COVID19 update, July 8, 2020: by CDC criteria about to fall below “epidemic” threshold in the USA?; Israel public health chief resigns, citing “frivolous” decision making process; Dr. Campbell on knowns and “known unknowns” of COVID19

(1) Instapundit reports that the death rate from COVID19 has fallen far enough that by CDC criteria it’s about to fall below the “epidemic” threshold. He comments:

WE CAN HOPE: Is The Pandemic Coming To An End At Last? “Well, firstly, it’s not actually us saying this. It’s the Centers for Disease Control, which reported that the death rate has fallen so far it’s now roughly equal to the threshold for even qualifying as an epidemic, which isn’t as severe as a pandemic.”

Death rates aren’t following case numbers up, at least not yet. In my area we had our first Covid deaths in two months last week, as case numbers climb — but we’ve had a total of 9 deaths in a county of over 400,000 people since the beginning of the pandemic. We’ve almost certainly lost more people to flu in the same period.

But case numbers are climbing, and death is a lagging indicator. Even so, though, if the disease is as fatal as it was in, say, March, deaths should be climbing much faster than they are. Some of that is no doubt because we don’t have the nursing home outbreaks we had back when Grandma-Killer Cuomo and other governors were sending infected patients into nursing homes, and some of it may be because Vitamin D levels are higher this time of year, and coronavirus fatalities seem closely tied to very low Vitamin D levels. Also, thanks to the marches and the general laxity that followed them, more of the infected are younger people, who typically don’t get as sick. That’s good, because it’s moving us toward herd immunity with as few fatalities as possible. But stay tuned; it’s still too early to know what’s really going on.

(2) Despite that, Israel is seeing a second wave of the same magnitude as the first, but again (tellingly) with much lower mortality than the first. Still, our country’s head of public health, Prof. Siegal Sadetski (on leave from Tel-Aviv U.’s medical school) suddenly resigned, and left a blistering public resignation letter.

In the letter sent to Health Ministry director-general Chezy Levy, she accused the government of “making frivolous and unsubstantiated decisions, without considering their widespread and long-term public health implications.” 

“Infinite time” is spent “calming the spirits” and “managing partnerships,” while the work that needs to be done in the field is relegated, Sadetsky said.

“Too much time is invested in debates, discussions, consultations and forums… while the operations and details required for the success of the various operations do not receive the proper attention,” she said, stressing that the work environment at the Health Ministry has become wrought with personal interests. 
“The [coronavirus] is a deadly, cunning and agile epidemic,” she added. “I feel with a high-level of certainty… that the coming months will be difficult and even tragic.”

[…] “Opening the education system first in a limited way and two weeks later in a sweeping way… led to widespread reinfection in Israel,” Sadetsky said. “Maintaining educational frameworks plays a major role in the ability to safeguard the economy and their importance to our children. However, in the absence of conformity to corona regulations, schools and kindergartens become fertile grounds for infection. 
“Israel opened the education system too quickly compared with most countries in the world. Without compatible conditions, education systems cannot be opened.”

“In the first phase, Israel’s achievements were reflected in the flattening of the morbidity curve, and the measures taken were inspirational and praised by other countries dealing with the plague. In contrast, the second phase was characterized by a vital but rapid and sweeping opening of the economy […] The atmosphere of illness treatment and decision-making has changed fundamentally, and the results are evident in the morbidity curve,” Sadetsky said. 
The government broke its promise of opening progressively and reviewing the impact of its decisions, continually moving forward even though the morbidity graph indicated the situation was getting worse, she said.

“The global experience in dealing with epidemics shows that actions and moves that are avoided due to the fear of difficult and painful decisions subsequently cost twice as much as making those difficult decisions,” Sadetsky wrote. “It was only last weekend that [the government] decided it was ready to return to preventative measures, which in my estimation is too little and too late.”

Another article in the Jerusalem Post (which sadly has gone downhill under its new editor) uses the term “ship without a rudder” and contrasts the clear voice with which authorities spoke during the first wave with the chaotic mess currently pertaining. 

The decision-making process is actually more complicated than the public is aware: Some decisions fall into the hands of the Health Ministry, some are the government’s and still others the Knesset’s, which means that even though the new directives were announced together, only some of them went into effect. 
“Sometimes, the directives are in the news, but they are not yet enforceable,” clarified Prof. Hagai Levine, a Hebrew University epidemiologist and chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians.

But whether the directives are enforceable or not should not be a question for the public, he said, adding: “If the risk of attending a mass wedding is high, then regardless of the law, you should not organize such a wedding.” 
Nonetheless, Levine admitted that when it is unclear to the public that the decisions made by the government are based on science, rather than pressure by the loudest interest groups, it harms public trust and makes it harder for the people to follow them.

The current national unity government with its proliferation of redundant ministerial portfolios created explicitly for coalition reasons, led to the quip “we have more ministers than patients on respirators”.

In other Israel-related COVID news, El Al, Israel’s national airline which was privatized 15 years ago, is being renationalized. The company was struggling to begin with, but now was brought to its knees like many national airlines.

(3) I’ve been wanting to do a “Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns about COVID-19” post for a while. This just-released video by Dr. John Campbell is a good starting point though.

For the impatient, there are some keyword-style talking points in the description of the video, which also links to two articles:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01315-7

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01989-z

Watch the whole video (on high-speed if need be — I often run such videos at 1.25 or 1.50 speed) but I just want to highlight one aspect I haven’t ever discussed here. 

(a) viral load (around 11 minutes into the video). Paraphrasing: Ten viral particles or so might be enough to get to the throat, but are likely to be cleared by the mucociliary system. By the time viruses from the throat infection can make it down to the lungs, the innate immune system, the rapid-response part of the body’s immune system, has mobilized. For such people, it would end with a mild case.

In contrast, you get a hundred viral particles or so, and some may make it past the mucociliary system down to the lungs before immunity has had a chance to mobilize — setting you up for pneumonia and a severe case. 

(b) genetics (about 21 minutes into the video): 4,000 people in Northern Italy who got particularly bad seem to belong to two particular gene variants. There are precedents for this in, e.g., the bacterial disease tuberculosis and the viral disease Epstein-Barr. 

BEFORE I FORGET: This other video by Dr. Campbell, which is mainly about face coverings, also has a cute memory trick for the different kinds of immunoglobulins:

IgM for iMMediate action

IgG for aGGlutinating

IgA for sAlivA, sweAt, and teArs (or mucous membrAnes)

IgE in type 1 hypersEnsitivity

COVID19 update, June 22, 2020: Is the virus weakening from a “tiger” to a “feral cat”?; EU taking a harder stance on China

(1) Italian infectious diseases specialist Prof. Matteo Bassetti, who works at the St. Martin Hospital in Genoa, makes the claim that the virus has mutated into a weaker form, reports the Daily Telegraph (among many other outlets). Here is an archive copy: http://archive.is/1EWSp

Coronavirus has downgraded from a “tiger to a wild cat” and could die out on its own without a vaccine, an infectious diseases specialist has claimed.
Prof Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the Policlinico San Martino hospital in Italy, told The Telegraph that Covid-19 has been losing its virulence in the last month and patients who would have previously died are now recovering.
[…] 
“The clinical impression I have is that the virus is changing in severity,” said Prof Bassetti.
“In March and early April the patterns were completely different. People were coming to the emergency department with a very difficult to manage illness and they needed oxygen and ventilation, some developed pneumonia.
“Now, in the past four weeks, the picture has completely changed in terms of patterns. There could be a lower viral load in the respiratory tract, probably due to a genetic mutation in the virus which has not yet been demonstrated scientifically. Also we are now more aware of the disease and able to manage it.
“It was like an aggressive tiger in March and April but now it’s like a wild cat. Even elderly patients, aged 80 or 90, are now sitting up in bed and they are breathing without help. The same patients would have died in two or three days before.
“I think the virus has mutated because our immune system reacts to the virus and we have a lower viral load now due to the lockdown, mask-wearing, social distancing. We still have to demonstrate why it’s different now.

Wishful thinking? Though this sort of thing has been known to happen in the past. Viruses that kill off their hosts quickly (such as Ebola and MERS) don’t get to spread their genome as well as those who just make their hosts sick, so there is “evolutionary pressure”, if you like. 

[UPDATE: A reader comments: “I don’t remember where I read it, but I recall a journal article from back when I was a bio/pre-nursing major that postulated that no disease with an infection mortality rate above ~5% would ever go global despite air travel, unless artificially spread, or had a crazy long (>1month) incubation period, because any bug that deadly kills enough people that the infected population ends up quarantined almost by default, no matter where. It seemed quite logical to me.”]

There is, of course, another possible explanation. Vitamin D deficiency is surprisingly prevalent in northern Italy, especially in winter. With the summer weather and people again being able to go outside — particularly indulge in the Italian pastime of sitting outside with one’s coffee and/or pasta — people may simply be less deficient and their immune systems better able to face the challenge of the virus.

The proof in the pudding would be to sequence the genome of COVID19 from this putative “new strain” and see if it really is different in anything that would affect the spike, the replicase (a.k.a, RdRp), or another part of the viral machinery. Absent that, my money is on vitamin D.

(2) Die Welt  (in German) reports on unprecedented complications in the relations between the EU and China, in the context of an EU summit meeting in Brussels on the subject.  The misinformation/Fake News campaign to diffuse the regime’s responsibility for the epidemic is one factor, the de facto abolition of Hong Kong’s internal autonomy is another. Then there are the “reshoring” efforts to bring vital production of medical supplies and PPE back to Europe in order not to be dependent on a fragile supply chain.

The article also cites measures to impede hostile takeovers of struggling companies by Chinese state-backed “bargain hunters” . 

They say about pressuring China,  “Trump does it his way, we do it our way, [albeit] less aggressive [sic].” The journalist comments that China has thus far not gotten any significant pushback for its behavior, and that pressure from European side might make them think again.

(3) The American Chemical Society has a special virtual issue on COVID-19 research across its extensive portfolio of research journals in various areas of chemistry, plus (alas) some what I shall charitably describe as “advocacy papers” and opinion pieces. But that still leaves a lot of original research papers: one that jumped out at me was this one about the role of glutathione deficiency (see our earlier blog post)

https://doi.org/10.1021/acsinfecdis.0c00288

ADDENDUM (hat tip: Mrs. Arbel). Dr. Shelton, about 15 minutes into this video, has some advice for people enhancing their vitamin D through sunbathing: “he says after sun exposure don’t shower off the body oils on large body areas … that’s where the vitamin D is still being made for a day …”

COVID19 update, June 15, 2020: Ivermectin redux; “modelers have failed’

(1) The Jerusalem Post interviews Prof. Eli Schwartz, the head of the tropical medicine department at Tel HaShomer hospital in the Tel Aviv borough of Ramat-Gan (one of the “Big Four” research and teaching hospitals in Israel, together with Sourasky/Ichilov in central Tel Aviv, Hadassah in suburban Jerusalem, and Rambam/Maimonides in Haifa) about a drug repurposing study involving ivermectin (an antithelmintic/anti-worm drug familiar to veterinarians and travelers to tropical countries, but not to most physicians in Western countries.

The discoverers of this drug shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. With the discoverers of the next-generation antimalarial artemisinin. An Australian study, part of an effort to find repurposeable already-approved drugs, found a few months ago that ivermectin liquidates the virus in vitro (i.e., in a test tube), which prompted several clinical trials:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

Here is a preprint about a retrospective, open-label study in several Dade County, FL hospitals (i.e., the Miami area):

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.06.20124461v2

280 patients with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection (mean age 59.6 years [standard deviation 17.9], 45.4% female), of whom 173 were treated with ivermectin and 107 were [given] usual care were reviewed. 27 identified patients were not reviewed due to multiple admissions, lack of confirmed COVID results during hospitalization, age less than 18, pregnancy, or incarceration.

Univariate analysis showed lower mortality in the ivermectin group (15.0 % versus 25.2%, OR 0.52, 95% CI 0.29-0.96, P=.03). Mortality was also lower among 75 patients with severe pulmonary disease treated with ivermectin (38.8% vs 80.7%, OR 0.15, CI 0.05-0.47, P=.001), but there was no significant difference in successful extubation rates (36.1% vs 15.4%, OR 3.11 (0.88-11.00), p=.07). After adjustment for between-group differences and mortality risks, the mortality difference remained significant for the entire cohort (OR 0.27, CI 0.09-0.85, p=.03; HR 0.37, CI 0.19-0.71, p=.03)

In plain English, p=0.03 means there’s a 3% chance that the difference is due to coincidence, while p=0.001 means there is just one chance in a thousand this is a coincidence. 

Considering this is a cheap and widely available drug, this sounds like great news.

(2) In a blog post at the IIF (International Institute of Forecasters), Prof. John Ioannides of Stanford and two colleagues from Northwestern U. and U. of Sydney say bluntly “Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed”. They go on to analyze the failures in detail and to conjecture reasons for them — which go further and deeper than “fog of war”. Read the whole thing — I can’t do it justice with selective quoting. Just a taste:

Failure in epidemic forecasting is an old problem. In fact, it is surprising that epidemic forecasting has retained much credibility among decision-makers, given its dubious track record. Modeling for swine flu predicted 3,100-65,000 deaths in the UK [11]. Eventually only 457 deaths occurred [12]. The prediction for foot-and-mouth disease expected up to 150,000 deaths in the UK [13] and led to slaughtering millions of animals. However, the lower bound of the prediction was as low as only 50 deaths [13], a figure close to the eventual fatalities. Predictions may work in “ideal”, isolated communities with homogeneous populations, not the complex current global world.[…]

Let’s be clear: even if millions of deaths did not happen this season, they may happen in the next wave, next season, or with some new virus in the future. A doomsday forecast may come handy to protect civilization, when and if calamity hits. However, even then, we have little evidence that aggressive measures which focus only on few dimensions of impact actually reduce death toll and do more good than harm. We need models which incorporate multicriteria objective functions. Isolating infectious impact, from all other health, economy and social impacts is dangerously narrow-minded. More importantly, with epidemics becoming easier to detect, opportunities for declaring global emergencies will escalate. Erroneous models can become powerful, recurrent disruptors of life on this planet. Civilization is threatened from epidemic incidentalomas.

(3) In brief:

• A 26-year old without pre-existing conditions got Kawasaki’s Disease as a COVID-19 complication and this became our youngest victim 
• Beijing reinstates lockdowns following resurgence
• As Americans return to offices after long lockdowns, they are told to beware of Legionella in stagnant water (h/t: littleoldlady)
• Of the Israelis laid off due to COVID-19, about two-thirds are still drawing unemployment benefits, the remaining third are working again 
• FDA pulls emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine, just as De Standaard (in Dutch) reports that it was used, open-label, on at least 5,000 COVID-19 patients in Belgium
• The paper also includes a brief piece on ’the druid” Prof. Didier Raoult, the French tropical medicine institute director who’s been plugging his treatment with HOcq, zinc, and azithromycine. Raoult is portrayed there as a hero of the political right (un soupir de lassitude cosmique/sigh of cosmic weariness) — especially after the right-wing mayor of Marseiile got better from COVID-19 under Raoult’s treatment.

COVID19 update, June 7, 2020: Do-it-yourself COVID-19 tests found to be more accurate as well as comfortable; Israeli study confirms protective effect of smoking?!; “half of colleges may close in the next 5-10 years”

(1) Via Instapundit, a popular writeup of a study that found samples acquired by the patients themselves were more accurate than the usual deep nasal and pharyngeal swabs, and not just more comfortable. Besides, they are less likely to expose healthcare personnel, as deep sampling often causes sneezing, coughing, and gagging.

I should perhaps clarify here that the accuracy-limiting factor of RT-PCR testing, at this point, is not the testing apparatus at all (with lab-prepared samples, accuracy approaches 100%) but the sampling technique.

 

The original scientific article about the study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine: http://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMc2016321

Here is an animation of how, once the sample has been acquired, RT-PCR testing works in the lab.

 

(2) There were several reports that, counterintuitively, smokers were underrepresented among COVID19 positive cases. Now in https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.01.20118877v2.full.pdf is an intriguing large-sample study from doctors associated with Clalit Health Services, the largest HMO in Israel which has about 3 million patients in its central database. [Full disclosure: we are insured through a competitor. All four authorized HMOs operate such databases—unlike with Surgiscape, I have every reason to believe these data are kosher.]

As of the cutoff date (May 16), over 145,000 adults insured with Clalit underwent RT-PCR testing for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),  3.3% of which tested positive. After discarding cases aged under 18 and over 95, as well as those where it was unknown whether they smoked or not, the authors were left with 4,235 positive tests and 124,192 negative. Out of the latter, they randomly selected a control sample of 20,755 patients (5x as many) that matched statistical make-up of the positive sample in terms of gender, age distribution, and ethnosocial group — Jewish Orthodox, Arab, General(mostly Jewish non-Orthodox).

Guess what: Statistically, 9.8% of the  COVID19 positive cases smoke currently, one-half the percentage in the control group 18.2%. Because of the large sample size, p<0.001, i.e., the probability that this result could have arisen from “the luck of the draw” is less than 0.1%. There was no significant difference for past smokers (11.6 vs. 12.9%) — it’s definitely got something to do with current smokers (nicotine or some other component of tobacco smoke).

Of the COVID19-positive tests, 1.8% deceased, 2.0% hospitalized in severe condition, 4.0% in moderate condition, 15.0% in mild condition, the remaining 77.2% did not require hospitalization. There was no significant correlation between the degree of severity and the patient’s smoking status.

Changeux et al11, relying on similar observations, propose a crucial role for the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) in COVID-19 pathology. According to their neurotropic hypothesis, SARS-CoV-2 invades the central nervous system through the nAChR receptor, present in neurons of the olfactory system, as reflected by the frequent occurrence of neurologic symptoms, such as loss of smell or taste, or intense fatigue in patients affected by COVID-19. Other mechanisms may also affect SARS-CoV-2 infection potential in smokers. It is widely accepted that the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) represents the main receptor molecule for SARS-CoV-2, and smoking has been shown to differentially affect ACE2 expression in tissues12–14. Other putative explanations could involve altered cytokine expression such as IL-6, for which increased levels are associated with unfavorable disease outcome14,15.

 

 

(3) Business school professor admits that as many as half of tier-2 colleges will be gone in the next 5-10 years. This was a bubble waiting to burst anyway: the COVID-19 crisis and the attendant shift to online learning is just precipitating the burst, the way Amazon and online shopping more generally were the downfall of many a brick-and-mortar store.

(4) This is the sort of behavior that makes me cringe in embarrassment for my profession. True scientists follow the facts wherever they lead, and seek the truth wherever it may be found. Political hacks exist in every profession — but they are especially grating in ours. And when the public loses all faith in us because of such politicized hacks, it will be blamed on “anti-science” and anti-intellectualism.

 

COVID 19 update, June 5, 2020: ex-MI6 chief drops bombshell; “chaos disguised as strategy”; Trump admin selects shortlist of five vaccine candidates

(1) The former head of MI6 (the UK’s foreign intelligence service — its CIA if you like), Richard Dearlove, says flat-out COVID-19 was engineered in a Chinese lab but escaped from there. 

He continues:

Although he did not believe that the Chinese released the virus intentionally, Sir Richard told the Telegraph that the Chinese regime handled the outbreak very differently from the way a Western government might have dealt with it, and that the incident should be a wake-up call for the rest of the world on underestimating the scope of Chinese global ambitions. 
“Look at the stories… of the attempts by the leadership to lockdown any debate about the origins of the pandemic and the way that people have been arrested or silenced,” he said. “I mean, we shouldn’t really have any doubt any longer about what we’re dealing with. 
“Of course, the Chinese must have felt, well, if they’ve got to suffer a pandemic maybe we shouldn’t try too hard to stop, as it were, our competitors suffering the same disadvantages we’ve got. 
“Look, the Chinese understand us extremely well. They have made a study of us over the last decade or longer, particularly through attending our universities. We understand the Chinese very poorly. It’s an imbalanced relationship in that respect.” 
Australia has been taking the lead on pushing for an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” of the global response to COVID-19, an ambition which was agreed to by the World Health Organization in late May. China launched cyberattacks and trade restrictions against the Antipodean state in response. 
“I think it’s very courageous of the Australians to take China on,” Sir Richard said. “I mean, there’s an obvious, huge imbalance in terms of power, both economic and military and political, but they are showing the way. You have to have a critical relationship with China.” 
He urged the British authorities to do the same, calling for the government to scrap plans to place the construction of Britain’s new 5G network in the hands of Chinese telecoms firm Huawei, and to reduce reliance on Chinese-made personal protective equipment for health workers. 
“We need to go into reverse,” he said. “It’s important that we do not put any of our critical infrastructure in the hands of Chinese interests. So telecommunications, Huawei, nuclear power stations, and then things that, you know, we require and need in a crisis, like PPE.” 
“We have allowed China so much rope that we are now suffering the consequences, and it’s time to pull the rope in and to tighten the way we do business. It’s very, very important that we keep a keen eye on this and do not allow the Chinese to, as it were, benefit strategically from this situation that has been imposed on all of us.”

Wow.  

(2) Die Welt (in German) continues to pour withering criticism on the Swedish sonderweg. They call it “chaos disguised as strategy” (Chaos getarnt als Strategie). Private corporations are now stepping up with immunity testing for pay. Due to high demand, they had to limit their offerings to Sweden’s two largest cities, Stockholm (by far hardest hit) and Göteborg, but other companies are looking to fill the void. 

Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Prof. Anders Tegnell, gave a remarkably self-critical interview on Swedish radio: “Too many have died too soon”. He regrets not having been more proactive to protect the most vulnerable. My translation (2nd hand via German): “I believe there is definite room for improvement in what we ‘ve been doing in Sweden, of course., And it would have been good if we’d known more precisely what to close to prevent infection spread.” Also, he said, if we’d encountered the same epidemic but with the knowledge we have today, then the correct course in his opinion lay intermediate between the road Sweden took and what the rest of the world did. “Unambiguously, we could have done better in Sweden, I believe.”

(3) Operation Warp Speed, an initiative of the White House, selected a shortlist of five vaccine candidates for mass manufacturing in the US

The five vaccines include Moderna’s mRNA1273, currently in phase 2 trials; AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s AZD1222, now in clinical trials at multiple UK sites; a candidate from Johnson & Johnson; a Merck vaccine based on that company’s successful Ebola vaccine; and Pfizer and BioNTech‘s BNT162.

The accelerated programs are funded through $10 billion from Congress and $3 billion directed for National Institutes of Health (NIH) research.

Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he was confident more than one COVID-19 vaccine would prove effective in a reasonable period of time.

Francis Collins, MD, NIH director, said some vaccine candidates will be ready for large-scale testing as soon as the beginning of July. The phase 3 trials would involve as many as 30,000 volunteers for each candidate vaccine, with half the volunteers receiving a placebo, Collins told National Public Radio.

If successful, this will be the most rapid vaccine development program in history.

 

ADDENDUM: GenomeWeb reports that another Surgiscape-sourced paper, in the New England Journal of Medicine, has now been retracted. 

The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have retracted two COVID-19 papers because of questions regarding the data used in the studies. The papers were both previously the subject of expressions of concern.

The now-retracted Lancet paper had reported that the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine may increase the risk of death among COVID-19 patients, while the now-retracted NEJM paper noted that though cardiovascular disease increases someone’s risk of dying from COVID-19, ACE inhibitors did not increase that risk.

Both studies relied on a database run by Surgisphere, which said it had detailed data on about 100,000 COVID-19 patients from 1,200 hospitals around the world, but as the New York Times noted earlier this week, clinicians and medical researchers have raised concerns about the data it houses.

The authors of the Lancet study who were not associated with Surgisphere noted in the expression of concern that they would be seeking an independent audit of the data. However, in the retraction notice, they wrote that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset to its independent reviewers, citing client agreements and confidentiality. Because of this, the Lancet notes in a statement that three of the four authors — the fourth author being Surgisphere chief executive Sapan Desai — said they “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.” 

The NEJM retraction notice similarly says that the authors, this time including Desai, could not “validate the primary data sources” and requested a retraction.

COVID19 update, May 30, 2020: Fang Fang’s “Wuhan Diary”

The Chinese novelist Fang Fang has lived most of her life in Wuhan, going back to the days before the Cultural Revolution. Until her retirement, she used to be the provincial chair of the Chinese Writers Association. 

(Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, was originally three separate cities named Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, all lying on the confluence of the Han and Yangtze rivers.)

When it became clear that an epidemic was breaking out, she started writing diary entries and posting them  on Chinese social media. They quickly acquired a following in the millions, despite furious attempts of online censors to airbrush them away. By the time the lockdowns on Wuhan were lifted, the combined diary had reached book length.  

Now translations in both English and German have come out. I read the English translation, which is available on Amazon. The rating is dragged down by a number of 1-star reviews posted by obvious “50-Cent Army” troll reviewers. So I decided to read the book for myself.

I warmly recommend it, despite its high price ($19.99). It is a unique first-person document by an articulate person with lots of contacts, including in the medical system.

It seems that the Wuhan residents were just as bamboozled by the ChiCom regime as the West. Doctors at the Central Hospital apparently realized early on that they were not just dealing with a new SARS-like infection, but that it was contagious person-to-person. After attempted whistleblower  Dr. Li Wenliang was strong-armed by the police into confessing he had been spreading false news, the others apparently restricted themselves to quietly warning each other. Yet officials eventually realized something was up and organized a high-level meeting on the 14th, which ended inconclusively. Even the Chinese New Year celebration was allowed to proceed.

She tells numerous stories of friends, acquaintances, and relatives who succumbed to the disease — many of them surprisingly young. Many medical personnel (including Li Wenliang) were among the early casualties, but also such people as journalists and cameramen.

She also relates the harrowing period where the local medical system was overwhelmed and patients would die while waiting to be admitted. This was a brief situation, alleviated when medical personnel and supplies started flowing in from other parts of China. 

She highlights the inventiveness of the locals in coping with the lockdowns and the attendant logistical problems. For example, as trying to shop individually was problematic (you were allowed out of your apartment complex once every 3 days) and often stores could not handle the flood of calls, an informal association of residents would collect orders, place a centralized bulk order, then distribute the ordered grocery parcels, at first by placing them in the building’s courtyard, then by placing them in buckets lowered from the windows of residents.

Food donations from other parts of China were apparently abundant enough that distributing them before they spoiled became a problem. She proposed a surprisingly (or not) “capitalist” solution: deliver to grocery stores (who have the storage and the delivery network in place), and let them resell at highly discounted prices meant to cover their distribution costs. 

While she affirmed the necessity of a strict lockdown, she highlights a number of instances where unthinking and callous enforcement of the letter of regulations, with no room for common sense, led to suffering and deaths. (One example that stands out in my mind was a special-needs child left to fend for itself when its father was placed in isolation. Another was a married couple stuck on a bridge between two boroughs because the two spouses had residence permits for opposite banks of the river.) 

“People often have reasons that they use to describe their actions, such as “we were just carrying out written directives.” But reality is filled with all kinds of unpredictable changes, whereas written directives are often prepared hastily with only broad guidelines. Moreover, those written directives are mostly composed with common sense in mind, so they are usually not in direct contradiction with the basic principles of humanitarianism. All we need is for the people assigned to enforce these principles to have just a little more humanistic spirit; just enough so that a driver who had been stuck out on the highways for more than 20 days wouldn’t end up with his life in danger; just enough so that when someone is infected with coronavirus, a crowd of people doesn’t end up sealing their front door with a steel rod so that everyone is locked inside; just enough so that when an adult is forced into mandatory quarantine, their children don’t end up starving to death alone at home. That is all I am asking for.”

Some of her tales will sound familiar — for example, how the suspension of all non-emergency medical services at the height of the epidemic led to other medical problems being neglected (e.g., dialysis and chemotherapy cases). (Apparently she and two of her siblings are diabetic, and the siblings have additional chronic medical problems, so this is something they experienced first-hand. Her ex-husband caught COVID but survived.) 

She also described, via her medical contacts, that mortality at the hospitals decreased once the capacity crunch was over and the doctors had refined their treatment protocols. She mentions remdesivir being applied with some success: non-intubated patients were also often treated with traditional Chinese remedies alongside Western medicine. She herself took various herbal potions in an attempt to boost her immune system. 

Telling it like it is, warts and all, earned her enemies, and even death threats.

“Today there is something I want to get off my chest that has been weighing on me for a long time: Those ultra-leftists in China are responsible for causing irreparable harm to the nation and the people. All they want to do is return to the good old days of the Cultural Revolution and reverse all the Reform Era policies. Anyone with an opinion that differs from their own is regarded as their enemy. They behave like a pack of thugs, attacking anyone who fails to cooperate with them, launching wave after wave of attacks. They spray the world with their violent, hate-filled language and often resort to even more despicable tactics, so base that it almost defies understanding.”

In a footnote, she explains that by ultra-leftists she means ultra-Maoist nostalgics for the Cultural Revolution era, opposed to the reformist polices introduced by Deng Xiaoping.  These people report her posts on the Chinese Twitter-clone and managed to get her account blocked a number of times.

In this atmosphere, newspapers practice self-censorship. She highlights the story of a man who left a testament of 11 word, “I donate my body to the state… what about my wife?” where the newspaper would only highlight the first seven words as concern for his surviving spouse was apparently not worthy of sharing the limelight with his selfless devotion to the state.

(She does mention that autopsies of people like that man were invaluable in helping doctors understand what they were dealing with, notably the ARDS.)

The party leadership and officialdom — well, let me quote her:

“The world of officialdom is filled with people who have never learned a damn thing in their entire lives, but one thing they have mastered is the art of putting on a show; and they have ways to deal with you that you would have never imagined even existed. Their ability to shirk responsibility is also second to none; if they didn’t have a good foundation in all these worthless skills, this outbreak would have never grown into the large-scale calamity that it is today.”

She mentions that three groups of specialists had come to visit during the earlier stages of the outbreak. The first two had accepted the claim that no person-to-person transmission took place, but the leader of the 3rd group —  one Dr. Zhong Nanshan, who had earned his spurs in managing the original SARS outbreak — did not take no for an answer. Under insistent questioning, it was admitted that a patient had infected 14 others, and he announced on January 20 that person-to-person transmission did take place. By then, of course, precious time had been lost.

 

 

 

 

COVID19 update, May 10, 2020: more on COVID19 outbreaks at German meat processing plants; BND drops bombshell about China and WHO; miscellaneous updates

(1) COVID19 outbreaks at meat processing plants are not just a US phenomenon anymore. Apropos the report yesterday of large outbreaks at two such plants at opposite ends of Germany (here and here, both articles in German): it was pointed out that many at these plants are foreign workers living in very tight quarters. But in addition, a friend who is a Ph.D. biologist as well as a volunteer EMT responded: “Meat packing is one of those physical jobs (so high respiration rate) which happens in close quarters, in a cool and air[-conditioned] environment. Most other airconditioned environments are probably not so close together and/or do not involve the level of physical labor. The other possible idea is that meat surfaces and the aerosols generated cutting with band-saws might be a good place for the virus to survive and thrive.”

(2) RedState, quoting German weekly Der Spiegel, has a bombshell: The BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst or Federal Intelligence Serivce, Germany’s equivalent of the CIA — in a report that is otherwise critical of Trump— says the following (my translation from the original German):

“Nevertheless, to the BND’s knowledge, China urged the World Health Organization (WHO) at the highest level to delay a global warning after the outbreak of the virus. On 21st January China’s Head of State Xi Jinping, during a telephone conversation with WHO leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, asked the WHO to withhold information on human-to-human transmission and to delay a pandemic warning. According to the BND, China’s information policy has resulted in the loss of four to six weeks worldwide to fight the virus.” [*]

Confirmation of what was obvious to many of us.

(3) Miscellaneous updates:

• must-read from Matt Ridley: “We need data, not models”
• The COVID19 riddle: why does the virus wallop some places and spare others?
• Daily Telegraph: right to work from home could be enshrined in law in the UK following the COVID19 crisis
• a model (yes, I know) by scientists at UC Berkeley and in Hong Kong purports to show that universal mask wearing is more effective at curbing COVID19 than all other social distancing measures put together. And without a doubt, it’s infinitely less costly to economy and people’s economic future than indefinite lockdowns.
• a study from Northwestern University adds to the mounting evidence for Vitamin D deficiency as causing vulnerability to COVID19 infection
• Trump: US federal government to buy $3B worth of agricultural products from farmers to distribute as food aid.
• Powerline compares Norway’s COVID19 response to next-door Sweden’s, and the comparison at this point does not favor Sweden.
• Jerusalem’s deputy mayor in an interview on attempts to revive the city’s tourism industry by marketing to domestic tourists unable to go on vacations abroad (or unable to afford them even if planes were flying). She cites the mayor of Cordoba, Spain, as having developed a similar strategy.

{*] original wording: “Nach Erkenntnissen des BND drängte China die Weltgesundheitsorganisation WHO allerdings nach dem Ausbruch des Virus auf höchster Ebene dazu, eine weltweite Warnung zu verzögern. Am 21. Januar habe Chinas Staatschef Xi Jinping bei einem Telefonat mit WHO-Chef Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gebeten, Informationen über eine Mensch-zu-Mensch-Übertragung zurückzuhalten und eine Pandemiewarnung zu verschleppen. [new paragraph] Nach Einschätzung des BND sind durch die Informationspolitik Chinas weltweit vier bis sechs Wochen für die Bekämpfung des Virus verloren gegangen.”

UPDATE: via masgramondou, a second analysis of Neil Ferguson’s COVID19 model code that is even “better” (ahem) than the first. I’ve encountered enough modeler hubris in my day job that I believe I recognize it when I see it.

COVID19 update, April 25, 2020: doctor videos edition

Good morning, happy weekend, shabbat shalom. In today’s update, mostly videos, which I’m linking rather than embedding (as a workaround for a WordPress dot com editor bug).

(1) Mike Hansen MD reviews COVID19 drug trials. He’s bearish on HOcq (2/10) but surprisingly bullish on ARBs (angiotensin II receptor blockers, 7/10) and to a lesser extent ACE inhibitors (5/10), both types of drugs in established use as antihypertensives. For remdesivir: great results in Chicago leaked, less so in Mass (7/10). Favipiravir [sold in Japan as AVIGAN as an anti-influenza drug] targets RdRp (6/10). IL-6 inhibitors:  tocilizumab (approved for managing cytokine storm, used in severe RA and in immunotherapy complications): expensive, potent immunosuppressants (5/10).  

His top 5: Recombinant ACE2 (8/10); ARBs tied with remdesivir (7/10) and favipiravir/Avigan (7/10); Umifenovir/Arbidol (6/10)

(2) Via reader Dawn Miller, a two-part interview by a local ABC affiliate with Dr. Dan Erickson, operator and chief physician of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, CA. Among many other things, he is saying that, at least at this point, the lockdown in CA is doing much more harm than the disease itself.

• Part 1 (bulk of the interview)
• Part 2 (Q&A segment after length limit reached)

On a tangentially related note, a medical source in Belgium told me that, while they never did the “shut everything down to make room for COVID19 patients” thing, they notice a steep drop in patients coming in with suspected cardiovascular and cerebrovascular complaints, and like their German colleagues, they can’t believe “heart attacks and strokes are suddenly 30% less frequent”. They believe they’ll have huge “medical cleanup bills” on deferred care cases. He also told me that in the grey area of urgency, access to care can be problematic: he gave the concrete example of a tooth abscess in an elderly patient with a pacemaker. As pericarditis is a not-uncommon complication of dental surgery in such “risk patients”, he referred the octogenarian to an oral surgeon at the local hospital — but the department was closed due to COVID19. “Just take antibiotics.”

(4) Miscellanea:

• U. of Washington doing new hydroxychloroquine trial, but now seeing if it can stop mild cases from becoming severe;
• (h/t: Erik Wingren) fatal strokes showing up in young coronavirus patients?! (WaPo; archive) We know (see, e.g., Dr. Seheult’s video I’ve been linking) that blood clotting in the lungs is one phenomenon occurring during severe COVID19, hence prophylaxis regimes of some doctors include mild anticoagulants/antithrombotics like low(ish)-dose aspirin. Note that at least here, many doctors start prescribing the latter to patients for cardio- and cerebrovascular prophylaxis when the patients reach their fifties: these younger patients would not yet have been on them.
• Marc Andreessen  [of Mosaic/Netscape fame, and now Andreessen Horowitz]: It’s Time To Build
• Belgium update: politicians accelerate the unlock time table, reports De Standaard (in Dutch): the 2nd phase has been moved from May 18 to May 11.
• A community immunity testing effort by the University of Geneva Hospital is reported on here (in French). More later perhaps on this, but as of April 17, they found that 5.5% of testing subjects had antibodies for COVID19. Again we see a very substantial Dunkelziffer/”dark number”/stealth infection rate: on the same day, total known COVID19 cases accounted for just 0.3% of the Swiss population, though I don’t have numbers for Geneva specifically.
• DIE WELT (in German) reports on the situation in the mostly-immigrant Paris suburbs of the 93rd Département, where workers in both the formal and “informal” economies have been pushed out of work. Even the Préfect (chief administrator of a Département, somwhere between a County Judge and a Governor in US parlance) takes seriously the possibility of food riots.

UPDATE: via David S. Bernstein, a profile of Stanford statistician John Ioannides (WSJ behind paywall, archive copy here).

Operation Eclipse: How Churchill and Canadian troops saved Denmark from Stalin in the last days of World War Two

Mark Felton just posted a video about a fascinating episode in the last days of WW II

Mark Felton video about Operation Eclipse

View the whole thing. But here is a quick summary:

At Yalta, the Elbe River had been the agreed-upon demarcation line between the Red Army and the Western allies. On April 25, 1945, the Red Army and the US Army had met at Torgau on the Elbe, effectively cutting what remained of the “Thousand-Year” Reich into two.

Winston Churchill, however, feared that if the Russians were allowed to reach the Elbe river in the North, they would be able to march into Schleswig-Holstein and thence into Denmark — adding that to their growing inventory of Soviet satellite states.

So a group of Canadian paratroopers was sent on a deep-penetration raid across the Elbe to capture and hold the Baltic port of Wismar, and block the Soviet advance there. The Canadians encountered negligible resistance — instead, they ran into thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers eager to surrender to the Western Allies. In order not to be slowed down in their advance, the Canadians disarmed the soldiers and sent them on an unaccompanied march toward the Elbe, while they continued.

Eventually they made their objective. Shortly after they had occupied the town (against no resistance other than sporadic sniper fire), advance scouts for a Red Army tank column showed up — they were headed for the Hanseatic city of Lübeck — confirming Churchills’s suspicions, as Lübeck was the Eastern gateway to Schleswig-Holstein and then Denmark.

An uneasy standoff ensued, but no open hostilities. Of course the Canadians had to be withdrawn just days later — but their maneuver had bought Montgomery and Churchill enough time to accept the surrender of the remaining German forces in Northern Germany and in Denmark.

This was not the most glamorous or heroic operation of WW II — but it achieved an important objective, and materially affected the power relationships between NATO and the USSR in years to come. And, of course, it spared the Danes from life as a Soviet satellite.

Two cheers for Winston, and for Canadian paratroopers! And thanks to Mark Felton for sharing this unknown but important tale with us.

UPDATE: more on Operation Eclipse here: https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/world-war-two-and-eastern-europe/operation-eclipse/

Gestapo-NKVD contacts in occupied Poland, 1939-1941

Anybody with a passing familiarity with WW II knows of the Molotov-Ribbentrop “Non-Aggression Pact” between Nazi Germany and the USSR, as well as of its secret annex in which the two competing totalitarian collectivisms divided up Poland between them, roughly on the Curzon Line that was later to be the basis for the postwar Polish-Soviet border.[*]

Received wisdom among many people has it that neither side was sincere in this pact; that Nazi Germany intended to invade the USSR already then (there is no doubt that Hitler y”sh dreamed of “Lebensraum” in the East since the 1920s — the debate is only about when this turned from pipedream to concrete objective); and that Stalin y”sh was trying to buy time, as he’d killed off roughly 90% of general officers and 50% of regimental officers in the Great Purge.

However, during the nearly two years between the 1939 pact and Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the USSR), a level of Nazi-Soviet cooperation existed that is hard to square with the notion of a “cold peace”. Diplomatic correspondence has been released online as part of the Avalon Project, and makes for some “interesting” reading: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/nazsov.asp

But something that astonished even this writer was the level of coordination and cooperation that appeared to exist between the Gestapo and the NKVD as regards the Polish population in their respective areas of recognizance. Wikipedia has a surprisingly detailed article on the subject, both in English and in German: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo–NKVD_conferences

A first meeting took place at Brzesc (Brest-Litovsk) on Sep. 27, 1939 (while fighting was still going on). According to understandings reached, almost 42,500 Polish POWs were handed over to the Nazis by the USSR. Both sides expected Polish resistance to emerge and discussed ways to suppress it.

A second meeting on these reportedly took place in late November 1939 at Przemysl (later the site of Albert Battel’s heroic rescue attempt), a city that straddled the Bug river along which the Curzon Line ran in that area, and hence was split between the occupiers.

The best-known meeting is the third, starting Feb. 20, 1940, in the south Polish mountain resort of Zakopane. The name of the Nazi German representative was none other than Adolf Eichmann (y”sh). According to some sources, notably Armia Krajowa (Home Army) commander Tadeusz “Bor” Komorowski, a followup meeting with NKVD representatives took place at Krakow in March 1940.

What we do know is that, with apparent mutual coordination, twin massacres of the Polish intelligentsia took place: the Intelligenzaktion (intelligentia action) and subsequent AB-Aktion (Ausserordentliche Befriedigungsaktion, Extraordinary Pacification Action) in the Nazi sector, and the Katyn massacres of Polish officer POWs held by the Soviets. (Katyn lies near Smolensk, Russia.)

The USSR also deported between 300K and 1M Polish nationals to Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan. Following Operation Barbarossa and a July 1941 treaty with the Polish Government in exile, this group at least benefited from an amnesty. Polish General Wladyslaw Anders recruited an army from among them and evacuated its soldiers and civilian relatives via Iran. Mortality during this evacuation was high as well, not even counting the Poles who had died in the Gulag.

In one of those ironies of history that would look absurd in fiction, the Katyn execution site was essentially next door to where Army Group Center had its headquarters. Its chief intelligence officer, Col. Rudolf Freiherr [=Baron] von Gersdorff, had been tipped off as early as August 1942 about rumors among Polish forced laborers on the site and at a railway line. On March 21, 1943, Gersdorff, a core member of the anti-Hitler conspirators around operations officer Col. Henning von Tresckow, had attempted a suicide bombing on Hitler and most of the Nazi top at a memorial ceremony in Berlin. Irony of ironies, shortly after Gersdorff’s return to his post, laborers discovered the Katyn burial site, and it was Gersdorff who would oversee autopsies (first by a German coroner, later by Swiss and other neutral pathologists), and host war correspondents, Red Cross representatives, and even Polish clergy at the killing site. I can only imagine the emotional anguish of being whipsawed between two mass-murderous dictatorships in this manner. That the massacre was grist on the mill of Goebbels (y”sh) did not make it any less real. Soviet propaganda tried to blame the massacres on the Nazis — but while there were plenty of real massacres to blame them for, the time frame did not work for this one. Ammunition offered no “smoking gun” – the men had been killed with single neck shots from German-made Walther pistols. Autopsy revealed the corpses had been killed about a year before Barbarossa. While the Walthers did impart a measure of plausible deniability, the main reason appears to have been that they were the “tool of choice” of the NKVD’s chief executioner Vassily Blokhin, who considered Soviet-made pistols too unreliable.[**] About 90% of the Katyn victims were ethnic Poles; most of the remainder were Jews, including the Chief Military Rabbi Baruch Steinberg.

Picture the same basic product, like a smartphone operating system, but with two different design philosophies and diverging in details of implementation. The more I learn about Bolshevism and National Socialism, the more I think of them not as “opposites” but as the iOS and the Android operating systems of totalitarian collectivism.

“That old saw about, ‘to understand all is to forgive all’, is a load of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.”

Robert A. Heinlein, “Starship Troopers”

[*] Post-1945, Stalin would “compensate” his own satellite state with German lands to the East of the Oder-Neisse line—Pomerania, Silesia, etc.

[**] Blokhin has the “distinction” of being listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most prolific executioner in history: during Katyn alone, he personally shot a total of 7,000 men over a 4-week period, at a rate of about one per three minutes.

Critical praise for “Operation Flash, Ep. 2”

From Pat Patterson’s long review on GoodReads:

I obtained this book through the Kindle Unlimited program.

When the series was introduced, it immediately was placed into my “Guilty Pleasures” category. A book in that category gets read, IMMEDIATELY, regardless of what else I’ve had in the queue ahead of it, and also regardless of whether or not I’m being at all diligent in in reviewing the books I have actually read. 
I don’t like talking about the fact that I have a Guilty Pleasure category. In fact, I plan to deny having such a category in all future conversations. Here’s the take-away: I absolutely LOVE this series. 

Just in case you missed my review of the first book, here’s the basic idea: one of the very many plots against Hitler actually succeeded.[…] the Allies are thrown into confusion that nearly matches that of the German leadership. Nobody is certain who they can trust, and how far.

This is not a criticism, not a criticism, not a criticism! The books end too soon.
That is SIGNIFICANTLY ameliorated by the fact that these books are so historically sound in their basis, that if you are like me, and love going on rabbit trails when your curiosity is triggered, you can spend a LOT of time reading about the way history worked out in OUR timeline. Almost all of the characters are based on real people; they make for fascinating reading. 
If the author had just used hand puppets, and told the story with them, it would still be a really nice thought-exercise of ‘what-if.’ However, through the eyes of the few fictional characters, we get great insights to the way people think, and what would have been real reactions to these circumstances, because the author has done a wonderful job of making the words on the page into real, flesh-and-blood people.

I’m going to eat each of these installments as they come out, BUT the real feast will be when the series is finished (and I hope that isn’t going to be too soon), and I grab up every installment and binge-read. Maybe multiple times.

Delightful!

The book is available for $0.99 on Kindle, or is included with your subscription for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Guest post at According To Hoyt: “Brahmandarins”

Sarah A. Hoyt asked me to contribute a guest post about “The Brahmandarins”, a term which I coined in the wake of the 2016 elections.
In this guest post, I touch briefly on the Brahmin caste in India, but at greater length on the Mandarins of ancient China, the Imperial Examination system by which they were recruited, the reason the once venerable institution decayed, and its parallels with the transnational New Class, “expert class”, or “credentialed gentry” of today’s West.

Read more at:

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/10/08/brahmandarins-guest-post-by-nitay-arbel/

PS: a related post by Eric Raymond on “Escalating complexity and the collapse of elite authority” is perhaps an enlightening companion read.

To my Jewish readers: Shana Tova uGmar Chatima Tova!

Midterm blue ripple, or midterm purple muddle

The 2018 midterm elections are mostly in. As usually happens in midterm elections, there was a loss in the house for the incumbent party.

But a “blue wave”? More like a purple muddle, or a “purple puddle”, as Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds called it in USA Today.

In the house, the D got 220 seats vs. 199, with another 16 races not yet called. One of these leans R, and five more are toss-ups. FiveThirtyEight predicts eventually 34 seats will flip control. (One district, MN-8, bucked the trend by flipping D to R.)

In the Senate, something quite different happened. The GOP actually strengthened its hold there: at present, the balance is 52:45 and three races not yet called. Of those, Mississippi is headed for a runoff election, McSally leads “The Cinema Show” (or the Synema Chow?) by just under a percent with 3/4 of votes called, and Rosendale actually is leading  Jon Tester (with 84% of votes in). Let’s call it 54±1 R, 46±1 D.

A mixed bag also in the gubernatorial races. The saddest defeat, to me, was Scott Walker in WI, tempered by the good news in some other states like GA.

 

There are two basic ways to spin this cat (ahem), depending on where you come from::

Either that Trump threw himself in front of the “blue wave” and blunted it, if not outright turned it into a purple muddle.

Or that the “blue wave” did emerge and the Dems would have taken the Senate as well — if they hadn’t snatched defeat from the jaws of victory there by going for broke on Kavanaugh.

But there is no way the Democrats can spin this as an undivided victory. Will they be sobered by this and at least pay lip service to “working with the other side”? Sure, and I can get you a yuuuuge deal on some beachfront land in Nebraska.

Finally, while my dog would have made a more coherent representative than Occasional Cortex (or, as Ace calls her, “Loopy Ocasio Fiasco”), the scandalous disenfranchisement of Female Canine Americans continues unabated.

Disturbed, “Savior of nothing”

After a three-year hiatus except for a mind-blowing cover of “The Sound of Silence”, the new Disturbed album is out. It’s got the trademark sound: David Draiman’s powerful yet melodic vocals, crunching guitars blended with bits of electronics, … The iron-strong opener “Are you ready” sets the tone.

But lyrically, the message of one track stands out. It hardly needs explaining what this is about.

 

Now you’ve become
Everything you claim to fight
Through your need to feel you’re right
You’re the savior of nothing now

When you were a young one, they tormented you
They could always find a way to make you feel ashamed
Now that you are older, everything they put you through
Left you with an anger that just cannot be contained

So you spend every day of your life
Always searching for something to set you on fire

Now you’ve become
Everything you claim to fight
Through your need to feel you’re right
You’re the savior of nothing now

Everywhere around you, you find reasons to
Turn into a warrior to protect what you believe
But you think their beliefs, make them less than you
And that is a delusion that your sickness has conceived

Now you spend every day of your life
Always hoping that something will spark the desire

Now you’ve become
Everything you claim to fight
Through your need to feel you’re right
You’re the saviour of nothing now

(Repeat chorus)

 

Bavarian Landtag (state parliament) elections 2018: “Wir haben es kaum geschafft” (we barely made it)

Last Sunday, Bavarians went to the polls for their regional/state parliament (the Landtag). These elections were seen by some as a referendum on federal chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy. The CSU (=Christian-social union), the sister party to the national CDU (=Christian-democratic union) felt the stridently anti-immigration AfD breathing down its neck and distanced itself from her. Did this tactic work?

Summarizing reporting at the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel online, and the national newscast “Tagesschau”, here are the results:

CSU: 37.2% (down 10.5) [christian social democrats]
SPD: 9.7% (down 10.9) [social democrats, center-left]
FDP: 5.1 (up 1.8%) [classical liberals, pro-market & business]
Greens: 17.5% (up 8.9%)
Freie Wähler: 11.6% (up 2.6%) “Free Voters”, centrist, non-aligned
AfD: 10.2% (from nowhere) right-wing, stridently anti-immigration

The “former” communists of Die Linke (3.2%, up 1.1%, hard left), and further small parties totaling 5.4%, did not clear the 5% electoral threshold, unlike the FDP which returns to parliament after falling short of the threshold last time around.

Landtag seats (out of 205, 103 needed for a majority):
CSU 85, Greens 38, Free Voters 27, AfD 22, SPD 22, FDP 11

Coalition negotiations have already started with the Free Voters, which would create a somewhat comfortable majority of 112. The FDP announced it will remain in the opposition: the Greens are in Germany traditionally split between a pragmatic “Realo” and hardcore “Fundi” wing, while the AfD, especially in Bavaria, is split between a national-liberal wing akin to Belgium’s N-VA, and a far-rightist faction with some unsavory elements.

The Biggest Losers

The CSU actually put in its worst performance in 60 years. Some (e.g. veteran psephologist Heinrich Oberreuter, himself a CSU member, quoted here) claim that this means the strategy of trying to position itself as AfD-lite on immigration backfired, while others claim it prevented an even bigger drubbing. The actual numbers (screenshots from the Tagesschau) seem to tell a mixed tale:

So the party actually drew 270,000 voters who did not vote in the previous election (voter participation, at 72.5%, was nearly 9% higher than in 2013), plus 100,000 SPD voters, while losing almost half a million voters split roughly equally between Greens, Free Voters, and AfD. One common complaint (70%) of those who changed their vote was that the CSU overstressed immigration to the exclusion of all other subjects.

But if the CSU saw a historical nadir, the SPD — the other major national party besides the CDU, and the country’s largest under Willi Brandt and Gerhard Schröder — is even deeper in the doldrums, having fallen to single digits! Where did they lose votes to?

Aside from the 100,000 who switched to the CDU, they lost big time to the Greens (200,000) and appreciably to the Free Voters (70,000) — but 30,000 even flipped to AfD!

When defectors were queried about their motives, three answers were gotten most frequently:

• 86%: time to “take the opposition cure”, as the priceless Dutch expression goes

• 85%: party lacks a central theme that can get people fired up

• 67%: nobody knows what the party really stands for

The latter is, of course, the most damning indictment of all.

In two weeks, there is another Landtag election coming up in the state of Hessen (the most important city of which is Frankfurt, though Wiesbaden is the state capital).

Angela Merkel’s words, “Wir schaffen das” (we can do this), have come to haunt her. Here in Bavaria, where the CSU went out of its way to show it wasn’t in Merkel’s pocket, the result was “sie haben es kaum geschafft” (they barely made it).

The von Fritsch Affair: a WW II-era cautionary tale of how character assassination can succeed even despite complete exoneration

The recent spectacle/trainwreck concerning SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh could not help remind the WW II history buff in me of the tragicomic episode known as the Fritsch Affair or Fritsch Scandal. That story bears retelling as a cautionary tale on how a character assassination may be successful even if the accusations are proven false and the accused is exonerated. Below follows my short summary.

Sometime in 1936, Berlin police arrested and interrogated a habitual criminal and extortionist named Otto Schmidt. His particular racket at the time was to spy on men who picked up homosexual prostitutes and to blackmail them.

During interrogation (clearly aimed at arresting the “johns” in question for violating the notorious “Article 175” of the penal code) he named various of his “clients”. Some enjoyed “protection” from above and could not be touched. Then Schmidt dropped the name of one “General von Fritsch”.

“You mean: Generaloberst[*] Freiherr von Fritsch?!”

“Yes! Him! I saw him in the act with Bayern-Seppl!” [Freely: “Bavarian Joe”, street name of a well-known male prostitute.]

Holy shmoly! Colonel-General Baron von Fritsch?! The Commander in Chief of the Army?!? [**]

The report made its way up the chain all the way to Reichsführer-SS Himmler (y”sh), who was also the supreme head of all police forces in the Third Reich. Himmler’s agenda at the time included fostering  his own parallel army (the Waffen-SS) at the expense of the regular army with its officer caste dominated by Prussian nobles — and therefore, pleased as punch, he immediately ran off to his master with the report. To his surprise and disappointment, however,  Hitler (y”sh) immediately told Himmler to “burn this filth”. (Evidently, von Fritsch still could not be spared.)

But instead of destroying the report as ordered, Himmler tucked it away in his safe, figuring it might yet come in handy.

Then the fateful Hossbach conference happened. At this closed gathering of the Führer with then-foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg, and the heads of the three Wehrmacht branches (army commander von Fritsch, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, and Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring) Hitler for the first time unveiled concrete military objectives, specifically Austria and Czechoslovakia. (Minutes of the meeting were taken down by his military adjutant, Col. Hossbach, by whose name the conference is hence known.) To the great surprise and disappointment of the grandiose dictator, Blomberg and especially Fritsch pushed back hard against the invasion plans, while von Neurath was not enthusiastic either.

Blomberg was shortly later forced into retirement when it turned out his much younger second wife had a past as a prostitute and X-rated photo model. The post of Defense Minister was then supplanted by a new Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) with the toadyish Wilhelm Keitel at the helm. Foreign Minister Neurath ended up being replaced in a cabinet reshuffle by the repulsive Joachim von Ribbentrop. But how to get rid of von Fritsch?

Aha! The “burned” report suddenly reappeared. Since Fritsch had never married and had no known girlfriend (he was, basically, married to his job) it all made sense…

When confronted with the accusation, Fritsch at first was stunned. He did not help matters by muttering something about how he had lunched with some Hitler Youth to satisfy his Winter Aid quota, and maybe people got the wrong idea…

An official announcement followed that both Blomberg and Fritsch were retiring “for health reasons”. However, with the help of pressure from senior army officers, Reichskriegsgerichtsrat [roughly: Judge Advocate General] Karl Sack, a secret member of the anti-Nazi underground, won the concession that Fritsch would appear before a court-martial rather than before one of Freisler’s kangaroo courts.

Sack started his own investigation, and quickly discovered that “Bavarian Joe”s actual “client” was a retired Rittmeister [cavalry captain] named Achim von Frisch (without the extra “t”). The Rittmeister had even kept receipts for the hush money he had paid to his blackmailer.

Confronted with the evidence, Otto Schmidt broke down and confessed he had deliberately confounded the identity of his victim in order to make himself more important (and valuable to his jailers).

Schmidt was packed off to a concentration camp (where he was later shot on the direct orders of Himmler) and von Fritsch was “acquitted due to proven innocence” and exonerated.

But… he was not reinstated as Army CinC. Instead, that position fell to the more pliant Werner von Brauchitsch[***].  Von Fritsch was instead appointed Kommandant (honorary commander, ceremonial commander) of the 12th Artillery Regiment (his onetime unit).

On September 22, 1939, after the invasion of Poland, von Fritsch went to the front and deliberately exposed himself to Polish fire, thus seeking and finding a soldier’s death. Call it “suicide by enemy fire” if you wish.

Am I comparing the Deep/Derp State to the Third Reich? Of course not, and I am not suggesting parallels between Kavanaugh and von Fritsch either?

I just can’t help thinking of how a character assassination can be successful even when the accused is fully exonerated.

 

[*] In the Wehrmacht’s table of ranks, Generaloberst [literally: General-Colonel or Colonel-General] is a rank between General and Field Marshal. Freiherr [literally: free lord] is the equivalent of Baron in the German nobility.

[**] The Heer (army) was only one of three branches of the Wehrmacht (armed forces) — the other two branches being the Kriegsmarine (war navy) and the Luftwaffe (Air Force).

[***] von Brauchitsch would in turn be dismissed in late 1941 as a scapegoat for the first failures of the invasion of Russia, at which point Hitler put himself in direct command of the army.

 

“Competitors, not opposites”: what Apple iPhone vs. Samsung Galaxy can teach us about politics

A friend got into an argument with somebody who claimed only the “far-right” could be fascist, and that, of course, the “far-left” is the opposite of the far right.

This is indeed the version that was successfully peddled when I was growing up in Europe. After all, communists were internationalist, fascists and Nazis were nationalist, the far-left was anticlerical or outright anti-religious while right-authoritarian regimes typically paid lip service to the church when not outright in bed with it, and… “far-left” and “far-right” were on opposite sides in WW II.

Except… when they were not. The inconvenient fact of the Non-Aggression Pact (and Molotow and ‘von’ Ribbentrop merrily dividing up Poland between their empires) is either forgotten or glossed over, as “a maneuver to gain time” (after Stalin butchered 90% of his generals and 50% of his colonels during the Great Purges). And there is the inconvenient fact that the full name of the Nazi party is “National Socialist German Workers Party” (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, for which “Nazi” is a typical German-style nickname). Also, let me quote some program points of self-styled US socialist Bernie Sanders:

we demand:
* Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.
* […] personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore, we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
* We demand the nationalisation of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
* We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
* We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
* […] immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
* […] Benefit for the community goes before benefit for the individual [*]

Oops, my bad, these are actually from the “immutable” 25-Point Program of the NSDAP. There was even a hardcore economic-left faction inside the NSDAP, led by the party’s #2 man, Gregor Strasser, and his brother Otto Strasser. Otto fled abroad in 1930: Gregor was among those liquidated in the 1934 Night Of The Long Knives, in which potential and imaginary contenders for Hitler’s [y”sh] throne were liquidated and old scores settled, and which cemented the primacy of the SS over the SA (the “Brownshirts”). Strasserism was later to be influential in postwar European far-“right” circles, and gave rise to a spinoff movement that called itself “National Bolshevism” [sic].

Of course, those of us who have read Isaac Asimov’s “Second Foundation” remember that a circle has no beginning and no end. “Les extrèmes se touchent” (the extremes touch each other), as the French expression goes. And indeed, especially among the older generation of Europeans, there is a sense that the political left-right division isn’t so much on a linear scale as on a circle, and that far-“left” and far-“right” have much more in common with each other than with the temperate zone of politics. This notion gained currency during the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, and is perhaps most eloquently expressed in Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism“.

What is totalitarianism, indeed? Unlike ‘merely’ authoritarian regimes (like the Tsars of old), totalitarian ones are not content to control the actions of their subject — they want the whole person, control their thoughts as well as their actions.

In contemporary American political discourse, the “left” (both moderate and radical) stresses the state and the collective, while the “right” emphasizes private or local initiative and the individual. In other words, the left-right axis is not internationalist vs. nationalist like in Europe, but collectivist vs. individualist. It corresponds (with the arrows reversed) to the horizontal axis on the Pournelle Chart. On this spectrum, both Communism and National Socialism are firmly on the same side, as are Socialism and classical Fascism. [**]

For the above, I submit that “Socialism and Fascism”, or indeed communists and Nazis, are opposites only in the same sense that an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy are opposites, or that macOS and Windows are opposites. They are merely two competing brands of the same basic product.

The product, in this case, is totalitarian collectivism.

For all the heated (and at times hysterical) rhetoric of their partisans, one would think that macOS and Windows are polar opposites. The same is true of iPhones and their Android competitors. Instead, what we have is the same basic product (a smartphone, a computer operating system) with different implementation philosophies. As they compete with each other (in largely the same market space) and copy or otherwise absorb each other’s most popular features, their interfaces even start to resemble each other.

Likewise with the classical “opposites”. They carefully studied each other’s propaganda, going back to even Hitler [y”sh] himself. They even recruited among the same ‘customer base’: entire Sturmbannen (battalions) of the SA (the “brownshirt” militia [**]) in urban areas with a large working class were known among the Nazi top as “beefsteak battalions” — brown on the outside, red on the inside. Furthermore: the degree to which the NSDAP regime availed itself in its propaganda of what we now call ‘social justice’ rhetoric (‘social justice’ for Aryans only, naturally), and the extent to which the construction of a fairly elaborate welfare state was bankrolled by the expropriation of Jewish capital, has been documented at book length by the German journalist and Holocaust historian Götz Aly (himself a former far-left activist).

The main “difference” between mass murderers like Hitler on one hand, and Stalin or Mao on the other hand, is not so much the degree to which they demanded submission of the individual to the state (where they were in broad agreement), but the specific distinctions which they leveraged for power: ethnic origins vs. class. And this has persisted to this day: increasingly, one reads and hears shrill rhetoric on the post-Marxist, multiculti, intersectional left where one only needs to change the labels to get something indistinguishable from a totalitarian collectivist screed from the nominally “opposite” side.

Too many people on the left think that, while electrocution is bad, it can be solved by reversing the polarity of the current. This makes them competitors of what they claim to oppose, not opponents. Opponents are the ones who want to cut the power (such as small-government conservatives) — and of course get called names for doing so, as they are a threat to the political and cultural hegemony of the “left”.

 

UPDATE: welcome Instapundit readers!

 

[*] Sounds better in the original German: Gemeinnütz vor Eigennütz.

[**] Of course, in most political discourse, “fascist” no longer seems to have another stable meaning than as a generic insult, like “poopyhead”. Already in 1992, Robert Hughes was decrying this in “The Culture of Complaint“.

[***] The Brownshirts were a key factor in Hitler’s rise to power, but were emasculated during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives. They continued to exist but had become a shadow of themselves. Henceforth, the SS — originally a mere protection squad for the leader (hence the name, Schutzstaffeln) — was the real power behind the throne.

The Kazakh Famine of the 1930s: another “Harvest of Sorrow”

Continuing the theme of this sad day, I will share a story I just learned about.

In this video from the Library of Congress, Sarah Cameron summarizes her forthcoming book: “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan“.

There are some similarities with the Holodomor (subject of Robert Conquest’s famous book, “The Harvest of Sorrow”) in that a forced collectivization campaign led to a massive man-made famine in a region that under normal circumstances was a major food exporter.  While you could say the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the USSR, Kazakhstan was its stockyard.

Unlike the Ukrainian peasants that fells victim to the dekulakization campaign, however, the Kazakhs were nomads, whose lifestyle was adapted to raising livestock in a vast territory of marginal land. Unlike in the case of the Ukraine SSR, a desire to stamp out Kazakh national identity and aspirations does not appear to have played a role as such. Furthermore, nomads did not fit any class category in “scientific” Marxism — but eventually the know-it-all social engineers in Moscow decided that the “backward” nation needed to be modernized, the nomads forcibly settled, and animal husbandry brought more in line with “modern” practices.

The result was disastrous — the number of cattle fell by 90%, and deaths from starvation were actually a higher percentage of ethnic Kazakhs than had been reached even in the Ukraine (where absolute numbers were of course larger). Combined with the flight of about another million Kazakhs to neighboring Soviet republics or to China, this actually made ethnic Kazakhs a minority in Kazakhstan until 1999.

Eventually, the Soviets were forced to backtrack. Their satrap in Kazakhstan, erstwhile co-executioner of the Tsar and his family Filipp Goloshchekin, was made a scapegoat and dismissed, but his protégé (and alleged former lover) Nikolai Yezhov — head of the NKVD during the Great Purges, which are known in Russian as the “Yezhovshchina” to this day — ensured he stayed unharmed. Only after Yezhov’s downfall and execution did Goloshchekin’s turn come: he was eventually executed by firing squad at Kuibyshev (Soviet-era name of Samara) as part of a group of “especially dangerous prisoners”.

During the Q&A, Dr. Cameron was, of course, asked why this episode is barely known in the West, while there is at least some awareness (not enough) of the Holodomor. She attributes this to the large Ukrainian diaspora in the West vs. the barely existent Kazakh one, as well as to the fact that Kazakh nomadic culture prizes oral history over the written word and stone memorials. (Dr. Cameron recounts that, when she asked where a monument to the victims had been built, she was told “in Almaty” [the former capital] and spent days touring the city, only to find a sign indicating a such a monument would be built there in the future.) The language barrier presumably plays a role too: Russian speakers can generally read Ukrainian (the two languages are closer than Dutch and German), but the Turkic Kazakh language is another matter.

(Kazakhstan itself, meanwhile, has been transformed radically, with the discovery and exploitation of vast natural resources (including but not limited to both oil and uranium). Since the 2000s, the country has seen very rapid economic growth, slowed down recently by a dip in world oil prices.)

As great and appalling as I knew the body count of communism to be, the story of the Kazakh man-made famine was new to me. There is scholarly discussion about whether it constitutes a genocide (which implies intent to decimate or eliminate an ethnic group) or a democide (a mass killing of genocidal proportions with motivated other than ethnicity). But for the victims and their kin, it would be cold comfort that they died as the results of a colossal deadly foul-up rather than deliberate intent. Whether they died from premeditated murder or from “Depraved indifference to human life”, if you like.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 

The memo, and what it implies

Not only has the damning memo been released (Francis Turner blogs here at length on what it implies), but now the “lost” text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his lover have been recovered.

A journalist at Forbes published a timeline, which now seems to have been memory-holed by the paper [UPDATE: seems it is back]— but a cached copy is available here. Mollie Ziegler Hemingway weighs in here: NEW: Criminal Referral Confirms Nunes Memo’s Explosive Claims Of FISA Abuse.

What emerges is something that makes Nixon look like a naughty boy in comparison, and Watergate a schoolyard prank. (See also this, h/t masgramondou.)

In this context, the conspiratorial-sounding term “deep state” is often uttered, even by people as level-headed as Instapundit. Does this refer to some mysterious, nefarious, octopus-like conspiracy at the heart of the federal government? No, it is merely the current US term for a phenomenon with which Europeans (particularly the French) are intimately familiar: the “permanent bureaucracy” of career civil servants. Governments come and go, and the unelected permanent bureaucracy stays in place.

In an ideal world, the professionalism of longtime civil servants should act as a moderating factor and ‘sanity check’ on the less well-considered ideas of elected officials, as well as stop power-grabbing overreach on their part. In the real world, at least as far back as Plato, one faces the question most pithily asked by Juvenal: “who watches the watchmen themselves?”

My contempt for the loser in the 2016 electoral campaign is bottomless: she seems to have all the moral restraint of Lucretia Borgia combined with a peerless capacity for self-pity (read this serialized fisking of her book if you have a strong stomach). In contrast, I am at least willing to entertain the notion that the FBI agents desperate to exonerate her, and find fault with Trump, had sincerely convinced themselves that they were trying to save the Republic from a disaster. There is of course, paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, no worse tyrant than one who sincerely believes his actions are for your own good.

The career civil service bureaucracy in France is notoriously incestuous, with such a large percentage of senior civil servants being graduates of just one academy, the ENA (National Administration School) that some French quip about being ruled by “l’ENArquie”. The ENA is one of France’s élite “Great Schools” that inhabit the tier above mere ‘universités’ in that country’s peculiar system. Its students are a truly elite crowd selected by standardized exams graded anonymously (and hence free of favoritism and reverse discrimination). However, this quasi-Mandarin monoculture ensures a homogeneity in outlook, and only exacerbates the natural tendency of any governing elite to conflate its own collective self-interest with the interest of the nation.

Their American counterparts are a good deal less of an elite, and a good deal more of a ‘credentialed gentry’, to use Angelo Codevilla’s term. Yet they are at least as cocksure as their French counterpart, and at least as averse to an outsider ‘not one of us’ upsetting the applecart. It is, therefore, no surprise that Clinton, Inc. and the Chicago machine behind Obama would have found willing accomplices.

Nobody in their right mind would want to go back entirely to the ‘spoils system’. And there are still people working in the Federal apparatus that it is a privilege to know and who are both highly competent and dedicated to their country.  It is, however, well past time for a thorough housecleaning. It is even more past time for those politicians who suborned elements—all the way to the top—in the country’s highest law enforcement authority to be called out, disgraced, and ostracized from political life forever. I used to dismiss the characterization of the Democrat Party as “a legalized crime syndicate” as irresponsible hyperbole. Used to being the operative word. Now I wonder instead: if it really were one, what would they be doing differently?

 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE 2: More from Mollie Ziegler H.: How the media buried two FBI stories yesterday. “Where journalistic instincts go to die”, indeed.

Chair of Belgium’s largest party: “The Left must choose: open borders or a welfare state”

[For an interesting window into Belgian politics, see the following note that was posted [in Dutch, English translation mine] to the Facebook feed of Bart De Wever, mayor of Antwerp and chair of the center-right N-VA (New Flemish Alliance) party.

Had his name been Burt Weaver, it could almost be an article in National Review or another conservative magazine in the Anglosphere. Milton Friedman would surely nod in recognition at the title. — Nitay Arbel]

The Left must choose: open borders or a welfare state

Bart De Wever is the chair of [the] N-VA [party] and mayor of Antwerp

The migration crisis has confronted Europe with its own moral nihilism. Citizens that form a human chain around the [Brussels-]North [railway] station, or put up transient migrants for the night, touch a soft spot in all of us. Suddenly we are wrestling with the age-old question: what does it mean to be a good person? What are we bidden to do? And by whom? And to whom? The Christian heritage that we still nurse from after the twilight of G-d, dictates to us that we should treat our neighbor as we would treat ourselves. But how near must our neighbor be?

In this moral confusion, an industry of leftist lawyers, NGOs, and activists has found a meal ticket. The present government, they claim, follows a policy that is inhuman, egotistic, and heartless. This is a subtle form of moral blackmail. For whoever does not agree with them, cannot be a good person. And who wants to be a bad person? Out of sincere moral compassion, we are all inclined to go along with this leftist discourse.

But, though the migration industry seems motivated by the will to do only good, rather ideological motivations hide behind this moral facade. I cannot dispel the impression that the left is cynically exploiting the migration crisis in order to, through judicial warfare [lawfare] and moral blackmail, make the concept of ‘borders’ so porous as to hollow out the nation-state. For some cosmopolitans, this is wish fulfillment. But the consequences are enormous, and there is room for doubt whether they are equally advantageous for all citizens.

A healthy res publica [body politic]

Borders do not just delineate our democracy and citizenship, but also our implied solidarity. Today we know who can make use of our social security system and why. A healthy body politic creates an ethical community where every citizen shoulders responsibility for the collective, but  also knows (s)he can count on the community if needed. In this context, net taxpayers do not object to contributing, even as they do not personally know the fellow citizens who benefit. The social security system we have built on this bases is among the most open and generous ones in the world.

 But if we [start] say[ing] that there are no more borders and anyone should be able to count on our solidarity, we enter a situation in which there are no more fellow citizens with whom we can show solidarity, but only fellow humans who live here today, elsewhere tomorrow. Human rights are, however, not [the same as] civil rights. Everybody is born with the inalienable right to life — that is [an example of] a universal human right. But you don’t get born in Sudan with the universal and inalienable right to access to a Western European social system.  That is a civil right, which you have when you happen to be born in that Western European nation-state, but which can also be acquired if you follow certain procedures [for naturalization] and fulfill the requirements.

If we start universalizing every civil right, we need to accept the consequences and accept that our current standard of living becomes unsustainable, simply because we won’t be able to afford it anymore. Then you get a denuded social system for paupers, which has no more carrying capacity—for it is difficult to remain in solidarity with people who enjoy the fruits of the social systems, but never have contributed to it and in many cases never will contribute. The strongest will withdraw into gated communities where their children will attend private schools, and the denizens will pay themselves for their own private pension and healthcare. Such a system is perfect if you manage to turn your life into a success. If you don’t, tough luck.

North American model

Europe will then evolve toward a more North American societal model, albeit it with even less of a social safety net. For the US has the geographic advantage that they are surrounded by two oceans, and, to the North, by a rich country with a very high standard of living. Only on the southern border are their migration streams that are difficult to contain, and they have been trying to seal that border hermetically since long before the coming of Trump. Europe, on the other hand, is but a peninsula of the enormous Eurasian landmass and separated from Africa only by an inland sea. Without enforced borders, people can simply walk into Europe. Allowing this, or not doing so, is a choice.

And our federal government has made that choice. Transit migration is not a European problem but a Franco-Belgian problem. We are the only countries with a passable border to the UK. Through the dismantling of the tent camps in Calais, the problem has shifted entirely to our country. Our government policy is to prevent [the emergence of] a second Calais at all costs. But a second Calais is emerging out of sight. Through the collaboration between left-wing NGOs and ditto mayor, and through various acts to morally blacken government policy and to suspend it[s enforcement], the left is now de facto itself organizing the transit migration, even though it is de sure prohibited. At the same time, the moderate left keeps claiming they are not advocating open borders — at least the extreme left is upfront about this.

Don’t we have the duty to help people in need? Of course. But those who can help themselves are not in need. Anyone who can travel thousands of kilometers from East Africa to end up in a Western European welfare state — not with the intention to request asylum there but to travel to another country — may be in dire poverty, but is not in an acute emergency. An emergency is a threat to life, not the desire to lead a pleasant life, however understandable be that wish. There are 37 million Sudanese, each of whom undoubtedly wants a better life. Do we have the moral obligation to take in all 37 million? And what about the rest of Africa?

Absorb newcomers

The left must dare to speak things through: what do they really want? Do we have to take care of everyone, and does that need to happen via immigration? Fine by me, but then we won’t be able to maintain our social system at the current level any longer. If we choose that path, there are two options left for us: a closed social security system only accessible to people who contribute, or its collapse. Our left-wing “gutmensch” [German loanword, idiomatically equivalent to “bleeding heart liberal”] will in its absolute goodness achieve just the opposite of what he claims to want: the total demolition of the welfare state.

I stand for a different policy. A policy with European efforts to absorb refugees in their own region, and with closed borders. A policy with strict controls on legal migration, where, if necessary, those we allow in are emancipated/acculturated in the Enlightenment values, and put to work as quickly as possible in order that they are able to contribute to our prosperity, and thus to our social security. In this way, we can absorb newcomers and enjoy their talent. In this way, our social security can remain open, freely accessible and generous for everyone. But then we must first dare to make difficult choices and dare to implement the chosen policy. Politicians must let the common interest prevail over their personal conscience, however hard it may be.

Hannah Arendt concluded the second part of her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” with a chapter that is controversial on the left until now: ‘The Decline of the Nation of the Netherlands and the End of the Rights of Man’. In it she argues that we need the nation-state and borders. It is not only the demarcation of our democracy, the outline of the rule of law, and the basis on which we organize our solidarity; it is also the only working mechanism that can enforce human rights. The nation-state is literally vital. Let us be careful that the dream of the “gutmenschen” does not end in a nightmare for us all.