project-syndicate | Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy
focused on great power competition with China. Many Americans of both
major political parties agree that Trump was correct to punish China for
cybertheft of intellectual property, coerced intellectual property
transfer, and unfair trade practices such as subsidized credit to
state-owned enterprises.
Reciprocity does need to be enforced. If China
can ban Google and Facebook from its market for security reasons, the US
can take similar steps against Huawei or ZTE.
Anger and mistrust
festers in both countries’ capitals.But what the COVID-19 crisis teaches
us is that this competitive approach to national security is
inadequate. And COVID-19 is not the only example. The information
revolution and globalization are changing world politics dramatically.
While trade wars have set back economic globalization, environmental
globalization, reflected in pandemics and climate change, obeys the laws
of biology and physics, not politics. In a world where borders are
becoming more porous to everything from drugs and illicit financial
flows to infectious diseases and cyber terrorism, countries must use
their soft power of attraction to develop networks and institutions that
address the new threats.
As technology expert Richard Danzig points out,
“Pathogens, AI systems, computer viruses, and radiation that others may
accidentally release could become as much our problem as theirs. Agreed
reporting systems, shared controls, common contingency plans, norms,
and treaties must be pursued as means of moderating our numerous mutual
risks.” Tariffs and border walls cannot solve these problems.
On transnational issues like COVID-19 and climate change, power becomes a positive-sum game. It is not enough to think of power over others; one must also consider power with
others. On many transnational issues, empowering others helps a country
accomplish its own goals. For example, all can benefit if others
improve their energy efficiency, or improve their public health systems.
All leaders have a responsibility to put their country’s interests
first, but the important moral question is how broadly or narrowly they
choose to define those interests. Both China and the US are responding
to COVID-19 with an inclination toward short-term, zero-sum, competitive
approaches, and too little attention to international institutions and
cooperation.
thesun |CHINA owes Britain £351billion in coronavirus compensation
and the government should pursue it through the international courts, a
study has concluded.
An investigation into the crisis has claimed the horrific impacts of
coronavirus could have been mitigated if China had just been more honest
about the outbreak.
The report, to be published tomorrow by the Henry Jackson Society
(HJS), a British foreign policy think-tank, claims China directly
breached international healthcare treaty responsibilities.
It also argues there are ten legal avenues major nations - such as Britain - could take to pursue damages from Beijing.
Experts calculated the G7, the world’s leading economies, face a bill of £3.2trillion.
And they said this could have been avoided if the Communist Party was more open about coronavirus, reports The Mail on Sunday.
Britain’s slice of the compensation would be used to cover the full
costs of the treasury’s economic bailout plan and the hike in NHS
spending to manage the crisis.
World governments have been forced to inject huge sums of cash into
their economies to keep them going, helping to prop up businesses and
support laid off or furloughed workers.
HJS experts concluded the Communist Party “sought to conceal bad news
at the top” and to “conceal bad news from the outside world”.
It comes as British ministers are now reportedly not discounting the theory that coronavirus actually came from a leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan.
And meanwhile, the report has spurred a group of 15 top Tories to
call on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “rethink and reset” the United
Kingdom’s relationship with China.
In a joint letter, the four former Cabinet ministers and 11 MPs said
they are worried about the “damage to the rules-based system caused by
China’s non-compliance with international treaties”.
dailymail | Boris Johnson’s allies turned on China over the coronavirus crisis yesterday, as Britain’s death toll from the epidemic reached four figures.
Ministers and senior Downing Street
officials said the Communist state now faces a ‘reckoning’ over its
handling of the outbreak and risks becoming a ‘pariah state’.
They
are furious over China’s campaign of misinformation, attempts to
exploit the pandemic for economic gain and atrocious animal rights
record.
In another dramatic day:
The UK death toll soared to 1,019 – up 260 in 24 hours, including the first surgeon to die from Covid-19;
NHS medical chief Stephen Powis said ‘every one of us has a part to play’ if deaths were to be kept below 20,000;
As
No 10 released pictures of Mr Johnson at work, a poll found Chancellor
Rishi Sunak is the voters’ favourite to be interim Prime Minister if Mr
Johnson cannot perform his duties;
Tracking by
this newspaper suggested the virus sweeping Whitehall may have
originated with the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier;
The first images emerged from inside London’s ExCel Centre as it is being transformed into a 4,000-bed makeshift hospital;
Deaths
across Europe exceeded 20,000, with Italy suffering 10,023 fatalities
and Spain seeing its biggest daily rise of 889 to reach 5,690;
Global infections hit 600,000;
Ministers were considering using the RAF to airlift Britons stranded abroad after Opposition pressure;
A
front line NHS doctor gave a harrowing account to this newspaper about
how medics are having to ‘play God’ due to equipment shortages;
Amid fear of more domestic abuse cases, Home Secretary Priti Patel warned culprits they would be ‘brought to justice’;
Police risked fresh claims of snooping by tracking motorists’ cars to check how far they have travelled;
Panic buyers provoked anger by throwing away excess food – some of it unopened;
US President Donald Trump suggested he may try to put New York in quarantine;
Wuhan, the Chinese epicentre of the crisis, partially reopened after more than two months in isolation;
The latest British victims of the epidemic to be named include the first surgeon to die from the virus.
Transplant
consultant Dr Adil El Tayar, 63, who died on Wednesday, is thought to
have become infected while was working at a hospital in the Midlands.
His
cousin, the BBC presenter Zeinab Badawi, said: ‘Adil was a stoic and an
optimist and thought he would soon recover. This virus is unforgiving,
indiscriminate and it can be brutal.’
nypost | When the going gets tough, the rich get going … to luxurious
underground bunkers. Suddenly, heading six feet under doesn’t sound so
bad, especially when the new digs often include pre-stocked food and
blast-proof doors.
Helicopters are on standby “if that moment comes,” says one bunker
specialist, to whisk elites into subterranean palaces with below-ground
swimming pools, tennis courts and gourmet food rations in spaces you’d
never know were originally designed for the military, both American and
Soviet.
If you’re not in the 1 percent, no problem, there are modest bunkers
available, as well, and even some reasonably-priced getaways above
ground.
Fast-talking entrepreneurs, boutique hotel owners and survivalists
are hoping to profit from the coronavirus pandemic by giving people a
route out of despair — and boredom — with varying degrees of success.
Real estate salesman Robert Vicino is literally sitting pretty when
it comes to his business — selling underground bunkers from the Black
Hills of South Dakota to a remote underground city in Rothenstein,
Germany. Unlike the millennial owner of a Manhattan startup who had to pull the plug on his luxe, mask-free spa last week, Vicino says business is booming in what survivalists call the “bug-out” business.
His company, Vivos,
also sells bunkers in Indiana and is planning new bunkers in Asia and
Marbella, Spain. He said sales are up 400% this year although his
cheaper properties (35,000 euros for a big bunker in South Dakota) are
selling faster than the 2 million euros, five-star Vivos Europa One underground apartments
carved into a German mountain, part of a facility originally used by
the Soviets to store munitions in case they invaded western Europe.
Vicino has been at the doomsday game since 2007 and it’s paying off
after a slight blip when a Mayan-predicted apocalypse in 2012 never
materialized and he had to dump plans for a 5,000-person bunker in Atchison, Kansas.
dailymail | New York's 'one percent' are hiring armed
guards to protect them from a feared 'zombie apocalypse' - stationing
former cops outside their luxury properties in Manhattan and the
Hamptons in preparation for a coronavirus doomsday where criminals come breaking down their doors.
Two
leading private investigative agencies in Manhattan, Sage Intelligence
and Beau Dietl & Associates, tell the DailyMail.com that business is
booming from rich New Yorkers who worry they'll become prime targets if
the coronavirus spirals out of control.
Clients are citing potential red flags -
thousands of police officers are getting sick, stores are running out of
basic supplies, millions of families are losing their livelihoods, and
hundreds of potentially violent inmates are being released from Rikers
Island and other jails - all due to the pandemic.
'These people are fearful of anarchy, that
crime is going to spike and that people will get desperate and steal to
feed their families,' said Mike Ciravolo, a retired NYPD detective who
serves as president of Dietl.
'They
fear they will become targets if this thing really ramps up. These are
very affluent people, with very, very expensive units.' Ciravolo said
he's assigned guards, round-the-clock, to secure an upscale co-op in
Soho and two luxury apartment buildings on the Upper East Side, and is
getting more calls every day.
Herman Weisberg, of Sage, said he started receiving Covid-19 business two weeks ago.
At first, it was clients who wanted
security guards to accompany them on errands to their banks, so they
could withdraw stockpiles of cash in the event of a run on banks.
Another
client, a business executive in Soho, called him in a panic, saying he
was seeking to acquire a firearm to protect himself, but couldn't find
one because all the stores he contacted were sold out.
'That moved up his decision to hire me,' Weisberg said.
Another
Manhattan power couple called Weisberg from their summer home in the
Hamptons, where they were hunkered down with their kids. 'They got on
the phone and explained they have an alarm system that they almost never
turned on,' Weisberg said.
'Now they're turning it on, but the husband was still stressed, saying, 'What good is an alarm if nobody's around to respond?'
The
husband was insistent on hiring 24-7 security, despite his wife's
hesitation and the fact the East Hampton police department is still
fully operational, with just one officer reportedly testing positive for
the coronavirus.
forbes | Gun sales have soared in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, with background checks by Americans attempting to purchase firearms jumping 41% to 3.7 million last month, according to recent FBI data.
While Bass Pro is privately held and doesn’t disclose how much of its
$8 billion in revenue is from firearm sales, its website lists 880 guns
for sale, starting at $129.99 for a semi-automatic rifle.
Ultimately, it is
up to states and cities whether gun stores can remain open. The federal
government emphasized that its list is advisory in nature and is not
intended to be a directive or standard that must be complied with. State
and local governments have the freedom to “add or subtract essential
workforce categories based on their own requirements and discretion,”
according to the guidance.
After the updated
federal guidance was issued, Massachusetts revised its list of
essential businesses in lockstep to include firearm retailers. However,
several hours later, the governor changed his mind and took them off the list
once again, underscoring the fluidity of the situation. Bass Pro
swiftly moved to close a store outside of Boston on Thursday, which had
remained open in apparent defiance of the original ban. The company
declined to comment on individual store closures.
In states like
Missouri, Alabama and Florida, which resisted issuing statewide
shelter-in-place orders until recent days, chaos has reigned for weeks
as decisions remained in the hands of dozens of local government
officials.
For instance,
Bass Pro closed a store Gainesville, Florida last weekend after a
shelter-in-place order from Alachua County excluded firearm retailers
from a list of essential businesses. When Gov. Ron DeSantis finally
stepped in with a statewide shelter-in-place order this week, he permitted gun stores to be open. For many counties, it marked a reversal in policy. Bass Pro’s store in Gainesville remained closed on Saturday, although it was legally permitted to reopen.
In some cases, Bass Pro has been classified as an essential business in one town but not another. Take
the company’s home state of Missouri, where John Morris started out in
1972 by selling fish tackle from the back of his father’s liquor store.
Bass Pro has been allowed to remain open in the St. Louis area but
forced to curtail its operations elsewhere in the state. After residents
in Kansas City and the college town of Columbia complained to local
government officials that stores were open despite local
shelter-in-place orders, the counties notified Bass Pro that it must
close because it was considered a non-essential business, according to
government spokespeople.
Bass Pro Shops
appealed the decision and cited a state statute that prohibits the
state, county or any municipality from restricting gun sales during an
“emergency,” according to Kayla Parker, an official with the Jackson
County Health Department. It received permission from both counties to continue
selling firearms and ammunition, but was required to cease the sale of
all other items. At its store in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, it
was instructed to sell via appointment only, which must be at least 15
minutes apart.
It’s a different picture across state lines in Kansas City, Kansas,
where its store remains open. The state issued guidelines last weekend
that declare any companies that manufacture or sell firearms, firearm
accessories or ammunition to be essential businesses because they
protect a constitutional or legal right. “While
I left these decisions to local health departments as long as possible,
the reality is that the patchwork approach that has developed is
inconsistent and is a recipe for chaos,” said Gov. Laura Kelly in a statement.
ianwelsh |Let’s chalk this up to
aristocratic elites. Aristocrats, unlike nobles, are decadent, but don’t
stop with that word; understand what it means.
Elites who are not aligned with
the actual productive activities of society and are engaged primarily in
activities which are contrary to production, are decadent. This was
true in Ancien Regime France (and deliberately fostered by
Louis XIV as a way of emasculating the nobility). It is true today of
most Western elites; they concentrate on financial numbers, and not on
actual production. Even those who are somewhat competent tend not to be
truly productive: see the Waltons, who made their money as
distributers–merchants.
The techies have mostly outsourced production; they don’t make
things, they design them. That didn’t work out for England in the late
19th and early 20th centuries and it hasn’t worked well for the US,
though thanks to Covid-19 and US fears surrounding China, the US may
re-shore their production capacity before it is too late.
We also have a situation where Western elites are far removed from
the actual creation of the systems they run. This is most true in in the
US, and to a lesser extent in the UK, which did not suffer the massive
bombing and destruction of most of the rest of Europe (the Blitz was
minor compared to the bombs dropped on Germany, for example). Of course,
reconstructing bombed societies is not the same as pulling oneself out
of poverty.
The best handling of the coronavirus crisis in the world was possibly
Vietnam, who are run by a generation that just pulled themselves out of
poverty. Other excellent handling has happened in societies which still
remember times of poverty or which were conquered and set free
(Japan/Germany). China’s Xi, probably the most incompetent, also managed
the crisis badly, but still better than the US/UK: Once he got serious,
he got really serious. Xi, while a princeling, had a hard early life
and was forced to work on the communes and so on.
This is all standard three-generation stuff: The first generation
builds, the second generation manages, and the third generation wastes
and takes it for granted because they’ve never known anything else.
Sometimes that extends to four generations or more, but that requires a
system which properly inculcates its elites, plus something to force the
elites into at least some of the same experiences as the peons. We do
not have that kind of a system.
Nobles, as Stirling Newberry explained to me years ago, are elites
who make a point of being better than the people below them: better
fighters, better farmers, and so on. Aristocrats are people who play
court games, which is what financialized economies supported by central
banks and bought politicians are. These people aren’t even good at
finance. They were actually wiped out in 2008, but used politics to
restore their losses and they were/are wiped out by this crisis, but are
using politics (the Fed/Congress/the presidency) to restore their
losses. The Fed is doing one trillion of operations a day.
dailymail | High-end stores throughout New York such
as Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana are boarding up their windows
in anticipation of civil unrest as the death toll in the city reached
1,867 on Friday with 305 new deaths.
The
wealthy businesses had already been ordered closed along with bars and
restaurants as part of the shelter in place protections but they are now
taking further steps to secure their property and products as the
city's police department suffers high numbers of officers calling in
sick with the coronavirus raging through its ranks.
New
York City cases spiked to 57,159 on Friday night with 5,350 new cases,
as the national total rose to 277,999 confirmed cases and 7,164
deaths.
Boarded up windows and empty
streets have transformed the city that never sleeps into a war zone with
city officials sending out on an emergency alert to New Yorkers'
cellphones on Friday calling on health workers to present themselves for
battle against the coronavirus outbreak on the front lines in the
city's overstretched, overwhelmed and under resourced hospitals.
The alert came amid warnings that New York City will run out of crucial
supplies by the end of next week and that Sunday will be 'D-Day' in
terms of assessing what is needed for the weeks going forward.
Dolce & Gabbana, Jimmy Choo and Louis
Vuitton were among the Manhattan stores to cover up their windows with
plywood in the past week as the crisis in the city worsened despite
streets being empty of customers or even passersby.
The
rows of boarded up buildings create a stark reminder of the newly
unemployed workers who lost their jobs after the scale of the outbreak
caused stores, bars and restaurants to shut their doors for the
foreseeable future.
Some businesses
attempted to light the mood on the closures, despite the rows of plywood
covering their entrance, painting messages of support and encouragement
that the coronavirus will be beaten.
Throughout Manhattan, the unsightly coverings are offset with the words of motivation.
'We are all in this together,' one reads. 'Stay save. Save lives.'
Louis
Vuitton in Soho was among the storefronts to leave its customers a
messages on the wooden boards guarding its property reading: 'The
journey that was paused will eventually start again, Louis Vuitton
wishes you & your loved ones health & safety.’
Prospect | On March 22, the Steward hospital chain sent a letter to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, saying it would close Easton Hospital, in the state’s Lehigh Valley, on March 27 unless it received a government bailout to keep it operating.
Steward’s letter read: “If the Commonwealth has no interest in
assuming all operating expenses and liabilities of Easton Hospital,
Steward Health Care will proceed immediately on planning to close the
facility.” The threat paid off: On the 27th, the state guaranteed Easton
$8 million for April and a likely $24 million through the month of
June. The bulk of the funds, Wolf said, would be covered by the federal bailout package that President Trump had signed into law that very day.
How Easton had descended to such dire straits is a good question,
inasmuch as its owner—the private equity firm Cerberus Capital
Management—is hardly a candidate for taxpayer-funded assistance, and is
responsible for loading down the hospital with an unpayable level of
debt.
The Easton story is likely to be just the first of many. After
compelling hospitals to take on huge piles of debt through leveraged
buyouts, private equity firms—currently sitting on $1.5 trillion in
uninvested cash from investors—are poised to line up for taxpayer
bailouts.
Steward has claimed that Easton Hospital has been financially
distressed for months, that competition from other larger hospitals is
fierce, and that the postponement of all elective surgeries has further
cut into revenues. It had worked out a deal to sell the hospital to St.
Luke’s University Network, but the deal has slowed down due to the
COVID-19 crisis.
But why is Easton Hospital struggling so much more than other hospitals?
After compelling hospitals to take on huge piles of debt
through leveraged buyouts, private equity firms are poised to line up
for taxpayer bailouts.
Size matters, but its private equity buyout history matters more. In
March 2017, Cerberus acquired Easton, along with seven other hospitals,
in a leveraged buyout for an undisclosed amount from Community Health
Systems (CHS). While we don’t know how much debt Steward took on in
order to buy out Easton, the typical private equity buyout includes debt
financing in the range of 50 percent to 70 percent of the purchase
price, which the acquisition, in this case Easton Hospital, is expected
to repay. We do know that at the time of the sale, Steward sold the
property of all eight hospitals to a real-estate investment trust,
Medical Properties Trust (MPT), and pocketed $304 million in return.
Since then, Easton Hospital has had to pay rent on property it had
owned for the 127 years of its existence. How much of Easton’s revenues
have been used to pay down debt Steward incurred to acquire it and to
pay rent on its facilities—revenues that could have been used to
financially stabilize the hospital?
Prospect | Surprise medical billing has quickly become a small but
critical flashpoint in health care reform. Because doctors and hospitals
negotiate separately with insurance companies over reimbursement rates,
it's possible for a patient's insurance to cover hospital charges while
failing to cover the fees of some doctors in the hospital who are “out
of network.” Patients who visit an emergency room (ER) or are admitted
to an in-network hospital by an in-network doctor may find that some of
the professionals who treat them are not covered by their insurance.
That is because hospitals have outsourced ER, anesthesiology, radiology,
or other specialized services to outside physician practices or
staffing firms. Patients often find themselves on the hook for
thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars in surprise medical
bills.
Twenty-five states have passed laws
with limited protection for patients from out-of-network bills, usually
for emergency room or urgent-care services; 20 more states are
considering legislation. But these laws do not cover self-insured
employer plans, which can only be regulated by the federal government.
These plans cover an estimated 61 percent of workers
who have private insurance, up from 44 percent 20 years ago. That means
Congress must step in to protect insured patients from unfair and
unexpected medical charges.
And that puts lawmakers up against the powerful and influential
private equity industry, which plays a major role in supplying hospitals
with physicians. They have aggressively bought up large national
staffing firms or “physician practice management” (PPM) companies, as
well as emergency providers that hospitals and other health
organizations have outsourced, such as ground and air ambulance
companies. And they are using the typical tools to protect their
investments from a legislative onslaught: lobbying cash, dark-money
front groups, and allies in Congress pushing loopholes and half
measures.
The Role of Private Equity: Driving Market Concentration
Private equity funds use substantial debt to acquire doctors'
practices through leveraged buyouts, and to finance mergers of practices
into large staffing firms. Emergency medical and specialist practices
are a prime buyout target, because patients who need emergency care
cannot haggle over price, and third-party payers guarantee payment. This
satisfies the private equity business model of promising “outsized
returns” to investors.
Private equity firms buy up small specialty physician practices that
have begun to consolidate and “roll them up” into umbrella organizations
to gain local, regional, and ultimately national market power.
Researchers at the Kellogg School of Management found that most individual acquisitions were below the dollar threshold that would have required the transaction to be reported to antitrust regulators.
laprogressive | About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on
the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision
Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare
employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs
20,000. Private equity firm Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth, Kravis
Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.
Care of the sick is not the
mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits
for the private equity firms and its investors. Overcharging patients
and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed
emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle
doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and
co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across
the US.
Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an
experienced ER doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic? One clue may
be that Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President
Trump’s inner circle.
He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s
doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the
allocation of supplies and protective gear. The President might conclude
that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would
that leave Schwartzman?
PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may
have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor
outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for
telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. Hospitals are
now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press.
WaPo | The story of how the novel coronavirus
emerged in Wuhan, China, has produced a nasty propaganda battle between
the United States and China. The two sides have traded some of the
sharpest charges made between two nations since the Soviet Union in 1985
falsely accused the CIA of manufacturing AIDS.
U.S.
intelligence officials don’t think the pandemic was caused by
deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead
began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The
prime suspect is “natural” transmission from bats to humans, perhaps
through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an
accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly
bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.
“Good science, bad safety” is how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) put this theory in a Feb. 16 tweet.
He ranked such a breach (or natural transmission) as more likely than
two extreme possibilities: an accidental leak of an “engineered
bioweapon” or a “deliberate release.” Cotton’s earlier loose talk about
bioweapons set off a furor, back when he first raised it in late January
and called the outbreak “worse than Chernobyl.”
President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added to the bile last month by describing the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus,” respectively.
China
dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own. On March 12, Chinese
foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao charged in a tweet: “It might be [the] US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” He retweeted an article that
claimed, without evidence, that U.S. troops might have spread the virus
when they attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.
China retreated on March 22, when Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai told “Axios on HBO” that such rumors were “crazy” on both sides. A State Department spokesman said Cui’s comment was “welcome,”
and Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged in a March 27 phone
call to “focus on cooperative behavior,” a senior administration
official told me.
edge | The modern theory of the quantum has only recently come to be understood
to be even more exquisitely geometric than Einstein's General
Relativity. How this realization unfolded over the last 40 years is a
fascinating story that has, to the best of my knowledge, never been
fully told as it is not particularly popular with some of the very
people responsible for this stunning achievement.
To set the stage, recall that fundamental physics can be divided into
two sectors with separate but maddeningly incompatible advantages. The
gravitational force has, since Einstein's theory of general relativity,
been admired for its four dimensional geometric elegance. The quantum,
on the other hand encompasses the remaining phenomena, and is lauded
instead for its unparalleled precision, and infinite dimensional
analytic depth.
The story of the geometric quantum begins at some point around
1973-1974, when our consensus picture of fundamental particle theory
stopped advancing. This stasis, known as the 'Standard Model', seemed
initially like little more than a temporary resting spot on the
relentless path towards progress in fundamental physics, and theorists
of the era wasted little time proposing new theories in the expectation
that they would be quickly confirmed by experimentalists looking for
novel phenomena. But that expected entry into the promised land of new
physics turned into a 40-year period of half-mad tribal wandering in an
arid desert, all but devoid of new phenomena.
Yet just as particle theory was failing to advance in the mid 1970s,
something amazing was quietly happening over lunch at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. There, Nobel physics laureate CN
Yang and geometer (and soon to billionaire) Jim Simons had started an
informal seminar to understand what, if anything, modern geometry had to
do with quantum field theory. The shocking discovery that emerged from
these talks was that both geometers and quantum theorists had
independently gotten hold of different collections of insights into a
common structure that each group had independently discovered for
themselves. A Rosetta stone of sorts called the Wu-Yang dictionary was
quickly assembled by the physicists, and Isadore Singer of MIT took
these results from Stony Brook to his collaborator Michael Atiyah in
Oxford where their research with Nigel Hitchin began a geometric
renaissance in physics inspired geometry that continues to this day.
While the Stony Brook history may be less discussed by some of today's
younger mathematicians and physicists, it is not a point of contention
between the various members of the community. The more controversial
part of this story, however, is that a hoped for golden era of
theoretical physics did not emerge in the aftermath to produce a new
consensus theory of elementary particles. Instead the interaction
highlighted the strange idea that, just possibly, Quantum theory was
actually a natural and elegant self-assembling body of pure geometry
that had fallen into an abysmal state of pedagogy putting it beyond
mathematical recognition. By this reasoning, the mathematical basket
case of quantum field theory was able to cling to life and survive
numerous near death experiences in its confrontations with mathematical
rigor only because it was being underpinned by a natural infinite
dimensional geometry, which is to this day still only partially
understood.
In short, most physicists were trying and failing to quantize Einstein's
geometric theory of gravity because they were first meant to go in the
opposite and less glamorous direction of geometrizing the quantum
instead. Unfortunately for Physics, mathematicians had somewhat dropped
the ball by not sufficiently developing the geometry of infinite
dimensional systems (such as the Standard Model), which would have been
analogous to the 4-dimensional Riemannian geometry appropriated from
mathematics by Einstein.
This reversal could well be thought of as Einstein's revenge upon the
excesses of quantum triumphalism, served ice cold decades after his
death: the more researchers dreamed of becoming the Nobel winning
physicists to quantize gravity, the more they were rewarded only as
mathematicians for what some saw as the relatively remedial task of
geometrizing the quantum. The more they claimed that the 'power and
glory' of string theory (a failed piece of 1970s sub-atomic physics
which has mysteriously lingered into the 21st century) was
the 'only game in town', the more it suggested that it was the string
theory-based unification claims that, in the absence of testable
predictions, were themselves sinking with a glug to the bottom of the
sea.
What we learned from this episode was profound. Increasingly, the
structure of Quantum Field Theory appears to be a purely mathematical
input-output machine where our physical world is but one of many natural
inputs that the machine is able to unpack from initial data. In much
the way that a simple one-celled human embryo self-assembles into a
trillion celled infant of inconceivable elegance, the humble act of
putting a function (called an 'action' by physicists) on a space of
geometric waves appears to trigger a self-assembling mathematical
Rube-Goldberg process which recovers the seemingly intricate features of
the formidable quantum as it inexorably unfolds. It also appears that
the more geometric the input given to the machine, the more the
unpacking process conspires to steer clear of the pathologies which
famously afflict less grounded quantum theories. It is even conceivable
that sufficiently natural geometric input could ultimately reveal the
recent emphasis on 'quantizing gravity' as an extravagant mathematical
misadventure distracting from Einstein's dream of a unified physical
field. Like genius itself, with the right natural physical input, the
new geometric quantum now appears to many mathematicians and physicists
to be the proverbial fire that lights itself.
Yet, if the physicists of this era failed to advance the standard model,
it was only in their own terms that they went down to defeat. Just as
in an earlier era in which physicists retooled to become the first
generation of molecular biologists, their viewpoints came to dominate
much of modern geometry in the last four decades, scoring numerous
mathematical successes that will stand the tests of time.
Likewise their
quest to quantize gravity may well have backfired, but only in the most
romantic and elegant way possible by instead geometrizing the venerable
quantum as a positive externality.
But the most important lesson is that, at a minimum, Einstein's minor
dream of a world of pure geometry has largely been realized as the
result of a large group effort. All known physical phenomena can now be
recognized as fashioned from the pure, if still heterogeneous, marble of
geometry through the efforts of a new pantheon of giants. Their
achievements, while still incomplete, explain in advance of unification
that the source code of the universe is overwhelmingly likely to
determine a purely geometric operating system written in a uniform
programming language. While that leaves Einstein's greater quest for the
unifying physics unfinished, and the marble something of a
disappointing patchwork of motley colors, it suggests that the leaders
during the years of the Standard Model stasis have put this period to
good use for the benefit of those who hope to follow.
I've created a Discord server for anyone who would like to discuss The Portal in real time. And with Eric's recent discussions of community building, I thought this may also have the possibility of becoming a useful place.
washingtontimes | Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
has asked the federal government for hydroxychloroquine and
chloroquine, days after her administration came under criticism for a
statewide crackdown on the drugs touted by President Trump for the novel coronavirus.
The request from the Michigan Health and Human Services Department was made after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) issued an emergency-use authorization Monday for the drugs, which
have long been approved for treating malaria, lupus and rheumatoid
arthritis.
“Based on the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization
to allow the use of hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine
phosphate products donated to the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) for
certain patients with COVID-19, we are pursuing a request for
hydroxychloroquine/chloroquine from SNS,” said Lynn Sutphin, Michigan
HHS spokesperson, in an email.
The request, first reported by the nonprofit Bridge Michigan, came
after the state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs warned
doctors against prescribing the drugs, citing lack of evidence about
their efficacy against COVID-19 and reports of stockpiling, adding that
reports of such conduct “may be further investigated for administrative
action.”
Pharmacists were also instructed not to fill
prescriptions if they believed they could be used for reasons “other
than legitimate medical purposes” or “cause harm to a patient,” adding
that medical providers had an obligation to report “inappropriate
prescribing practices.”
washingtontimes | Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has come under criticism for a
statewide order cracking down on prescriptions of hydroxychloroquine, a
drug touted by President Trump to treat the novel coronavirus.
The Michigan Department of Licensing and
Regulatory Affairs issued an order Wednesday warning physicians against
writing prescriptions “without a legitimate medical purpose” and
instructing pharmacists to evaluate the “legitimacy” of
hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine prescriptions.
The department cited concerns about stockpiling
amid “multiple allegations” of doctors writing prescriptions for family
and friends, adding that reports of such conduct “may be further
investigated for administrative action” and that other health
professionals are required to report “inappropriate prescribing
practices.”
Michigan isn’t the first state to restrict the use of the drug — Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak
issued an emergency order last week over concerns about “bad actors”
creating a shortage — but the moves have fueled allegations on the right
that Democrats and media outlets are seeking to play politics with the
drug.
Kathy Hoekstra, who previously worked for
Republican businessman Herman Cain, accused Ms. Whitmer of putting
patients at risk with her administration’s “knee-jerk scare tactics.”
foreignpolicy | While the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to
do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with
considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new
field—health.
After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the
COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest
of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on,
which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to
leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on
international health bodies.
Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the
World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China
and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels.
Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until
Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end
of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from
the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese
doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and
reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international
concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do
so.
After the Beijing visit, though, WHO said in a statement
that it appreciated “especially the commitment from top leadership, and
the transparency they have demonstrated.” Only after the meeting did it
declared, on Jan. 30, a public health emergency of international
concern. And after China reported only a few new cases each day, WHO
declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11—even though it had spread
globally weeks before.
WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a
previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most
ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,”
WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China.
The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an
“all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or
delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community
and “creating a stronger first line of defense against international
spread.”
China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical
measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report
said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted
and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However,
while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO
neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure
to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human
rights costs.
It’s not surprising that China’s containment strategy was effective,
said Richard Neher, virologist at the University of Basel. “The big
lockdown, centralized quarantine, and contact tracing for sure
accelerated the decline,” Neher said. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of
the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at
Georgetown University, points to “major human rights” concerns with the
lockdown techniques pioneered in China and now—to a different
degree—adopted in many nations. Gostin recommends standard public health
measures like testing, treatment, contact tracing, and isolation or
quarantine “as scientifically justified.”
While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t
alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of
the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not
recognized by WHO or other bodies.
One reason is that official data from China is often highly
dubious—which can lead to ill-advised health policies in other
countries, since studies based on information from China are the first
used to understand COVID-19. Countless cases of people dying at home in
Wuhan—some being described in social media posts—will probably never go
into the statistics. And while a report by Caixin
on the Chinese province of Heilongjiang said that a considerable
percentage of asymptomatic cases has not been reported—which amounts to
about 50 percent more known infections in China, according to a South China Morning Post report on classified government data—WHO takes numbers reported by Beijing at face value.
americanmilitairynews | Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott on Tuesday
called on Congress to investigate the World Health Organization (WHO)
for its early handling of the coronavirus outbreak that began in China,
and allegations the WHO helped China conceal the severity of the virus.
Scott described his concerns about the WHO’s handling of the virus in a statement shared on his Senate website.
“The mission of the WHO is to get
public health information to the world so every country can make the
best decisions to keep their citizens safe. When it comes to
Coronavirus, the WHO failed. They need to be held accountable for their
role in promoting misinformation and helping Communist China cover up a
global pandemic,” Scott said.”We know Communist China is lying about how
many cases and deaths they have, what they knew and when they knew it –
and the WHO never bothered to investigate further. Their inaction cost
lives.”
Scott called on Congress to open an
investigation of the WHO, once it comes back in session, “To review
whether American taxpayers should continue to spend millions of dollars
every year to fund an organization that willfully parroted propaganda
from the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Chinese government reportedly took several efforts in late December and early January to conceal knowledge about the novel strain of coronavirus,
now commonly referred to as COVID-19. Chinese medical professionals who
encountered the disease early on were reportedly detained and
reprimanded for “spreading rumors” and in some reports were told to
destroy data establishing the existence of the novel coronavirus strain.
WashingtonTimes |Chinese government
researchers isolated more than 2,000 new viruses, including deadly bat
coronaviruses, and carried out scientific work on them just three miles
from a wild animal market identified as the epicenter of the COVID-19
pandemic.
Several Chinese state media outlets in recent months touted the virus research and lionized in particular a key researcher in Wuhan, Tian Junhua, as a leader in bat virus work.
The coronavirus strain now infecting hundreds
of thousands of people globally mutated from bats believed to have
infected animals and people at a wild animal market in Wuhan. The exact origin of the virus, however, remains a mystery.
Reports of the extensive Chinese research on bat viruses likely will
fuel more calls for Beijing to make public what it knows about such
work.
“This is one of the worst cover-ups in human
history, and now the world is facing a global pandemic,” Rep. Michael T.
McCaul, Texas Republican and ranking member of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, said last week. Mr. McCaul has said China should be held accountable for the pandemic.
A video posted online in December and funded by the Chinese government shows Mr. Tian inside caves in Hubei province taking samples from captured bats and storing them in vials.
“I am not a doctor, but I work to cure and save people,” Mr. Tian says in the video. “I am not a soldier, but I work to safeguard an invisible national defense line.”
theroot | Even as the governor is pushing the state to ramp up its hospital capacity, away from the cameras, he’s been trying to take an axe to Medicaid funding
in New York, a move that could cost the Empire State $6.7 billion in
desperately-needed federal relief funding. Medicaid money is essential
for public hospitals that primarily serve low-income residents in New
York City, and for the state’s rural communities.
“It’s obscene,” State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a Bronx Democrat who chairs the Senate Health Committee, told the Nation. “These are immoral actions that the governor is taking.”
But
the governor’s maliciousness doesn’t stop there. He’s proposed a
massive bail reform reversal that would take a powder keg—the
vulnerability of New York’s jails and prisons to coronavirus
outbreaks—and throw a Molotov cocktail on it.
The current state law forbids cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felony offenses—as Slate explains, judges may still incarcerate thousands of people pre-trial, but they’re typically accused of felonies.
Cuomo’s proposal would “dramatically expand judges’ ability to ‘remand’ defendants
or to detain them indefinitely before their trial without due process
protections,” Slate writes. Pretrial detention would also apply to a
wider range of offenses: it would permit judges to evaluate the future
“dangerousness” of defendants (basically, guess how likely they will be
to commit another violent crime—something the state has never allowed
judges to do while setting bail); and allow the courts to remand people
who commit misdemeanor offenses while awaiting trial, meaning someone
who shoplifts from a pharmacy could face indefinite pretrial detention.
The
plan would make closing jails on Riker’s Island nearly impossible. But
more immediately, it increases the state’s carceral capacity at a time
when overcrowded jails pose a major public health risk because of the
coronavirus pandemic.
Slate breaks it down this way:
New York City jails may actually be the most dangerous place in America as far as the coronavirus is concerned. On Wednesday, the Guardian reported
that almost 180 people incarcerated at Rikers and 141 corrections staff
were infected with the coronavirus. The infection rate in New York City
jails is more than seven times
higher than the rate for all New York City residents and at least 75
times higher than the rate for all Americans. Rikers does have an infectious disease unit with 88 beds, but the unit has no ventilators for incarcerated patients, and the jail’s chief physician estimates
that about 20 percent of incarcerated people with the virus will need
hospitalization, and 5 percent will need ventilators. Incarcerated
people are also fundamentally unable to practice social distancing; one incarcerated woman told NY1 that dormitory beds weren’t even 6 feet apart.
This is a danger both to the people behind bars, and those who are far removed from them.
jerusalempost | Israel Police arrested six suspects belonging to the Peleg HaYerushalmi
after they were found gathering in a synagogue in the Haredi city of
Modi'in Illit, violating Health Ministry instructions issued to fight
the coronavirus outbreak.
The
suspects refused to listen to police instructions to leave and refused
to identify themselves and began clashing with police.
"We
call on the public to listen to directives and instructions by the
Health Ministry and to follow them completely," said Israel Police in a
statement. Most of the public in the city is listening to directives and
Israel Police is acting and will continue to act with increased forces
to enforce [the rules] on those who break them and endanger public
health."
timesofisrael | Ramat Gan Mayor Carmel Shama-Hacohen has written a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other government officials demanding a general closure on the neighboring city of Bnei Brak, which has become one of the main coronavirus hotspots in the country.
Shama-Hacohen says the situation in Bnei Brak is placing his own residents in mortal danger.
The mayor says if action is not taken immediately he will petition the High Court of Justice on the matter tomorrow.
Bass
Pro Shops will be allowed to remain open but only for the “sale of
firearms, ammunition and other goods directly related to responsible
firearm storage and maintenance,” Jackson County said Wednesday in a
statement.
The county issued a stay-at-home order amid the ongoing COVID-19
pandemic March 24 and received complaints March 27 about Bass Pro Shops
remaining open.
“On March 30, the Jackson County Health
Department, in consultation with County officials, notified Bass Pro
Shops that it was not considered an essential business,” the county said
Wednesday.
But Bass Pro Shops appealed the decision, citing state law that prevents restrictions on firearms sales during an emergency.
“Based
upon this information, legal counsel advised county staff that Bass Pro
Shops should be allowed to stay open for the sale of firearms and
ammunition,” Jackson County said Wednesday.
According to a Missouri law that went into effect in August 2007,“
the state, any political subdivision, or any person shall not prohibit
or restrict the lawful possession, transfer, sale, transportation,
storage, display, or use of firearms or ammunition during an emergency.”
Bass Pro Shops remains classified as a non-essential business except for firearms sales.
“All
other in-person sales must cease,” Jackson County said Wednesday. “The
County will allow two business days for Bass Pro Shops to rectify this
issue.”
nationalreview | To the extent that impeachment was consuming the finite attention of
senior policymakers in the White House and on Capitol Hill, we can only
be thankful that Senate Republicans wrapped up the trial by voting down
additional witnesses on January 31. Had the Democrats gotten their wish,
Washington would have been consumed for additional critical weeks into
February looking backward at Ukraine instead of forward at the threat of
the virus.
Key health agencies within the federal government — the CDC and
National Institutes of Health — were not inactive during January, but
aside from a ban on foreign travel from China, there was little public
leadership from the president. There were early, obvious-in-retrospect
missteps such as the CDC’s botching the early coronavirus-testing kits
and the FDA’s dragging its feet on approval of private testing
development and inspection of equipment. While FDA red tape is a problem
inherent to the agency’s design and culture, it is precisely the kind
of problem that can be mitigated by the hands-on leadership of a
bull-in-a-china-shop figure such as Trump. If you read the timeline on the Trump campaign’s website,
which is designed to cast the federal response in the most favorable
possible light, you will notice that the items before February 5 are
almost all agency-level actions rather than White House actions. The
White House Coronavirus Task Force wasn’t formed until January 29.
On February 4, Trump included a brief mention of the outbreak in the State of the Union address:
“Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases.
We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely
together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will
take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”
Little of the media commentary on the speech focused on that line. As late as February 19, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd of NBC moderated a Democratic debate without asking a single question about the virus.
Some voices in politics and the media (including, as Ross Douthat notes,
an odd assortment of people on the right) were beginning to sound
alarms about the virus in late January and early February, but they were
a distinct minority. As Zeynep Tufekci details at The Atlantic,
“From the end of January through most of February, a soothing message
got widespread traction, not just with Donald Trump and his audience,
but among traditional media in the United States, which exhorted us to
worry about the flu instead, and warned us against overreaction.” Many
politicians focused more on fear of anti-Asian racism than on the risk
of a real health crisis. Mayor Bill de Blasio spent much of that period giving New Yorkers disastrous health advice.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
