intensification, and watching lots of Outlander

T says he's feeling worse today, but still no fever/cough/breathing problems.  Ah, yes, the Day Three intensification stage of common cold symptoms, as the immune system kicks in, the mucus thickens, the inflammation/irritation of the ears, eyes, nose, throat worsens.  I remember this happening to me so many times, it's usually the stage in a cold when I get a multi-day asthma flare and start taking Albuterol around the clock.

It's the stage of the cold when your own immune system's reactions to the cold virus feel worse than the effects of the virus itself.  Hopefully he'll feel better by Christmas morning when we open presents.

Poor guy.  We'll continue giving each other space and wearing masks if we're in the same part of the house, until his symptoms die down.

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I'm still in bed this morning, I was up very late finishing the first season of Outlander.  I decided near the end to start calling it Prison Break 1743.  How many times would this couple have to break each other out of prison?  Plus the brutality of the ongoing physical, mental, and sexual assaults -- I told T this show portrays a period before there was a Bill of Rights constraining the behaviors of government officials -- such assaults made parts of the later episodes nearly unwatchable, especially if you want to sleep that night.  But the season held my interest with excellent writing and acting, incredible sets & props, and tons of well-detailed extras -- even too many extras!  At times I felt Scotland must have been overpopulated in the 18th Century.  I laughed out loud a lot, and cried at times.  A few times the suspense was so unbearable I paused and ran away to the Internet to spoil myself, which I rarely do, I generally despise spoilers.

The show reminds me a bit of the German sci-fi/historical drama Dark (which I watched for only two of its three seasons), because I suspect there may be some family tree paradoxes going on in Outlander, due to people going back in time and having children while in the past.  Sometimes two distinct characters are played by the same actor in different time periods. In Dark, the family tree paradoxes are the entire darn plot, and these paradoxes multiply exponentially as the seasons pass.  I don't think this theme is as central to Outlander, but I cannot be sure yet, there are many more seasons ahead of me.

An interesting feature of Outlander's editing is that no subtitles are provided when people speak languages other than English.  I think this is supposed to put you in the position of the main character, when she cannot understand what is being spoken around her.

I struggle to think of an example when I've seen as much or more graphic bisexual sadism on screen, even in some of the more extreme porn scenes I've collected, even in some art house films I've watched by European sadomodernists like Lars von Trier.  I was not expecting this, it repeatedly approached the level of a snuff film.  To see this depth of multi-dimensional violence coming from Ron Moore and Ira Steven Behr (both of Star Trek fame) repeatedly shocked me.  This show was at times more like something K would recommend than something my sister would recommend (which she did, when I asked her about it a few days ago).  Though I started watching it because Anais recommended it.

Somebody compared Outlander to a slow-burn Game of Thrones, probably because (1) pre-modern setting with UK accents, (2) gratuitous violence, and (3) lots and lots of titties; but I ultimately wasn't a fan of the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones and stopped watching it.  I'm curious about where this Outlander show goes after such a disturbingly dark first season.  Will the second season be about puppies, perhaps?

slow healing?

My back injury seems to be healing slowly as I stretch, rest, take short walks with Dax, and try to avoid postures or activities that cause pain.  I might try cooking dinner this evening, last night we had frozen pizzas.

When I told Sir Ben about how I'm spending my days -- off work, watching Outlander, stretching, resting, taking short walks -- he said it sounded delightful.  Well ... if it were by choice ... if it weren't punctuated by back pains.  He said it can be difficult to force myself to rest.  Yeah, T is the same way, he was super grumpy when he realized he was sick and needed to rest.  I'm not super grumpy, but I do feel like LIFE IS UNFAIR, HOW DARE MY BACK HURT, WHEN WILL IT STOP HURTING, WILL IT HURT LIKE THIS FOREVER.

I mean, I just internalize it because I'm an introvert (except for writing here in my journal).  T externalizes it because he's an extrovert.  Probably if T kept a journal we'd sound pretty much the same right now, except we'd flip in describing who has which symptoms.  He'd probably write that I was insufferable on Monday as well, hahah.

I think both of us agree WORST CHRISTMAS EVER.

I'm taking today off also, which now means I'm not working again until next Monday.  I expect to feel all better by Saturday at the rate I'm healing, unless I catch T's cold in which case I'll have something else to complain about for a week.  We'll have to decide soon whether to cancel the next Maids visit so they aren't exposed to virus particles as they clean house.

I'll try 2nd season Outlander and try not to stay up past 3am again ;-)

the cousin of fake news

I was reading an instance of something from the Right that isn't "fake news" per se, but it has a similar effect.  It's what I'd call a "lonely anecdote".

This author on the Right believes that deaths from COVID-19 are overestimated.  So he found one instance of a husband and wife who were apparently counted as dying from COVID-19 when their deaths were a murder/suicide.  They did have COVID-19 when they died, and perhaps their murder/suicide was in reaction to having COVID-19, but they didn't die from the virus.

OK -- yes, this happened, but the author found out about it because the misclassification was being corrected by state officials, state officials who spoke to the media about fixing the mistake.  A mistake had been made, and state officials found the mistake and were fixing it.

The author takes this single instance of a mistake, and through fancy word games turns it into an entire opinion piece about how officials are overcounting COVID-19 deaths, which is why people on the Right don't trust the government, which is why they don't trust the vaccine.

If you take a more expansive approach in looking at death rates across the country, you find that overall deaths are way up in 2020, and that official COVID-19 deaths don't account for all the excess deaths happening in the US this year.  Which means the official COVID-19 death count is likely an undercount, not an overcount.  It is also likely that the stress of COVID-19 is causing additional deaths that aren't directly caused by the virus.  For example, some people are not going to the emergency room for heart attacks or strokes because they fear catching COVID-19 if they go to the emergency room.  Some hospitals are delaying various medical procedures because they have to focus instead on their COVID-19 patients.  Some people are committing suicide because of financial pressures, loneliness, or losing loved ones to the virus.

Public health officials are not biased toward overcounting COVID-19 deaths, they're just trying to do their jobs, they're trying to count all the deaths and list the proper causes.  And everybody makes mistakes from time to time in their jobs.  And many of these mistakes are caught and corrected.  This is normal.  But for various reasons the Right wants to believe, and wants the rest of us to believe, that COVID-19 is not a big deal.  So in addition to blatant misinformation about COVID-19, they also play up stuff like this lonely anecdote.  Somebody made a mistake, so we cannot trust any government data, so don't worry about anything a government public health officer tells you about COVID-19.

There was an episode a few years ago where some hackers on the Right broke into private email accounts of climate scientists.  They used these emails to show that climate scientists sometimes disagree with each other.  They hoped to discredit the entirety of climate science by highlighting these disagreements.  But in reality, Science is an evolving discipline in which different groups make hypotheses and collect data and then review each other's work.  Sometimes they find mistakes, and then correct them.  Sometimes they disagree over how to interpret ambiguous data.  Sometimes there is more than one potential reason to explain why something happened.  This is entirely normal, but the Right hopes to discredit the very idea of Science by showing "how the sausage is made".

One of the weird things about this -- without Science, our entire modern economy and lifestyles would fall apart.  The products we manufacture and use rely upon Science.  The oil companies rely on scientific advances to pull more oil out of the ground.  But the Right deploys skepticism about Science only with respect to government policy, not with respect to business operations.  The idea is to discredit government regulations based on Science, because these regulations stand in the way of companies that want to pollute the environment or sell dangerous products.

We need Science to fly as passengers on airplanes, but the Right wants us to forget about Science when it comes to the effects of the CO2 emitted by airplanes, or the effects of the COVID-19 viruses exhaled by our fellow passengers.  So the Right deploys misinformation and lonely anecdotes.  Like when my brother N told the family chat group that he knows people who caught COVID-19 even though they wore masks.  That was a lonely anecdote, ignoring the larger picture that disease transmission rates fall when people wear masks.

If you had to get surgery for cancer to save your life, you'd probably want the surgical team to wash their hands and scrubs, and to wear masks, to reduce the chance of giving you a dangerous infection during surgery.  Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you'd want your surgical team to sterilize their equipment before cutting you with it.  But step outside of that personal domain into the political domain, and then Republicans spread misinformation and lonely anecdotes about the effectiveness of wearing masks.

We shouldn't necessarily put scientists in charge of making policy in a democracy, but why does the Right feel the need to discredit scientists in unfair ways?  It's because they don't want to have rational policy discussions in which you weigh the costs and the benefits, they just want to cut taxes and deregulate -- they've already decided: taxes are bad, regulations are bad.  So they have to make their arguments fit their prejudiced conclusions.  If that means deploying misinformation and lonely anecdotes, so be it, their goal is not Truth, their goal is to cut taxes and deregulate.  Because they have faith in the market.

But as a democracy, we cannot function if one side wants to engage in a pros and cons debate, while the other just wants what it wants and is willing to lie or obfuscate to get it.

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"I don't want to shut down my restaurant."

"I don't want you to shut down your restaurant either, but the data show 50% of the COVID-19 cases we can trace are happening inside restaurants and bars.  We could save 1500 lives per day by shutting down indoor dining and drinking."

"That's ridiculous, we follow all city guidelines, we're safe.  Those data must be an exaggeration.  This entire pandemic is a hoax, cooked up by the vaccine companies.  Nobody in my restaurant has ever caught COVID-19.  These regulations are the worst imposition on American freedom in our history.  You're just trying to destroy the economy to hurt Trump."

This is our 21st Century democracy.

progress!

I was able to cook dinner!  Not totally painless, but better than I'd have expected yesterday.  Unfortunately we couldn't eat it together, I took T's plate to him downstairs, where he's playing video games and watching videos.