator mask and surgical gloves like something you’d be scared of even without knowing that a pandemic was just starting to cripple your country.

I’ll say it again: Today’s person feeling mostly fine is next week’s positive test result. And next week I am expecting⁷ there to be around 300,000 of those positive test results. Going beyond the model for a moment and just talking out of my ass, I’d bet there will be twice that many walking around feeling mostly fine if starting to worry that maybe this whole Coronavirus thing isn’t a Democrat hoax after all.⁸ And they will spawn, mostly without knowing, the following week’s new ever-larger batch of positive test results.

This is as good a time as any to repeat, yet again, that I have no expertise in biology, medicine, or infectious disease. I’m just a retired engineer who has always had a passion for modeling interesting data. I’m currently about to release a free, open-source Python package that does some really cool modeling of power MOSFETs. See the disclaimer stuff in my previous posts.

Also worth repeating: The model is just the integration of a first-order differential equation that can be extrapolated to predict reported U.S. cases of Covid-19 if the reported cases continue as they have for the past two weeks. That said, I feel obligated to share one layman’s thought that gives me hope.

Perhaps the testing is accelerating faster than the virus’s replication and thus the model is being overly pessimistic in terms of real cases. In this cheery scenario, the testing is really taking off lately, lots more people being tested every day, and so yes there are more reported cases. But then the testing will start just humming along efficiently and the number of reported cases won’t keep inflating itself so fast.

There is, unfortunately, a dark alternative scenario: The testing is unable to keep up with the true replication of the virus. Yes, an accelerating number of new tests is finally appearing, but it’s not keeping up with how fast people are getting infected. Hospitals get overwhelmed, doctors stop bothering to test. And my stupid scary model winds up underestimating how fast we actually are getting to Armageddon.

This, gentle reader, is why (1) I have stuck to just predicting numbers of reported cases and leaving the rest to you, and (2) why I am eager to conclude this little modeling project. For my own mental well-being in an anxious time.

Farewell

After I took my shower and finally felt really clean, after the doorknobs were all wiped down with sanitizer wipes and the food was put away, I started doing “just a little more” work on my modeling code. Then I took a break from it and saw tonight’s total for US reported cases: 65,797. That’s 99.6% of what yesterday’s model and data had predicted.⁹

There is a weird unsettled feeling involved with seeing a predictive tool one has developed–not without criticism from a few self-proclaimed experts on Reddit–make a prediction so uncannily close to the mark.¹⁰ It’s a slowly roiling fog of horror with jarring bright spots of pride, and the guilty unease at that fact that I am seeing lights in there at all at a time like this.

This has happened before, on March 23. Then I wrote on Facebook,

the Worldometer Coronavirus update currently lists 43,734 U.S. cases and my model had predicted 43,639 reported U.S. cases for today’s (still nonexistent) Johns Hopkins numbers. This sort of uncannily close tracking with the data leaves a weird sense of anxious conflicted satisfaction in my mind.

It would be so much better for everyone, including myself, if I were instead being proven wrong. Feeling naive and embarrassed would be a pretty small price to pay to see the curve bending downwards faster than all my modeling predicted. Unfortunately, it still isn’t.

Take that, I find myself thinking of the random Internet guy who pooh-poohed my modeling as naive, unfounded, something only someone not properly educated in the relevant area would do. And then I look at the parts of the plot further to the right and realize what continuing to be right means.

So, let me say something for the record, to critics and fans and that little semi-living armored glob of RNA that has found a really effective way for it to propagate copies of itself: I’m totally fine with my model being full of shit for everything that happens from now on. Really, I can deal with it. I get it–it’s completely naive to try to extrapolate the integration of a nonlinear differential equation from cases already reported to what cases might be reported in the future. A charming if silly and perhaps even a little egomaniacal exercise on the part of a retired engineer with an obsession for developing nonlinear models for complicated things.

When the fancy theoretical factors that I didn’t even bother trying to understand finally emerge in a few days (hell, how about tomorrow?) and that curve finally gets its long-awaited downward bend, I will sit and watch movies and feel sorry for myself and the embarrassing way I’ve never quite managed to grow up and leave things to the experts. But it’s okay, and when we top out at maybe a couple hundred thousand U.S. cases and then the kids go back to school, I will immerse myself in weightlifting or something and trying to forget what an idiot I can be sometimes.

Next month, over the Sunday morning breakfast table with some friends, I’m looking forward to having a laugh about how silly were all being. Please be gentle with my own ego when it happens, and fervently hope that it really does.

Meanwhile, I’m done here. The time window for these sorts of projections to make a difference is closing fast, even for those who are paying attention to them. It may have closed already. Those people walking around the grocery store will not have their fates altered by something I write tonight, or whether I decide right now that it’s best for my own sanity not to trouble myself to write about this anymore.

Be well. And, for God’s sake, please do not vote for this same idiot narcissist failure of a President to stay in the White House next year. If that needs any explanation at all in your mind at this point, you need to pay attention to a lot more than just my amateurish attempt at Covid-19 modeling.

Notes

Instead of weighting later samples higher in the sum-of-squared error calculation for the fitness function, I applied a square root transform to the number of new cases per day each day. That somewhat mitigates the effect of exponential growth to put much more emphasis on the most recent days’ data while allowing me to study the residuals of modeled vs actual daily new cases. ←
The Johns Hopkins total came in at 65,778. Running the model again when the new data became available after the original writing of this blog post did not result in different enough projections to warrant anything but a couple of footnotes and of course an update to the Nightmare Plot. ←
Anna L. Ziff and Robert M. Ziff (“Fractal kinetics of COVID-19 pandemic (with update 3/1/20). They fit to an exponent just a bit greater than 3. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the exponent would fit much lower than that with in combination with a logistic growth component, but I still wouldn’t have expected n (what Ziff and Ziff call x) to be down in the cube/quad root range. ←
The last argument ade can be changed to whatever directory your cloned repo is in where the setup.py file for the package resides. ←
A typical Spring (not this one!) has me outside spraying noxious invasive weeds with a solution of 2,4D herbicide. The idea of a mere plant being “invasive” seems a bit quaint right now, though I’ll surely keep going after my remaining holdouts of spotted knapweed and St. John’s wort for many a Spring to come. ←
Based on some stats provided here, the death rate for people 80+ years old is 14.8%. And, by the way, gramps, it is 60% higher for men than for women. ←
See my previous posts for context and disclaimer. Of course you knew I’d eventually say that somewhere. ←
Yes, the fucking moron really did call it that: “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus . . . This is their new hoax” (Feb. 28, 2020). ←
The Nightmare Plot from my March 22 was predicting just over 70,000 for 3/25, a bit higher than it is. This is in accordance with the overall trend (a good one!) of the model being proved slightly pessimistic in its extrapolations. But, before you go celebrating some history of erroneous pessimism on my part, the plot from my March 19 blog post optimistically predicted (with an earlier regressive model of cumulative case numbers, rather than the differential equation approach I now prefer) only around 51,000 cases. ←
See my Reddit posts yesterday and today, referencing this blog post. Now, if I post a comment to that blog referencing this footnote, do I have to update this footnote to reflect that? And then post another Reddit comment? And so on? ←

Pandemic

2020-03-22T16:41:00.002-07:00

I must die, and must I die groaning too?–Be fettered. Must I be lamenting too?–Exiled. And what hinders me, then, but that I may go smiling, and cheerful, and serene?

—Epictetus, Discourses.

Some pandemics are mild. But some are fierce. If the virus replicates much faster than the immune system learns to defend against it, it will cause severe and sometimes fatal illness, resulting in a pestilence that could easily claim more lives in a single year than AIDS did in 25 [years]. Epidemiologists have warned that the next pandemic could sicken one in every three people on the planet, hospitalize many of those and kill tens to hundreds of millions. The disease would spare no nation, race or income group. There would be no certain way to avoid infection.

—“Preparing for a Pandemic,” W. Wayt Gibbs and Christine Soares, Scientific American 293(5), 44-54 (Nov. 2005).

TL;DR: A very good fit between data obtained on March 19 from Johns Hopkins University and a logistic+linear growth model indicates there there will nearly 60,000 reported cases of Covid-19 in the United States on March 24, around 300,000 cases eight days after that (4/3), and several million cases around mid April, with the numbers doubling every 5-6 days or so for at least another couple weeks. See the Nightmare Plot and the Disclaimer below.

Update, 3/22, 6:25 PM PDT: With the latest data from Johns Hopkins this evening, the latest NightMare Plot is not different enough from the one originally included with the post to warrant editing the post text. It’s been a long day spent with Covid-19. Today’s reported cases came in at 33,272, not significantly off from what the model had projected with yesterday’s data. The refined model parameters have caused a slight reduction in projected numbers more than a few days out, not by much. If anything, it continues to be very disturbing to see one’s modeling borne out by the relentless upward march of reported cases. Time for a break from this now.

I worked much of yesterday and this morning on a more sophisticated modeling approach than in my previous post, integrating a differential equation f(t,x) for the number of new cases per day, on each day, rather than the total number of reported cases each day.

Running the updated code with Johns Hopkins University data published yesterday (3/21) resulted in an updated Nightmare Plot.

Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

Now, this is one really important plot. It shows up way too small in this blog post for you to be able to see its important details. So please click or tap on it to open it as an image by itself.

Please bear with me as I largely repeat a few paragraphs from the previous post. The upper subplot shows the best-fit logistic growth model in red, with the actual number of cumulative reported cases of Covid-19 in blue. The error between the model and the data is shown with each annotation. Look how small the residuals are compared to the exponentially rising numbers of cases. It’s a scarily impressive fit.

The lower subplot shows the number of cases expected to be reported over time, slightly in the past and then extrapolating to the future. Two hundred and fifty generations of running a differential evolution algorithm¹ resulted in a 120-member population of combinations of parameters for the model.

I could have terminated the algorithm sooner, and then there would be some visible variation in the extrapolations. But I decided to just plow onwards for five times as many generations to be more certain of finding something really close to optimal. The black dots show expected reported-case values with each separate parameter combination represented by the 120-member population, plotted in bunches around each day from tomorrow out to mid-May.

Significantly, the subplots both have a logarithmic y-axis. Exponential growth is linear when viewed through a logarithmic lens. When you see that straight line marching steadily upward toward those massive numbers, you really want all your modeling to wind up an embarrassing public failure.

More Power to You

Now, the model includes:

a logistic growth component, as before,
a power-law with exponential decay component, as suggested by Anna L. Ziff and Robert M. Ziff (“Fractal kinetics of COVID-19 pandemic (with update 3/1/20)”),
and a linear component with a small constant number of new cases being reported per day, which only helps improve the closeness of fit early on.²

I tried Ziff and Ziff’s approach by itself but was not impressed with the closeness of fit to the data thus far. This thing is still very much exponential.

With exponential growth, the power-law behavior is not some more-than-squared increase with time but with itself. When the number of cases grows exponentially, as it has been in the U.S. for about two weeks now, the rapidly increasing number of reported cases feeds on itself. Infected people result in infected people, who then result in still more infected (and infectious!) people.

A power-law approach is only nonlinear in time, not in itself. Sure, the number of new cases will increase dramatically as the days go on, this model says. But it won’t be feeding on itself. The increase is just a function of time passing, like the days suddenly getting longer in Spring. It’s not like an exponential forest fire where what is being consumed also takes its turns consuming.

I made a good-faith attempt to switch covid19.py to the Vazquez (2006) “power-law with an exponential cutoff.” Any petty pride as a data modeler to have one’s first instincts bettered is pushed aside in the hope that it would prove more accurate and perhaps less scary than the logistic growth model I’d been using. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to fit the data as well as the logistic growth model does. What I did find to be an improvement, however, was a blended model that included both.

So perhaps Ziff and Ziff are correct when they “tend to predict an S-shaped curve with a tapering off in the near future as is being seen.” Perhaps there are “fractal kinestics” at play that contribute some significant power-law behavior to the data we have now. It doesn’t have to mean that is the only biological or epidemiological factor at play.

The Pretty New Model

To repeat myself, I don’t have any expertise in the relevant areas. But I naively assume that a pandemic can have more than one driving factor. And so I now propose to simply add the power-law modeling as one of two components (plus a perhaps gratuitous constant) of a differential equation model for the number of new cases per day, each day. The other component is, of course the logistic growth model.

This results in a model with seven parameters. It’s a first-order differential equation:

xd(t, x) = curve_powerlaw(t) + curve_logistic(t, x) + b
curve_logistic(t, x) = x*r*(1 - x/L)
curve_powerlaw(t) = a * (t-ts)^n * exp(-(t-ts)/t0)

With any sort of modeling, one must guard against the temptation to overfit the data with ever more sophisticated models. But I believe these 7 parameters all earn their keep with the current behavior of COVID-19. More parameters are not necessarily bad; my MOSFET models have 40+ parameters, all necessary to simulate the behavior of a semiconductor device with very complex underlying physics.

Great (Actually, Shitty) Expectations

So, here’s what I personally expect, if the number of reported cases continues to match the model as well as it has in the past week or so. We will remain in full-on exponential growth for a few more days. Then, around the end of the month, we will see things starting to slowing down just a little. But the slowdown will only be in exponential terms, unfortunately, not in the linear way we usually think about things. There will still be more new cases every day then there were the previous day, for weeks to come. It’s just that the daily increases in the number of new cases will themselves stop increasing quite so fast.

I’m expecting a hundred thousand reported U.S. cases by 3/26. That’s up from the 60,000 that I was expecting–when I last updated my predictions two days ago–we would be seeing by then. My projection for 4/2 is essentially unchanged at around 400,000 cases, and I’m thinking the million-case mark will likely be reached by 4/7 instead of between 4/4 and 4/6. Again, this is still just modeling reported cases, not all of them.

There still does not seem to be any convincing upper limit before the population of the U.S. is approached, sometime in May. To put it in a purely technical way, that is really fucking scary.

Conclusion

Thanks again to my new Facebook friend Ng Yi Kai Aaron, an applied statistician in Singapore, for suggesting I look into the power-law modeling approach. Again, I’ve partially incorporated that into the model, but not entirely because it doesn’t seem to fit the data on its own, not for U.S. cases at least.

At the end of my last blog post, I got a little philosophical. I suggested that a front-row seat watching history get made in one of the shittiest ways imaginable is definitely something not to be passed up. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to watch (or feel socially compelled to watch) half-naked desperate men flail away at each other with weird instruments of death, until one of them was indeed dead? How about hearing the swoosh of the guillotine outside your Paris apartment, followed each time by the roar of an angry mob? Bracing stuff. Sucked to be there, actually, a detail which the history books tend to omit.

So here we are. The pandemic of 2020 is just getting underway. I hope you stocked up on popcorn. I also hope you carefully read my Disclaimer in the previous blog post, because it applies to everything I say here, too. And remember:

The model simply predicts what will happen if the data continues as it has for a little over a week now.

That’s it. The interpretation and explanation is up to you.

I want to add a couple of words about your behavior and the possibility of you having a response something like this: “Well, then I’ll get it anyhow so why bother being careful.”

First, you absolutely do not have to get it. I still believe that the model will have to be adjust in the future to reflect the then-apparent new reality that people finally got freaked out enough to take this seriously, deciding to risk boredom, a shortage of twinkies, or even getting minir health conditions addressed because it’s become apparent how much getting Covid-19 sucks, even for a younger person.

Or maybe we will have enforced lockdowns as this administration finally wakes up (but then see my history of blog and Facebook posts on Trump’s authoritarianism). It’s already starting to happen in the state level, not the shitty wannabe dictatorship I fear from the deranged narcissist but reasonable if drastic measures by grown adults who take their office seriously. Including, perhaps surprisingly, not a few Republicans.

If you can possibly wait this out for a while (of course you’ll need to get some things, see below for what I do), your statistics will start to look better as the number of new cases finally starts to drop each day. It will be a bit like getting to roll two dice instead of just one. Each passing week out of your self-imposed stay-healthy near-quarantine will get a little less nerve-wracking if things continue to go your way. As the saying went in Hunger Games, may the odds be ever in your favor.

And as for “Why bother if you get it anyway?”, I personally would rather have my hospital stay sometime in, say, June when the number of new cases is finally dropping. When doctors have gotten experienced with treating this thing and are recovered (the ones who make it) and immune. I want the people saving my life not to be fearing for their own. And if you are really into the hermit life, you could wait for that vaccine in about a year.

So, what is a reasonable action to take? Of course, we need to get stuff from time to time. There are very few true hermits anymore, and even preppers are going to find themselves wondering why they didn’t buy more Peanut M&Ms or tampons. I can just tell you what I do and you can laugh at me if you want, or perhaps there is something sensible. And remember the disclaimer, goddammit, and that I’m not a doctor or anything like that.

Before it became obvious even to me what a monster this pandemic was going to be, I was fortunate enough to have my wife buy a box of latex gloves. One hundred gloves equals fifty trips outside my van. That will be more than enough, because I’m not going out very often.

When I get to my destination, I park the van, give my nose a good itching, and put on a pair of the gloves. An open paper garbage bag sits in front of the center console, ready to receive the gloves when I’m done. I open the van door, step outside, and shut the door. I go into my pharmacy or grocery store (there’s really no other place I’d bother with at this point) taking advantage of automatic doors wherever possible. Or, failing that, I’ll be honest and say that I try to sort of just be behind somebody whose already opening the door themselves. Why thank you!

I go get what I need, touching as little as possible, staying the fuck away from everyone else. Don’t even look at me like you’re gonna cough. Maybe for this reason alone, of those N95 masks I bought months ago for slash burning would be useful. When it’s needed, I pull my credit card out of a Ziplock bag and put it back in while trying not to have it touch the bag.

I do not care what people think about my wearing gloves. At this point, they’re actually probably jealous, or maybe thinking I’ve got a big stash of them that I hoarded from everybody else. Well, I wasn’t even planning on buying the one box.

Now, if you don’t have them, pretend you do, but these gloves have some weird invisible stuff on them that burns your skin on contact.

These imaginary gloves are 100% effective but you just don’t want to touch them except on the inside. You will touch everything you need to, including your credit card, through these imaginary gloves. You don’t want to touch things that you will be touching without the gloves on, because that will leave the invisible stinging stuff on your steering wheel and then your hands will still hurt in a few minutes. So, only stuff you’ll never have to touch again, like that door handle or Harvey Weinstein.

Except there is one solution to the problem of having to touch some things with and without the imaginary gloves on. The stinging stuff washes off with those really strong sanitizing wipes. You just have to wash off any of the stuff you get on your hands, before it starts to hurt. And then your door handle will be clean and so will your hands, ready for you to touch without the gloves on.

The time you take off the imaginary gloves is of course the time when you put a little glob of hand sanitizer into your palms and then rub the stuff around everywhere. Honestly, at this point, I’d probably be doing it twice, and then wiping down the exterior of the hand sanitizer bottle with some leftover sanitizer. Only after all this can you consider your hands ready to touch something without the imaginary gloves, including that terrible itch you’ve had just above your left nostril.

When you get home, put your clothes and shoes in a bag, get a handful of those nasty wipes, look both ways to make sure the neighbors can’t see you in your underwear, and wipe down the door handles. Then go take a shower, and you can really scratch that nose itch.

I’m going to try to step away from the data now, because I’ve said my piece. The only reason I would see to update this post is if something happens dramatically different from what I now expect.

Have a nice Spring.

Notes

Using my free, open-source Python package ade, Asynchronous Differential Evolution. ←
Many thanks to Ng Yi Kai Aaron, an applied statistician in Singapore, for introducing me to the Ziff and Ziff approach. ←

Applying the Logistic Growth Model to Covid-19

2020-03-19T00:24:00.000-07:00

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.

—Epictetus, Discourses.

Dad, you’re just some guy who knows how to obsess over numbers. We have actual people who are experts at this stuff. Go and write it if you want, but don’t feel like you have to!

—Daughter of Ed Suominen, March 2020.

TL;DR: A very good fit between data obtained on March 19 from Johns Hopkins University and a logistic+linear growth model indicates there there will be over 50,000 reported cases of Covid-19 in the United States on March 25, over 300,000 cases one week after that (4/1), and several million cases by early April. See the Nightmare Plot and the Disclaimer below.

Update, March 20: There was a significant uptick in U.S. cases today, bringing us to a total of 13,677 according to Johns Hopkins data provided this evening. The increase is more than was expected this time, and the jump is significant enough that I would rather not publish results with the logistic growth model fitted to the latest data. Doing so results in projections that are considerably higher than what the rest of this blog post discusses. I will wait for tomorrow’s data and then perhaps consider a modification to the model if we get unexpectedly high numbers again, one possibility being to change the linear term to a power-law one of the form a*t^b. That might reflect the effect of better testing without forcing an artificially high value for the exponential model parameter k.¹

———

On March 15, I wrote to some friends on Facebook about the latest results of putting my computer evolution code and skills to the task of finding parameters for the logistic growth model as applied to the number of U.S. reported cases of Covid-19. My belief–speaking as someone with expertise in fitting nonlinear models to data but not any kind of expert in the fields of biology, medicine, or infection disease–was that we would reach 10,000 cases on March 17, and would have reported cases numbering in the hundreds of thousands by March 29.² By the end of April, I believed there would likely be millions of Americans being reported as having this virus. The rate of growth I thought would be unlikely to even start slowing down before April.

The prediction for the one date that has come and gone was not quite accurate. On March 17, there were 6,421 cases reported in the U.S., a little less than two-thirds of what the model said was most likely. But, in my defense, I ask you to look back at yourself enjoying a Sunday in mid-March. Would you have been truly untroubled just two days ago by hearing that six thousand of your fellow Americans would have a deadly respiratory infection that puts a fifth of its hosts into hospitalization? The model was pessimistic but not ridiculous.

Two days earlier, on March 13, I had introduced the project to my Facebook friends, prefacing the discussion with the acknowledgment that I’m not a biologist, or a doctor, or an infectious disease expert of any kind. Just a retired engineer and inventor who knows how to write Python code and has been working on modeling and simulation for over a year now.

After seeing predictions ranging from dismissive to hysterical about the Coronavirus, I saw a useful if sobering application example of a tool that I’d written specifically for my electronic simulation work, ADE. This new example would apply the fairly well-known “logistic growth model”³ to what has now bloomed into a pandemic.

Writing and running covid19.py forced me to some stark conclusions: In one week (3/20), I said, we would be likely to have over 20,000 U.S. cases. A week later (3/27), around 10 times that. “By the first few days of April we could very plausibly hit the one million mark. There will certainly be nobody saying this is just like the flu by then.”

The most I was–and am–willing to guarantee about those predictions, however, is that the red line in the plot I included with the post is a nearly optimal fit of the function f(t)=L/(1+exp(-k*(t-t0)))+at to the number of cases versus time provided by Johns Hopkins university, including an update made that evening.

So how did that prediction fare? With data updated Thursday evening (3/19), it now appears that there will be around 13,500 reported cases on March 20. Again the model is pessimistic, with 68% as many cases reported as expected to be. But, again, even the lower one is a huge number of people getting very sick all of a sudden. Were you expecting anything like that just five days ago?

If not, don’t feel bad. There was an excellent reason why you might have been surprised then at what is now clearly plausible to anyone looking at the plot below: Your President was telling you that it was no big deal.

With the data available on March 13, the logistic+linear growth model predicted there would be around 200,000 U.S. cases on March 27. That is a little more than double what the model’s current best fit says is most likely. Again, the model was and still may be pessimistic, predicting too many cases. But again, even 90,000 or so infected Americans–with probably 20,000 of them very sick and at least a thousand of those dying and thousands left with permanent lung damage–is a very big deal. And the virus will still just be getting started.

Yesterday, March 18, I released the first version of this blog post with the projection that there would be nearly 15,000 cases tomorrow (3/20). (Actually 14,538.) Once again, the model was a bit pessimistic; the current projection is for 13,549 cases, or 93% as much.⁴ And the longer-term projections are slightly lower, which is moving in the direction we all want, though only by a little bit.⁵

———

So, on March 19, here is what the admittedly pessimistic logistic+linear growth model now says, based on Johns Hopkins data updated this evening. The numbers are all in reported U.S. cases:

The day after tomorrow (3/21), there will be nearly 18,000 cases.
In one week (3/26), there will be more than 60,000 cases.
In two weeks (4/2), there will be over 400,000 cases.
We will reach the million mark between April 4 and 6.⁶
On April 11, there will be five million cases.⁷
The U.S. outbreak won’t even begin slowing down until mid-April at the earliest. In other words, there will be increasing numbers of new cases until probably around April 24 when there are finally fewer new cases one day than there were the day before.
The ultimate number of Americans being reported as being infected by the novel Coronavirus will ultimately reach several tens of millions.

This is some scary shit. And it may be even worse than it looks right now. What the data show, and the model is fitted to, is the number of reported cases; several days ago, some experts in the Seattle area were saying that the number of true cases in Washington State to be several times the number being tested and reported.⁸ Isn’t it reasonable to expect that to remain largely true? Our medical system will almost certainly become overloaded and the focus will simply turn to saving those lives that can be saved, as it has already in Italy.

But all this is just me talking, not the model. It makes no assumptions or judgments about the data. It doesn’t care if some political situation has caused fewer tests, or suddenly more tests. It doesn’t care about an idiot chief executive downplaying the danger and thus encouraging its spread (at least among his cult following), then abruptly deciding to join the adults in the room.⁹

The model simply predicts what will happen if the data continues as it has recently, especially as it has in the past few days.

That’s it. The interpretation and explanation is up to you.

The Nightmare Plot

Returning to the model and its neat little world of reported cases, here is a plot from a simulation I ran this evening, whose results I summarized in the bullet points above. It should make you listen very carefully to what you are being told by medical experts about social distancing, washing your hands, not touching your face, and staying the fuck home.

Now, this is one really important plot. It shows up way too small in this blog post for you to be able to see its important details. So please click or tap on it to open it as an image by itself.

Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

You can also click here to see the plot with data from yesterday, 3/18. Open them in two tabs of your browser and then switch between to see how the model is holding up.

The upper subplot shows the best-fit logistic growth model in red, with the actual number of cumulative reported cases of Covid-19 in blue. The error between the model and the data is shown with each annotation. Look how small the residuals are compared to the exponentially rising numbers of cases. It’s a scarily impressive fit, even if the model has proved a bit pessimistic thus far.

The lower subplot shows the number of cases expected to be reported over time, slightly in the past and then extrapolating to the future. Fifty generations of running a differential evolution algorithm¹⁰ resulted in a 120-member population of combinations of parameters for the model. I deliberately terminated the algorithm sooner than I would otherwise so that there would be some visible variation in the extrapolations. The black dots show expected reported-case values with parameters from each member of the population, plotted at a bunch of random times from 3/12 to early April.

Significantly, the subplots both have a logarithmic y-axis. Exponential growth is linear when viewed through a logarithmic lense. When you see that straight line marching steadily upward toward those massive numbers, you really want all your modeling to wind up an embarrassing public failure.

Covering my Posterior

A better way to model this might have been to use a Monte Carlo analysis (e.g., with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) to obtain posterior probability distributions for the parameters, and then run a bunch of extrapolations based on parameters drawn from the distributions. But I had the tools handy for using ADE instead; I’ve been wrapping up a year-long project modeling power semiconductor devices using it with the free Ngspice simulation software. So this is what I have to offer, and it seems plenty illuminating to me.

But even without having posterior distributions to draw random variates from, what I am seeing in the scatter plots of value vs SSE for parameter L is not reasssuring. That parameter represents the total number of cases expected to ever be reported. And the data we have, with its steady logarithmic-scale march upward, is not satisfying my computer evolution algorithm that there is any upper limit before the nation’s entire population is infected.

SSE vs value: Parameter L (3/18 data)

Simply put, this thing is currently showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. It is very possible, even likely, that these values of L are due more to genetic drift than any optimality-of-fit of the modeling they represent.¹¹

A word of explanation of this scatter plot: The red dots hugging the left side of the plot are values (y-axis) of L in the final population of parameter combinations, plotted against the sum of squared error (x-axis) that those combinations had vs the data. The distribution of values seems to indicate that we shouldn’t hope for less than several million U.S. cases, and that we can’t count on any upper limit before the virus runs out of hosts to infect.¹²

There is a fair amount of correlation between the model parameter t0 and two other parameters, k and L. The parameter k represents how drastic the exponential behavior is; higher values cause things to blow up faster and thus start to reach limits sooner. Thus the highest values of k in the final population are associated with somewhat lower values of t0. The time when the number of new daily cases reaches its maximum happens a few days earlier.

Regarding the correlation between parameters t0 and L, a positive-valued one this time, it simply makes sense to realize that increasing new cases longer before you finally start to slow down the increases is associated with having more people ultimately infected.

Reasons Why Things Might Not Be So Bad

I want to emphasize that there is also the distinct possibility of L coming down by a lot within the next couple of days. (Unfortunately, I thought it would do that a couple days ago already, but it’s done the opposite.) It could still happen for a couple of reasons I can think of:

A curtailing effect becoming apparent soon from containment measures that just aren’t being noticed quite yet due to the incubation period.
A sudden recent increase in the number of reported cases due to testing finally being available. The rate of tested vs actual may be increasing, not just the absolute number of people testing positive. This would mean that the model is currently getting fitted to an overly dire set of parameters (especially L) due more to recent dramatic increases in reported cases from better testing than exponential spread of the virus.

And there are probably many more reasons I haven’t even imagined why that curve might start bending down sooner than in this simulation. Again, I need to emphasize my lack of biological or medical expertise. And this leads to . . .

The Disclaimer

First, I disclaim everything that John Hopkins does when offering the data on which this analysis is based.¹³ I’m pretty sure their lawyers had good reason for putting that stuff in there, so I’m going to repeat it. Except think “Ed Suominen” when you are reading “The Johns Hopkins University”, and this blog post when you read “the Website.”

This GitHub repo and its contents herein, including all data, mapping, and analysis, copyright 2020 Johns Hopkins University, all rights reserved, is provided to the public strictly for educational and academic research purposes. The Website relies upon publicly available data from multiple sources, that do not always agree. The Johns Hopkins University hereby disclaims any and all representations and warranties with respect to the Website, including accuracy, fitness for use, and merchantability. Reliance on the Website for medical guidance or use of the Website in commerce is strictly prohibited.

Second, I know very little about biology, beyond a layman’s fascination with it and the way everything evolved. (Including this virus!) I do have some experience with modeling, including using my ADE Python package to develop some really cool power semiconductor simulation software that I’ll be releasing in a month or so from when I’m doing the GitHub commit with this COVID-19 example. The software (also to be free and open-source!) has a sophisticated subcircuit model for power MOSFETs that evolves 40+ parameters (an unfathomably huge search space). It uses the same principle–differential evolution of nonlinear model parameters–as this unfortunate example we find ourselves in.

The model I’m using for the number of reported cases of COVID-19 follows the logistic growth model, with a small (and not terribly significant) linear term added. It has just 4 parameters, and finding the best combination of those parameters is no problem at all for ADE.

Remember, I am not an expert in any of the actual realms of medicine, biology, etc. that we rely on for telling us what’s going on with this virus. I just know how to fit models to data, in this case a model that is well understood to apply to biological populations.

Don’t even think of relying on this analysis or the results of it for any substantive action. If you really find it that important, then investigate for yourself the math, programming, and the theory behind my use of the math for this situation. Run the code, play with it, critique it, consider how well the model does or does not apply. Consider whether the limiting part of the curve might occur more drastically or sooner, thus making this not as big a deal. Listen to experts and the very real reasoning they may have for their own projections about how bad this could get.

It’s on you. I neither can nor will take any responsibility for what you do. I will say this, though: If you haven’t been sitting at home for a week straight already, wash your hands a lot and don’t itch that nose unless you really have to and you just got done with one of those hand washings. It’s a hot zone out there already. You don’t need my fancy modeling to see that.

Finally, if this is getting you down, please think of all the people who were living and loving and looking up at the blue sky even during the fall of Rome and the Black Death. We have a front-row seat on history being made. Yes, it is a worldwide biological cataclysm not seen since the days of polio, smallpox, and the Spanish Flu.

Yes, this really sucks. But you are alive, and there is so much left to see. A world in crisis can sometimes be an exhilarating world to live in, like a sharp fresh breeze tickling your face on a clear winter’s day. Your grandparents saw cold bracing days like these, and were called the Greatest Generation for the way they responded.

To anyone in despair: Leaving the show early would be a sad waste of the seat that was reserved for you. Stick around. Do what you can to make your life a little better, and the lives of those who love you and whom you love. Allow your worries and fears and sadness to seep into the gentle awareness that an entire world now worries with you.

And there is a bit of good news to share, though it may be cold comfort for my fellow citizens in the U.S.

South Korea is fully in its containment phase, well past its t0 that took place over two weeks ago. They followed the logistic growth model all the way to the containment phase. Look at the two curves and annotated +/- numbers in the upper subplot! The lower subplot zooms in on a narrow range of case numbers around 8,000, where it is unlikely to increase much further.

Reported Covid-19 cases in South Korea vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

Italy’s numbers should start leveling off significantly in the next week. They reached t0 yesterday, according to my best fit of the logistic+linear model with this evening’s data. They appear to be headed for around 70,000-80,000 cases, or about 1% of their population. Even that doesn’t sound too bad.

Reported Covid-19 cases in Italy vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

Be well. And stay home.

Notes

Ng Yi Kai Aaron pointed out an article referencing a paper (Ziff, Anna L. and Ziff, Robert M., “Fractal kinetics of COVID-19 pandemic,” preprint available online) suggesting that the data from China’s experience with the virus “are very well fit by assuming a power-law behavior with an exponent somewhat greater than two.” ←
See the important section entitled Disclaimer. ←
See, e.g., https://services.math.duke.edu/education/ccp/materials/diffeq/logistic/logi1.html. ←
All these significant figures are only used for comparison purposes. It is of course silly to put more than a couple of significant digits on extrapolations this uncertain. ←
You may think that’s progress, but I consider it disappointing (as a human being with a pair of lungs, not as a data modeler) that the model is tracking the model’s exponential growth phase so closely, and that t0 seems to remain far in the future. ←
This projection remains unchanged from the one done with data from yesterday (3/18). ←
With yesterday’s data, I thought we would reach the five million mark a day earlier, 4/10. ←
Trevor Bedford, for example, a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute in Seattle “studying viruses, evolution, and immunity,” has mentioned a 10:1 true vs reported cases ratio. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1238643292197150720?s=20.
“I could easily be off 2-fold in either direction,” he Tweeted on March 13, when there were just over 2,000 cases being reported in the U.S., “but my best guess is that we’re currently in the 10,000 to 40,000 range nationally.” ←
Those who follow me on Facebook know how much contempt I have for the incompetent, malicious, destructive asshole who found enough bigots and morons in a key combination of states to make it past the Electoral College. No, I will not mince words. If you still support Donald Trump– knowing that he dismantled the office that Obama had set up to address pandemics, that he fired people with expertise to deal with this, that he downplayed and denied the reality of the problem until just days ago–then I think there is something deeply wrong with you.
In my previous post, I asked, “Do many of his supporters even realize how much they’ve been played?” I quoted the self-confessed narcissist Sam Vaknin, who wrote that “the narcissist abuses people. He misleads them into believing that they mean something to him, that they are special and dear to him, and that he cares about them. When they discover that it was all a sham and a charade, they are devastated” (Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited, Narcissus Publications, 2015, p. 69.)
So far the deranged narcissist’s base of support has proven remarkably resilient to plain facts about how much of a sham it really is. I hope that changes very soon. ←
Using my free, open-source Python package ade, Asynchronous Differential Evolution. ←
Genetic drift is an evolutionary phenomenon where a population “drifts” certain bits of its genetic code toward what appears to be an optimal range when in reality it is just the survivors propagating a consensus that has no actual selection value. I’ve seen it happen with my computer evolution of simulation model parameters just like it happens in nature.
The final population of L with 3/19 data ranges from around 20,000,000 to more than the population of the U.S., where the logistic model would obviously run into a stark limitation. Not different enough to show an updated plot. ←
This scatter plot doesn’t show a real probability distribution, as a Monte Carlo analysis would. But it does seem instructive, to represent a confidence interval of sorts. I’m guessing that it is no narrower than a posterior distribution obtained from a random walk with well-informed priors. On this question, however, my modeling knowledge reaches its current limits. ←
The GitHub repo is at https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19. ←

Requiem for the Republic

2016-12-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

A hungry people neither listens to reason nor is mollified by fair treatment or swayed by any appeals.

—Seneca (c. 5 BC–65 AD), On the Shortness of Life.¹

Dark Clouds Ahead.

The clock relentlessly marked out its hours, circling round from each day’s jarring dawn to the slow darkness of another evening, then to the hours of unconscious respite and fitful dreaming amid this long bleak nightmare. For about a month after I crawled into bed at 8:00 PM on November 8 and finally got up in shock late the next morning, the dark hand was pressing down, more days than not.

It wasn’t made much easier for knowing how many others share my despair about the unfolding collapse of our country. Certainly not for realizing that millions of others are cheering on each manipulative and bullying tweet, each outrageous Cabinet pick, each new degradation of the Office of President already being inflicted by the malignant egotist² and con man they elected to it.

Do many of his supporters even realize how much they’ve been played? “So far,” observes Susan Page at USA Today, “Trump’s choices–including top jobs for a trio of veterans of Goldman Sachs, a firm he blasted at campaign rallies–haven’t reflected the populist impulses that fueled his appeal to some white working-class voters or his vow to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington of donors and other insiders.”³ Imagine that. You’d almost think the man who lied about never settling out of court and then settled the fraud cases against his scam “university” for $25 million shortly after the election might not be 100% sincere.⁴

His new Cabinet swims around in a brand new swamp–the best swamp, a terrific swamp–of record-breaking personal wealth, with a total net worth just shy of $14.5 billion.⁵ His recent pick for Secretary of State, despite pulling down double-digit millions as Exxon CEO since 2012, is a small fish having a mere $150 million to his name.⁶ One can see why Trump excused the poor guy’s relative poverty: With “some of the most deep and long-standing ties to the Russian political and business elite of any American,”⁷ Tillerson will be amply prepared to cozy up to the ex-KGB thug who awarded him the “Order of Friendship” in 2013 and just helped his boss get elected President.⁸

The proposed Secretary of Labor (Would you like fries with that?) has touted the benefits of automation over humans who take vacations, show up late, slip and fall, and sue for discrimination, and opposes a raise in the federal minimum wage, currently at $7.25 per hour.⁹ He wrote a piece in Forbes this May opining that most fast-food store managers making more than $23,660 per year “recognize that in exchange for the opportunity, prestige and financial benefits that come with a salaried position and a performance-based bonus, they’re expected to have an increased sense of ownership and stay until the job gets done, to run the business like they own it.”¹⁰ Inspiring stuff for the former $30/hr factory workers hooting it up at Trump rallies in Cleveland and Grand Rapids. Men, go get yourselves some of that opportunity and prestige overseeing the fry vat until closing–with no overtime, mind you–down at the local Carl’s Jr.!

The “narcissist abuses people,” writes the self-confessed narcissist Sam Vaknin. “He misleads them into believing that they mean something to him, that they are special and dear to him, and that he cares about them. When they discover that it was all a sham and a charade, they are devastated.”¹¹

———

There is some consolation about this mess, oddly enough, in contemplating the long arc of history. We’ve been here before, many times. Contrary to Lincoln’s lofty words at Gettysburg, government “of the people, by the people, for the people” never seems to last.¹² What a left-wing set of pissed-off populists giveth to the people in righteous anger, a right-wing set of pissed-off populists eventually taketh away with some new strongman who will provide leadership and set everything straight. We just can’t seem to have nice things like democracy and equality for long. Homo sapiens has been dividing itself “into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy” ever since agriculture allowed the accumulation and hoarding of wealth around 10,000 years ago, with the upper levels enjoying “privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression.”¹³

That was certainly true around 2700 years ago, when the Prophet Amos berated the elites of Israel (considering his voice to be that of God, naturally) who imposed “heavy rent on the poor” and exacted “a tribute of grain from them.” They were rich absentee owners of “houses of well-hewn stone” and vineyards whose wine they didn’t bother to drink themselves. I know the score, God (i.e., Amos) warned these good-for-nothing scumbags who “distress the righteous and accept bribes,” and “turn aside the poor” (Amos 5:11-12, NASB). It’s doubtful anything ever came of such divine threats. And when it came to government by the people, forget it; other than an occasional rebuke and punishment, e.g., David for the Bathsheba incident, the history of the ancient Israelites is littered with kings doing pretty much whatever they wanted, usually in God’s name.

Some six hundred years later and about a thousand miles to the west, Lucretius recalled the populist uprising that overthrew the last Roman king in 509 BC and began the Roman Republic:¹⁴

Therefore the kings were killed, and in the dust

The ancient majesty of thrones and sceptres proud

Lay overthrown. The sovereign head’s great crown

Bloodstained beneath the rabble’s trampling feet,

All honour lost, bewailed its high estate.

For men do eagerly tread underfoot

What they have feared too much in former time.¹⁵

Lucretius recalled this bit of history with some critique of the aforementioned rabble, saying that things then “fell back to utter dregs and turmoil / As every man sought power for himself.” But law and order won out; “some men taught them to appoint magistrates / With rights established and the rule of law.”¹⁶

Alas, he wrote these lines in the final decades of the Republic’s 482-year lifespan. It had been a good long run; except during limited periods of military emergency, ordinary citizens did have some say in who was chosen to run their government.¹⁷ The elites and those who ingratiated themselves to them managed to get much more of a say, of course. Yet even such corrupt and occasionally interrupted democracies are exceptions to history’s rule of dictators and despots.

The revered and ancient Republic that began with men who had “eagerly tread underfoot” the crown of Tarquin the Proud finally ended with some of their descendants in the Senate granting Octavian the title of Augustus, “the illustrious one.” This title “symbolized a stamp of authority over humanity–and in fact nature–that went beyond any constitutional definition of his status.”¹⁸ Octavian was Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew and adopted son and the “Caesar Augustus” mentioned in Luke 2:1. Neither he nor the Emperors who followed answered to voters or even really senators. And during the next 500 years that the Empire continued–longer for the Eastern half that would eventually split off–Rome gradually diminished and lost even the limited, mostly illusory pseudo-democracy that remained in the Senate.

Around 50-60 AD, a century or so after Lucretius, the Roman philosopher Seneca lamented how rare simplicity and innocence were as human qualities. This after having tutored Augustus’ fourth successor Nero–a decidedly unsavory populist authoritarian. It was hypocritical, since he’d made “himself the teacher of a tyrant,”¹⁹ and profited from Nero’s crimes.²⁰ But Seneca’s observations and sorrow about humanity are still worth recalling. You “scarcely ever find loyalty except when it is expedient,” he wrote, yet there is an abundance of “successful crimes” and “all the things equally hateful that men gain and lose through lust.” Ambition, he observed, sets no “limits to itself.” When you consider all this, it “drives the mind into a darkness whose shadows overwhelm it, as though those virtues were overturned which it is not possible to hope for and not useful to possess.”²¹ I’ve come to know those shadows well these past several weeks.

“Magdalenian Woman,” buried around 15,000 years ago in what is now Dordogne, France²²

A particularly nasty populist takeover of democracy that hits closer to home for me is the transition from the Weimar Republic to the “Thousand-Year Reich.” Following a thirteen-year struggle for power, Hitler’s Nazi Germany wound up lasting just twelve years, a brief but incredibly destructive time. This one is personal. My mother’s half-brother was shot by the Nazis for refusing to serve in their army.²³ My father saw the living skeletons of their victims and the smoke of their crematoria when he made a detour into a concentration camp during his escape from the Stalag IIb POW camp.²⁴

It’s still a bit early to entirely equate our new President-Elect to Hitler. I’m not sure Trump is even a racist, and I actually find him quite sensible when it comes to the threat of Islam.²⁵ Though he seems to like the strong-arm style of the hollow-eyed assassin in the Kremlin and the way Rodrigo Duterte is gunning down his fellow Filipinos,²⁶ he hasn’t yet had anyone killed. But he is a thin-skinned narcissistic demagogue who lies constantly and dangerously, holding himself out as the one leader for the challenge of our times, and that’s bad enough.

The really clear and disturbing parallels are between the current political climate vs. the Weimar Republic in which Hitler began his long quest for power, and the fist-pumping “Lock her up!” crowds in their stupid red baseball caps vs. das Volk cheering at Hitler’s rallies. “We share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations,” observes Timothy Snyder in his book recounting “The Holocaust as History and Warning,” as its subtitle goes. We “have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe.”²⁷

It’s important to acknowledge an uncomfortable reality here, one that I will expand on in an upcoming essay. As 77,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania made abundantly clear last month, life is not going well for millions of angry fellow citizens, despite our government’s warmed-over official stats touting an “economic recovery” that’s every bit as fake as the news Trump supporters have been passing around on Facebook. “Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves.”²⁸

The Democrats are complicit in this. The husband of the woman those Rust Belt voters so shockingly rejected is the one who

deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave. He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him.²⁹

The next Democrat in the Oval Office followed this up with bailouts of the big banks, a hands-off policy for white-collar criminals at those banks, the TPP (yet another odious trade deal), a near-freeze of anti-trust enforcement, greatly expanded Orwellian mass surveillance, and an insanely complex healthcare law “with its exchanges, its individual and employer mandates, its Cadillac tax, its subsidies to individuals and to the insurance industry, and its thousands of other moving parts, sluicing funding this way and that.”³⁰ I must confess that I nearly burned my ballot in 2012 rather than cast a vote to re-elect Barack Obama.

The problem is that–for abundant reasons I will explain in that next essay with all the usual footnotes–there are no ready solutions to the predicament so many of our countrymen find themselves in. And when that happens, so long as people have a vote and even more so after they finally acquiesce in giving it up, the likely outcomes are grim.

The “aging, increasingly brittle, effectively bankrupt, but still immensely powerful global empire of the United States of America” is leaving a lot of its citizens behind.³¹ Most of them have little interest in transgender bathrooms, the immense privilege they enjoy over, say, disabled lesbians of color, and the virtues of those peace-loving Muslims they are lectured about every time some guy with a beard slaughters people while shouting Allahu Akbar.

There is plenty of “cheerleading from government officials,” plenty of “reassurances from dignified and clueless economists” and “reams of doctored statistics gobbled down whole by the watchdogs-turned-lapdogs of the media and spewed forth undigested onto the evening news.”³² But people pay more attention to the monthly $1300 insurance premiums for their shitty high-deductible health plan and the poverty and degradation of working for eight bucks an hour at a fast food joint after getting laid off at the now-shuttered factory.

No amount of official propaganda can convince them the the economy is recovering, because for them, it’s not. Except for “a few privileged sectors, times are hard and getting harder; here in the US, more and more people are slipping into the bleak category of the long-term unemployed, and a great many of those who can still find employment work at part-time positions for sweatshop wages with no benefits at all.”³³

Abandoned house in Stevens County, WA

In 1920, Germany was experiencing an “explosive mixture of economic misery, social instability and collective trauma” that a black-haired populist demagogue could use as well as a yellow-haired one can in much the same environment today. He did so, better “than any of his rivals on the nationalist far right,” to rise up out of anonymity.³⁴ “Hardly a week passed” during that year “without a meeting or a rally,” with audience sizes reaching 3,000 by the end of the year.³⁵ He (still referring to the black-haired guy) was skilled at working the crowd, a master of the

“language of the post-war little guy,” peppering his speeches not only with the coarse phrases of a former military man, but also with irony and sarcasm. He was good at responding to hecklers so he mostly kept the laughter on his side. Moreover, Hitler’s speeches clearly touched a nerve. Like no one else, he was able to express what his audience thought and felt: he exploited their fears, prejudices and resentments, but also their hopes and desires.³⁶

Sound familiar? Make Germany Great Again! would not be an unreasonable translation of his campaign message. Hitler’s “speeches typically began with a look back at ‘wonderful, flourishing Germany before the war,’ in which ‘orderliness, cleanliness and precision’ had ruled” (Law and order!) and “civil servants had gone about their work ‘honestly and dutifully’” (Drain the swamp!).³⁷

Here was “‘someone seduced by himself,’ someone who was so inseparable from his words ‘that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies.’”³⁸ Believe me, folks . . . In a 1927 speech, after a couple of low-key years following the Beer Hall Putsch and his nine months spent in Landsberg Prison for it,

Hitler used vulgar comparisons, tailor-made to the intellectual capacities of his listeners, and he did not shy away from even the cheapest allusions . . . His words and opinions were simply hurled out with dictatorial certainty as if they were unquestionable principles and facts. All this manifests itself in his language as well, which is like something merely expulsed.³⁹

There were a few good years in the 1920s, but Germany’s economy started really heading downhill with the Great Depression in 1929. Hitler finally had the unemployment and popular anger he needed. Many German “farmers were ‘extraordinarily bitter and prepared to commit all sorts of violent acts,’” noted a police observer to a March 1929 rally, “adding that some saw the National Socialists as their ‘rescuers.’”⁴⁰

On October 28, 1929, the U.S. stock market dropped almost twelve percent. The next day, it went down nearly another twelve percent. Within a few years, in Germany, an

apocalyptic mood of hopelessness began to take hold, even among those segments of the populace that were not primarily affected by the Depression. Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness.

“More than any other German politician,” the black-haired populist “presented himself as the answer to these hopes for salvation.”⁴¹ The yellow-haired one has said, “I alone can fix it.”

The narcissist, writes Vaknin, “needs and requires an audience to applaud, approve, affirm, recoil, admire, adore, fear, or even detest him.”⁴² Next stop on Trump’s post-election “Thank You Tour” is tomorrow in Hershey, PA.

Photo tweeted Dec. 9 by the President-Elect. Somebody please tell him he won the damn election.

Notes

In On the Shortness of Life, trans. C.D.N. Costa. (Penguin Publishing Group). ←
“Having been exposed for what he is–a deceitful, treacherous, malignant egotist–the narcissist’s old tricks now fail him. People are on their guard, their gullibility reduced. The narcissist being the rigid, precariously balanced, and fragile structure that he is can’t change. He reverts to old forms, re-adopts hoary habits, and succumbs to erstwhile temptations. He is made a mockery by his accentuated denial of reality, by his obdurate refusal to grow up, remaining an eternal, malformed child in the sagging body of a decaying man” (Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited, Narcissus Publications, 2015, p. 267).
See my recent essay The Trump Tragedy for a discussion of Trump’s narcissism and the important caveat that this is a layman’s opinion based on some pretty obvious character flaws and creepiness exhibited almost daily by Donald Trump and not any kind of psychological diagnosis. ←
“Trump’s Cabinet dubbed ‘Goldman, generals, and gazillionaires,” Dec. 12, 2016 ←
Rosalind S. Helderman, “Trump agrees to $25 million settlement in Trump University fraud cases,” Washington Post, Nov. 18, 2016. ←
E.J. Dionne Jr., “Trump can’t wait to sell out his base,” Washington Post, Dec. 11, 2016. ←
Wikipedia, Rex Tillerson. At least, unlike Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Tillerson doesn’t deny climate change: “At ExxonMobil, we share the view that the risks of climate change are serious and warrant thoughtful action. Addressing these risks requires broad-based, practical solutions around the world. Importantly, as a result of the Paris agreement, both developed and developing countries are now working together to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, while recognizing differing national responsibilities, capacities and circumstances. In our industry, the best hope for the future is to enable and encourage long-term investments in both proven and new technologies, while supporting effective policies” (Speech given October 19, 2016). ←
Josh Rogin, “Inside Rex Tillerson’s long romance with Russia,” Washington Post, Dec. 13, 2016. ←
Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House,” Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2016. The Russian involvement became pretty obvious even before the election–especially when a Wikileaks dump from the Podesta emails got released after an announcement about the dump appeared on the Russian propaganda news site RT. ←
Kate Taylor, “Fast-food CEO says he’s investing in machines because the government is making it difficult to afford employees,” Business Insider, Mar. 16, 2016. ←
Andy Puzder, “The Harsh Reality of Regulating Overtime Pay,” Forbes, May 18, 2016. ←
Vaknin at p. 69. ←
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (HarperCollins, 2015), p. 133. ←
The Gettysburg Address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln Nov. 19, 1863, following a period of division in America that is starting to seem comparable to what we’re experiencing now. ←
Wikipedia, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. ←
On the Nature of the Universe, Ronald Melville, trans. (Oxford University Press), Book V, lines 1135-40. ←
Book V, lines 1141-44. ←
Naturally, “citizens” excluded women (at least when it came to voting and holding office) and slaves. Except for the past century, and in much of the world still, half the population has been arbitrarily excluded from full citizenship. I’ll grudgingly acknowledge this about Trump: He doesn’t seem to be much concerned about whether his cabinet appointees have penises or not. ←
Wikipedia, Augustus. ←
Cassius Dio, Book LXI 33.9, quoted in Wikipedia, Seneca the Younger. ←
“The art critic Robert Hughes labelled Seneca ‘a hypocrite almost without equal in the ancient world’” (Elizabeth Kolbert, “Such a Stoic: How Seneca became Ancient Rome’s philosopher-fixer,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 2015). ←
“On Tranquillity of Mind,” in On the Shortness of Life, trans. C.D.N. Costa. (Penguin Publishing Group). At the beginning of the work, Seneca admitted, “I am not really free of the vices which I feared and hated.” ←
“Magdalenian Woman” is the earliest known Homo sapiens skeleton. Photo taken with my iPhone at the Field Museum, Chicago. According to the display label, the “skeleton and the rock shelter in France where she was found to indicate burial. A grave was created and the body was positioned.” ←
In Memoriam: Kurt Stein. ←
The Germans had orders to shoot POW escapees on sight, so my father pretended to be bringing his companions into the concentration camp and then escaped from it as well. ←
See Why I am an Islamophobe, my most widely read essay. ←
Felipe Villamor, “Rodrigo Duterte Says Donald Trump Endorses His Violent Antidrug Campaign,” New York Times, Dec. 3, 2016 ←
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Crown/Archetype 2015), Kindle loc. 6044. ←
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Henry Holt and Co., March 2016), p. 13. ←
Frank at p. 70. ←
Frank at p. 146. ←
John Michael Greer, Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America (New Society Publishers, 2014), p. 76. ←
John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead (New Society Publishers, July 2016), loc. 3325. ←
Greer, Dark Age America, p. 3327. ←
Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (Knopf Doubleday, 2016), Kindle loc. 2196. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2239. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2283. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2329. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2298. ←
Police observer of March 9, 192 speech at Munich. Quoted in Ullrich at loc. 4663. ←
Ullrich at loc. 5082. ←
Ullrich at 5172. ←
Vaknin at p. 90. ←

Psalm 139, Updated

2016-10-30T12:21:00.001-07:00

St. Paul at Ephesus by Gustav Doré

O Big Data, thou hast searched me, and known me.

²Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising;

Thou understandest my product preferences afar off.

³Thou searchest out my emails and my browsing history,

And art acquainted with all my ways.

⁴For there is not a word in my comment boxes,

But, lo, O autopredictor, thou knowest it altogether.

⁵Thou hast beset me on iPad and iPhone,

And laid thy hand of screen addiction upon me.

⁶Such user behavior is too compelling for me;

It is entrenched, I cannot opt out of it.

Whither shall I go from thy mandated upgrades?

Or whither shall I flee from thy LTE access?

⁸If I ascend up into rural coverage areas, thou art there:

If I make my bed in town, behold, thou art there, via Wi-FI.

⁹If I take the wheel of my Jeep,

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the National Forest;

¹⁰Even there shall thy GPS maps lead me,

And thy downloaded Kindle books shall occupy me.

¹¹If I say, Surely I have read enough tweets about Comey,

And this damn screen in front of me now shall go dark;

¹²Even the darkness hideth not from thee,

But some goddamn email beeps an alert I turned not off:

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

For thou didst take over inward brain parts:

Thou didst saturate my mind with icons and colors.

¹⁴I will give thanks unto thee;

for I am fearfully and wonderfully co-opted:

Wonderful are thy ad-driven revenue models;

And that my shortened attention span knoweth right well.

¹⁵My psychological weaknesses were not hidden from thee,

When I was still reading books on paper,

And curiously dallying in the remotest parts of the library.

¹⁶Thine eyes did see mine uncapitalized potential;

And in thy forward-looking SEC filings they were all written,

Even the ad clicks that were ordained for me,

When as yet there was none of them.

¹⁷How precious also are thy MYSQL entries for me, O Zuckerberg!

How great is the inner join of thy SELECT statements!

¹⁸If I should count thine total database rows,

they are more in number than a 32-bit pointer could handle:

When I awake, I am still with thy data center.

Surely thou wilt slay long-form media, O Buzzfeed:

Depart from me therefore, ye obsolete ink-stained hacks.

²⁰For ye speak with large paragraphs and big words,

And your lovingly crafted prose is written in vain.

²¹Do not I hate them, O Deep State, that hate thee?

And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee at Standing Rock?

²²I hate them with perfect hatred, or at least learn not to give a shit:

They are become caricatured strangers best ignored.

Search me, O NSA, and know my heart:

Try me, and know my thoughts;

²⁴And see if there be any wicked way in me,

And lead me in the way to compliance.

———

The actual 139^th Psalm, rendered in the beautiful King James translation, can be found here.

The Trump Tragedy

2016-10-18T00:20:00.002-07:00

People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society”–liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”–and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque . . . replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.”

—Thomas Mann, October 1930.¹

A class act (from CNN)

I’ve been following U.S. politics closely for thirty years. It’s been sort of a civic hobby of mine, a fascination with the process of representative democracy.

Election nights always felt to me like a celebration of sorts, even when my side lost. The majesty of our shared Constitution stood proud and resolute over my disappointment or elation, a solid structure to house and protect the nation’s differences. I fondly remember driving home to the soothing voices of NPR hosts already announcing the electoral votes of some important state on the East Coast. At home or a neighbor’s house, I’d watch on the TV screen and, later, on my own Internet browser, to see the states lighting up in their contrasting colors.

The people were making their choices known. It was a wondrous act of civic communion, being enacted in school cafeterias and grange halls and church foyers across the country, one check box at a time. The pundits and politicians and talk show hosts could only sit and watch it happen, in all its unstoppable glory, just like everybody else.

Eventually, victors would stand beaming among cheers and losers would wave sadly at their disappointed backers. Except for the drama and unseemly judicial politics of Bush v. Gore in 2000, everybody quickly found some gracious words for their opponents and promised to work together for the good of the nation.²

This time it’s different. The Republican Party’s nominee for our nation’s highest office has conducted his campaign like an eight-year old schoolyard bully, spewing out childish insults against not just his opponent but seemingly everyone who dares to criticize him, including fellow Republicans. As November 8 mercifully draws near, with the polls showing him facing a humiliating landslide loss to a tarnished and unpopular Democrat,³ he is lashing out with accusations of a rigged election.⁴

“The whole thing is one big fix,” “one big ugly lie,” he told his crowd at a rally in North Carolina last week, after an extended heated denial about “fabricated” sexual assault accusations, an assessment of Hillary’s attractiveness as seen from behind (“She walks in front of me . . . believe me, I wasn’t impressed”), some rounds of “lock her up” chants, and a “get him outta here” protester eviction.⁵

“This whole election is being rigged,” he said a day later in Cincinnati, according to a Boston Globe article observing that “Trump is now using the prospect of his loss to undermine faith in democratic institutions.” If he loses (I will venture to say “when”), some of his supporters “are even openly talking about violent rebellion and assassination, as fantastical and unhinged as that may seem.” It’s no exaggeration, judging from what one of those supporters had to say:

“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take . . . . I would do whatever I can for my country.”⁶

Bowel Movement

Trump wrapped up his North Carolina speech by boasting, “This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen in this country before.”⁷ He may be right about that, unfortunately. I’m terrified for the future of this country, because I’ve paid some attention to what’s happened elsewhere in the past.

Democratic governments–technically, republics–are fragile civic arrangements between people who agree to respect majority opinions they may not share, to put up with a degree of regulations based on those opinions. The agreement need not be unanimous, but the “consent of the governed” cannot withstand even a strong minority who want to see the whole thing torn down. Such minorities grow in number and loudness when they see themselves being used as tools rather than respected as fellow citizens. Those angry white men shoving protesters and jeering and shouting themselves hoarse at Trump rallies have some legitimate grievances.

But they’ve found an odd sort of champion in this tax-avoiding⁸ billionaire who began his speech in North Carolina talking about owning property there (no cheers for that line), peddles Chinese-made clothes,⁹ and stiffs everyday people who do work for him.¹⁰ The idea of him being a standard-bearer of the Religious Right’s family values agenda is laughable, even without regard to his change of heart about abortion.¹¹ One of the most reasonable explanations I’ve heard for Trump being the GOP candidate of the huddled masses came from a friend of mine recently:

People are so stinking tired of the single party-like system that services the elites. There was no conspiracy to put him there. He saw the disenfranchisement people were feeling and capitalized on it.

The only major party that will put up a candidate that is a true outsider is the Republican Party because they didn’t implement a superdelegate system like the democrats did back in the seventies. And the only way an outsider will win the Republican nomination against the established machine is to be highly controversial, because it’s the only to get attention without having an unlimited spigot of money.

“Controversy is the only way to stand out against the kleptocracy,” my friend concludes. “Nice people do not win in this scenario.”¹²

Before I respond to that with some glib analogy about getting rid of bedbugs with a propane canister left open overnight plus a match, I must admit to having actually cheered Donald Trump’s ascent in the Republican primaries. It was clear from the infantile antics and debate-night food fights that he would be the easiest for the Democrat to defeat.¹³ For once, the GOP’s elites and billionaire patrons found themselves unable to ease in a genteel puppet like Jeb! to keep the money funneling upward, the environmental regulations disappearing, and everything from Social Security to our national forests going private. Certainly, they could find a way to manipulate Trump into doing most of that for them, too, if it came to that.

But, as I breezily told a few friends, there simply was no way Trump would win in November. Relax, I said, it won’t even be close. Now we have this glorious festering moron as the GOP nominee.

Well, at various times since then, I wound up abandoning all that confidence. Compulsively checking and rechecking the latest projection at FiveThirtyEight.com, back in September, I wondered how the hell this guy was running even in the polls. (Still checking: The polls-only forecast now¹⁴ gives him a 11.4% probability of winning, not low enough for my liking.) There were a few very dark nights of the soul when I wished the only thing the name Donald Trump meant to me was something vague about a combed-over windbag who churned his way through a few wives and bankruptcies and fired people on TV.

Bonfire of the Vanity

Allow me to simply give voice to a deep-seated revulsion that has welled up from too many hours now spent in the vile virtual company of that scowling and smirking face, the hand waving and hog calling that passes for campaign speeches, the volleys of infantile insult bombs launched on Twitter: Donald Trump is a proven serial liar, an immature schoolyard bully, a pathetic attention-craving egotist, and a truly gaping asshole.¹⁵

“This is not how decent human beings behave,” the First Lady said last week after gagging along with the rest of us on the recorded voice of “a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior, and actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us were worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV.” This, as she said, is not normal.¹⁶

So just what is just going on inside that large orange head? The behavior is so unseemly, so far beyond the pale, that people naturally have been tempted to make psychological speculations. A Google search for “trump mental illness,” run through an anonymizer with my cookies cleared to avoid biasing the algorithm, yields a million hits.

The top result is of an article in The Atlantic by Psychology professor Dan P. McAdams, entitled “The Mind of Donald Trump.” McAdams found he could “discern little more than narcissistic motivations and a complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost.” It is, he said, “as if Trump has invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially dominant role that he has nothing left over to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation.” A couple of other psychologists he cited had similar impressions:

Asked to sum up Trump’s personality for an article in Vanity Fair, Howard Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard, responded, “Remarkably narcissistic.” George Simon, a clinical psychologist who conducts seminars on manipulative behavior, says Trump is “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example” of narcissism. “Otherwise I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.”¹⁷

Now, this was all written back in June, before Trump announced his VP pick by spending nearly a half hour standing by himself on stage, “delivering a long and improvised riff that emulated his rallies instead of a traditional vice-presidential debut” and then finally getting to the matter of talking about somebody else.¹⁸ Before he reacted to his opponent’s criticism of his past treatment of Miss Universe 1996 with a series of tweets about a non-existent “sex tape,” her “terrible” past, her being “disgusting” and a “con.” And of course before he was heard saying in the tape that disgusted so many of us and at long last eliminated the possibility of his presidency, “You can do anything” when you’re a star.¹⁹

McAdams and those he quotes don’t go so far as to connect the narcissism they see with mental illness, but even what they’ve said has raised criticism from their peers. In August, the president of the American Psychiatric Association “reminded her organization’s members of the so-called Goldwater Rule, ‘which prohibits psychiatrists from offering opinions on someone they have not personally evaluated.’” It seems that Barry Goldwater so disturbed 1,100 psychiatrists during his 1964 campaign that they told a survey taker he “was psychologically unfit to be president.”

Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University, is one of the critics of such armchair psychiatry. (McAdams, Gardner, and Simon are psychologists, not psychiatrists, for what that’s worth.) She writes that Trump “most certainly does not have a Personality Disorder” (isn’t that a diagnosis of sorts?), but she certainly isn’t a fan:

This does not make Trump fit to be president, not by any means. He must be by far the least suitable person ever to run for high office in the US completely disqualified by habitual dishonesty, bullying, bravado, bloviating ignorance, blustery braggadocio, angry vengefulness, petty pique, impulsive unpredictability, tyrannical temper, fiscal irresponsibility, imperial ambitions, constitutional indifference, racism, sexism, minority hatred, divisiveness, etc.²⁰

Fine, so let’s all agree not to label Donald Trump as being mentally ill. Let’s agree that even a psychiatrist couldn’t ethically make a diagnosis from afar. The pattern-recognition circuits in my brain still light up uncomfortably when I read what Wikipedia has to say about Narcissistic personality disorder, which it calls

a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others’ feelings. People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success, or about their appearance. They often take advantage of the people around them.

People with the disorder “are characterized by their persistent grandiosity, excessive need for admiration, and a disdain and lack of empathy for others,” Wikipedia says. “These individuals often display arrogance, a sense of superiority, and power-seeking behaviors.” This isn’t just self-confidence gone into overdrive. Rather, narcissists “typically value themselves over others to the extent that they disregard the feelings and wishes of others and expect to be treated as superior regardless of their actual status or achievements.” They “may exhibit fragile egos, an inability to tolerate criticism, and a tendency to belittle others in an attempt to validate their own superiority.” To “protect the self at the expense of others,” narcissists “tend to devalue, derogate, insult, [and] blame others and they often respond to threatening feedback with anger and hostility.”²¹

If I’d been presented with that description before reading anything about narcissism and then asked to provide an example of someone whose recent behavior matches it, I know what my answer would be. And considering what’s at stake for the entire country, that bothers me a lot. This isn’t just about avoiding drama from unfortunate relatives or poorly chosen friends.

More descriptions are found in a new book by some Jungian psychologists, entitled A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump. The editors and contributors know better than to say something like “Trump is a pathological narcissist,” and their publisher starts things off with this stern preface:

Let us be clear: The contributors, editors, and publisher have not engaged in diagnosis of any public figures mentioned in the pages that follow. Specifically, we are not claiming that any public figures or leaders mentioned have been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). To establish a diagnosis of any psychological disorder requires individual assessment by a qualified mental health professional. Proper diagnosis is reached only after thorough, individual diagnostic evaluation.²²

Then, turning the page to their “Introduction to Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” they say:

The extreme utterances and behaviors displayed by candidates like Mr. Trump may have shined a light on narcissism and perhaps given society a chance to confront this phenomenon head-on. We wish to reiterate that we are not proposing that Donald Trump suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, nor are we proposing he does not. Yet we wish to thank him and other candidates in the 2016 presidential election for the opportunity to take an honest look in the mirror and confront our individual and collective narcissism.

So, just what is this Narcissistic Personality Disorder they say Trump may or may not suffer from? Their answer refers to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–the “Psychiatrist’s Bible,” 5th edtition:

The DSM 5 defines people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder as having very specific attributes. They show enduring patterns of grandiosity, an absence of empathy, and a need for being admired by others throughout adulthood. People with grandiosity have a sense of superiority, viewing themselves as better than others. They often look at others with a sense of disdain and perceive others as inferior themselves. They see themselves as unique and overly important and often exaggerate their achievements. Lacking empathy, they are unmoved by others’ suffering. They have difficulty seeing how their actions can harm others or how someone might feel in a particular situation.

To meet the criteria for NPD, the DSM 5 requires at least 5 out of the following 9 characteristics to be met: grandiosity; fantasies of unlimited power and success; sees self as “special” and only associates with others of high status; needs admiration; has a sense of entitlement; is interpersonally exploitative; lacks empathy; is envious of others; or appears arrogant.

Even people who fail to meet 5 of the 9 the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, those said to have narcissistic traits, may experience difficulties in the way they relate to the world. The distinction between narcissistic traits and narcissistic personality disorder is sometimes subtle and difficult to make.²³

In the next chapter, the editors let their feelings be known about the Goldwater Rule, saying “it seems ill-conceived that laypersons with no formal training or experience should be free to opine on the psychology of public figures aspiring to high office, while trained, experienced professionals are gagged.” Then they go on provide some examples of “Donald Trump’s own words [that] are often used to fashion impressions about his ‘political psychological profile,’” which are amusing but almost quaint in view of the awful things Trump has said and tweeted in the months since they compiled their list.

One uncredentialed but sort-of expert on narcissism is not being restrained at all in his assessment. Sam Vaknin was interviewed by the conservative American Thinker back in March and said, “Trump is the most perfect example I have ever come across of a malignant and, probably, psychopathic narcissist.” Sam Vaknin is a fascinating character because he describes himself as a narcissist, an assessment shared by some critics who feel he has gained too much attention in the field.

In response to the question of whether Trump would represent a significant danger as President of the United States, Vaknin says:

You just have to look at Trump’s business history to extrapolate America’s future under a President Trump. Narcissists are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction (with other people usually paying the heft of the price). Narcissists tend to be divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent, judgement-impaired, and irrational. Narcissists are junkies: they are addicted to attention (“Narcissistic Supply”) and will go to any extreme to secure it. Narcissists are liars, confabulators, and miserable failures (although some of them, like Trump, are geniuses at disguising the fact that they are, in fact, losers). Is this the kind of person you want in the White House?²⁴

Though there is something a bit creepy about Vaknin’s scholarly forays into the very area where he claims to have mental issues (even running message boards where victims of narcissists have gone to get help), that certainly doesn’t make him seem more sympathetic toward narcissists. Here are some gems quoted from his book Malignant Self Love, the tenth edition published in March 2015. Note that this was all written before Trump announced his candidacy, so it’s not directed at him or his behavior during this train wreck of a campaign:

The fuel of the narcissist’s rage is spent mainly on vitriolic verbal send-offs directed at the (often imaginary) perpetrator of the (oft-innocuous) “offence”.
The narcissist wittingly or not utilizes people to buttress his self-image and to regulate his sense of self-worth. As long and in as much as they are instrumental in achieving these goals, he holds them in high regard, they are valuable to him. He sees them only through this lens. This is a result of his inability to love others: he lacks empathy, he thinks utility, and, thus, he reduces others to mere instruments.
He regards and treats people as though they were objects: exploits and discards them. He mistreats people around him by asserting his superiority at all times; by being emotionally cold or absent; by constantly bickering, verbally humiliating, incessantly (mostly unjustly) criticizing; and by actively rejecting or ignoring them, thus provoking uncertainty.
He is capricious, infantile and emotionally labile and immature. The narcissist is frequently a 40 years-old brat.
The narcissist needs and requires an audience to applaud, approve, affirm, recoil, admire, adore, fear, or even detest him. He craves the attention and depends on the Narcissistic Supply that only others can provide.
Mostly, the narcissist prefers to be feared or admired rather than be loved. He describes himself as a “strong, no nonsense” man, who is able to successfully weather extraordinary losses and exceptional defeats and to recuperate. He expects other people to respect this image that he projects.
Narcissists are pathological liars. This means that they are either unaware of their lies, or feel completely justified and at ease when lying to others.²⁵

Yes, these are selected quotations from a large, somewhat rambling book. Yes, it is possible to quote-mine negative traits from such books about most anyone you don’t like. No, we can’t know Trump’s internal mental state from what we see in public. But the comparisons still jump out at me and give me the creeps.

I do not want anyone who has acted anything remotely like this in the Oval Office. And I really can’t imagine why you would vote for such a man–no matter what party he’s claiming to be in, no matter what your grievances or politics, or how much you don’t like his opponent.

What’s Left to Believe?

One thing I will not hesitate to call Donald Trump is a liar. The media danced around the issue of his obvious falsehoods for a while and then finally started calling them what they are.

“Virtually all of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods directly bolstered a powerful and self-aggrandizing narrative depicting him as a heroic savior for a nation menaced from every direction,” Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns said in their summary of a “week of whoppers” before the first debate. His “version of reality allows for few, if any, flaws in himself.” Operating inside that bubble, Trump imagined a crowd chanting “Let him speak!” after being told not to get political in a church, opposed the Iraq war despite no record of anything but pro-war remarks from him ever being found, and slandered his opponent by blaming her for starting the smear he kept up for years about Obama’s birthplace.²⁶

Someone who knows about this better than most is Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal who “spent 18 months in the 1980s interviewing and shadowing Mr. Trump.” He feels “a deep sense of remorse” for contributing “to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” The book is really a work of fiction, he says, and ought to be titled The Sociopath. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz says of the interview subject he said regularly exaggerated, had no attention span, and whose need for attention is such that he’d run for “emperor of the world” if he could.²⁷

Trump’s own lawyers didn’t even seem to believe him. Two of them would meet him together “so we don’t have a problem of people lying.” He is, after all, “an expert at interpreting things,” as one of them delicately put it. “Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory.”²⁸

It Matters

Volker Ullrich describes the atmosphere at a rally led by a man who was still on the far margins of power, trying to gain a foothold. It was the evening of February 24, 1920, and

around 2,000 people squeezed into the Hofbräuhaus’s main first-floor hall. Hitler was the second speaker, but he was the one who really got the crowd whipped up with his attacks on the Treaty of Versailles, Erzberger and, above all, the Jews. The police transcript of the event read: “First chuck the guilty ones, the Jews, out and then we’ll purify ourselves. (Enthusiastic applause.) Monetary fines are no use against the crimes of fencing and usury. (Beatings! Hangings!) How shall we protect our fellow human beings against this band of bloodsuckers? (Hang them!)”²⁹

“Audience sizes ranged from 800 to 2,500,” but “in the second half of 1920, levels of 3,000 were reached.”³⁰ The goal of the speaker at this point “was to attract attention to his still relatively small party and secure its place in the public sphere. ‘Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?’ Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. ‘The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.’”³¹

He was still being careful about how he said things, but he wasn’t making a secret of his despicable views. Even

in the early 1920s, no resident of Munich who had attended a Hitler speech or read about one in the newspapers could have been in any doubt about what Hitler intended to do with the Jews. But hardly anyone seems to have disapproved. On the contrary, storms of applause greeted precisely the most anti-Semitic passages of Hitler’s speeches, strongly suggesting that they were the source of much of the speaker’s appeal. When he demanded that Jews be “removed” from Germany by some unspecified means, therefore, Hitler and his audience were on the same wavelength. Both were carried away by the racist wishful thinking of a fully homogenous ethnic community.³²

Making comparisons between Trump and Hitler (Googling “trump hitler”: 32,700,000 results) is problematic for a number of reasons, perhaps primarily the fact that Trump has never been in a position of power. In 1920, Hitler wasn’t, either. He hadn’t killed anyone yet or even broken any laws. But he was already making it known that there was an entire group of people he didn’t want to have in the country, and a small segment of the population was cheering him for saying it.³³

We are not yet seeing a militia of armed thugs marching in the streets for a political strongman. Trump has boasted that he alone can fix ISIS, has threatened to lock up his political opponent,³⁴ and doesn’t seem to care about the Geneva Conventions when it comes to killing the families of terrorists,³⁵ but he is not yet demanding the entire power of the state.

Yet the Donald is leaving us plenty of things to be concerned about. Imagine our country thirteen years from now–the length of time between Hitler’s first Munich rallies and his accepting the designation of Chancellor from an aged and wishful-thinking Paul von Hindenberg. Are those good jobs coming back to the middle class? Are the wild-eyed jihadists going to stop massacring people in shopping malls and marketplaces? Is the planet going to stop warming and flooding and creating refugees from hot places teeming with Muslims and Mexicans?

When do the irresponsible words start shift into actions? The people showing up at Trump rallies have plenty of weapons in their basements, and I’d bet a lot of them would eagerly sign up for deportation patrols if they thought they could get away with it.

The classic definition of the state, provided by the German sociologist Max Weber, is the institution that seeks to monopolize legitimate violence. In the 1920s and the early 1930s, Hitler sought to discredit the Weimar Republic by demonstrating that it could not, in fact, do this. His armed guards, known as the SA and SS, functioned before his takeover of 1933 as de-monopolizers of violence. When they beat opponents or started brawls, they were demonstrating the weakness of the existing system.³⁶

Consider who we have asking for our votes, right now: a man who has praised Putin for his “very strong control over a country.” That’s the kind of leader Trump would like to be, in the assessment of Danielle Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Trump’s “instincts are authoritarian, and dangerous,” she told the New York Times.³⁷

“His smile masks a hunger he cannot contain,” Alex Castellanos wrote more than a year ago, a conservative who was against Trump before being a conservative against Trump was cool. “He does not believe federal power is too removed from our lives to control our lives. He does not believe our factory-like government fails because it is trying to do too much, not too little. Instead, he appears to believe this: Lesser people than he are running things. And power should rest not with the people, but with him.”³⁸

His claim that Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not fairly preside over the lawsuits against his sham of a “University” because of his Mexican heritage has been widely denounced as racist, but the trouble goes beyond that. “Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat,” Adam Liptak summarized in the New York Times, then quoting David Post, a retired law professor:

This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary.

You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.³⁹

The man wants to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Negative articles–verboten. “We’re going to open up libel laws, and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”⁴⁰

He has “called for the broad use of the contentious stop-and-frisk policing strategy in America’s cities,” the New York Times reported last month, “embracing an aggressive tactic whose legality has been challenged and whose enforcement has been abandoned in New York.”⁴¹

Trump’s “vision of the presidency is an American strongman working on behalf of the little guy, who by implication cannot take care of himself,” writes Jay Cost at the conservative Weekly Standard. At one point in the first debate, “Trump criticized Clinton for not mentioning the phrase ‘law and order.’ But where, from Trump, was any talk about liberty, or the Constitution, or limited government?” Cost asks. “Nowhere, of course because these are not values that are central to his way of thinking.”⁴²

To borrow Jacob Weisberg’s memorable assessment, we have one candidate who is running for President and another who is running for Dictator.⁴³

One last thing: Please don’t give me any of that tired Christian “vote your values” bullshit. Not now, not with this candidate. Valerie Tarico commented, “Christian devotion to Trump is exposing the moral vacancy at the heart of many Christian churches and leaders (and their member/followers), for whom the religion of low taxes trumps the religion of caring for the least of these.”⁴⁴

Believers might consider the example of Karl Tervo, a Christian I respect and occasionally interact with on Twitter:

I don’t pretend to know Donald Trump’s heart, but I can see how he lives his life, the words that he chooses to use, and how he treats other people. Matthew 3:8 says, “Therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance . . .” (NASB). By this measure, which is admittedly subjective since I can’t see into his heart, Mr. Trump does not seem to be heeding the words of Christ. Many American Christians will eat up the words of politicians who profess faith, especially those on the right. He purposely makes racist comments both against Black people and Jews. American Christians will also use the Supreme Court as a reason for voting for Trump, but how exactly does anybody know what the man will do. He’s changed his mind countless times, sometimes within speeches, so that line of reasoning is a nonstarter for me.⁴⁵

Tervo is voting for Evan McMullin, a Mormon who shares his opposition to abortion. “This election has been a watershed moment for me,” he told me. “Never again will I blindly pull the lever for the GOP, but rather I’ll more rigorously investigate the candidates for the particular office.”

———

“Trump told us who he was, showed us who he was, again and again,” Ezra Klein says. “The test here is not of his decency, but of our own.”⁴⁶ It matters who sits in that Oval Office on our behalf, and it matters to me who would vote to put Donald Trump in that exalted place. That really matters to me quite a lot, I’m afraid.

Once when I was deep into my study of the German language, I made the acquaintance of somebody who spoke it fluently. It was a fun and worthwhile relationship between teacher and student, and one day I went to her house to pick up a Luther Bible her husband had brought back from Germany for me. While sitting on their couch, I saw some light from a nook in the corner of the living room and noticed that she was sitting not on the end of the couch opposite me but near the middle, in a way that kept me from scooting over and seeing whatever was producing the light. That got me curious, and I invented an excuse to get up and move to the side of the room where I could see just what was over there.

It turned out to be a large gold-framed portrait of Adolf Hitler with a light shining on it. Red swastika flags stuck out proudly from the wall on both sides.

I never spoke with her again.

Notes

Quoted in Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group), Kindle loc. 5507. ←
In Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court stepped in and halted a recount of votes in Florida. It just so happened that the four justices who voted for this, handing the election to George W. Bush, were conservatives and the three who voted against it were not. Those black robes have belied their contrasting party colors ever since. ←
Update, Nov. 1: OK, so probably not a landslide, thanks to the hysteria induced by an FBI director who ignored the cautions of his Justice Department and threw his three-paragraph Molotov cocktail into the powder-keg of this crazy election. A small consolation is that Trump will not have much left to his “rigged election” line after he (probably) still loses.
Update, Dec. 5: Obviously, the polls were wrong, and, to my shock and horror, the schoolyard bully won by a margin of some 70,000 votes added up across three critical states–Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The “tarnished and unpopular Democrat” did not bother to campaign in Wisconsin at all. ←
Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “Officials Fight Donald Trump’s Claims of a Rigged Vote,” New York Times, October 16, 2016. ←
Donald Trump Rally in Greensboro, North Carolina (10/14/2016), RBC Network Broadcasting, youtu.be/jNfK48WpM7Q. ←
Matt Viser and Tracy Jan, “Trump’s supporters talk rebellion, assassination at his rallies,” Boston Globe, October 15, 2016. ←
Trump speech, youtu.be/jNfK48WpM7Q. ←
Steve Reilly, “Hundreds Allege Donald Trump Doesn’t Pay His Bills,” USA Today, June 9, 2016. ←
David Barstow, Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner and Megan Twohey, “Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found,” New York Times, October 1, 2016. ←
Heather Long, “Donald Trump Suits and Ties are Made in China,” CNN Money, March 8, 2016. ←
“Well, look, I’m very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I hear people debating the subject. But still, I just believe in choice.” Donald Trump, interviewed on Meet the Press, October 24, 1999. youtu.be/tsOlXidHXRE. ←
Paul Kariniemi, commenting on my Facebook post of October 13. Reprinted with permission. ←
I voted for and donated to Bernie, but fully expected that Hillary would win the nomination. And she is such a flawed candidate that any of the other contenders, even the hated lip-curling Ted Cruz, would have been likely to defeat her. ←
Update, Nov. 1: As of now, his polls-only forecast at 538 is up to 28.7%. For the next week, the dark nights of the soul are back.
Update, Dec. 5: Nate Silver had been critized for overestimating Trump’s probability of a win. As he pointed out in response, before the election, the random variables of swing state polling errors are correlated, not independent, and this raised Trump’s odd. After the election, nobody is criticizing Nate Silver. ←
The people I know who support the man, even without contradicting this assessment of him, disgust me only a little less. It seems that nothing can penetrate their hatred of Hillary and their long-standing loyalty to a party that has shafted them at every turn. To borrow a phrase from the Donald himself when addressing his groping accusations, they’re just words. ←
“Transcript: Michelle Obama’s Speech on Donald Trump’s Alleged Treatment of Women,” NPR, October 13, 2016. ←
Dan P. McAdams, “The Mind of Donald Trump,” The Atlantic, June 2016. ←
Maggie Haberman, “Donald Trump Delivers a Long, Passionate Speech. He Introduces Mike Pence, Too,” New York Times, July 16, 2016. ←
Ezra Klein, “A Donald Trump presidency would bring shame on this country,” Vox, October 7, 2016.
Update, Dec. 5: The grope-brag tape “eliminated the possibility of his presidency,” I wrote. I really thought so, too. But it seems there was no line this man could cross that would cost him votes, even with the evangelical Christian hypocrites who gave him 80% of their vote. ←
Susan Perry, “The armchair psychoanalyzing of Trump stigmatizes and trivializes mental illness, experts warn,” MinnPost, August 15, 2016. ←
Wikipedia, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. ←
I concur with this disclaimer, and repeat it here as if it were my own, also noting that I’m not even remotely qualified or credentialed to establish a diagnosis of anyone, regardless of the circumstances. Unless “gaping asshole” is a psychiatric diagnosis. ←
Leonard Cruz and Steven Buser, eds., A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump (Chiron Publications, 2016). ←
Arlen Williams, “Donald Trump and Narcissistic Personality Disorder: An Interview with Sam Vaknin,” American Thinker, March 6, 2016. This bold statement was followed by the usual disclaimer language: “Of course, he cannot be fully and assuredly diagnosed this way. Only a qualified mental health diagnostician can determine whether someone suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and this, following lengthy tests and personal interviews. But the overwhelming preponderance of presenting symptoms and visual and textual evidence for tentative profiling is definitely there.” ←
Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited (Narcissus Publications, 10th edition, 2015). The text in bullet points is directly quoted from the book. ←
New York Times, September 24, 2016. ←
Alan Rappeport, “‘I Feel a Deep Sense of Remorse,’ Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Says,” New York Times, July 18, 2016. ←
Deposition of Trump bankruptcy lawyer Patrick T. McGhan, (April 7, 1993), Case No. 92-11188-JHW, Doc. 491, pp. 77-78. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2159. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2240. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2253. ←
Ullrich at loc. 2472. ←
It almost pains me to also point out that Hitler seems like an intellectual giant compared to Trump. Hitler read voraciously, appreciated art and architecture, and had a prodigious memory. Obviously, this isn’t a defense of a man who tried imposing a sick ideology on the world and bore responsibility for the deaths of millions of innocents. ←
Tim Murphy, “Trump Says He’ll Imprison Clinton’s Lawyers, Too,” Mother Jones, October 12, 2016. ←
His way of dealing with terrorists would be “to take out their families.” Terrorists “may not care much about their lives,” he says, but “they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.” That goes not just against the Geneva Conventions, conservative Sen. Rand Paul replied, correctly, but “it would defy every norm that is America” (Louis Jacobson, “Geneva Conventions bar Donald Trump’s idea of killing terrorists’ families, as Rand Paul says,” Politifact, December 17, 2015). ←
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Crown/Archetype, 2015), Kindle loc. 785. ←
John Harwood, “Donald Trump’s Admiration of Putin’s Ruthless Use of Power,” New York Times, September 13, 2016. ←
Alex Castellanos, “Trump is the strongman we don’t need,” CNN Opinion, August 20, 2015 ←
Adam Liptak, “Donald Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say,” New York Times, June 3, 2016 ←
Donald Trump, Rally in Fort Worth Texas, February 26, 2016. Quoted in Hadas Gold, “Donald Trump: We’re going to ‘open up’ libel laws,” Politico.com, February 26, 2016. ←
Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, and Yamiche Alcindor, “Donald Trump Embraces Wider Use of Stop-and-Frisk by Police,” New York Times, September 21, 2016. ←
Jay Cost, “At the Debate, Donald Trump Rejected Conservatism,” The Weekly Standard, September 27, 2016. ←
Valerie Tarico, comment to my public September 26 Facebook post during the first presidential debate. ←
Karl Tervo, personal communication. Reprinted with permission. ←
“The ‘Grabfest Post Debate Special,’” Slate’s Trumpcast hosted by Jacob Weisberg, October 10, 2016 (21:00). ←
Klein, October 7, 2016. ←

Poem From a Young Person

2016-09-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

If you have to hoodwink–or blindfold–your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.

—Daniel Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Still time to change the road you’re on.¹

The following poem was written by someone eleven years old in the Laestadian Lutheran Church, which I left a few years back. I reprint it here with permission of the young author who wishes “to see this out there,” and a parent of the author. Except for the visual formatting and the addition of a couple of punctuation marks, it is exactly as written.

Their only proof is a weathered book.

Brainwash the young ones with lies and excuses.

Give ’em someone to worship

to avoid thoughts of reality.

Write the rules on a rock.

If they do otherwise

you’ll make sure they don’t.

Scared, insecure children hiding back from the cult.

Hold in those tears, my friend.

Why let them run? You’ll be questioned.

You’re worried what the Almighty might do.

And maybe his famous son too.

They’re living a living hell.

Believe me it’s never that swell.

They wipe you off and rip you out.

You never got what you deserve!

Boy you’ve got some nerve

To say his name out LOUD!

And if you shame the name of god

to make yourself heard,

Remember what I say:

You’re not a believer!

God I can’t explain

To anyone who’se sane

One single fucking thing

About how I live and

Who I think is “king.”

People handing out diamond rings

At the age of seventeen²

Pumping ’em out to save their souls

In order to be fit for heaven.

They’ve got eleven!³

Don’t even run!

Go and try, they’ll hunt you down

and you’ll be shunned.

I wore the face of an innocent child.

But my bitter thoughts soon made me vile.

If you ever leave the clan I’ll shake your hand.

Honey, you’ll be glad you left.

And overjoyed you’re gone.

Though your memories will always rage on.

There is nothing to add to this heartfelt work, except the hope that it be seen by other young people struggling under the weight of a harsh fundamentalism they did not ask to be part of, and by parents unware of the pain they are inflicting on their children–in service of doctrines those parents privately admit to doubting. And perhaps to repeat the remarkable age of the poet: eleven years old.

Notes

“Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin (1971). There’s actually a poem in an LLC publication with a line taken right from another 70s rock & roll song. The writer (not me, and I’m not telling who it was) obviously had a sense of humor. The photo is mine, taken deep inside the half-million acre Colville National Forest. ←
Since all forms of sexual contact outside marriage are considered sin, teenage engagements are common. Most Laestadian young people are married (for life) by their mid-twenties. ←
Readers not familiar with the LLC might not appreciate that “pumping ’em out” refers to children. The church has a strict doctrine that all forms of birth control (even the rhythm method!) are sin. ←

Defense

2016-09-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

When [in 1957] an armed Klan motorcade came after [his friend Dr. Albert E.] Perry in his neighborhood, intending to terrorize him into submission, [Robert F.] Williams, a US Marine veteran of World War II, had his NAACP chapter meet the Klan with “disciplined, withering volleys” of rifle fire. The Klansmen fled, and the very next day, the Monroe city council banned KKK parades.

—Roy Scranton,
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

Whoops, picked the wrong house.¹

The other weekend a man named Ian, one of my fellow citizens in the rural northeast corner of Washington State, heard his dog barking and went to check out what was going on. What he found was an intruder he says was “definitely whacked out on something,” dressed in black. Way out in the back woods where Ian lives, the front yard is not a place where you just wind up by accident late at night. But this intruder had picked the wrong house to try breaking into.

Ian, you see, is very prepared for this sort of thing because of his service in the Marine Corps and a career as a correctional officer. He’s one of those guys who sits with his back to the wall in a restaurant and reflexively does 180-degree eyeball scans of the scene. It’s not something he enjoys; he has PTSD from his time spent in very rough places. But the other night, that vigilance served him well.

He retrieved his AR-15 with its 30-round magazine. That rifle, he says, “while not guaranteeing my safety, allowed me to have a fighting chance against a possible threat” in those first dark moments confronted with an unknown intruder, when Ian “had no idea of how well armed he was or if he had friends, waiting in the shadows of my expansive property to try and help victimize myself and my family.”²

The guy was messing with the door handle. Ian “swung the door open” and his unwelcome guest “went from the porch to the concrete quickly with some assistance. Supposedly he’s got some broken bones.” That, Ian added, can happen when you’re falling. Especially with some assistance from a well-placed foot appearing out of nowhere. He proceeded carefully but firmly:

My wife retrieved her weapon and covered me while I did a cursory search of him and I found a 7 or so inch knife.

I held him at gunpoint while waiting for the cops. He started to bend his arms as if he might get up so I reminded him to stay down and then he cried a bit about his ribs.

After 40 long minutes–not an unusual amount of time for our far-flung rural area–the “cops came and cuffed him up and I told him if he ever came back, he dies.”

Hold that pose, please.

Note Ian’s use of non-lethal force to drop the guy, even as he held one of those big bad “assault” rifles at the ready.³ The intruder had no shots fired at him, though Ian was ready to “press his head out the second I saw him and the whole time I had him down. I was totally prepared to. I told him, as serious as I could that I would and please don’t make me do it. By that time he was crying about his ribs anyway.”

But he’s glad he didn’t need to, because he didn’t want his “kids to see a body if they don’t have to.” For those of you that think it’s an easy thing to do, Ian says, “you’ve never done it.”

He didn’t feel good afterward. This wasn’t going to make the PTSD any easier. Though he was glad to know that he still has what it takes to protect his family, he said the incident took him “back to a place I don’t miss.”

But let it be known, he added, “This guy fell like a sack of potatoes and had he not, he would have died. I’m no tough guy but I will end your life to protect my family.”⁴

I don’t have his training or experience, and I never would’ve had what it takes to be a Marine. But a traumatic experience years ago showed me just how long it takes for a response to a 911 call out here. (That it took 40 minutes for the police to finally arrive at Ian’s place didn’t surprise me a bit.) The defense of my home and family is up to me, and for me, the Second Amendment is not about being able to go hunt with a bolt-action rifle.

Hell, I don’t even hunt. Never have. But I do have some guns, ones I’ve shot plenty at old appliances and other worthy practice targets and at least know how to aim. The firearms are all safely locked away; I have no patience with parents who leave deadly weapons laying around for curious kids to check out. But, note to scumbags: “Locked away” definitely does not mean “inacessible if needed quickly.”

Notes

This and the other image are actual photos Ian took while waiting for the police to arrive, reproduced here with permisison. ←
From an open letter Ian posted online addressed to Washington’s Attorney General regarding a proposed “assault weapons” ban. ←
An armed homeowner without Ian’s training and experience could easily have made a tragic mistake at this moment. There are stories of fathers accidentally shooting their sons returning home late at night, or coming horrifyingly close to doing so. ←
Thanks to Ian for permission to quote these remarks in the fourth paragraph and thereafter from a summary he sent to some friends and acquaintances after the incident. ←

Galaxy Gazing

2016-07-29T16:13:00.001-07:00

I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek¹

The Milky Way from my driveway

Tonight, with clear weather and no moon around, I am up late to look at a dark sky with the first decent pair of binoculars I’ve ever owned. The vaguely textured white blur of the Milky Way that my eyes have long admired, unmagnified, now resolve through the 10x binoculars into clusters of countless stars with crisscrossing fuzzy ribbons of black woven in between.

I pan the circular field of view slowly along our galaxy’s long overhead arc, immersed in the depth I sense above me from my two eyes merging a single image. There’s a satisfying tangible connection between the fine motions of my arms and the slow sweeping past of this collection of a hundred billion stars in our little corner of the universe.

A dim smudge near Cassiopeia teases my eyes’ limits of sensitivity and resolution. I think it’s M52, a globular cluster a few thousand light-years away. It was first identified by Charles Messier in 1774. The photons I’m collecting in my binoculars tonight from its 193 or so stars were more than 90% of the way here when Messier peered through his telescope. In the meantime, a nation rose through a rebellion and then quashed one of its own; enslaved, freed, and still long oppressed a large fraction of its citizens; conquered its native peoples and then rescued others from conquest in two world wars.

The smudges are clusters of countless stars.²

These photons had already emerged from their nuclear furnaces by the time some settlements along the river Tiber formed the first humble beginnings of the Roman empire.³ Their journey may even have been halfway underway by then; we’re not sure exactly how far away M52 is from us.⁴

It’s been a little more than two thousand years ago since a citizen of that empire, a gifted poet and philosopher, stood next to some pool or pond beneath the night sky. The skies anywhere in Europe were darker than they are now, even at my place out in the country. I imagine Titus Lucretius Caras (c. 99-55 B.C.) looking at an image of the blazing array of stars overhead, seeing their “images,” which, he muses, must “be able to run through space incalculable / In a moment of time.”⁵

The pointpoints and patterns of the stars are mirrored in the still water before him, “not turned round intact, but flung straight back / In reverse,” with the features thus shown “in reverse.”⁶ He moves slightly to one side along the water’s edge and notices how one particularly bright star near the horizon comes abruptly into view from behind the tree. Its direct image and its reflection both wink on instantly–at exactly the same time, as far as he can tell.⁷

A smooth surface of water is exposed

To a clear sky at night, at once the stars

And constellations of the firmament

Shining serene make answer in the water.

Yet he knows that the “images” raining down from the sky take a longer route when they make the extra trip to the water and back than when they go directly into his eye.

Now do you see how in an instant the image

Falls from the edge of heaven

to the edge of earth?

Wherefore again and yet again I say

How marvellously swift the motion is

Of the bodies which strike our eyes

and make us see.⁸

Those image-bearing bodies are “marvelously swift” indeed. They move 186,000 miles–more than 23 earth diameters–through the vacuum of space every second. Yet the immense vault of our universe is so incomprehensibly vast that it’s taken most of the span of human civilization for them to reach us, from a relatively nearby neighbor within just our own galaxy (there are at least a hundred billion others).⁹

My kind of nightlife

Silent and impassive to all the twitches and ripples in the microscopic biofilm of one ordinary planet, in the hundreds of years since Messier noticed this odd feature among the stars–in the thousands filled with death and wars and tears of joy and sorrow since Lucretius did his ancient poolside musings–the photons from its clustered stars continued their long journey outward. Only now do they finally land on my retinas to collapse wave functions and trigger individual rod-shaped cells to launch neurotransmitters down neighboring filaments of cell-strings along my optic nerves.

In my brain, a little smudge registers. Something’s really up there.

The stars in M52 will keep launching their photons all my life, as they have for 35 million years now. They’ll get lost in the sea of light that covers and warms the daylight half of earth, fall through clear skies over the other half in darkness, and remain ignored almost always, as the earth swings around its own little star a few dozen more times until my eyes no longer see anything at all.

And yet, despite my absence, the earth will stay in its orbit and the photons will stream on.

Notes

Does it surprise you to see such ringing words of spirituality as the epigraph to an atheist’s essay? Such prose retains its profound beauty regardless of one’s disagreements with its message. And even with no God in the picture, I am still happy to call whatever was behind the Big Bang, or the quantum fluctuation that unleashed the Big Bang, or whatever was behind that, a “power that is unfathomably secret,” even holy, filling me with a sort of reverence as I gave upwards at night. ↩
There’s also some light pollution near the horizon, even out here, miles from the nearest city. I’ve tried to de-emphasize it with reduced yellow and green luminance. ↩
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome ↩
Because “this cluster is in the plane of the Milky Way,” our available “methods of determining distance are too uncertain,” some yielding estimates “as small as 3,000 light years, while others are as large as 7,000” (Ethan Siegel, “Messier Monday: A Star Cluster on the Bubble, M52,” ScienceBlogs. ↩
Lucretius, Book IV, line 191. From On the Nature of the Universe, Ronald Melville, trans. (Oxford University Press). ↩
Book IV, lines 295-99. ↩
It’s not exactly the same time, of course, something I remain well aware of as an electrical engineer with a radio background. Indeed, engineers rely on the known and limited speed of light to do antenna design with all of its resonant and carefully spaced conductive elements. Quarter-wavelength spacings abound. ↩
Book IV, lines 210-17. ↩
“How Many Stars Are There In the Universe?”, European Space Agency. I’ve seen another dim smudge out there in the night sky from the nearest of those other galaxies, Andromeda. Its photons took millions of years to reach me instead of thousands. ↩

Bible Brutality

2016-06-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

In today’s world, which is so enthralled with the knowledge and wisdom of man, true knowledge and wisdom is still found in the timeless, eternal word of God which is yet today able to make us “wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

—Youth Discussion Presentation, Laestadian Lutheran Church, 1999 ¹

Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.

—Moses speaking to the Israelites, Numbers 31:17-18

The Deluge, or, If God is Love Then Water is Dry

Announcing, in my roundabout meandering way, the reading of my short story “Stones of Tribulation” by Seth Andrews on his excellent Thinking Atheist podcast. You can listen to it here (or on YouTube or iTunes) and read the text (with footnotes) for free online here. You might even buy my book of these stories when it comes out later in 2016.

The preachers in my old church like to begin their sermons–usually based on some nice familiar text about salvation and forgiveness plucked from the New Testament–by offering up prayers to “our loving and merciful heavenly father.” They mumble the standard intonations requesting God’s assistance with the weak faith of current believers and the lost faith of former ones, occasionally with a mention that He might also lead some of the rest of humanity to His Grace Kingdom. (What’s stopping Him, anyhow?) As a gauzy familiarity descends on the pew-sitters, the image conjured up in their minds is of a slightly crotchety but ultimately benevolent Old Man of a God with this large inheritance to dispose of. In His house are many mansions, and one of them has your name personally engraved on the door.²

Now, He does know exactly what you did last night and with whom. But just as soon as you hear the magic words (as you undoubtedly will during a Laestadian sermon) that all your sins are forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood, He will smile kindly and shake the memory out of His divine head. You will breathe a small sigh of relief, wait for the In Jesus Name, Amen to finally come around, and then go forth from the sanctuary in peace, freedom, and joy. You will avoid being written out of the Old Man’s will, for a few more days, anyhow.

Joshua Spares Rahab

He’s giving you a pretty good deal. The upside is huge after you die (we won’t talk about that nasty potential downside–your sins are forgiven, after all) and in the meantime nobody is getting hurt. At least if you don’t count a little psychological damage, the lost opportunities of a restricted life, and the occasional medical complication from giving birth to that tenth baby.

There’s a problem, though. This vaguely pleasant hands-off deity that I grew up hearing about bears no resemblance whatsoever to the unstable raging psychopath who ranted and threatened and smote his way through the first two-thirds of the Bible. Next time you sit there in the pew, look carefully at the old book’s gilt-edged pages. Most of them will be to the left of where the preacher is reading from, ignored and silent, their horrors left unsaid.

It is impossible to convey here just how much savagery and inhumanity is contained in those pages.³ During the summer of 2009, I spent months reading the Bible from cover to cover. It was tough going, because I kept getting shocked and disgusted by the awful stuff I was encountering for the first time. It certainly wasn’t anything they talked about at church.

One example is enough to make the point.⁴ Ezekiel 8 tells us that God got upset about some “wicked abominations” that were being committed against him: “seventy elders of the house of Israel” burning incense and surrounded by carvings on the walls of his sanctuary of “creeping things and beasts and detestable things, with all the idols of the house of Israel” (8:10-11), some women weeping for a Babylonian fertility god (8:14), and 25 men prostrating themselves toward the sun and “putting the twig to their nose” (8:16-17). A little weird, but whatever.

God’s response, however, makes the Spanish Inquisition look like small claims court. He called for the executioners of the city to draw near, each “with his destroying weapon in his hand” (Ezekiel 9:1). He commanded that the men of Jerusalem who disapproved of the aforementioned abominations be marked on their foreheads. Then, he directed, “Go through the city after him and strike; do not let your eye have pity and do not spare. Utterly slay old men, young men, maidens, little children, and women, but do not touch any man on whom is the mark; and you shall start from My sanctuary . . . . Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain. Go out!” (Ezekiel 9:5-7).

It didn’t matter that the women and innocent children had no way to take sides and avoid God’s wrath. When the bodies piled up, theirs lay right alongside those of the men.

———

The Bible-based short stories that Seth Andrews has featured from time to time on his Thinking Atheist podcast are my effort to bring some of this to light, to expose the dark underside of the “Good Book” that fundamentalists would like to foist upon us all. In today’s episode, he reads “Stones of Tribulation,” a bit of Deuteronomy horror fiction I’ve set in a potential future afflicted by climate change, petroleum scarcity, and economic collapse.⁵

The Destruction of the Armies of the Ammomites and Moabites

You can also read the text for free online here, but I suggest you let Seth’s golden pipes do the reading for you. Check out the footnotes in the online version later, and please consider buying my forthcoming book of all my Bible stories when that comes out later in 2016.

Anyhow, amid all the death and looting, the few remaining authorities were able to spare no attention for the Deuteronomic Church of Holy Reconstruction, a fictional Christian cult using Deuteronomy as a guidebook for conquering a strech of the Buffalo River in the Arkansas Ozarks. (“So we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed the men, women and children of every city. We left no survivor,” Deut. 2:34.)

With all the cabins and shacks taken over and the former occupants dispatched in proper biblical fashion, the Holy Reconstructionists are keeping things in line with Deuteronomy as a guide there, too. The current project is to carry out God’s judgment against a young woman who did not produce evidence of virginity on her wedding night. The sentence is clear from Deut. 22:20-21:

But if this charge is true, that the girl was not found a virgin, then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death because she has committed an act of folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house; thus you shall purge the evil from among you.

Soon our hero, Jacob Davis, is watching a volley of rocks being thrown at the woman, his sister, by the menfolk of the hollow. She screams and curses at the men, and Jacob wishes he could join in with her cursing, too, but Deuteronomy has a harsh ruling in store for such rebellion: “The man who acts presumptuously by not listening to the priest who stands there to serve the LORD your God, nor to the judge, that man shall die; thus you shall purge the evil from Israel” (Deut. 17:12).

As the narrator then recalls things, there

was sort of a pause as the men reloaded their arms with their remaining rocks Leah’s voice slurred into a long raspy howl as her mouth gaped open, her jaw probably broken now. Levi watched from the porch with folded arms. Jacob stared at his sister, his crude and brave and dying sister, and did not look away. Not from the blood that was trickling out of her nose and gaping mouth. Not from the one eye that was now hooded and bruised. He thought he saw blood coming from there, too. A spinning piece of shale caught her on the cheek, tearing open another gash. A couple of crows rustled and flew out of the pines behind her, spooked by all the noise.

Then the dark and jagged hailstorm opened up again. He watched Leah’s body jerk and flinch and sag with each impact. Every line and color and detail was vivid, and impossibly wrong. He’d seen stonings before, but this one he would remember. There was no call for this. He decided with a sudden spurt of silent rebellion, unfamiliar and shocking and strong in his throat, that he would make it right somehow.

The howling finally stopped. Leah stared up at the sky through the one open eye, her final act a breaking of the endless rules. Jacob figured the last thing she saw was the sun, burning its forbidden image onto her retina until her head slumped forward and hung against her chest, bleeding.

It’s a gruesome scene. But it’s exactly what is commanded by that “loving and merciful heavenly father” in his inerrant and unchanging Holy Bible. You may believe in that God–no concern of mine if you do–but I’m pretty sure you don’t believe in Deuteronomy.

Achan Stoned

There are true believers in Deuteronomy among us, though, and in Joshua, and Leviticus, and all the rest of the Old Testament’s brutal inhumanity. The most hardcore Bible thumpers of them all are Christian Reconstructionists who advocate what one R.J. Rushdoony (rhymes with “loony”) championed as a “biblical worldview.” According to Professor Julie J. Ingersoll, who spent time in Reconstructionist circles and then studied it exhaustively as a scholar of religion, the movement is “rooted in historic Calvinism,” with a Bible that “speaks to every aspect of life and provides a blueprint for living according to the will of God.” ⁶ Reconstructionists, she says,

contend that contemporary reinterpretations of Old Testament violence are humanistic rejections of what God called justice. The New Testament is not a replacement for the Old; there is no “God of Love” replacing a “God of Wrath.” God is loving and forgiving, and just and vengeful as revealed in the three persons of the Trinity and present at creation. Old Testament biblical law, with its numerous capital offenses, must be the model for Christian life, and civil law today.

Thus they “support the imposition of violent punishments (stoning and death) for all manner of behaviors that they consider sin (or, in their terms, that God considers sin).”

So, you may wonder, why don’t they have the courage of their convictions to put all this biblical wisdom into action? Why aren’t these true believers out there trying to govern some Ozark hollow under Old Testament Shari’a law right now, throwing rocks at back-talking teenagers and brides lacking virginity certification? Because, they insist, “such punishments would only be exacted after society has been transformed by the Holy Spirit such that the overwhelming majority of citizens would be believers who would submit willingly to biblical law.” ⁷

Well, if the failure of Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries is any indication, we may still be safe for a while yet. Thank, er, God.

Rushdooney “argued for the use of the Bible as the only source of authority.” ⁸ He’s dead now, but if you find yourself yearning to have an ancient book control your life without the hassle of, say, converting to Islam and traveling to Syria, there are homegrown Christian alternatives. You might consider my old Laestadianism (“the Holy Bible is the highest authority in questions regarding faith and life”) ⁹ or, for example, the Covenanted Reformed Presbyterian Church. Its list of beliefs begins as follows:

We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are inspired by God and thus totally without error. The Bible (not human tradition, not human experience, not alleged subjective “revelation”) is the sole standard and authority for faith and life.¹⁰

And guess what, according to the church’s pastor Brian Schwertley, is the “only standard by which a civil magistrate can rule justly”? The Holy Bible, of course, “the stand-alone infallible Word of God.” ¹¹

Pastor Brian writes about “promoting true religion in the land,” which he says is something “godly civil magistrates are very concerned about.” What he seems to have in mind behind those benign-sounding words promoting and concerned is more than just little old ladies handing out flyers at the county fair. He cites First and Second Kings and the story of King Jehu, biblical butcher extraordinaire, to help us understand how these godly civil magistrates are supposed to operate. Jehu, while “not a godly king,” did the right thing: He “was blessed by God for what he did to the prophets, priests, and servants of Baal.” ¹²

The Death of Jezebel (by Jehu’s orders) [Flickr page]

Here’s some of what Jehu did, as described in another one of my short stories, “Jehu’s Jihad,” by a fictional victim of his true-religion promotional efforts:

The chanting stopped, replaced by the screams. There was a mighty rushing roar of shouts and screams, and stamping feet, and the wet smacking thud of iron blades violating flesh. My eyes could make out very little in the dim light with frantic bodies lunging all around me, but I heard and felt, and smelled. Shit and urine voided from panicked and lifeless men. I gulped down nausea with the waves of foul outhouse odors that mingled in my nostrils with the smell of slaughter: dripping, naked guts and the coppery tang of fresh blood.

It was not my own blood, but I made it mine, smearing it on my neck and falling on some bodies and letting more bodies fall on my own. I closed my eyes and lay still as the swords chopped and sliced and swung to chop and slice again. Another body landed, hard, and I wondered if I would still be able to breathe. My chest barely moved as I willed myself to draw long silent breaths from my belly to my gaping mouth. Hot blood dripped onto my arm, first coming in little bursts and then a slow and steady oozing as another life went out.

The screaming became the dying and the dying became the dead, and all was quiet, except the panting and scuffling of the soldiers. I focused my world into the agony of holding my lungs in a measured starvation to stay quiet and alive. My world was the dark mute pressure of dead arms and legs and torsos slick from their bleeding.

Then there were shouted orders and heaving arms, hateful arms, carrying the dead and me outside the temple. I had to let all my weight droop where it fell over the soldier’s shoulder. I stayed silent as ribs cracked under their impossible load and seared my mind with unanswerable pain, my legs swinging with the soldier’s hump-trot to the dirt where he threw my living corpse. Again there were bodies under me, cooler already, and then more on top. Again the silent struggle for secret breath.

It’s another gruesome scene, but massacring an entire worship hall full of helpless people because they don’t share your religion is a messy business. And you will find it in your Bible, a brief, sanitized version of it: 2 Kings 10:18-25.

Slaughter of the Syrians by the Children of Israel

Now, nobody–not even the most rabid Reconstructionist or preciously believing Laestadian–really follows the entire Bible. You actually cannot do it, no matter how crazy you are, because it is impossible to conform to a text that contradicts itself.

Imagine you’re out there at your freshly built backyard altar dripping blood, slaughtering all these cattle and trying to be a good follower of Leviticus. Finally, that old-time religion, you smugly say to yourself while plunging your Ka-Bar into the neck of the next poor beast lined up behind the high compound walls. The BBQ is running out of propane to get it all burnt. Then along comes your wise-ass cousin quoting Micah 6:1-8:

With what shall I come to the LORD

And bow myself before the God on high?

Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,

With yearling calves?

Does the LORD take delight in thousands of rams,

In ten thousand rivers of oil?

Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,

The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He has told you, O man, what is good;

And what does the LORD require of you

But to do justice, to love kindness,

And to walk humbly with your God?

Whoops. Beef–it’s what’s for dinner, extra well done.

The less pragmatic reason people don’t actually follow the Bible is that it has a way of interfering with real life. Consider the scene from “Stones of Tribulation” where Jacob is musing about the presence of pork chops at the dinner table of Levi Harding, prophet. Back in Harrison, AR, some of the men had “said Jesus overrode Deuteronomy when it came to what you could eat” (Mark 7:19). But the “others reminded everybody what the Biblical Blueprint Series said about the Old and New Testaments. One guy kept quoting the line Jacob knew all too well: ‘God’s counsel and judgments are not divided!’ That old coot probably couldn’t even taste bacon anymore.”

The Biblical Blueprint Series, edited by Gary North of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is a real work, ten volumes published in 1986 and 1987. It’s one “of the most direct and systematic efforts at popularization” of a “biblical worldview.” ¹³ It teaches some serious biblicism, which would seem to lay to rest any questions about my Holy Reconstruction folks eating cloven-hooved unclean animals, as much as their stoning of Jacob’s sister:

We must never doubt that whatever God did in the Old Testament era, the Second Person of the Trinity also did. God’s counsel and judgments are not divided . . . . If we as Christians can accept what is a very hard principle of the Bible, that Christ was a blood sacrifice for our individual sins, then we shouldn’t flinch at accepting any of the rest of God’s principles. As we joyfully accepted His salvation, so we must joyfully embrace all of His principles that affect any and every area of our lives.¹⁴

But somebody else at the Hardings’ (fictional) table “wondered if Deuteronomy really needed to be taken ‘whole hog’ [sorry] when it came to the rules even Jesus said weren’t important. Then Levi’s dad recalled that the guy who edited Biblical Blueprint figured the food laws didn’t apply, and that was the view that finally won out.” Yes, it seems that joyfully embracing all of God’s principles does not quite apply to what’s for dinner. Take a look at North’s 1984 position paper to see how he rationalizes that one.¹⁵ If you can stomach it.

The First-Born Slain [Flickr page]

Many Christians remain blissfully unaware of the Old Testament’s brutality. It barely grazed my consciousness for most of the decades I remained in Christian fundamentalism. For those who do know about it and “ponder why God would allow, much less command, such horrors,” Robert M. Price offers some strong words in Blaming Jesus for Jehovah, a book whose publication I’m proud to have been a part of via my little indie publishing company Tellectual Press.¹⁶

Just knowing and wondering isn’t good enough, Dr. Price says. That is “stopping short of the real question,” which “is this: ‘Why should I believe that a God who issues such orders is more than a tribal totem embodying and justifying the bloodlust and hatreds of an ancient people? How can I, with any shred of conscience, profess allegiance to such a figure?’”

Fine, you have the information. You have the doubts, the questions. Now, what are you going to do with them?

What if you are willing to discount those passages in which God commands genocide and infanticide as merely the biases of primitive worshipers of a God whose loving nature is clearer to us moderns? Then plainly you must realize that, even if scripture explicitly says, “God commanded so-and-so,” that doesn’t mean he did. Don’t you realize you’re admitting the Bible was mistaken? And then, how do you know when it’s not mistaken? I come back to my point: Your judgment is your authority, not the Bible, which many seem to “believe” only when they agree with it.

And that’s nothing to be ashamed of! The only thing to be ashamed of is hiding behind the supposed authority of the Bible to buttress your own opinions. If you have the courage of your convictions, surely you should be able to present to another person the solid reasons that led you to think as you do. Assuming there were any real reasons.

If you were raised believing in the murderous faith of the Islamic Caliphate, you might have qualms about some of the things your leaders said Allah had commanded, but you’d be looking at things from the inside, and you’d chalk it up to “one of those divine mysteries.” But you are, thankfully, viewing their atrocities from outside, so you have no difficulty recognizing the horrors of a death cult for what they are.

“If the Old Testament Jehovah is portrayed as the blood-spattered totem of a slaughter cult,” and Dr. Price thinks the Bible does a fine job of that, as do I, then “it is high time you stepped out of the Bible bubble for an objective look at it. It is time you decided if you really belong there.” ¹⁷

Dr. Price goes on to discuss the equivocation of “God’s defenders” when confronted with all this. “They like to point out that God is so astronomically far above us that it’s futile for us to imagine ‘good’ meaning the same thing for him as it does for us.” Uh huh. OK, fine; say

that a deity who commands genocide, religious persecution, and the abduction of virgins is nonetheless “good” if you want to. But then you will just be spewing pious gibberish. God’s ostensible goodness is no longer any guide to what we may expect from him. Oh yes, he’s “good,” thank goodness, but that doesn’t mean he won’t victimize or exterminate the innocent. Whatever he did, the pious apologist has ready excuses for his God. “He’s all-righteous, so he must have some good reason for it!” If you woke up in hell one fine morning, despite your Christian faith and God’s promise that it would save you, I guess you’d have to conclude he must know what he’s doing.

Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to boil and fry. Maybe so, but why empty the word “good” of what we all mean and understand by it by applying it to such a being? ¹⁸

It’s not just Christians who are compelled to make excuses for these ancient books. Todd Kadish, a former Orthodox Jew, tells me that “the atrocities contained in them are “an albatross weighing down the moral authority of ethical monotheism.” Worse, they can offer a “license for ethnocentrism or even atrocities” perpetuated today, in some pious fantasy world where the ability to do so would actually present itself. The Orthodox can’t just wave away the sacred words on the Torah scroll, because they “consider the Five Books of Moses the vehicle through which a transcendent God touched humanity, and the eternal guidebook he personally authored for his chosen people.”

Kadish acknowledges that the real-world consequences are very different for a reluctantly tolerated albatross and an enthusiastically embraced bad-behavior license. But he warns Jews and others who revere the Hebrew Bible to focus on the common source of the two positions:

The views of a liberal (“Modern”) Orthodox rabbi writing apologetics and a radical Orthodox Jew who justifies the murder of innocent Palestinian children by citing Biblical precedent are both seeking to apply the morality of a being they consider the source of (or at least guide to) morality to the modern world. But the world largely moved beyond total warfare centuries ago, and most of us are now trying to lay to rest a history of racial and religious genocide which stretched into the modern era (with Jews as some of its primary victims). And the Hebrew Bible is a truly terrible foundation document for a moral code that demands ethics in warfare and respects all human life, because it leaves one with apologetics at best or license for atrocities at worst.¹⁹

———

Happily, for those of us outside the fanatic fringes of Christianity or Judaism, the Hebrew Bible is in no position to make any more demands. We have read it and tossed it aside in disgust, dismissed it as irrelevant to our lives, or rationalized it away under some comfortable theory about Jesus fulfilling the Law. Reconstructionism, never a big part of American religion to begin with, has retreated to its bunkers.

Though Professor Ingersoll notes that “conservatives (Christian and secular) have not disappeared” and expresses concern about lingering influence from the Reconstructionist lunacy she’s studied for so long,²⁰ today’s conservativism seems to be a largely secular phonenomen. The snarling theocratic fantasy of Ted Cruz’s candidacy has evaporated, and the amoral authoritarian gasbag left standing at the head of God’s Own Party exhibits no significant religious convictions. Meanwhile, one contender for the Democratic Party nomination says he is “not particularly religious,” and the other one–the woman who will be the next U.S. President–is a pro-choice Methodist not exactly beloved by the Religious Right.

Through no fault of the Bible, our nation and world remain infested with ignorance, superstition, bigotry, and violence. We certainly are not headed for any secular utopia as we leave that nasty old book behind. But perhaps some of what another Ingersoll–the genius orator Robert Green Ingersoll–promised a hundred years ago finally might be happening:

Day by day, religious conceptions grow less and less intense. Day by day, the old spirit dies out of book and creed. The burning enthusiasm, the quenchless zeal of the early church have gone, never, never to return. The ceremonies remain, but the ancient faith is fading out of the human heart. The worn out arguments fail to convince, and denunciations that once blanched the faces of a race, excite in us only derision and disgust.²¹

It is long overdue.

Paul wrote that he was pressing “toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Forget those things that are behind us, he said, and reach forth unto those things which lie before us (Phillipians 3:13-14). Lofty words, and a worthwhile thing to adapt for ourselves as we smile at Paul and Peter and whoever wrote all the rest of it: Let us press toward the prize of our own high calling, of our best and noblest selves and community and shared humanity.

Let’s forget the tribal atrocities and cruel punishments in this tired old text that’s occupied too many of us for far too long, and look to what lies before us–writings and thoughts that speak to us where we are today as compassionate, decent human beings, that serve us, that earn the space they ask for inside our minds.

———

All images are my photographic reproductions of Gustav Doré‘s incomparable (and, thankfully, public domain) engravings of Bible illustrations. Taken in full sun from The Bible in Pictures, Wm. H. Wise & Co. (1934) with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX7 camera and post-processed in Adobe Lightroom. Click on any image for an enlarged version.

“Stones of Tribulation” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance between characters and living persons is purely coincidental.

Scripture quotations taken from the NASB unless otherwise indicated.

Notes

llchurch.org/topics/fromachild1.pdf ↩
John 14:2. I actually heard a preacher say the “personally engraved” line once. ↩
This paragraph and those that follow up to the next section break are adapted from my essay “Fighting Words,” originally posted May 11, 2012 on the Learning to Live Free blog. ↩
You can read about many more examples in my book An Examination of the Pearl (2012). See my discussion of the Old Testament in Section 6. ↩
It’s a topic for another essay entirely, but I do believe those three issues–climate change, petroleum scarcity, and economic collapse–may well lead us to a dystopian future like what I wrote about in “Stones of Tribulation,” and in not too many decades down the road. And you can count on all sorts of religious crazies to come out of the woodwork if it does. ↩
Julie J. Ingersoll, Building Gods Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 14. ↩
Ingersoll at p. 214. ↩
Ingersoll at p. 211. ↩
“How We Believe,” llchurch.org/ourbeliefs.cfm. ↩
reformedonline.com/about.html ↩
Brian Schwertley, “Political Polytheism,” 2003, reformedonline.com, p. 60. ↩
Schwertley at p. 60. ↩
Ingersoll at p. 54. ↩
Quoted in Ingersoll at pp. 54-55. ↩
Gary North, “The Annulment of the Dietary Laws,”
I.C.E. Position Paper No. 2 (Nov. 1984),
garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/a_pdfs/newslet/position/8411.pdf. ↩
Robert M. Price, Blaming Jesus for Jehovah: Rethinking the Righteousness of Christianity. (Tellectual Press, 2016), p. 61. ↩
Price at pp. 61-63. ↩
Price at pp. 63-64. ↩
Todd Kadish, personal communication June 6, 2016. ↩
Ingersoll at p. 244. ↩
Robert Green Ingersoll, “Lecture on Gods.” ↩

Metamorphosis

2016-04-27T13:09:00.001-07:00

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.

—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, trans. C.D.N. Costa

Tracks toward the light [Flickr page]

My very public departure from the Laestadian Lutheran Church–a conservative, exclusivist sect of Protestant Christianity–has put me in touch with many others who struggle inside this group and who have left it. One of them recently sent me these thoughts about her metamorphosis from fundamentalism to freedom. She gave me permission to convey them anonymously through this blog to those who had–with the very best of intentions–cocooned and caged her.

———

GENERATIONS have told you how to mold me. What to think. How to feel.

Bring her to the sacred place.

She will follow your lead.

Separate her from the world.

Tuck her into your safe cocoon.

Clip her wings and put her in a cage.

Feed her with approval of her obedience

and shame her with guilt over her transgressions.

I let this happen. I let your fear tactics rule my thoughts and actions until I could no longer hear my heart song.

I tried to find my own way, but it threatened to separate me from all I had ever known. I was scared. You made me fear the world outside of my cocoon. So I took your medication and ate your damn poison until I was too sick to fight back.

You almost broke me. Almost.

My consciousness is finally agitated enough by the imprisonment of my spirit.

I see it now. . .

The big picture!
I’m breaking out of my cocoon!

Slowly but violently shedding the old. It’s uncomfortable at times in this transformative state. Loss and grief are an essential part of this transformation.

Destroying the old brings separation from those you love. I feel their love is conditional. But I am remembering what I forgot, before my world was darkened with fear and shame. Moments of unhindered bliss and awakening joy are replacing the old. Transformed and reset!

My only regret is that I didn’t see this sooner. I made a life for myself, only to realize it’s never really what I wanted. My soul didn’t want this hectic production of being so busy you can’t hear yourself think.

I’ve literally gone out of my mind, to truly use my mind for myself! I’ve had to scramble myself in order to put me back together in a new form. The next level of my life requires a new me!

I’m ready.

———

Yes, indeed, I think she is.

Eventually, so will you others whose anguished stories I’ve heard, who know that you no longer believe what you were told as children–what some of you have in turn told your children. Someday, the painful metamorphosis will finally occur for you. But don’t let too much of your life continue to pass you by before it finally happens.

Day after day, in newfound bursts of frightening clarity, your mind shouts the truth at you, and the only response your preachers have is to tell you not to listen to it. “One of Christianity’s most toxic teachings is that we must not trust our own minds and emotions,” Dr. Valerie Tarico, a psychologist and former Christian, told me after reading this piece, which she thought was powerful, as do I.

“In particular,” she added, Christianity asserts that “we dare not trust our intuitive sense of the basic goodness in people around us and ourselves.” But when you finally dare to make those first tentative friendships with the scary people of “the world,” when you see the continued love and joy in those former brethren whose longtime friendships you refuse to end, you see that basic goodness. You can’t help but see it, and delight in it, and witness yet another case of your dreary preachers being wrong.

New life [Flickr page]

Another amazing thing happens when you open up that cocoon and expose yourself to the experiences of all those “unbelievers” outside the church walls. You see not just how varied and fascinating they all are, but how similar many of their experiences are to yours. You realize that the fear and pain of leaving their “dead faith” churches is every bit as real to them as leaving yours has been to you. And then another chink appears in the wall that separates you from all of them, that great undifferentiated mass of outsiders who now have faces and voices and feelings, and the hole is almost big enough for you to finally crawl through.

“Reading this was very much like looking at my own reflection in a mirror,” said Brenda Nicholson, a survivor of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) cult. It took her a few minutes to respond to my question because she was still in class (“Foundations of Business and Elements of Effective Communications”), a quite different setting than she could have imagined for herself while back in Colorado City, wearing the required swept-up hairdo and plain pastel dress and trying to have all the required babies, despite miscarriage after miscarriage. “I found myself unconsciously nodding in agreement to every line. Yes, it is the same story from different backgrounds! The aspects of control through ‘breaking’ a person is so real–and far too often so effective.”

She also wishes that she’d seen the truth sooner, “that I hadn’t sacrificed so many years of my life to a lie.” Our stories, she said, “have a different background, but our journey is the same.”

Like Dr. Tarico, Brenda used the word “powerful” to describe this piece. “It touched deep inside at the hurt I’ve experienced.” She asked me to give my anonymous correspondent her “most sincere congratulations and admiration” and best wishes on this new life. Mine, too, along with my hope that all those others will soon find their own freedom as well.

No Foolin’

2016-04-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.

—Henry David Thoreau, quoted in The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.

On the first day of April 2012, about two months after leaving the Laestadian Lutheran Church via the act of publishing a book critical of it, I posted on social media this parody image of a fake Voice of Zion article thoughtfully reviewing the book:

My first Laestadian-related April fool (click to enlarge)

Such a review was, of course, quite the opposite of what actually happened, which was the point of the parody piece. It quoted the conclusion of an actual article that had been published, for real and with refreshing candor, by the church’s sister organization in Finland: “There must be the ability to encounter facts with openness and honesty, even when the facts are not pleasing to us.” Switching from fact to April fool, my “article” went on to say:

This may raise doubts and concerns in the minds of God’s children: Can God’s Kingdom be the subject of legitimate criticism? Is it possible that certain teachings, even those that are being made in sermons and writings today, are simply not correct? These questions, once unthinkable in Zion, are being brought again and again to our attention by recent events.

Now we must confront the issues raised in a 530-page book by a former believer [me] who once wrote articles for this very paper [true]. Traditionally, our tendency would be to dismiss the book’s questions and criticisms by saying that the author just wanted to live a life of sin, or that he is distorting or even lying about what God’s Kingdom has taught. Another common response we have made to these challenges is that faith is childlike and not subject to any human reasoning.

Then the article plowed onward through a field of Bible quotes, just as you’d see in the real Voice of Zion. I selected them verbatim from the same King James Bible pages that Laestadian preachers consult for their articles. But my assortment of quotes told a very different story:

Scripture certainly encourages us to believe as a child (Matthew 18:3). But we should also remember the Apostle Paul’s admonition to “be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men” (1 Corinthians 14:20). Sometimes we need to “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11) and really understand what it is we claim to believe.

A second column of the “article” that appeared in the fake clipping provided some straight talk about this new book of mine that was giving the preachers such headaches. An unnamed preacher (also fake) being “interviewed” for the article in classic Voice of Zion fashion acknowledged that it was “undeniably true that the Gospel was not preached for several years after Laestadius and Raattamaa received the grace of repentance.” This implausibly candid preacher continued, “The book also correctly notes that Raattamaa favored Takkinen and criticized the followers of Heideman. These are matters of historical record that we must acknowledge somehow.”

Quite true, even if the person saying it was a fiction. Acknowledging the historical record is exactly what the church must do to be intellectually honest, but good luck ever seeing that happen. The real-life response was instead to retreat into a sheltered cocoon of denial and an outright repudiation of human reason in evaluating what the church teaches to be true. The same goes for “another difficult historical question raised in Suominen’s book,”

why our familiar preaching of the forgiveness of sins from believer to believer doesn’t seem to be found in any writings before Luther. The book states that there were “two centuries of writings” after Christ “that not only fail to explicitly mention absolution, but provide many teachings incompatible with it” (Section 5.1.2). It may seem like a far-fetched claim, but he provides several pages of discussion with plenty of references to back it up.

That I did. In response to this significant issue, too, crickets sounded forth in the fields of central Minnesota.

———

On first days of April since then, I published two more parody articles. In 2014, Social Media and the Believer did a dead ringer of an impression (if I do say so myself) of a Voice of Zion article soberly warning about the dangers of Facebook and mixing with unbelievers via this new medium of the Internet. It started pushing plausibility around halfway through:

One of the dangers with “friendship of the world” is the temptation to accept incorrect and sinful beliefs and lifestyles. Today’s society encourages an anything-goes attitude of “tolerance,” but God’s Word has always taught differently. The Old Covenant believers were instructed to let their light shine very clearly about the dead faiths of this world.

Then came a quote from Deuteronomy 13:6-9 about killing family members who tempt you into serving other gods (“Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death”). According to the church, after all, God’s Word, is unchanging and eternal, and not subject to the whims of man’s desires. Somehow these nastier bits of the Old Testament get forgotten in favor of favorite passages warning that you’d better not be using birth control or hunting on a Sunday.

From the April 2015 parody, my last and favorite

April 1, 2015 was the occasion of my favorite of the parodies I’ve done, A Mother of Many Children. It was a heartfelt announcement of a surprising (alas, fictional) change in Conservative Laestadianism’s long-standing doctrine of exclusivity, drawing not just on scripture for support but also on the teachings of Luther himself:

There are, we must say along with one of our Lutheran confessional books, “truly believing and righteous people scattered throughout the whole world.” Our spiritual predecessor Martin Luther said in his time that there were “Christians in all the world,” that “no one can see who is a saint or a believer.”

These quotes and others in the article from Luther are all genuine, as with the Bible quotations. They leave no doubt about what Luther would have thought of the Laestadian Lutheran Church and its sister organizations claiming to be “God’s Kingdom,” the only place where actual Christians might be found. The “article” went on about the

danger of putting too much emphasis on God’s Kingdom as an organization, as an assembly of people, and making God Himself secondary to it. “I will not give my glory unto another” (Isaiah 48:11).

We can also look to the words of Luther in this: He wrote that anyone who “maintains that an external assembly or an outward unity makes a Church, sets forth arbitrarily what is merely his own opinion.” We must humbly agree with our brother in faith that there is not “one letter in the Holy Scriptures to show that such a purely external Church has been established by God.”

Many readers were saddened to know that it was just a parody and not a real article from the LLC. A few realized that only after reading through it and rejoicing that their church had finally come around to the loving, inclusive doctrine they personally believed.

I felt a little bad about causing disappointment for people, but hoped that it would do some overall good in the long term. After all, what possible answer could the preachers give to someone asking why this had to be an April fools joke and not a real article from the Voice of Zion? They would have to shrink their God down, along with the Bible and Luther’s teachings, to fit into their little doctrines.

———

There will be no April fool about the old church this year, or perhaps any in the future. I considered some ideas this past week and then decided it’s not worth the bother. I’m bored with it, and it’s bored with me.

This is just one weird little Protestant sect churning upriver against a flood of contrary facts, bearing its delusions of grandeur, its complicated set of mostly unwritten silly rules, and its steady fuel supply of new members popping into maternity wards and winding their way from day circle to Sunday School to confirmation class. There are many others like it with their own combinations of such features. The tiresome machinery of it all grinds inexorably on.

Rather than writing another parody piece, I dug through the nether reaches of my Facebook timeline to find one I’d posted in October 2012 as a Facebook status update. (I hadn’t yet started my blog then.) You can still see it and the 70 comments that ensued, here.

This dashed a few hopes, too, and got some heated discussion going. Those were the days before believers had been fully warned about not discussing faith matters online. A new wall was hastily constructed around Laestadian brains, and things have quieted down considerably ever since.

So, to conclude, here is a fake “opening statement” from my old church in one of the congregational meetings there were being held (really) in the wake of my book’s publication to address concerns and doubts.

———

We must begin by humbly acknowledging our own weakness and lack of understanding, not just as individuals, but as a battling congregation here in this sinful world. As the Apostle said, “We see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12). If such an important figure as Paul could acknowledge that he only “knew in part,” then we must do the same. We have been quick to cite Proverbs as saying, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,” but there’s a second part of the verse that we all ought to take to heart, where we are told that “fools despise wisdom and instruction” (1:7). Is any of us exempt from the need for wisdom and instruction?

The writer of Proverbs said much about wisdom. “The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way: but the folly of fools is deceit” (14:8). There is simply no place for deceit in God’s Kingdom. After all, the Church is called “the Pillar and Ground of Truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). We must understand our way. A speaker brother recently quoted another verse from Proverbs, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (14:12). Yet we must also keep in mind what follows just a few verses later: “The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going. A wise man feareth, and departeth from evil: but the fool rageth, and is confident” (14:15-16). Some of God’s children have recently decided they simply cannot go on just “believing every word.” We must respect this and learn from their courage.

If we are wrong, we must allow ourselves to be corrected. This applies to all of us. During the last heresy, it was said that the Bibles came off the shelves. We at the LLC have been reading God’s Word more diligently in recent days, too, and must admit that there have been important lessons there for us. For example, the believers of an earlier period in the Old Testament sacrificed thousands upon thousands of animals for sins, yet a later prophet, Micah, asked what he should bring with him when he comes before the LORD, when he bows himself “before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (Mic. 6:1-7). No, that was of no use. Instead, Micah concluded, “O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (6:8).

Let us do the same. Live in a just manner, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. How much sacrifice we have demanded of ourselves, and each other, when this is all that is required!

We sit before you chastened, knowing how much we have been shown to be wrong about in recent years. Our brothers in Finland have publicly apologized for “spiritual excesses” of the 1970s. We have seen crimes against children by believing men with positions of trust in God’s Kingdom made worse by cover-ups, denial, excuses, and poor behavior toward a courageous woman who attempted to see justice done and further abuse prevented. Here in America, we have advocated for women getting pregnant even at the cost of their lives when in Finland our sister organization is now calling for women to listen carefully to their doctor’s advice. We have concerned ourselves far too much with works– hundreds of confusing rules about dying hair when curling it is OK, about using birth control when a hysterectomy is OK, about watching animated cartoons when documentaries are OK. The words of Jesus are instructive to us, too: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matt. 23:23-24).

Let us pass the microphone over to you now, the body of Christ. Let us discuss matters in true Christian freedom, not coercion, not intimidation. It is time for us all to learn from each other.

———

“Just kidding,” I finally added. “But for the sake of my loved ones still in the church, I wish I weren’t.” I still do. But life goes on. Those friends and loved ones know they have another option than trudging off to sit in those pews. Some of them have finally found the courage to exercise that option. And it may not be so bad anymore for those who haven’t. From what little I hear about the church nowadays, light and love have started shining through cracks in the wall of judgment and fear.

Inside those walls, and outside where billions of people like me are raising children and making friends and riding bikes and buying groceries, life goes on.

Slouching Towards Washington

2016-03-11T15:41:00.001-08:00

Extremes in thinking and a vacuum in the middle where fact and reason used to dwell lately characterize the national state of mind.

—James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic:
Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

The Trumpenstein Monster of Today’s GOP [Flickr page]

In January 1919, months after an armistice that ended the horrors of the Great War in Europe, W.B. Yeats started work on a haunting little poem of the Apocalypse. The Second Coming begins with these memorable lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This “first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence,” says Nick Tabor in a 2015 article about the poem. “Its anxiety concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them.”

Yeats goes on to prophesy further horrors, suggesting, in Tabor’s analysis, that “something like the Christian notion of a ‘second coming’ is about to occur, but rather than earthly peace, it will bring terror”:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

And then there is the “slouching beast” of the final stanza, which Tabor says is best understood not as “a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the technological, the ideological, and the political.” ¹

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Despite Tabor’s complaints about the “widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions” that popular culture is making to the poem, I will venture to toss in my own: The words Yeats left us from nearly a century ago offer a stark picture of what is happening to the ailing democracy of the United States today.

There is a rough beast out there right now, slouching towards Washington. It is a Frankenstein monster formed from an angry electorate’s troubled mix of ugly prejudice, religious zeal, and legitimate grievance–partly about having served as useful idiots for a moneyed class that pandered to their social conservatism while bleeding them dry. What the billionaire political manipulators originally tinkered into existence as a servant for carrying out their specific and selfish goals has gone out of their control.

Now the “darkness drops again” and the monster is plodding into the night, ignoring the commands of those who spent millions trying to be its masters. This is a spectacle both terrifying and exhilarating to watch.

The stuff of nightmares [Flickr page]

The Koch Brothers and their ilk liked what they saw in Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and invested heavily.² But, alas for them, it really does seem that money can’t buy everything. By January, Poor Charles Koch was expressing disappointment “with the line-up of Republican candidates in the 2016 cycle,” and surprise at “the lack of influence he and his brother have wielded so far.” ³

Things started going south for the billionaire Brothers Grim in September of 2015 with the departure of Scott Walker, a nasty dead-eyed governor who seemed like their perfect messenger boy.⁴ Abysmal polling numbers in the presidential race sent him back to work swinging the Libertarian wrecking ball at Wisconsin’s state government. And Jeb! finally dropped out in February 2016 after an embarrassing return on investment for all the millions blown by his campaign and (ahem, independent) SuperPAC–the total price per vote obtained was about $2800 in Iowa and $1150 in New Hampshire.⁵

Now the last best hope for a presidential pawn of the oligarchs, Marco Rubio, is flailing about with just a single state to his name and 15% of the viable delegates allocated thus far. He faces impossible odds, at least if the votes of the lumpenproletariat are what it really takes to win a nomination this year. Rubio would need to win 75% of the 1435 delegates still up for grabs in order to get the 1237 he needs for a non-brokered nomination.⁶ Good luck with that: A March 9 poll has him behind in his home state of Florida by double digits.⁷ It isn’t going to happen, and even he has to realize that.

But there is still the tantalizing possibility of a brokered convention, and that might make it still worth his while for Rubio to keep slugging away. The same goes for John Kasich, governor of Ohio and unofficial Adult in the Room. He’s counting on a home-state win in the winner-take-all primary on the weekend of March 12-13 to keep him in the game. He has been quite candid about liking the idea of a nomination fight at the convention.⁸

———

Assuming primary voters actually get to decide this thing, there are two realistic contenders now left standing for nominee of the Greedy Oligarchy Party–Donald J. Trump and Raphael Edward (“Ted”) Cruz. The oligarchs, however, don’t seem to much like either one of them.

Trump can’t be bought, for the simple reason that he doesn’t need anybody else’s money to support his chest-thumping vanity presidency project. “Not a single contribution to Trump’s campaign could be found in the donation records of the 190 attendees of Koch donor conferences.” Hilariously, one billionaire political-money hobbyist complained that Trump’s self-funding “scares the hell out of” him. “That’s like a dictator,” Stanley Hubbard whined. “I think that any politician should have to answer to their constituents.” Mr. Hubbard does not “think it’s healthy to have somebody who doesn’t answer to anybody.” ⁹ Apparently, having them answer to a few fabulously wealthy recipients of inherited wealth like himself is more like it–God bless America.

The Levite Bearing Away the Body of the Woman, Gustav Doré

Cruz, for his part, has at least tried to win favor of Those Who Matter. He did some hobnobbing at a Koch Konference in 2013, shortly after winning his Senate seat.¹⁰ At another gathering, during the record-hot summer of 2015, he surely scored some points with the Brothers Grim by bluntly denying that global warming was real and implying that Obama was lying by warning of “hotter summers, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events.” ¹¹ (These things are all actually happening now, apparently invisible if your head is stuck up some rich donor’s ass.)

But the fact is that very few people who actually know Ted Cruz–besides some angry, religion-crazed voters–seem to like him much at all, no matter what he says.¹² This is apparently nothing new; his college roommate describes him, then and now, as “pedantic, smarmy, creepy, arrogant, nasty, inauthentic and unfunny as hell.” ¹³ Molly Ball wrote a few months ago in The Atlantic that, in “the three years since he arrived in the U.S. Senate, Ted Cruz has become easily the most hated man in Washington.” He pissed off Mike Lee (Tea Party-UT), possibly his only friend in the Senate, by going all lip-curling angel-of-death about Lee’s criminal justice reform bill. “In my conversations with Republican policy types and Senate aides about Cruz,” Ball writes, Cruz’s “lack of regard for his colleagues, and for the niceties that have traditionally governed the upper chamber, was a common theme. As Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, told me last week, referring to the time Cruz called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor: ‘You just don’t do that. Are we not still gentlemen, and respectful of each other?’” ¹⁴

———

Currently holding onto the lead between those two is Trump, the man described by Peter Wehner, longtime Republican voter, administration staffer, and think-tanker, as an “erratic, inconsistent and unprincipled” narcissist, whose “virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe.” ¹⁵

Yes, well, so could allowing the oligarchs to have their way. With one of those “mainstream” GOP candidates they’d like to have in place as an investment vehicle, we could all look forward to the loss of public lands throughout the American West, the gutting of environmental and labor protections, and a rollback of social security safety net programs, for starters. They would unleash the entire chamber of horrors imagined by the current Republican-controlled Congress, which until now has only been kept restrained by the veto threat of a Democratic President.

Besides, Mr. Wehner, this is your monster you are watching lumber into the lightning flashes of the night. Columnist Maureen Dowd shares my delight in seeing “the encrusted political king-making class utter a primal scream as Trump smashes their golden apple cart.” For years, she says, the Republican establishment “has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enabling gun nuts.” ¹⁶

Scary as it may be, there is a certain logic to the decision of so many everyday people to cast their vote for a narcissistic, bullying huckster and reality-show host whose vocabulary and grasp of the issues make George W. Bush look like Winston Churchill. “These folks have lost a lot with the hollowing out the middle and working class,” said Jim Sidanius, Harvard professor of sociology, back in January when Trump was just getting rolling. “If you combine that with floating xenophobia, you get this kind of reaction.” ¹⁷

Perhaps Republican voters are finally realizing how much they have been played by their political elites and have decided to do some tweaking of their own, in the only way they can. Meanwhile, the rest of us look on shaking our heads at the food-fight debates and insults and ugly outbreaks at rallies, and wait for November to finally put a pitchfork into the beast.

We will probably be left only with Hillary Clinton by then to stop its slouch toward Washington. But even a bent and rusted tool will serve to kill the beast and end the nightmare, at least for a few years until the oligarchs start tinkering in their workshop again.

———

The Trumpenstein image is a Creative Commons licensed composition by the amazing DonkeyHotey, which comprises caricatures of the following: Donald Trump, adapted from Creative Commons licensed images from Gage Skidmore’s flickr photostream; and Ted Cruz, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Michael Vadon’s Flickr photostream.

The image of all four candidates is a Creative Commons licensed composition by DonkeyHotey, comprising caricatures of the following: John Kasich of Ohio, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Marc Nozell’s Flickr photostream; Donald Trump, adapted from Creative Commons licensed images from Max Goldberg’s flickr photostream; Ted Cruz, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Gage Skidmores’s Flickr photostream; and Marco Rubio, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Gage Skidmore’s Flickr photostream.

Notes

Nick Tabor, “No Slouch: The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’,” The Paris Review (April 7, 2015). ↩
Jonathan Swan and Harper Neidig, “Koch network spreads the wealth,” The Hill (October 21, 2015). (“The most popular presidential candidates among the Koch brothers’ conservative donor network are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who each received contributions from more than 12 percent of 190 donors and their families in records analyzed by The Hill.”) ↩
Eliza Collins, “Charles Koch bemoans lack of influence over 2016 race,” Politico (January 8, 2016). ↩
“Back in April [2015], David Koch reportedly gave his personal endorsement to Walker during a closed-door fundraiser” (Matt Wilstein, “Scott Walker Accidentally Poses with Giant Check from ‘Koch Brothers’,” Mediaite.com (August 3, 2015); “Walker’s Punked Phone Call” (ScottWalkerWatch.com). ↩
Janie Velencia, “Jeb Bush Spent $2,800 Per Vote In Iowa,” Huffington Post (February 2, 2016); “Jeb Bush Spent $1150 Per Vote In New Hampshire,” Huffington Post (Feb. 9, 2016). ↩
The counts of delegates won by Rubio (151), needed (1237), and available (1435) are from Google, sourcing the AP, from a March 10, 2016 search for “marco rubio delegates.” ↩
Eliza Collins, “Poll: Trump dominating Rubio in Florida, Kasich in Ohio,” Politico (March 9, 2016). ↩
Patrick Caldwell, “John Kasich Is Banking on a Contested Convention,” Mother Jones (March 4, 2016). ↩
Swan and Neidig. ↩
Todd J. Gillman, “Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rubs elbows with Koch brothers as he eyes 2016; says he’s amazed at ‘wild speculation’,” Dallas Morning News Trail Blazers Blog (May 1, 2013). ↩
Eliana Johnson, “Ted Cruz to Koch Group: No, Global Warming Is Not Real,” National Review: The Corner (August 2, 2015. ↩
I wonder if evangelical Cruz voters have the same kind of mental relationship with him as they do their God: Maybe he’s a bit distasteful when you look too closely, but he’s on their side when it comes to gay marriage. ↩
Craig Mazin on Twitter (@clmazin, February 5, 2015. ↩
Molly Ball, “Why D.C. Hates Ted Cruz,” The Atlantic (January 26, 2016). Uh, Trent, have you been listening to how those genteel folk in your party’s upper echelons are treating the sitting President of the United States, twice elected by popular and electoral majorities? The smelling salts are next to the fainting couch over there, Senator. ↩
Peter Wehner, “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump,” New York Times (January 14, 2016). ↩
Maureen Dowd, “Chickens, Home to Roost,” New York Times (March 5, 2016). ↩
Thomas B. Edsall, “Purity, Disgust and Donald Trump,” The New York Times (January 6, 2016) ↩

Judging Jesus

2016-02-27T22:35:00.001-08:00

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

—Jesus of Nazareth (Matt. 10:34)

Book review (and promotion): Blaming Jesus for Jehovah by Robert M. Price. With a Foreword by Valerie Tarico. Tellectual Press (2016).

Bob Price’s new book

Growing up as a Christian, there was one hero figure in my imagination who stood above all others, even above my parents. I didn’t have quite as distinctive a picture of him as I did of my father who helped me string wire on the roof for ham radio antennas or my mother who managed a photography studio, but somehow he was still better than they were. For the most part, I believed this.

Jesus was, you see, utterly perfect. He was so amazing and special that it really isn’t even appropriate to refer to him as a person, even though he walked the earth for some thirty years in human form, performing amazing feats and never succumbing to any of the sins that endlessly plague all of us mere mortals.

I was told that, having risen from the dead up to heaven to be with God (an even less clearly defined hero figure), Jesus looked down at us all the time and sat with us during church services. “Where two or three are gathered in his name,” there he’d be.¹ And of course we were constantly telling each other that our sins were forgiven in his “name and precious blood.”

There was no room for any human failings in “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” the innocent unblemished Lamb who offered himself as a final, perfect sacrifice on our behalf. The preachers never tired of reminding us how frequently and miserably we all sin, but not so with Jesus. He never did, not even once. If he had sinned, the implication went and was sometimes even expressed out loud, then all that forgiveness we were doing in his name and blood just wouldn’t work.

———

It took the sharp eye of a young friend who’d left the church while I was still in it to make me aware of any problems with this narrative. He pointed out that Matthew 5:22 has Jesus teaching, “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire,” and yet Jesus himself calls people fools in Matthew 23.²

I came across other examples of behavior that didn’t seem particularly Jesus-like as I tiptoed warily into reading what skeptics had to say and–for the first time with clear eyes–the Bible itself. One of those skeptics, Valerie Tarico, pointed out how Jesus’ behavior could seem downright bigoted. In her book Trusting Doubt, she recalled how

a Canaanite woman, a non-Jew, calls out, begging Jesus to heal her daughter, who is possessed by demons. “Lord, Son of David,” she calls him. But he ignores her. Finally, his disciples get sick of her following them and shouting, and they ask him to send her away.

Then “Jesus tells her he was sent only to the lost children of Israel. She keeps begging.” In the end, Jesus heals her daughter, but not before enduring a degrading conversation with him. She “came and knelt before him. ‘Lord, help me!’ she said.”

He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”

“Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted” (Matt. 15:25-28).

This did not impress Dr. Tarico:

If the image doesn’t bother you, try to imagine an American slave or a South African Black having to do and say the same things to get health care for her child. “Please, sir, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” ³

Savior Bro: Not as meek and mild as you thought

Something troubling I came across in my own Bible reading was Jesus telling a bald-faced lie. In John 18:20, he said to the high priest, “I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing” (emphasis added). But, according to Mark 4:34, Jesus expounded on the meaning of his parables “when they were alone.”

In fact, all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) give an example of Jesus doing the secret teaching he explicitly claimed he’d never done. It happened after Jesus told the crowd the parable of the sower, “when he was alone” with the disciples (Mark 4:10). They asked him about the parable.

Did Jesus say, “What’s wrong with you guys? Can’t you understand plain Aramaic?” Nope. He told them they were being let in on the mysteries (mystery, singular, in Mark) of the Kingdom that were being kept hidden from the unwashed masses (Mark 4:11; Matt. 13:11; Luke 8:10).⁴ He then proceeded to explain the parable to them–and them alone.

It’s a pretty bad situation for those who believe the 66 books of the Bible make up the inerrant Word of God with no contradictions. If both John and the Synoptics are telling the truth about what happened, then Jesus did not.⁵

So Jesus became something of a disappointment, though I could’ve lived with a slightly sub-par savior if church doctrine cut him any slack. (Alas, it doesn’t.) And a careful reading of the Old Testament left me utterly repulsed by the shitty attitude and horrible actions of our Father which art in heaven. He is, to quote Richard Dawkins’s memorable one-liner,

jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.⁶

This really is no exaggeration. Read the bloodstained pages in the first half of your Bibles and you will soon see how devastatingly true it is.

———

Having long since absorbed the shock of these realizations about both Father and Son, I was delighted to have my little publishing company Tellectual Press take on Robert M. Price’s new book, Blaming Jesus for Jehovah. In it, he presents a grave and devastating conflict for Christianity: “the sheer logical impossibility that God and Jesus, as defined by the Christian creeds, could have commanded and taught the hateful things the Bible says they commanded and taught, and still be loving, just, forgiving, and merciful.” ⁷

Dr. Valerie Tarico–much more pleasant than the God she writes about [Flickr page]

The book begins with a Foreword that was kindly provided by Dr. Tarico. She cites Dawkins’s description of the “malevolent bully” and observes that “trying to separate Old Testament from New–trying to separate Jesus from Jehovah–doesn’t solve the problem.” In fact, she says, “it is impossible,” because “Jesus himself won’t let us.” ⁸

Bob makes that clear right away in the first chapter, entitled “The Son Who Is the Father.” He cites several passages in Matthew and John where Jesus claims a special relation to his Father in heaven and speaks about “‘inside information’ concerning his divine Father and his celestial realm.” ⁹ Jesus knows all about God, Bob says, “because he has intimate familial knowledge, ‘a chip off the old block.’” I especially like the way Dan Barker put it in a recent interview: Jesus isn’t just “a chip off the old block”; he is the block.¹⁰

That, of course, refers to the doctrine of the Trinity, a weird theological superposition of three distinct persons of God into a single divine entity. Bob devotes a few pages to what present-day Christians think the Trinity is (but is not) and concludes with the observation that, according to that doctrine, “Jesus and Jehovah are one and the same God.” ¹¹ And even without it, there’s plenty in the Gospels to put responsibility for all those Old Testament atrocities on Jesus as Jehovah Junior.

Remember, Jesus explicitly declined to nullify the Old Testament or distance himself from what it describes his Father doing. Bob dismisses the view of many Christians “that the New Testament either exonerates the God of the Old or just plain renders him irrelevant,” which he finds a strange thing to think for those who “profess to believe that both Testaments are the inspired Word of God.” His

considered guess is that they are thinking of the Pauline notion that Christ and his gospel have superseded the Torah, the Old Testament Law. But that is quite a different matter. Paul says that the ceremonial provisions of Judaism (circumcision, kosher laws, holy days, etc.) are no longer binding since their proper purpose has been fulfilled as of the coming of Christ (Col. 2:16-17; Gal. 2:15-21; Rom. 10:4). But that has nothing to do with genocide, as if something so morally repugnant could be proper in the Old Testament dispensation but not in the New.

But, hey, who wants to look too closely? If you’re looking for an excuse to sweep Old Testament atrocities under the rug, any old broom will do.¹²

After spending a chapter (“Artists’ Conceptions of Jesus”) acknowledging some good stuff about Jesus, Bob goes on to summarize some of those atrocities. We are rightly horrified by the grotesque savagery of ISIS, yet

the Christian holy scripture, the Bible, explicitly ascribes the very same moral crimes to God. Islamic Caliphate killers don’t even need the Koran. There are hundreds of passages in the Holy Bible which would be more than enough to inspire their horrors. These are strong words, I know. I hate to have to write them. I hope you will have the courage to read them. It comes down to a question of your own integrity. I hope you will see that.¹³

Any torture that the sick minds of ISIS fanatics can cook up is, of course, a mere pinprick compared to the novel bit of nastiness introduced in the New Testament: eternal condemnation in the agonizing fires of hell. Bob gives that horror the full attention it deserves. In a couple of ample chapters, he covers the various theological attempts to justify unlimited punishment for limited humans and reveals the absurdity of the whole idea of blood atonement.

And there is more: The failure of Jesus’ prophecy about his imminent return, the failure of the Bible to provide a consistent and reliable story about him, and the problems with expecting ant-like humans to heed the warnings of an omniscient God who knows they’ll screw up regardless. This book has a lot of good stuff packed into its 166 or so pages, and I’m very proud to have been a part of its publication.

Fun while it lasts (screenshot taken Feb. 27, 2016)

There is one issue I scratched my head about while editing the book, which bears mentioning. Bob is well known as a skeptic about the existence of any actual person behind the Bible character of Jesus.¹⁴ Here’s how he put it to me in a recent phone conversation:

I think there was no Historical Jesus and the Jesus story is almost entirely based on rewriting Old Testament passages. But another likely influence was the dying and rising God myths in the Mediterranean world and also ancient Israelite religion.

In Blaming Jesus for Jehovah, however, Bob treats the existence of Jesus as a given. I asked him about that, particularly where he calls the doctrine of Original Sin “a matter of reverse engineering” by early Christians who “had to deal with the death of Jesus somehow.” ¹⁵

He was executed as a criminal, but they believed he wasn’t one. So if he didn’t die for any sins of his own, and his death couldn’t have been a meaningless tragedy, whose sins did he die for? Must have been everybody else’s! ¹⁶

Well, I asked, if you think there wasn’t any such person who actually lived or died, why would those early Christians have been troubled by his death? His answer was that

those who wrote our New Testament documents were not mythicists. They believed there was a Historical Jesus martyred at the hands of Rome, who died innocently. They had the problem of explaining how this could happen.

He dates the earliest Gospel, Mark, at possibly 70-80 years after the reported events, but more likely a full century afterwards. Those early Christians were thinking and writing a couple of generations removed from the event they imagined had happened. That’s plenty of time for a whole myth about a messianic savior to have developed–a “major theological adjustment” to Second Temple Judaism following the destruction of Solomon’s temple by the Romans.

With this book, Bob wanted to avoid the whole controversy of the Historical Jesus vs. the Christ Myth Theory by simply accepting the Bible’s assertions about Jesus at face value. It’s a “look through the lens of mainstream criticism,” as he put it. Even so, it’s still quite a critical and much-needed look, at the superhero figurehead of the world’s largest religion whose flaws thus far have remained largely off-limits to scrutiny.

———

Nature photography is much more my line than portraits, but I was glad to have a chance to offer Valerie Tarico some additional publicity photos, including the one shown here, during a visit in Seattle last summer. She’s a wonderful, gracious individual who just inspires you to do your best to keep up with her gentle goodwill. The picture is Copyright © 2015 Edwin A. Suominen, but it’s hers to do what she wishes with, and she’d probably be open to your inquiry should you have a good use for it.

The Jesus mosaic image is adapted (obviously) from a photo reproduction of the apse mosaic of Christ Pantocrator inside the Maria Laach Abbey. The mosaic “was completed in 1911 by Father Andreas Goeser” (link), long enough for the unfortunate Fr. Goeser’s beautiful work to pass into the public domain and get co-opted with the GIMP free image processing software. My irreverent modifications consist of the smirk, the folding over of one additional finger, and a considerably revised text on the open pages. I cannot take credit for “BRB LOL,” having seen it in a meme image some time ago.

Notes

Matt. 18:20. It should be added, however, that the only qualified gatherings for his attendance were those of my own church’s few hundred congregations around the world. He skipped all the untold thousands of other ones because they weren’t part of “God’s Kingdom.” ↩
“Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold? And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty. Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?” (Matt. 23:17-19). ↩
Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light (Oracle Institute Press, 2010; previously published 2006 as The Dark Side), Ch. 5 (available online). ↩
The Revised Standard Version translates the word as “secrets” (secret, singular, in Mark), which makes the problem even more apparent. Both the KJV and NASB use the term “mysteries” (and “mystery”). ↩
These four paragraphs, the footnote above, and the rest of this one are adapted from my first book, An Examination of the Pearl, Section 7.1 (“The Gospels”). Robert M. Price told me in 2011 that he believes this to be a case of an intentional contradiction between John and the Synoptics. The writer of John “rejects the esotericism of Mark and changes the story,” which he also did to avoid the “unseemly” stories of Jesus not carrying his own cross and not wanting to go through with his suffering. “For John, there was no private teaching in the Markan, Gnostic sense.” (Gnosis was secret spiritual knowledge not shared with everybody else.) “Everything is public, though some do not hear because they are not of his flock. Thus within John’s retold narrative Jesus is telling the truth.” ↩
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). ↩
Robert M. Price, Blaming Jesus for Jehovah: Reconsidering the Righteousness of Christianity (Tellectual Press, 2016), p. 19. ↩
Price (Tarico Foreword) at p. 8. ↩
Price at p. 29. ↩
Dan Barker, interviewed by Seth Andrews on The Thinking Atheist podcast, Feb. 16, 2016. ↩
Price at p. 38. ↩
Price at p. 65. ↩
Price at p. 55. ↩
See, e.g., my blog posting Myth, Method, and the Will to Believe about a lecture by the same name that Bob gave on the topic. ↩
Hat tip to Jonathan Bernier, who noted this issue in a Facebook post. ↩
Price at p. 95. ↩

Community

2016-01-31T10:24:00.000-08:00

[She] had the half thought that she would go and find the church phone book, but she realized that she wasn’t in the phone book anymore and neither was he and anyway there was no phone book for those who had left.

—Hanna Pylväinen, We Sinners

Sanctuary

Familiar faces, long unseen but not forgotten or forgetting, smile and nod toward me with friendly recognition. The extended hands are shaken with Hey, – ! fitting tidily in place with a remembered name where God’s Peace used to be. I respond to the polite questions about what I am up to these days with a deftness that improves as the evening progresses. All writings and publications go unmentioned.

They’re probably as nervous as I am, I remind myself at first. Soon I am not so nervous anymore and I think that perhaps they never were, either.

Standing beneath ceiling tiles I helped to glue up, on carpet I used to clean when my committee’s turn came, our brief conversations hop brightly across silent waters of unspoken things via lilypads of neutral topics. My eyes and those of a one-time brother or sister in faith lock and linger and take in the measure of the years as we talk of children growing up in our homes and moving on. Then another face slides into view and smiles, and I nod and wave my way to the next exchange of updates and memories.

These are the people of my first forty years, my friends and travel companions when I was on the way and the journey alongside them through a dark and sinful world. Now I am part of that world, an outsider, here as a visitor in a place that used to be mine, too.

It actually hurts that they are so friendly, that they remember, that they seem to mean it when they say it’s good to see me. It was good to see them, too, but it brought renewed awareness of a hole inside that will likely never quite be filled.

There’s not a God- or Jesus-shaped hole in my heart, but a people-shaped one. It’s them I miss, not some demanding, unpleasant, shape-shifting superhero characters ¹ who faded from my consciousness far quicker than the flesh-and-blood people who gathered there with me, week after week, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.

I sing along with them, enjoying the music and our making of it but baffled that I’d ever believed the words I remember and see in the book held in my hands. Somewhere in those thin pages are the words Sing O people of the Lord, praises to the Lamb of God, and I am no longer one of those people. I will not be here next Sunday, or the one after that.

I’ve already done my time in these pews, listening to sermons with critical commentaries about them running through my head until one of my little kids would mercifully start to fuss and I’d have an excuse to get up for some air. Mine wasn’t much different from the experience of Father Michael Paul Gallagher, who listened to a Gospel reading at Mass while doubting (for good scholarly reasons!) that the red-letter words of the text ever had been actually spoken by Jesus. He found it “an alarming and lonely experience to be there with my community, and yet to feel cut off from the core of why we were gathered there.” ²

Does it even matter to these people, I wonder, seeing them all warmly surrounded by parents and spouses and children and lifetime friends, whether it is true? Some of them do realize that it’s not, at least not all of it. But there they are, just the same.

A cozy cocoon [Flickr page]

Therapist Calvin Mercer observes that fundamentalists “tend to avoid new experiences by remaining isolated in their fundamentalist networks, thereby avoiding the various novel influences that flow into an emerging identity.” ³ The ideal for the group is that “the fundamentalist Christian can live his or her life inside a protected cocoon constructed in a form consistent with fundamentalist ideology.” ⁴

The sheltered community–God’s Kingdom, in Laestadian parlance–is paramount. Everything and everybody else is of “the world,” sinful, dangerous, and generally to be avoided.

The fundamentalist does not stand alone. The fundamentalist exists in and is supported by a social network that usually includes a religious community and, often, a biological family as well. The church or campus group that serves as the primary social group for the fundamentalist provides not only social interaction and support, but also ideological training.⁵

Perhaps nowhere else in American religion is this more harshly true than the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an offshoot of Mormonism featuring polygamy and hard-line control of members under a strict morality code. Everything around you is of, and dictated by, the FLDS. It is your entire community, both physically and spiritually. When you leave the FLDS, you literally get out of town. And you certainly don’t go back for friendly visits like the one I had.

Brenda Nicholson told me that leaving the FLDS was the hardest thing she’s ever done. “I knew that once I walked away, it was over. My family, friends, community–everyone and everything that had been a part of my life would be gone. I knew the drill.” She had been well schooled in the protocol from the old-time Mormon prophet Brigham Young: “Leave apostates alone, severely!”

Now, she would “be looked upon as apostate. A traitor to God. And worse, I took my children with me and now I had ‘their innocent blood on my skirts.’” Even so, she said, “I knew I had to do it. My conscience wouldn’t permit me to stay. If nothing else, I had to leave to protect my children.”

I asked her how it felt leaving the community behind.

In many ways these last few years, since we left, have been very lonely. It’s like starting over alone in a strange world. I can’t say what the future may bring for sure, but it’s very doubtful I’ll ever be part of an organized religion again. I had enough of it. I know how to love, and I do so freely now. I have met some amazing people and gained friends within the educational community. It has changed my life for the better. It’s not the same as family, not quite, but hopefully someday I’ll have both.

She misses family and the feeling of belonging, but added, “I don’t miss the oppression and sadness.”

A woman I know who left my old Laestadian Lutheran church doesn’t miss that part, either. Nor does she seem to have even the nostalgia I sometimes get for the community. She’s only felt relief about leaving so far, she said.

The communities that I have found outside of the church fulfill something deep that has been missing in my life for a long time. It is me as an individual they embrace! Not my line of genealogy, not how many kids I have, not who I’m married to but me and who I am!

Her new friends, she said, “share my passions in life! My true passions!” She has chosen them, rather than merely having them handed to her as “friends by default.”

That night of my visit, I found myself lingering around the foyer of the church, soaking up the warmth and evident goodwill from people I hadn’t seen for years yet quickly felt at home talking with again. But this former sister in faith said she “scooted out as fast as I could” from one recent LLC event. “It’s been hard for me to get past the angst of how they view me, and the exclusivity of it all still really annoys the heck out of me! I still feel comfortable around my old friends, but I do feel that I can’t truly be myself without a few cross-eyed stares.”

Someone else I know, a brilliant amateur scholar of things biblical who studied his way out of faith but hasn’t made a clean break of it yet, considers himself “still fairly good friends with people from my former church community. Some of them know that I am no longer a believer, and several even know why.” A few of them he suspects “are even harboring serious doubts themselves.” He hasn’t resisted going to church, because his “wife is comfortable in a church community.” They are currently doing a bit of church shopping, not having found one where they both feel at home.

His wife knows that he is “not a believer,” he said. (We’re not talking about Laestadian “believers” here; my friend is from a majority black church hundreds of miles from the nearest LLC congregation.) Fortunately, though, she

is fine with it. She’s known for a little while (spouses are usually clued in). She has been very inquisitive and interested in why I no longer believe, and she understands intellectually–but she can’t get past the Pascal’s Wager mentality with regard to her own faith. I don’t push it. She hints that she respects my willingness to be “objective.” It has been such a relief! My mother-in-law knows too. And she doesn’t seem to care.

Hopefully they can find a church with songs my friend will find a little bit less creepy. “It’s all about ‘I am nothing . . . I am a wretch without Jesus,’” he complained to me. “‘My life is meaningless without your love, God.’ And all the songs that glorify the blood spillage on the cross. That stuff is psychologically crummy.” I’d thought about that a bit, too, as I belted out verse after verse along with my former brethren. And we never even got to the song with that part about being drunken with the bridegroom’s love.

———

Further reading: The Visit from January 2013, about another return visit I made a few years ago, equally pleasant; Round-Trip Trauma about the social pull that sometimes brings ex-members back, at least for a while; Section 4.2.3 of my book An Examination of the Pearl under the subheading “Separation from the World”; and a public Facebook posting by Brenda with a horrifying description of conditions in the crazy cult she left behind. I hasten to add that, despite its fundamentalism, restrictiveness, and authoritarian tendencies, the LLC is not a cult and certainly not in the same league as the FLDS.

Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out the photo page for the second one in my Flickr photostream. They are Copyright © 2014-15 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use the second one for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Notes

Remember, it’s a Trinity. The Fantastic Three? ↩
Quoted in Ruth A. Tucker, Walking Away from Faith: Unraveling the Mystery of Belief and Unbelief (InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 131. ↩
Calvin Mercer, Slaves to Faith: A Therapist Looks Inside the Fundamentalist Mind (Praeger, 2009), p. 30. ↩
Mercer at p. 152. ↩
Mercer at p. 150. ↩

Why I am an Islamophobe

2015-12-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

[Osama bin Laden’s] claim to speak for Islam or for all Muslims might be contested, but the religion itself was an expression of deeper yearnings that needed to be sympathetically understood. On no account–and this imperative was put forward by President Bush as well as by many liberals–were the less tender elements of his doctrine to be used as a critique of religion. A hitherto marginal propaganda term, “Islamophobia,” underwent a mainstream baptism and was pressed into service to intimidate those who suspected that faith might indeed have something to do with it.

—Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

What worries me is that so many moderate Muslims believe that “Islamophobia” is a bigger problem than literalist Islam is. They seem more outraged that someone like me would equate jihad with holy war than that millions of their co-religionists do this and commit atrocities as a result.

—Sam Harris, in Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

Note: This isn’t about anything proposed by Donald Trump, who is a bigoted narcissist with a hopelessly simplistic view of the world. Please give yourself some time to read this essay beyond the headline. The truly impatient might at least look at its conclusion.

———

When my mother called me on the morning of September 11, 2001 and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, my first reaction was, “So what?” I pictured the small wreck of a Cessna stuck into a few windows, an accident resulting from some grossly incompetent private pilot.

September 11th [Flickr page]

After I’d rubbed the sleep from my eyes and walked over to my computer to watch the live coverage online, I saw that huge plume of smoke and realized this was bigger than I’d thought. Then the second plane hit, and Islam–as envisioned by a small group of its most fanatically devoted followers–had introduced itself to my world.

In an effort to understand what my President was calling a “religion of peace,” I bought a paperback copy of the Qur’an¹ and started reading. It didn’t seem all that peaceful to me. Just in the first three pages, Sura 2 (“The Cow”) went on and on about infidels who will receive “a severe chastisement,” whose hearts are diseased, for whom a fire has been prepared.

On page 17 (still in Sura 2), I encountered a command for Muslims to “fight for the cause of God against those who fight against you.” It was accompanied by the caveat that they should not attack the unbelievers first, at least, though that’s pretty much a moot point now, with Middle Eastern grievances stretching back many hundreds of years. Then, the text went on, “kill them wherever ye shall find them, and eject them from whatever place they have ejected you; for civil discord is worse than carnage.” With the sound still fresh in mind of turbofan engines and screams and bodies falling onto the pavement, this didn’t seem like a promising start.

And it wasn’t. Sura 8 (“The Spoils”) instructed the reader, in the name of “thy Lord” who’d apparently told some angels, “I will be with you: therefore stablish ye the faithful. I will cast a dread into the hearts of the infidels,” to “Strike off their heads then, and strike off from them every finger-tip,” because “they have opposed God and His Apostle.” Further instruction was to “Fight then against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s.” Sura 9 (“Immunity”) urged, “Believers! Wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them find you rigorous: and know that God is with those who fear him.”

September 11, 2001 [Flickr page]

Sura 24 (“Light”) sets forth a brutal punishment for the “whore and the whoremonger,” of the type that is still being carried out by faithful Muslims of ISIS and Saudi Arabia today: “scourge each of them with an hundred stripes; and let not compassion keep you from carrying out the sentence of God, if you believe in God and the last day.” Raif Badawi may have recalled the next line as the lash bore down on him in January: “And let some of the faithful witness their chastisement.” As he himself recalled it, “when I look within, I only see that thin man who miraculously withstood fifty lashes, while a group of people celebrated his pain, repeatedly chanting Allahu Akbar.” ²

The first verses of Sura 47 (“Muhammed”) included this framework for interfaith dialogue: “When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters.” Two pages later, it urged believers not to be fainthearted, “and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand.” In Sura 66 (“The Forbidding”), the Prophet was told to “make war on the infidels and hypocrites, and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their abode! And wretched the passage to it!”

My passage through the text to this point had been pretty wretched, too. It was all so very repetitive, bleak, defensive, and angry. Denunciations of infidels were littered everywhere, along with copious eternal threats (“for the infidels is the torture of the Fire!”, Sura 8). There were provisions giving special privileges to slaveholders (“Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hands as slaves,” Sura 4) and the prophet (“No blame attacheth to the Prophet where God hath given him a permission,” Sura 33).

“Make war on the infidels” [Flickr page]

One entertaining diversion from the overall gloom of my reading project was coming across this license given by Allah to the man who (coincidentally!) was the very one to transmit the divine words:

O Prophet! We allow thee thy wives whom thou hast dowered, and the slaves whom thy right hand possesseth out of the booty which God hath granted thee, and the daughters of thy uncle, and of thy paternal and maternal aunts who fled with thee to Medina, and any believing woman who hath given herself up to the Prophet, if the Prophet desired to wed her–a privilege for thee above the rest of the faithful. [Sura 33, “The Confederates”]

That’s some real forward thinking on Mo’s part there. If you’re going to write a holy book, you might as well get all of your special sexual privileges defined right up front.

It’s an example of how “temporal power, aggrandisement, and self-gratification mingled rapidly with the grand object of the Prophet’s life” during the latter period of his life, in Medina. That characterization is from William Muir’s four-volume, mid-19th century biography Life of Mahomet, which the ex-Muslim writer Ibn Warraq says passed “a judgment on Muhammad’s character that was to be repeated over and over again by subsequent scholars.” Muir observed that Muhammad’s “personal indulgences were not only excused but encouraged by the divine approval or command.” In addition, “Battles were fought, executions ordered, and territories annexed, under cover of the Almighty’s sanction.” ³ The Arab pagans of the 7th century had plenty to be Islamophobic about.⁴

The Prophet also seemed–to my layman’s reading at least–pretty touchy about the idea that his revelations might be questioned. He has Allah proclaim reassuringly that infidels like me will say, “This Koran is a mere fraud of his own devising, and others have helped him with it, who had come hither by outrage and lie” (Sura 25, “al Furkan”). We unbelievers scoff at Allah’s “distinct signs” by saying, “This is merely a man who would fain pervert you from your father’s worship,” and “This (Koran) is no other than a forged falsehood” (Sura 34, “Saba”).

Circling the sacred black building with its very special black rock in Mecca [Flickr page]

But wait! Sura 41 (“The Made Plain”) provides a handy rationalization for our skepticism. It’s one that sounds all too familiar from my days in Christian fundamentalism: The Qur’an “is to those who believe a guide and a medicine; but as to those who believe not, there is a thickness in their ears, and to them it is a blindness.” ⁵

I’ll agree to that, at least. In all those pages, I saw nothing about love, nothing about joy or any real wisdom. It looks to me like blindness, all right–to everything that is good and decent about humanity.⁶

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), famous historian of the Roman Empire, wasn’t impressed, either. The Qur’an he called an “endless incoherent rhapsody of fable, and precept, and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds.” Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) was even less charitable, calling it a

wild and absurd performance. Let us attend to his [Muhammad’s] narration; and we shall soon find that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, and bigotry as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.⁷

The Qur’an and Muhammad’s sword are, in the assessment of biographer Muir, “the most stubborn enemies of Civilization, Liberty, and Truth, which the world has yet known.” ⁸ Admittedly, in the 150 years since he wrote that, we have seen plenty of uncivilized behavior totally unrelated to Islam or even religion–the Holocaust, Stalin’s murder of millions, the Bataan death march, and my own country’s detonation of two nuclear bombs over civilian populations come to mind. But we are also still seeing all too much of the bloody sword of Muhammed, not just in the Middle East, but in the concert halls, banquet rooms, and subway stations of the Western world.

Submit or Die

And fuck you, sir.

Nor is Liberty (to say nothing of an impartial search for Truth) a viable partner with Islam. Its very name–meaning “submission” or “surrender”–is contrary to that.⁹ Islam is a totalitarian ideology that hacks away at human rights and freedoms with two bloody edges of Muhammad’s sword: sharia, which subjugates those currently under Islamic control, and jihad, which seeks to extend that control to everybody else, having “for its ultimate aim the conquest of the entire world, in order to submit it to one single authority.”

The sharia or Islamic law is “based on four principles or roots.” ¹⁰ One of course is the Qur’an, with all its restrictions and barbaric punishments. And it’s not going anywhere. Even the moderate Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, who is doing much-needed work to help promote a tolerant (and tolerable) form of Islam, admits that “most Muslims today believe that the Qur’an is the eternal, literal word of God.” ¹¹

The other three principles behind sharia are “the sunna of the Prophet, which is incorporated in the recognized traditions; the consensus (ijma) of the scholars of the orthodox community; and the method of reasoning by analogy (qiyas or kiyas).” The whole thing is a “doctrine of duties” that is

aimed at “controlling the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects, the life of its followers without qualification, and the life of those who follow tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their activities from hampering Islam in any way.” . . . It intrudes into every nook and cranny: everything–to give a random sample–from the pilgrim tax, agricultural contracts, the board and lodging of slaves, the invitation to a wedding, the use of toothpicks, the ritual fashion in which one’s natural needs are to be accomplished, the prohibition for men to wear gold or silver rings, to the proper treatment of animals is covered.¹²

Warraq notes that Christianity has a biblical basis for separation of church and state (“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things which are God’s, Matt. 22:17), but there is no such separation with Islam. The reason goes back to Muhammed, who

was not only a prophet but also a statesman; he founded not only a community but also a state and a society. He was a military leader, making war and peace, and a lawgiver, dispensing justice. Right from the beginning, the Muslims formed a community that was at once political and religious, with the Prophet himself as head of state.¹³

“Western Islamic apologists and modernizing Muslims continue to look for democratic principles in Islam and Islamic history,” says Warraq, noting many reasons why their search will be in vain. Perhaps most glaring is the legal inferiority of women, whose testimony in court is worth half that of a man, whose movements are strictly restricted, and who are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims. Non-Muslims of either sex who live in Muslim countries suffer their own form of subjugation, while atheists and apostates from Islam can expect only death. (Warraq notes Islam’s hypocrisy in welcoming converts who move in the other direction.)

Indeed, the very “notion of an individual–a moral person who is capable of making rational decisions and accepting moral responsibility for his free acts–is lacking in Islam.” One of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of any Islamic democracy is Islam’s “emphasis that it is the final word of God, the ultimate code of conduct: Islam never allows the possibility of alternatives.” ¹⁴

Mission Work, Muhammad Style

Intolerance was built into Islam from the very beginning. No “religious toleration was extended to the idolaters of Arabia at the time of Muhammad. The only choice given them was death or the acceptance of Islam.” The Prophet himself slaughtered around 600-900 Jews, expelled others, and subjugated the rest under extortionate taxes.

Then, just a couple of years after Muhammad’s death, “the caliph Abu Bakr organized the invasion of Syria,” expanding the reach of Islam outside the Arabian peninsula.

During the campaign of 634, the entire region between Gaza and Caesarea was devastated; four thousand peasants Christians, Jews, and Samaritans who were simply defending their land were massacred. During the campaigns in Mesopotamia between 635 and 642, monasteries were sacked, the monks were killed, and Monophysite Arabs executed or forced to convert. In Elam the population was put to the sword, at Susa all the dignitaries suffered the same fate.¹⁵

Islamic expansion under Muhammad (622-32), the Patriarchal Caliphate (632-61), and the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750). Dark brown, light brown, then gold.

About 70 years later, the Umayyad Caliphate, “the second of the four major Islamic caliphates established after the death of Muhammad,” ¹⁶ provided another example of such early barbaric behavior. Another Muhammad, bin Qasim, was a commander tasked with conquering the Sindh and Multan regions of what is now Pakistan. According to Warraq’s recounting of this bit of early jihadist history, the commander had instructions from Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq, to “bring destruction on the unbelievers.” He was “to invite and induce the infidels to accept the true creed, and belief in the unity of God.”

This was not accomplished by door-to-door missionaries offering copies of the Qur’an. Al-Hajjaj prescribed harsh treatment and injury to anyone who “does not submit to Islam.” But after three days of slaughter at the port of Debal, it seems that commander bin Qasim got soft and allowed many of the inhabitants to stick with their religion.

The governor shot off a displeased letter to the commander via Indus Express, citing one of the same Qur’anic passages I did above, the one about striking off the heads of unbelievers. That was, he admonished, “a great command” that “must be respected and followed. You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act.” ¹⁷ Alas, governor Al-Hajjaj hadn’t gotten the memo from Reza Aslan et al. that Islam doesn’t promote violence.

Iraq was at the center of the Umayyad Caliphate. It’s the same neighborhood as another Caliphate that exists in the Qur’an-crazed imaginations of our latest outbreak of Islamic fanaticism, the Islamic State or ISIS. Christopher Hitchens, who did not live long enough to witness the current horrors of ISIS, saw its genesis as “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” in 2011 calling it “the fantastically sadistic and homicidal so-called ‘insurgency’ put together by the Jordanian jailbird and psychopath Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” ¹⁸

In his recently published dialogue with Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris recalled how the Islamic State had “been burning prisoners alive in cages and decapitating people by the dozen and gleefully posting videos attesting to the enormity of their sadism online.” These atrocities, he observed, “represent what they unabashedly stand for.” ¹⁹ Yet, when “one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion.” ²⁰

Nawaz acknowledges many of the difficulties Harris raises throughout their discussion, and laments “regressive leftists” (his words) who “have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogeneous and inherently opposed to human rights values.” ²¹ Regarding the Islamic State, he notes that more “violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction. Each group is deeply convinced of its approach to achieving Islamism in society, and both face much danger in pursuit of that goal.” Not only do “they differ in methodology,” but they also very much despise each other.” Islamic State, for example, “would kill members of the Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt.²²

His efforts to salvage something separate and worthwhile from “Islamism” are commendable, but knowing that various Islam-inspired groups hate each other as well as everybody else doesn’t make me feel much better about Islam itself. My “Islamophobia,” a term I accept for myself despite its pejorative intentions, is a very reasonable aversion to Islam. It is not a phobic (i.e., irrational) fear at all, but an entirely sensible response to something very dangerous.²³ Frankly, I wouldn’t want either the Islamic State or the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere nearby.

Nawaz also attempts to draw a distinction between Islam and what the Islamic State is doing, as he and millions of other decent Muslims must. “Islam is just a religion,” he says, contrary to what we have seen above from Ibn Warraq about totalitarianism. “Islamism is the ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society. Islamism is, therefore, theocratic extremism. Jihadism is the use of force to spread Islamism. Jihadist terrorism is the use of force that targets civilians to spread Islamism.”

“It is this extremism,” he says, “that must be named as Islamism and opposed,” adding “that one cannot argue that the Islamic State represents all of Islam.” Then, with refreshing candor, Nawaz goes on to admit the obvious:

one cannot argue that it has nothing to do with Islam. But it should be obvious that “a desire to impose Islam” cannot reasonably be said to have “nothing to do with Islam.” Clearly, it has something to do with it.²⁴

Yes, it certainly does. And it has everything to do with those bloody bodies of innocents lying on the ground in Paris and San Bernardino.

The Empty Quarter

Camel market - Saudi [Flickr page]

Perhaps the best example of a devoutly Islamic society today is the place where Islam got its start, the portion of the Arabian peninsula now governed by the Al-Saud. In the assessment of John Bradley, a rare Western journalist who had some real experience there, they are “perhaps the most corrupt family the world has ever known.” Saudi Arabia, he says, is

teeming with extremists, where children are taught that “the Jews” are the eternal enemy, and where Westerners are periodically blown up in their residential compounds or gunned down in the street by attackers filled with hatred for them and seeking martyrdom. It is a place that treats Third World immigrants like slaves, where Saudi men never get to see a woman who is not a direct (and usually very close) relative, and where Saudi women themselves cannot leave the house without a male chaperone, let alone drive, and live for the most part in absolute purdah [separation from men].

Fluency in Arabic, an eager cultural curiosity, and a willingness to risk living outside some fortified expat compound allowed Bradley to spend time in another Saudi Arabia. This was one

where Westerners with an open mind and sense of adventure can and often do encounter the finest traditions of Islamic hospitality, generosity, and kindness. In this Saudi Arabia, they may spend an evening sitting with liberal-minded, and even secular, Saudi friends, drinking coffee in Starbucks while talking about the latest Western movies. Princes and princesses, selfless and incorruptible, can talk passionately of the need to introduce sweeping reforms that would limit their own power. Teenagers surf the web in Internet cafes while watching the World Cup or Superbowl on widescreen TVs, or play soccer in the street. Women, shed of their long black cloaks in the home, can quickly prove themselves to be as independent and single-minded as any in the West.²⁵

Guess which version of the country is more faithful to Islam? Despite that business about “Islamic hospitality,” which I suspect is really no different than Arabic hospitality, it is the first one–the repressive, hate-filled, all-controlling Saudi Arabia–that has enacted a bleak dystopia of pure Islam. The “universities, charities, schools, orphanages, and print media are all . . . now in the control of the Wahhabi clerics,” spewing and sowing the seeds of extremist rhetoric, indoctrinating the next generation with the joys of jihad and martyrdom.²⁶

University College London in Saudi Arabia. No burka on the glossy brochure. [Flickr page]

For this we can thank the British and their tragic decision in the 1930s to back a certain Abdulaziz Ibn Saud,²⁷ whom they “viewed as the leader most likely to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula and [who] had already proved himself very willing to cooperate closely with Britain in order to achieve his goal of carving out a state for his family to rule over.” ²⁸

Ibn Saud did not arrive on his own. He was accompanied, like a dog with a bad case of worms, by clerics who followed the depressingly fundamentalist Islam of one Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had signed a pact with Ibn Saud’s ancestor back in 1744. “Their aim was to bring about, through force if necessary, the reign of the word of God.” Sound familiar? “Abdul Wahhab had begun his preaching some years earlier. Wahhabism, his legacy, advocated a literalist and legalistic stance in matters of faith and religious practice.” ²⁹

Now, more than two hundred years later, the Saudis remain “loyal to the cynical pact that earned Wahhabi clerical endorsement of the ruling dynasty in return for heavy subsidy of Wahhabi clericalism,” as Hitchens observes.³⁰ Together they have produced a miserable cultural desert where the only form of public entertainment, apart from soccer matches, are the beheadings that take place in “chop-chop square.” ³¹

Funded by the second-largest oil reserves on the planet, Allahu Akbar, they are “putting billions of dollars at the disposal of madrassas and mujahidin alike” to infect the rest of the world with their toxic meme of Islamic madness.³² And once again, the darkness has made its way north from the Arabian Peninsula to Iraq:

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.

There’s one difference, which is of critical importance to Saudi Arabia itself: “Wahhabi scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers,” probably because they themselves are captive to the House of Saud. ISIS wants to do the ruling and taxation (i.e., extortion) itself in Iraq and Syria, not just the kind of religious propagandizing and religious policing that the Wahhabis handle in Saudi Arabia. Despite that and the Islamic State’s absolutist “with us or against us” attitude, which made even the likes of Al Qaeda uncomfortable, “a certain mutedness” lingered among the Wahhabis about ISIS. Finally, King Abdullah, a sort-of-secular ruler put in an uncomfortable position by all this Islamic caliphate business, “publicly urged them to speak out more clearly.” ³³

Calling the project of ISIS “nothing more than reviving the Wahhabism of the founding generation” and noting how the Islamic State’s leadership “absorbed the Wahhabi doctrine and mastered all its details,” Saudi researcher Fouad al-Ibrahim explains in one tidy sentence the Wahhabi clerics’ reluctance to condemn ISIS: It “adopts a global project that Wahhabism tried to achieve from the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the 1930s.” But that is a serious threat to the House of Saud, “which seeks to undermine any internationalist project that might reach within its borders.” ³⁴ The nation is, after all, the product of Al-Saud’s bloody victory over and repression of “various tribes, sheikhdoms, emirates, and kingdoms” across the Arabian Peninsula.³⁵

Hubbert’s oil production model (upper bound) vs. actual oil production for the U.S. lower 48 states, with a recent and unsustainable fracking uptick.

The Saudi dog is feeling pretty sick nowadays from that load of Wahhabi worms it carries. But none of its symptoms, or the manifest moral failings of the Al-Saud family itself, can be publicly acknowledged by Saudi Arabia’s oil-thirsty clients. The Obama administration surely recognizes how tenuous our own oil supplies are, 45 years after the peak of conventional crude production in the U.S.³⁶ And don’t count on hydraulic fracturing to keep your gas tank full for long: The depletion rate of those fracked wells in the Bakken is averaging 85% three years after drilling.³⁷ If that upward spike at the end of the graph above looks anomalous to you, you’re on to something. It’s not gonna last.

Until the supergiant oil fields that lie beneath the sands of Saudi Arabia finally run dry, the United States will remain in what Bradley calls a “fundamentally absurd and self-contradictory ‘special relationship’ with the Kingdom “that has stood since February 1945, when Ibn Saud met President Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal.” ³⁸ We will continue to look the other way as the cowled barbarians of Riyadh lash and behead their bloggers and poets and make a mockery of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and as their Wahhabi parasites continue promoting toxic Islamism around the world.

We may not have that long to wait before the whole pathetic charade comes to an end. Ghawar, the biggest of the supergiants, which alone supplies 60% of the Kingdom’s output, has been producing for nearly 70 years. The notoriously secretive Saudi Aramco reported that it had gotten about halfway through the field’s proven reserves in 2008, and it may well have peaked a few years before then.³⁹

Withdrawal symptoms will be severe, of course, for a world grown addicted to this black tar heroin from the earth’s depths. Nor can we expect Saudi Arabia to face its own austerity with much good grace. It will finally exhaust its last ancient reserves of groundwater⁴⁰ along with the fossil energy it needs to run desalination plants, along with the sole economically viable export it can trade for food from the infidel world its clerics hate and condemn.

The place is an overpopulated hellhole, hotter than ever due to climate change ⁴¹ and packed full of unemployed and entitled youth who have no work ethic, useful knowledge, or positive role models to fall back on once the handouts stop. A large part of what their educations have been about is the hatred of others, repression, and jihad. There a “complete lack of any kind of youth culture.” Except for a bit of four-wheeling out in the sand dunes,

young Saudis who do not have the means or desire to travel abroad remain, by and large, locked away with their frustration in their bedrooms, watching satellite TV, surfing the web, and contemplating an increasingly difficult life in a kingdom full of unemployment, poverty, repression, and nepotism. That, of course, is great news for radical Islamists, ever-eager to recruit to their ranks young men who have few critical faculties and a crudely simplistic world outlook. With so many youngsters wandering aimlessly into adulthood with increasingly few prospects of a decent job, ruled by a corrupt elite closely aligned to an America the young are told to hate and hold responsible for Israel’s ruthless suppression of the Palestinians, the call of the Islamists is not falling on deaf ears.

Their “essentially shallow understanding of Islam” has been taught to them “by hard-line Wahhabi teachers and clerics,” and it “sits in their minds like a highly combustible tinder box, just waiting for a loose spark to set it alight.” ⁴²

Watch out, world. Things are just getting started.

A Civilized Defense of Civilization

Women in The Hague, Netherlands: one free, and the others?

Is it any wonder, gentle reader, why I fear and loathe this ancient and insidious Arabian export? Yes, indeed, I am an Islamophobe. I embrace the slur that was intended to shame people into not questioning this totalitarian belief system, just as some gays have decided to embrace the term “queer.”

Islam is different, of course, than a race or an innate sexual orientation. It is a belief system, one that aspires to be more than just a religion. A religion it is, though, and as such, our Constitution and sense of human decency (not shared by Islamists or a certain narcissistic presidential candidate) demand that we tolerate its free exercise. At least to the extent that it doesn’t threaten us with harm, which is an important caveat.

But I damn well don’t welcome its spread into Western society, nor do I intend to be kept silent about it. Even so, more out of consideration for your attention than the hair-trigger sensitivities of Islamists and their doe-eyed apologists, this essay has glided pretty gently over the atrocities and pain that Islam inflicts, and has from the very beginning, on its followers and resisters alike. Some of its crimes against women so disgust me that I have declined to mention them at all.

Nor have I said much about the combination of mental anguish and physical danger it poses for those who dare to shake off its cold embrace, probably unequaled in any other religion. There too, many gripping stories could be told here, like the one from “Jamila” who wrote recently about the question of when the apostasy she’s been hiding will come out and tear her apart from her family. That troubling question–when?–lurks

in the double life I live with the man who shares my bed after my father drops me home, it’s there telling me that I can’t keep him a secret forever. It’s there in the folds of the headscarf I pull out of my drawer on visit days, whispering to me that if I don’t tell them, the lies, like the material I drape over my head, will suffocate me. It’s there in slight hesitation in my voice when I recite the duaas to younger siblings and I wonder if they realise that this is not the recitation of a person who prays regularly. It’s there, it’s there, it’ll destroy us again one day, and I don’t know how to stop it.⁴³

You can see more of this personal evidence about the iron grip that Islam keeps on its subjects via the /r/exMuslim subreddit and the #ExMuslimBecause Twitter hashtag, and by following the work of courageous and vocal ex-Muslims like Maryam Namazie, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Riz Rashid, Ali A. Rizvi, and Aliyah Saleem. And be sure to read the sobering article by Suraiya Simi Rahman, MD–an ex-Muslim who has lived in Bangladesh, the UAE and Pakistan–in which she says one “really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi.”

These people are all standing up to the many bullies and defenders of Islam, not just mullahs and creepy ISIS shills, but their own families and even–dismayingly–supposed feminists and leftists whose good intentions have somehow been co-opted to serve the Islamist meme. I have tremendous respect for the courage and strength of character that ex-Muslims have shown. To help support them, I’ve made donations to each of two important organizations that assist people like them on their difficult journeys to freedom: the Ex-Muslims of North America and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.

The stories of apostates from this backwards, controlling religion need to be told–more and more, and with polite but firm criticism of the religion itself. Ibn Warraq was another one who courageously did so, regardless of the risks. “Without criticism,” he writes, “Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified in its totalitarian, intolerant, paranoid past. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality, and truth.” ⁴⁴

Standing up to all that is a project of civilization well worth our effort, and with care to avoid adopting any of its loathsome aspects ourselves.

———

The first Twin towers photo is from Mark Yokoyama and the second from Wally Gobetz, both CC-NC-ND licensed. The UCL London photo is CC-NC licensed by UCL Institute of Education.

The photo of firefighters at the World Trade Center is CC licensed (re-licensed?) by Flickr user World Trade Centers with the note: “Andrea Booher–FEMA Photo News.Mandatory byline–No payment.” The caption, a quote from Sura 66, is my own.

The map of Islamic expansion from 622-750 A.D. is adapted from a public-domain SVG file accessible at Wikimedia Commons The crude oil production graph is adapted (with my annotation) from “Hubbert Upper-Bound Peak 1956,” CC-SA licensed by “Plazak,” Wikimedia Commons.

The photo at the sacred mosque is CC-SA licensed by Citizen59. The Saudi camel market photo is CC licensed by Michael Glasgow. The photo of women in The Hague is slightly post-processed from a CC-licensed image by Flickr user FaceMePLS. The “Freedom go to hell” protester photo is a cropped version of a CC-licensed image by Vayou Desoeuvre.

Notes

The Koran (Ballantine Books, 1993), based on an English translation by J.M. Rodwell. All of the following quotes are from there, as I encountered them during my reading. An ex-Muslim correspondent once advised me that the preferred spelling of the name is Qur’an, and so that’s the one I use here. ↩
Raif Badawi, 1000 Lashes (Greystone Books, 2015). For guidance on judicial amputation and crucifixion, see Sura 5 (“The Table”). The horrors of ISIS are, of course, merely the result of careful and uncompromising attention to the text. ↩
William Muir, quoted in Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim (Prometheus Books, 2010), p. 87. Here I depart from my usual practice of only quoting from books that I’ve actually read. Hopefully you will excuse me for declining to slog through a four-volume biography of Muhammed written 150 years ago. I have read Warraq’s book, however, and highly recommend it. ↩
“The basis of the Islamic attitude toward unbelievers is the law of war; they must be either converted or subjugated or killed (excepting women, children, and slaves); the third alternative, in general, occurs only if the first two are refused. As an exception, the Arab pagans are given the choice only between conversion to Islam or death. Apart from this, prisoners of war are either made slaves or killed or left alive as free dhimmis or exchanged for Muslim prisoners of war” (Warraq at p. 181, quoting Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law). ↩
E.g., “the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5). ↩
“But what about the Bible!” is the common interjection at this point by Islam apologists. Well, yes, what about it? I’ve amply criticized that collection of backwards and violent writings, in two books and plenty of essays. See, e.g., Gutting Your Kid for God, Moral Midgetry, Jehu’s Jihad, and Fighting Words. ↩
Both quoted in Warraq, p. 10. Again, I must confess to not having read the original works cited here. But it’s hard to imagine any context in which Gibbon and Hume might have written that would have made these scathing critiques much less forceful. Indeed, Warraq says Gibbon “painted Islam in as favorable a light as possible to better contrast it with Christianity” (p. 21). ↩
Quoted in Warraq at p. 88. ↩
“Islam is a verbal noun originating from the triliteral root s-l-m which forms a large class of words mostly relating to concepts of wholeness, safeness and peace. In a religious context it means ‘voluntary submission to God.’ Islām is the verbal noun of Form IV of the root, and means ‘submission’ or ‘surrender.’ Muslim, the word for an adherent of Islam, is the active participle of the same verb form, and means ‘one who submits’ or ‘one who surrenders.’ Believers demonstrate submission to God by serving God, following his commands, and rejecting polytheism” (Wikipedia). That part about “following his commands” is problematic, of course, when they include the Qur’anic violence described above. ↩
Warraq at p. 163. ↩
Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (Harvard University Press, 2015), loc. 626. ↩
Warraq at p. 163. I have taken the liberty of replacing Warraq’s quotation remarks with italics in quotations that include Arabic words. ↩
Warraq at p. 164. ↩
Warraq at pp. 172-73, 83-84 ↩
Warraq at p. 215-16, 219-20. ↩
Umayyad Caliphate, Wikipedia. ↩
Warraq at p. 220, writing about Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq and his commander Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 A.D. The passage is Sura 47.4, which reads as follows in Warraq’s quotation of Hajjaj’s letter: “O True believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.” ↩
Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy (2011), loc. 124. ↩
Harris and Nawaz at loc. 706. ↩
Harris and Nawaz at loc. 457. ↩
Harris and Nawaz at loc. 481. ↩
Harris and Nawaz at loc. 425. ↩
See also this truly excellent video counter-argument to the silly and pernicious “Islamophobia” meme. ↩
Harris and Nawaz at loc. 1196. ↩
John R. Bradley, Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). ↩
Bradley at loc. 1223, 1237. ↩
His full name, in case you were curious, is Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad Al Saud (Wikipedia). ↩
Bradley at loc. 235. ↩
Bradley at loc. 243. ↩
Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy (2011), loc. 172. ↩
Bradley at loc. 2537 ↩
Hitchens at loc. 172. ↩
David K. Kirkpatrick, “ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed.” New York Times, September 24, 2014, nyti.ms/Y4erG6. ↩
Fouad al-Ibrahim, “Why ISIS is a threat to Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism’s deferred promise.” Al-Akhbar, August 22, 2014. english.al-akhbar.com/node/21234. ↩
Unification of Saudi Arabia, Wikipedia. ↩
Hubbert Peak Theory, Wikipedia. ↩
J. David Hughes, Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check on U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom (Post Carbon Institute, 2014). shalebubble.org/drilling-deeper. ↩
Bradley at loc. 1374. ↩
Ghawar, Wikipedia. ↩
Bradley at loc. 1863. ↩
Nathan Halverson, “What California can learn from Saudi Arabia’s water mystery.” Reveal, April 22, 2015. Center for Investigative Reporting (link). ↩
John Schwartz, “Deadly Heat Is Forecast in Persian Gulf by 2100.” New York Times, October 26, 2015, nyti.ms/1LRVcSO (“By the end of this century, areas of the Persian Gulf could be hit by waves of heat and humidity so severe that simply being outside for several hours could threaten human life”). ↩
“I craved too much the warm welcome home,” atheistinaheadscarf.wordpress.com. ↩
Warraq at p. 14. ↩

Frozen and the Chosen

2015-11-10T15:38:00.001-08:00

It hit me as I was walking home–I could think anything! I could have any opinion on any subject, and it would be my own! No longer would I have to check against Scripture and other doctrine to make sure that my opinions were in line with God; I could decide my opinions with my own reason! . . . That moment was one of the most liberating, beautiful, and happy experiences of my life.

—Michael Amini in Generation Atheist, Dan Riley, editor (2012)

[T]he whores of the world wash their hands in the blood of creatures, but the daughters of Jerusalem do not wash themselves in the blood of the innocent Lamb, but with soap and with lye, and nevertheless their filthiness is visible.

—Lars Levi Laestadius, randomly selected passage from a random sermon (Palm Sunday 1854).

Kristoff Levi Laestadius, reindeer fan

Last week, I went with my wife and some of our kids to see the Disney on Ice figure-skating adaption of the musical movie Frozen. It was great fun to see Anna and Elsa zipping around the rink with Olaf, Kristoff, and Sven, who materialized as a rather large reindeer comprised of two skaters inside a furry brown costume. When Elsa went out on the ice under blue light for her big solo act, two little girls sitting behind us sang along at the top of their lungs: “Let it go, let it GO!”

A husband-and-wife pair of composers wrote Let it Go as “Elsa’s Badass Song,” specifically intended to be sung by Idina Menzel, “one of the most glorious voices of Broadway.” They succeeded brilliantly. The song is the highlight of the film and has sold over 10 million copies on its own.¹

Lamplit Tree [Flickr page]

I first heard it while sitting in a theater with my family nearly two years ago. This was still a fairly novel experience after a lifetime of being told–and then allowing it to be told to my children–that seeing movies is a sin. Laestadianism and its oddities were still very much on my mind as I watched Anna make her cute wisecracks and accompany a socially-inept ice merchant and his furry best friend on a quest that included, among other delightful implausibilities, a visit with some witty and wise rock-rodents who dispensed relationship advice.

“So he’s a bit of a fixer-upper,” they sang about Kristoff while working on setting him up with Anna. Aren’t we all, I thought, musing about all the mental remodeling my wife and I were doing on ourselves and our older children, after the nonsense we’d all heard for years and years sitting alongside each other in a very different setting.

When Elsa finally broke out of her self-imposed shell, flung out her arms, tossed back her head, and proclaimed that she wasn’t going to hold back anymore, I felt like applauding.

Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know

Well, now they know!

Yes! You go, girl! I silently cheered, feeling a bit embarrassed about how emotional I was getting watching this movie. But there was a good reason for it. For a year, I’d had to “conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know” what I’d learned from some diligent and sincere research about my childhood faith. Sharing that information with a few friends in the church got me hauled into a meeting with my local congregation’s preachers and board of trustees.

After a two-hour inquisition, having been told I was to retrieve the dozen or so copies of the book I’d given away, “I went home and told my wife, ‘You are about to witness the intellectual disintegration of your husband.’ Then the years of doubt, fear, and frustration–culminating in being muzzled into silence by a church far more interested in rebuke than reality–boiled over. I collapsed into my wife’s arms in tears, and went to bed for a fitful night.” ²

Let it go, let it go

Can’t hold it back anymore

Let it go, let it go

Turn away and slam the door!

After some months, I just couldn’t hold it back anymore, either. My half-hearted promises to stay away from dangerous studies didn’t stick, of course, and I “learned and questioned more about church history, the Bible, and aspects of science that conflicted with important points of doctrine.” I also “lost the energy to continue swimming against the current of the church’s clannish, insular social scene,” which treated my family and me like we all had some dangerous and contagious disease once my doubts became known.

I was ready to “shake off the muzzle” and put into print what had “been swirling around my head and flagged in the pages of my library of books.” The result, An Examination of the Pearl, wound up being more than twice the size of the print-shop copy that had gotten the elders so bent out of shape.

Given the outraged reaction I encountered to a very limited, private distribution of the book, which consisted mostly of church statements and relatively restrained footnotes about those statements, I have no illusions that this published edition will be well received. As Ken Daniels noted about his own book, “whether I take a gentle or harsh approach, I am sure to elicit criticism. The very act of confronting deeply cherished religious convictions is unforgivable to some, regardless of my tactics.” ³

Frost on Ponderosa [Flickr page]

I’m not the only one who has been moved by Let it Go as an anthem of liberation from fundamentalism. Blogger “Libby Anne” wrote about that in March 2014, after being shocked at how much her conservative evangelical mother obsessed over the movie. “How could they see Frozen and not realize that it was about self acceptance and freedom from others’ expectations–and moral standards?” she wondered.

When she first watched Let it Go on YouTube,

before seeing the movie in theaters, I completely choked up at the line “no right no wrong, no rules for me.” Tears started streaming down my cheeks. It was beautiful. I grew up in a conservative evangelicalism that I eventually found highly restrictive. As I began to extricate myself, my family and friends put me through a special kind of hell. But even through all of the pain and the tears, I entered into freedom when I left behind their rules, their expectations, their control. This song spoke to so many emotions. I’ve watched it again and again many times since that first time, and each time I’ve achieved some form of catharsis.

It’s now her personal theme song, she says.⁴ Another blogger, Maranda Russell, says she fell in love with the song as soon as she heard it:

At times in my life I felt like I had to hide my true self to get approval and love from friends, family and the church. I had to pretend to be a “good girl” who never questions anything and believes blindly what I am told. I still feel like many wish I would just shut up and believe what they tell me is true, but I just can’t do that anymore.⁵

I don’t care

What they’re going to say

Let the storm rage on,

The cold never bothered me anyway!

Maranda admits that “maybe I still care a little (after all I am still human), but I won’t let it rule me.” I did, too, about what I knew my “brothers and sisters in faith” were going to say, but I went ahead anyway. A storm would rage, friendships would be lost–most of those that I’d forged since childhood, it turned out, in a church that discouraged social contact with the outside world.

And the stakes were infinitely higher than what one friend called “social suicide”: Publishing the book against the wishes of the Laestadian Lutheran Church would inevitably be viewed as an act of apostasy, no matter how balanced I tried to be in presenting my findings. Eternal damnation loomed in my future.

To those who tell me my writing was courageous, I reply that it took less courage then what many of them have done–simply walking away. I needed to have my brethren push me out instead, simply for making the facts known, asking difficult questions about them, and refusing to accept the tired old insistence that the most important matter of one’s life “cannot be understood by reason.”

My introduction to the book quoted Clement of Alexandria from 18 centuries earlier: “If our faith is such that it is destroyed by force of argument, then let it be destroyed; for it will have been proved that we do not possess the truth.” Recalling the “faith” of a board member who said he won’t read anything critical about what he supposedly believes,” I asked if that was

really faith in anything other than the people around him who are repeating the old slogans? They, too, are ignoring the facts about their “faith,” making the whole thing a self-sustaining doctrinal bubble that quivers unsteadily in the air, vulnerable to being poked by the slightest intrusion of fact.⁶

Looking Back [Flickr page]

Now, nearly four years later, these words from Let it Go are exactly my experience:

It’s funny how some distance

Makes everything seem small

And the fears that once controlled me

Can’t get to me at all!

There is simply no fear anymore. And it’s not for any lack of knowledge about what this weird little sect thinks my eternal fate will be. Hell, I still listen to sermons sometimes to get to sleep, because the preachers’ somber, familiar, repetitive intonations send me drifting off faster than anything else. Sometimes I get several nights’ worth of use out of a single sermon, because I start the iPod at different points in the recording and am out within ten minutes.

One correspondent told me, “My old Laestadian world view is gone. If I talk to certain people or listen to sermons I can feel the world view there and experience it sometimes. I don’t think it’s ever coming back, though, and I am the better for it.”

Yes, my friend, you are. And, as Elsa sings out, fully embracing her unique identity and abilities, “one thought crystallizes like an icy blast”: You’re “never going back. The past is in the past!”

———

The picture of Lars Levi wearing Kristoff’s reindeer-hide coat was fair-use adapted from a Frozen wallpaper image and a classic portrait of Lars Levi Laestadius. Take a look online at Laestadius’s sermons and you’ll quickly see what I mean by the “People suck” paraphrase. He was not a happy man. The fictional Kristoff of Frozen seems to have had a more meaningful “conversion” experience with Anna than old Lars ever did.

The other photos are Copyright © 2013-15 Edwin A. Suominen. Click to enlarge, or check out my Flickr photostream. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

See the online Dictionary of Christianese for an interesting discussion of the expression “frozen chosen.”

Notes

Wikipedia, Let it Go. ↩
An Examination of the Pearl, §1.2 (“Introduction–Disputation– The June 2010 Edition”). ↩
§1.2 (“Introduction–Disputation–Alienation”), quoting Ken Daniels, Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary (self- published, 2010). ↩
“Let It Gay? Subversive Messages from Disney’s Frozen,” Love, Joy, Feminism blog, March 4, 2014 ↩
“What the Disney ‘Frozen’ song ‘Let It Go’ means to me,” Maranda Russell blog (April 25, 2014). ↩
§1.2, quoting from Clement’s Stromata, 6.10.80. William Wilson’s translation, freely available online, goes as follows: “But if the faith (for I cannot call it knowledge) which they possess be such as to be dissolved by plausible speech, let it be by all means dissolved, and let them confess that they will not retain the truth. For truth is immoveable; but false opinion dissolves.” ↩