Ideas

Mac Isaac, the laptop repairman with whom Hunter Biden apparently left a laptop, has sued Twitter. His complaint is not that Twitter locked the New York Post account of the contents of the laptop's hard drive. It is that their explanation for locking it was the claim that the account was in violation of Twitter's hacked material rules, and that Twitter, in explaining that policy, defines a hack as

an intrusion or access of a computer, network, or electronic device that was unauthorized or exceeded authorized access.

By Isaac's account of what happened, his access to a laptop that had been dropped off at his shop for repair and then abandoned was authorized, hence not a hack. It followed that Twitter was making false statements which, according to Isaac, have had large negative effects on him. On the face of it, it looks like a legitimate case.

What made the story of particular interest to me was that Isaac is doing something I had thought about doing, decided not to do, and suggested to a law firm that they might do in similar cases — with regard to Facebook, not Twitter.

About a year ago, I discovered that Facebook was blocking all links to my web page. Anyone who attempted to put up such a link got a message saying that the page violated Facebook's community standards. I went through the procedures on Facebook to object, never got any response. Eventually they stopped blocking it, still with no explanation.

Facebook is a private firm, and as such has a legal right to decide what messages they will or will not publish. They do not have a legal right to defame me, which, assuming that nothing on my page actually violated their community standards, they were doing. The problem had been solved when they stopped blocking the page, and in any case was never a large enough problem to justify the trouble of a court case. But it occurred to me that it might justify a class action by someone else, so I emailed a law firm that seemed appropriate with the suggestion.

Mac Isaac, or his attorney, apparently had the same idea in a much larger case, and has now acted on it. I wish him well.

The U.S. has contracted for enough vaccine from the two sources that have been or almost certainly will be approved to vaccinate another 100 million over the next few months. Combine those numbers and we should have 200 million people who either have had the disease and so are very nearly immune or have been vaccinated and so are very nearly immune, getting us at least close to the level required for herd immunity. Add in the number who will have gotten the infection by then and we should probably be over that level, which means the number of infections should start falling.

There is one problem with this optimistic story. As best I can tell from online discussions, the current plan for allocating the vaccine does not include any attempt to avoid giving it to people who have already had the disease, not even to those who have been diagnosed with it. If so, about a third of the first hundred million doses will be wasted on people who don't need them.

One possible argument for doing it that way is that having Covid does not create perfect immunity, there having been a few cases reported of someone who got the disease, recovered, and was later reinfected. But the vaccine does not create perfect immunity either — reported effectiveness for the first two is about 95%. If as many as five percent of those who had had the disease and recovered were still vulnerable to it, we should have had a lot more than a few cases of reinfections.

To make that argument more precise, consider that, as of the end of September, there had been about seven million reported cases. If infection gave only 95% immunity, about 350,000 of them should have still been vulnerable, a little more than one thousandth of the population. Since the end of September there have been another nine million cases, so more than nine thousand of them should have been known reinfections, individuals who were diagnosed with the disease, recovered, and were then diagnosed again. That did not happen. It follows that, while infection may not give complete immunity, it gives considerably better immunity than the vaccines.

Another possible argument is that tests for whether someone has already had the disease have a significant false positive rate. Checking online, it looks as though the false positive rate for most such tests is below ten percent (specificity>.9). At ten percent, that means that if you skip the people who test positive you are vaccinating an additional ten people for every false positive you are not vaccinating, which sounds like a substantial positive. If we had enough vaccine for everybody it might be better for everyone to get vaccinated, but we don't.

If my analysis is correct, current policy is lethally stupid.

People who know more about this than I do are invited to correct either my interpretation of what is currently being done or my argument for what ought to be.

I'm currently on a low glycemic index diet, following advice from Bredesen's book The End of Alzheimer's. So far as I know I don't have Alzheimer's, but I do have one copy of the genetic variant that makes it more likely and I have observed what I think is age-related cognitive decline, most notably the fact that I can no longer easily memorize poems. Given the theory behind Bredesen's book, I think his approach has a reasonable chance of helping even if the cause is normal aging rather than Alzheimer's.

Being on such a diet raises an interesting set of problems — how to replace high glycemic foods I like, which include wheat, rice, potatoes, and things made from them such as bread and pasta, with low glycemic substitutes. I have found some solutions to that, including a southern Indian pancake made from mung bean flour, which we happened to have some of, that works for enchilada-like dishes, crepe wrapped around a filling. Also barley as a substitute for rice, barley being apparently the one grain with a really low glycemic index.

The challenge is bread. Looking around the web, I find multiple recipes using almond flour or coconut flour. But, as some of the recipes concede and my limited experience confirms, the result is not very much like a wheat bread. To quote one such recipe:

When making this paleo and keto almond flour bread, it is important to adjust our expectations. The yeasty aroma and gluten-induced fluffiness that we love about traditional bread cannot be achieved without yeast and gluten.

So this is more of a quick bread that fills the need (if you still have it) to make a sandwich or to have a slice of bread for breakfast.

This raises an obvious question. Almond flour or coconut flour or mung bean flour doesn't have gluten. Wheat flour does. Why not add some of the gluten from wheat flour to one of the other flours and then make an ordinary raised bread, using yeast or sourdough?

One reason is that some people are, or at least believe they are, allergic to gluten — the webbed recipes routinely describe the bread as low-carb and gluten-free, and obviously regard the latter as a plus. I am not, to the best of my knowledge, allergic to gluten. Gluten has some carbohydrate as well as a good deal of protein, so adding it probably raises the glycemic index of bread, but as best I can tell it should only take about ten percent of the flour being straight gluten to produce something that will rise like wheat flour, which shouldn't raise it by much.

My one experiment along these lines so far, an attempt at a sourdough bread made mostly from mung bean flour, was a flop, with an off taste that neither I nor other members of my family were willing to eat, but it doesn't follow that there is no way of doing it. Almond flour seems to be the preferred ingredient for the quick breads that I have found recipes for, so I may get some of that and continue my experiments, probably using yeast instead of sourdough.

The question is, why isn't this already being done — or is it? There are a lot of people out there who are diabetic or near-diabetic and are looking for low carb/low glycemic index foods. There are a lot of foods out there advertised as fitting that requirement. Are there raised yeast breads made from one of the nut or bean based flours with added gluten? If not, is the reason that it isn't doable, in which case I am wasting my time trying to make one?

Anyone know?

I have a bunch of promo codes, which can be used to get a free copy in exchange for agreeing that, if you like it, you will post a favorable review somewhere, most likely although not necessarily on Amazon. If you want one, email me for it.

So far as I can tell, Audible is providing me promo codes for the U.S. but not for the U.K., which may mean that the ones for the U.K. went to Robert Power, who narrated the book. If you are in the U.K. and want one I can forward your request to him.

My email is ddfr@daviddfriedman.com.

I also have promo codes, U.S. and U.K., for the audio versions of The Machinery of Freedom and Future Imperfect, both narrated by me.

The defense sometimes fails, often succeeds, a result that has gotten quite a lot of criticism, much of it probably deserved. What mostly doesn't get criticized is the fact that actions which are, on their face, obviously criminal — beating someone up is assault and battery, whether or not the perpetrator is a police officer — are being punished, if at all, only by a civil suit.

The reason is quite simple. Legally speaking, the victim of the crime is not the person who was beaten up, it is the state he lives in. If Mr. Smith assaults me and the case comes to trial, it will be not Friedman vs Smith but State of California vs Smith. Criminal prosecution is controlled by the state, so crimes the state does not want to prosecute don't get prosecuted. If Mr. Smith happens to be a police officer, the state knows that prosecuting him, convicting him, and locking him up for a year will make it harder to hire police officers, as well as provoking conflict with the police union. So, most of the time, it doesn't. A civil case is created and controlled by the actual victim, so in practice civil cases are usually the only way of punishing criminal acts by people the state approves of, such as its employees.

This issue was first brought to my attention in a case where the crime in question was not assault and battery but first degree murder, the killing of two Black Panthers by Chicago police back when I was a graduate student in Chicago. None of the killers were tried, but the city, state, and county ended up settling civil claims for well over a million dollars.

There is a possible solution, one that actually existed in a legal system ancestral to ours. In England in the 18th century, any Englishman could prosecute any crime. In one famous case, a magistrate instructed troops to open fire on a crowd of demonstrators, several people were killed, and the magistrate ended up tried for murder.

If he had been convicted the King could have pardoned him, but pardoning an official, or a policeman, who has been convicted of murder is a much more visible act than never charging him. And England in the 18th century still had in law, although not in practice, a legal action, the Appeal of Felony, which was an entirely private suit for a criminal penalty. The King was not a party to the suit and so, according to Blackstone, could not pardon a convicted defendant.

For more on the subject, see the chapter on 18th Century England in my Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. A late draft is webbed.

News stories keep reporting record numbers of cases but not record numbers of deaths. Santa Clara County, where I live, shows detailed information on both, and the divergence is striking: Looking at the graphs, the case rate began to climb rapidly about a month ago, the death rate appears to be holding roughly steady. We would expect deaths to lag cases, but not by a month.

The divergence is less striking in the U.S. figures, but it's still there. Roughly speaking, over a period when case rates are more than tripling, death rates are doubling. I don't have the data in a form that would let me do a more precise comparison, but that seems to be the pattern so far.

Three possible explanations occur to me. One is that we have more testing, with the result that more of the milder cases are being spotted. If so, the reported increase in cases exaggerates the real change. A second is that we have gotten better at treating Covid, which would be good news but consistent with the increase in cases being real. A third is that fewer of the patients are old. Has anyone here spotted an analysis of the data that can distinguish among those alternatives?

As I have mentioned here before, I am currently mining fifteen years of blog posts for one or more books. I now have drafts of the first two sections of one book webbed for comments, a section on libertarianism and a much shorter section on religion. Feel free to comment here or by email to ddfr@daviddfriedman.com.

There is a recent report out on an Israeli experiment which seems to have reversed two of the cellular processes associated with aging — shortening of telomeres and cellular senescence. It used hyperbaric oxygen, given daily over a period of months, and the effects appear to be large.

It's possible that the result will turn out to be mistaken — the confidence intervals for the various effects include zero, although most of them are significantly positive. It is also possible that the experiment is changing the cellular markers and not whatever underlying biology they are associated with.

The obvious next things to do are to repeat the experiment, ideally with more subjects and varying the procedure, and to observe the subjects of the first experiment to see whether physical effects of aging are being reduced.

But if it's real, it's huge, since the experimental results are for humans, not mice, the procedure should be easy to duplicate at relatively low cost, and we ought to have much clearer results in only a few more years. I've been saying for a long time that the cure for aging will probably come in time for my children but not for me, but perhaps I was wrong.

I would be interested in comments from anyone here with relevant expertise.

Gavin Newsom, who has supported a variety of restrictions in order to slow the spread of Covid, was caught blatantly violating his own rules, attending a dinner with a large number of unrelated people, sitting close together, not wearing masks. He claimed it was outdoors, but that turned out to mean a room that had glass doors to the outside which were closed because the dinner party was a noisy one. He has been suitably apologetic, conceded that it was something he ought not to have done.

There are two possible interpretations of his behavior, depending on whether one regards the primary function of masks as protecting the wearer or protecting everyone else. If it is protecting the wearer, than his behavior is strong evidence that he doesn't believe in the claim on which his rules are based, since he was willing to do without that protection for himself. At least, he doesn't believe in it for men in their late fifties — and there has been no suggestion in the rules he imposed that they only apply to those of us sixty-five and over.

If one believes, perhaps more plausibly, that the primary function is protecting other people, than his behavior is evidence that he is a hypocrite, willing to impose on other people risks that he forbids them from imposing on each other, but not that he does not believe the claim those rules are based on.

A third possibility is that he is merely a snob, someone who believes in his heart, although he would never say, that pandemic diseases only infect his social inferiors.

From a short term standpoint, the outcome was about as good as I could reasonably hope for, assuming that the Republicans will win at least one of the two Georgia Senate runoffs. I was mostly worried that one party, more probably the Democrats, would end up with control of both houses and the White House. Since I expect either party to do mostly bad things, divided government is the least bad alternative.

In the longer run, the situation is depressing. Trump did well enough so that, whether or not he tries to run again, the coalition he created will survive. That means that we will have, for the foreseeable future, two parties neither of which has even a rhetorical commitment to the free market. The Republicans are against free trade and immigration, and the Democrats are against practically everything else.

If so, do you approve?

Part of what worked was coming across as someone who could not be pushed around, who responded to attacks by counter attacking. Would it work to tone that down a little, only attack people who are very clearly attacking him rather than anyone who says anything critical? Or would that just lose him opportunities to show what a he-man he is?

I suspect that the rhetorical exaggeration, the sort of thing that comes across to many as deliberate lying — "we'll build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" — also helped him with his supporters, not because they believed him but because they automatically discount that sort of bluster and the discounted version was something they could believe in.

The Mark Two version would have to keep Trump's major positions, including hostility to immigration and trade, unfortunate from my point of view but pretty clearly part of what worked. It didn't cost him the Hispanic vote, as many seem to have expected — he did better there than any Republican candidate since Eisenhower. I'm not sure if he has to maintain Trump's policy of outsourcing judicial choice to the Federalist Society, one of the two features of his term that I on the whole approved of. He has to be willing to appoint judges conservatives will like, but that isn't necessarily the same thing. He probably does have to maintain Trump's hostility to foreign military intervention, the other thing I approved of — unless there is some incident such as 9/11 that makes a hawkish response briefly popular with almost everyone.

One thing I'm not sure of is how much, if any, of Trump's crude, rude, abrasive presentation produces a net gain in votes, how much a net loss.

I haven't been distinguishing between what the candidate has to do to get elected, which Trump did, and what he has to do to get re-elected, which pretty clearly at this point Trump is not doing. And these are preliminary thoughts. Do others have ideas? I am more or less assuming that Trump Mark Two would be another Republican, but he might not have to be.

Eric Kaufmann, one of the most astute political scientists writing today, notes that the segment of the Trump vote the polling missed was educated white voters. He suspects they were afraid to say out loud to pollsters how they were really going to vote. After all, “45% of Republicans with degrees, compared to 23% of Democrats with degrees, said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.”

So the polling got the less inhibited white non-college-educated Trump voters right, but the graduates very wrong: “The exit polls show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates.” The threat of wokeness both alienated educated white voters — and caused more of them to vote Trump than anyone expected. The problem with woke media is that they mislead Democrats who then misread the country.