I have just finished watching one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time: A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong from 2017. It is purportedly a BBC production of A Christmas Carol hijacked by the Cornley Polytechnic Dramatic Society (Mischief Theater). I’ve embedded a snippet of it above. The entire thing is about 45 minutes long. Anybody who’s been involved in amateur dramatics will completely appreciate this. I think I’ve been in that production or one very much like it. If you’re wondering what part I played, I was the stage manager (the prop guy).

I understand they now have a regular program on the BBC.

It’s been nearly 15 years since I wrote my post on the rule for making biscuits and I thought it was about time that I returned to that subject. In the intervening years I have made biscuits nearly every Sunday for our Sunday brunch and I thought I would pass on what I have learned in that time.

First, if your objective is the lightst, fluffiest, tastiest biscuits, you can’t beat the old standbys. Use butter or baking lard as your shortening, white flour, and buttermilk.

Second, ingredients matter. The best butter has not been adulterated with water. I use Land O’Lakes Unsalted. Most grocery store butter has been adulterated. Nothing beats southern flour for biscuits and pie crusts. Is White Lily being made again? It was taken off the market for a while. It was the best. There are probably some fair replacements. I use King Arthur Unbleached White flour. It’s softer than, say, Ceresota which produces tenderer biscuits and pie crusts. I like biscuits made with bakng lard. If you’re not familiar with it, baking lard has not been hydrogenated (as most lard is) and does not have an off taste to it as even most non-hydrogenated lards do. I get my baking lard through Amazon.com and it’s made in Canada.

I have found that Land O’Lakes Butter with Canola Oil makes a pretty good biscuit without as much saturated fat as pure butter. I have also perfected a pretty darned good biscuit made with 100% whole wheat flour, reduced fat yogurt, and water but I suspect that’s not for beginners. My only advice is keep a light touch.

The big news of the day, of course, is that, following its emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, deliveries of Pfizer’s COVID-19 are beginning to stream from Pfizer’s warehouses to various pre-prepared destinations around the country. Those will soon be used to inoculated people according to the priorities in their individual jurisdictions. You can see the State of Illinois’s vaccination plan here. The top priorities are

• Healthcare workers
• Residents of long-term care facilities
• Essential frontline workers< including first responders
• Those with high risk medical conditions and adults over age 65

IMO there are aspects of those priorities that are misguided and even perverse. For example, residents of long-term can be protected by inoculating people who work in long-term care facilities before inoculating the residents themselves and they are, presumably, healthier than the residents.

Let’s divide the rest of the expectations into known knowns and known unknowns. I could color code these but I’m too lazy.

Known knowns

• The inoculations will be voluntary
• The initial inoculations will be limited in number. If the numbers given by Pfizer can be trusted, here in the U. S. we will have either hundreds of thousands or, possibly, a few million doses.
• Some people will be discouraged from getting the second inoculation by the side effects or the severity of their immune responses. That’s what happened during the clinical trials which is why I consider this a known known.
• Allocations will be partly practical and partly political. That’s simply the way things work when governments are involved which I why I consider this a known known.
• A black market in COVID-19 inoculations will arise. Whenever resources of anything are allocated a black market arises which is why I think this is a known known.
• There will also be some counterfeits. See above for why this is a known known.
• There will be some adverse reactions. Again, this is just the way things work.
• People who receive inoculations will start letting down their guards, engaging in behaviors they might not had they not been inoculated. Ditto.

Known unknowns

• We don’t know how many people in the U. S. will receive inoculations in this first round.
• We don’t know whether the Pfizer vaccine will prevent the inoculated from spreading the virus.
• We don’t know how many people who get inoculated will eschew a second dose.
• We don’t know how practical or how political the inoculations will be.
• We don’t know how many people will die simply from being inoculated. If we’re very, very lucky it will be zero but I’m skeptical. IMO prioritizing long-term care residents maximizes the likelihood of the number being non-zero.
• We don’t know what adverse reactions will be observed that weren’t seen in clinical trials.
• We don’t know how long the vaccine will promote people remaining asymptomatic or not spreading the disease (if it does, indeed, prevent people from spreading the disease)
• We don’t know whether the virus can or will adapt to the vaccine
• We don’t know whether the Pfizer vaccine has long-term adverse effects. That’s true for any new vaccine but IMO particularly true for this one because it employs a novel modality
• We don’t know how big the black market will be
• We don’t know how big the market for counterfeits will be
• We don’t known what the public reactions to the black market, counterfeits, or potential misallocations will be
• We don’t known how the general public will react to the adverse reactions or deaths
• We don’t know how how the media will react to the adverse reactions or deaths
• We don’t know when additional vaccines will receive emergency use authorization
• We don’t know when or if “herd immunity” can ever be reached

Please tell me what I’ve missed and I’ll add it to one of the lists. Also if any of my “known unknowns” are, in fact, known, please inform me an I’ll recategorize them.

It is possible that in the near term the inoculations will actually have the perverse effect of increasing the number of cases of COVID-19 diagnosed. We don’t know what the reaction to that will be, either.

Please don’t construe anything I’ve said in the post above as my attempting to discourage people from getting inoculated. That is not my intent. My intent is to try to control expectations.

Update

Bullet items which have been added to the lists have been added in blue.

According to this piece in the Financial Times by James Kynge and Jonathan Wheatley China’s ambitious “Belt and Road” developing world infrastructure lending program has flopped and China is retrenching:

What was conceived as the world’s biggest development programme is unravelling into what could become China’s first overseas debt crisis. Lending by the Chinese financial institutions that drive the Belt and Road, along with bilateral support to governments, has fallen off a cliff, and Beijing finds itself mired in debt renegotiations with a host of countries.

“This is all part of China’s education as a rising power,” says Mr Hillman, a senior fellow at Washington-based think-tank CSIS. “It has taken a flawed model that appeared to work at home, building large infrastructure projects, and hubristically tried to apply that abroad.”

and

China’s retreat from overseas development finance derives from structural policy shifts, according to Chinese analysts. “China is consolidating, absorbing and digesting the investments made in the past,” says Wang Huiyao, an adviser to China’s state council and president of the Center for China and Globalisation, a think-tank.

Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at Hong Kong university, says the retrenchment in Chinese banks’ overseas lending is part of a bigger picture of China cutting back on outbound investments and focusing more resources domestically. It is also a response to tensions between the US and China during the presidency of Donald Trump, when Washington used criticisms of the Belt and Road as a justification to contain China, Prof Chen adds.

“In domestic Chinese media, the frequency of the [Belt and Road] topic occurring has come down a lot in the last few years, partly to downplay China’s overseas expansion ambitions,” says Prof Chen, who is also director of the Asia Global Institute think-tank. “I expect this retrenchment to continue.”

One of the things I noticed about the piece is that it fails to mention one of the earliest debacles in the program, the Hambantota port project in Sri Lanka. If you don’t remember it, the Chinese lent more than $1 billion to the project and built it with Chinese contractors, the Sri Lankans were unable to meet their interest payments, so the Chinese repossessed the port. Now it’s operating under a 99 year lease to the Chinese. This has been condemned as “colonialism” or scorned as “debt-trap diplomacy”.

My only observation is that there are reasons that the developing world is struggling and they’re not limited to low capital investment, that people will love you as long as you’re doling out cash, and that it’s just a short step from there to becoming “the Ugly Chinese”. Many countries do have infrastructure problems but the infrastructure issues most in need of remediation aren’t roads, bridges, or ports but social, legal, and political infrastructure. Those can’t be solved just by handing out money. In some cases big, showy infrastructure projects will create roads, bridges, or ports that can’t be financed and won’t be maintained. In others the money will just disappear.

You might find the departing messages of some recent Facebook employees as they leave the company, published at Buzzfeed by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman interesting or depressing or both. Here’s the one that caught my attention:

“AI will not save us,” wrote Nick Inzucchi, a civic integrity product designer who quit last week. “The implicit vision guiding most of our integrity work today is one where all human discourse is overseen by perfect, fair, omniscient robots owned by [CEO] Mark Zuckerberg. This is clearly a dystopia, but one so deeply ingrained we hardly notice it any more.”

The article also lists the 10 Facebook pages dispensing the greatest volume of hateful content. All are on the right and include Breitbart, Fox News, The Daily Caller, and Donald Trump for President. That could be viewed in more than one way. Either those sites actually have lots of friends, lots of volume, and hateful content or Facebook’s definition of hateful content skews left.

Update

I think it’s worth mentioning that “AI” covers a lot of territory. It could mean a rules-based system which is inherently biased, it could mean a content analysis system based on a neural network which would, essentially, be impossible determine whether it was biased or not, or it could be something else entirely. In the absence of internal knowledge I couldn’t say what it actually means. My guess is that it’s an expert system—rules-based.

I found this New York Times op-ed by Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, titled “Why Is Publishing So White?” very interesting. It is absolutely drenched in Critical Race Theory although the words “critical race theory” never appear in it so if you find such things too distressing to read, you can just take my word for it. Here’s an example of what I found interesting:

First, we gathered a list of English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018. That list came from WorldCat, a global catalog of library collections. We wanted to focus on books that were widely read, so we limited our analysis to titles that were held by at least 10 libraries and for which we could find digital editions.

We also constrained our search to books released by some of the most prolific publishing houses during the period of our analysis: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday (a major publisher before it merged with Random House in 1998), HarperCollins and Macmillan. After all that we were left with a dataset containing 8,004 books, written by 4,010 authors.

To identify those authors’ races and ethnicities, we worked alongside three research assistants, reading through biographies, interviews and social media posts. Each author was reviewed independently by two researchers. If the team couldn’t come to an agreement about an author’s race, or there simply wasn’t enough information to feel confident, we omitted those authors’ books from our analysis. By the end, we had identified the race or ethnicity of 3,471 authors.

We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.

I wasn’t a bit surprised at that outcome and I suspect few are. I wonder if the op-ed’s authors recognize that their method of analysis makes assumptions that essentially stack the deck in favor of their preferred conclusion, summed up by a quotation from Zora Neale Thurston:

In a 1950 essay titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Zora Neale Hurston identified the chicken-or-egg dilemma at the heart of publishers’ conservatism. White people, she wrote, cannot conceive of Black people outside of racial stereotypes. And because publishers want to sell books, they publish stories that conform to those stereotypes, reinforcing white readers’ expectations and appetites.

There are some other quotes in the piece that I think are actually more telling, for example:

This broad imbalance is likely linked to the people who work in publishing. The heads of the “big five” publishing houses (soon, perhaps, to become the “big four”) are white. So are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books, according to a 2019 survey.

“There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color,” said Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins that is focused on Black literature.

Is a breakdown by race of the number of books published the appropriate metric? I can think of a number of others

• Consumers of books by race
• Book submissions by race
• Qualified job applicants to publishing houses by race
• Publishing house employees by religion
• Limit the analysis to first books by an author

just to name a few off the top of my head. I assume that some will consider even mentioning such subjects as indicative of overt bigotry. As Joel Stein wrote about who runs Hollywood, that just shows how dumb Americans have become.

Let’s do a little quick comparison. 80% of NBA players are black while 45% of basketball fans are black. I don’t believe that’s indicative of anti-white racism. I think it’s a sign that more blacks try harder to play basketball, starting at very young ages, than whites.

Do I think there’s racism involved in publishing? Sure. But I also think that publishers will not ignore a C note left lying on the table just because of the race of the person that put it there.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I think of one type of post that I write as “musing”. In such a post I’m wondering about something. I guess this post is musing. This morning this report from the Chicago Sun-Times filled me with questions:

As the fight continues over the safe reopening of Chicago Public Schools in the midst of a raging public health crisis, the Chicago Teachers Union has released for the first time a list of demands it wants met before members return to schools, including lower COVID-19 test positivity rates, testing and vaccination protocols and changes to both hybrid and remote learning.

Some of the demands are likely to face strong and immediate rejection by city officials who have been adamant that it’s up to them to decide how and when the nation’s third-largest school district will return to classrooms for the first time since March.

This demand caught my attention in particular:

The CTU is also demanding clear public health criteria for opening and closing schools and is proposing a 3% test positivity threshold. Schools would reopen citywide for all students and staff if the rate is lower, and would close if it’s higher, the union said, with community-by-community decisions also possible if rates vary. The city’s seven-day rolling average stood at 13.1% Thursday.

That just filled me with questions. Do I not understand what the “test positivity rate” means? Will we see a test positivity rate of 3% for the foreseeable future? Will the COVID-19 vaccinations increase or decrease test positivity rates? Does that depend on the type of vaccination? Could the effect of heeding the CTU’s demands be to abolish the Chicago Public Schools?

I don’t honestly know whether Josh Rogin supports Lloyd Austin’s nomination to be Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense or opposes it in his latest Washington Post column:

A 2015 video circulating widely in Washington shows Austin, then in charge of Central Command, being scolded by then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) for failing to support measures to protect Syrian civilians or to develop a viable strategy for protecting U.S. interests there.

“I have never seen a hearing that is as divorced from the reality of every outside expert and what you are saying,” McCain told Austin. Also in that testimony, Austin admitted Centcom’s $500 million train-and-equip program for Syrian rebels had produced only “four or five” trained fighters who survived the first battle. For Syria-watchers, the Obama administration’s policy as partially implemented by Austin was, as McCain said, an abject failure. But that is not Austin’s fault; he was obeying orders and following the Obama White House’s lead. As many have recently noted, Austin is known for being a competent manager and a loyal soldier, never putting his own views or interests ahead of his orders. Some say these characteristics are weaknesses for a defense secretary, who ought to be a strategic visionary and a policy wonk. But Austin may prove to be those things as well. If confirmed, he will for the first time have the chance to make policy, not just implement it.

I guess he supports him but it’s not entirely clear. I also think he does not understand what the SecDef does.

Yes, the Obama Administration’s policy was a flop. It was a flop because he relied on false premises among them that they were supporting liberals against the Assad regime, that doing so protected civilians, that replacing Assad would solve anything, and that there was a better alternative than Assad’s regime. Does Mr. Rogin have those misconceptions as well? There might have been some liberals opposing Assad but that ended quickly and what were left were Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. When we were training and supplying the anti-Assad rebels we were perversely supporting Al Qaeda. And, in fact, the Islamic State as well—the two are pretty fluid, both radical Sunni Islamists.

And the Islamic State persecuted civilians, too. The only recourse we had for protecting civilians was to support the Assad regime, deeply distasteful and politically impossible. There was also the assumption that in a truly free and fair election in Syria Assad would not have prevailed.

Here’s my question about Joe Biden’s nomination of Lloyd Austin: what does it actually signal? Other than diversity I mean.

I think this is hard news for anyone counting on vaccines from a multiplicity of sources ending the COVID-19 pandemic within the next few months. Fox Business reports that GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi’s vaccine won’t be available until late 2021:

LONDON — Drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi said Friday that their potential COVID-19 vaccine won’t be ready until late next year because they need to improve the shot’s effectiveness in older people.

The companies said early trials showed the vaccine produced an “insufficient” immune response in older adults, demonstrating the need to refine the product so it protects people of all ages. London-based GSK and Paris-based Sanofi, now expect the vaccine to be available in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Both companies’ stocks declined on the news.

As of today there are 52 COVID-19 vaccines approved or in development. Of the six which have received approval, only Pfizer’s has received approval for use in humans in any Western country. The other five were developed in China or Russia.

Of the other 46, six are in Phase 3 trials. Moderna’s vaccine is the closest to gaining emergency use authorization. Of the balance of those being developed by Western companies, the closest to getting approval are from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax.