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Dear Readers:
Due to some technical glitch, I cannot respond to individual comments. This kept me from replying directly below the essay by Sam Guttenplan, an American philosopher long based in London (amd married to my accomplished cousin Jen.) Sam's nuanced article suggests what I was thinking and trying to say,but he does it better. This is Sam Guttenplan: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/philosophy/our-staff/academics/guttenplan I also inadvertenly cut out a nice comment by Ed Martin -- gone, into the ozone. Maybe the hurricane is messing up the site. And I cannot resist adding this comment from my friend George Mitrovich who worked for Robert F. Kennedy (Dem) and Charles Goodell (Rep.) George forwarded this comment by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, once the chief of staff to Colin Powell, on MSNBC the other night, responding to the vile Sununu comments: "My party is full of racists. And the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as Commander in Chief as President, and everything to do with the color of skin, and that is despicable!" Mitrovich added: "That is not an uncommon view of what has happened to the party of Lincoln, but seldom had it been said with such candor and directness." -- Sounds right to me. GV
tom
10/28/2012 12:18:24 pm
Non-sense. it's the politics.
Brian Savin
10/28/2012 12:20:19 pm
Horsefeathers, George. In my opinion, your post is inappropriate (notwithstanding this is your blog) because it transcends the ability of any fair-minded, trying-to-be-objective person to respond. 10/29/2012 04:06:16 am
George
Brian Savin
10/29/2012 12:06:34 pm
Alan, you are too much of an admitted Democratic Party partisan to be objective. I implore you, please, do not presume to speak for moderates, or, especially, life-long eastern Republicans. We need to go beyond the Jackasses and Elephants if we are to achieve anything in our lifetime together for the good of the country. Let's work together. GV's articles, frankly, are the best sports comments I have ever read, and they are important to me. Because they make me think. But I also know, personally, a lot about this President (whom I voted for enthusiastically) and as Lord Palmerston once actually said (the quote is attributed to others), "I reserve the right to holler 'tripe' whenever tripe is served."
Gene Palumbo
11/2/2012 03:10:49 pm
George has a column in tomorrow's (Saturday's) Times (page D3 of the New York edition) on the decision to call off the marathon: "Wisely Stepping Aside in a Bombarded City,"
Brian Savin
11/2/2012 03:39:00 pm
Yup, perfect. The outliers will get over it. Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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