#I think the term cultural appropriation lost its meaning several years ago and now everyone is afraid of being problematic

[bioswear]

Actually I think we as America could potentially Benefit by more white people digging into their white culture (barring people like nazis bc that’s the bad side of history and you should not be taking up Nazi history as your identity and yet😬 but I digress), but like if your family is Finnish or German or French, I think we should let the white insta-girlies connect to it more.

At least it would give them a more interesting facet to their personality beyond iced mochas, Pilates, and social media.

[scienceblogtumbler]

Overreaction

I have become concerned that dangers of the COVID pandemic have been overstated, perhaps deliberately. The containment measures adopted in most Western countries have had little effect on the spread of the virus, but they have been maximally disruptive of our economic and cultural lives, and have produced loneliness and isolation, while throwing millions of people living on the edge of their means into desperate poverty.

(graphic is my own, based on data from http://OurWorldInData.org/coronavirus )

Here is Dr John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology at Stanford Medical School, speaking to this point.

The good news is that daily deaths from the virus have peaked worldwide, and begun their decline. Since death rates trail the rate of new infections by 2-3 weeks, we expect that spread of the virus peaked worldwide in mid-March and in the US 10-12 days ago.

Does it make sense to continue with policies of economic shutdown and social isolation now that COVID is declining? The answer depends on whether these policies have been responsible for the decline, or whether COVID is declining for other reasons. I tend to think “other reasons”, but I’ll try to present both sides. I recognize that there is no definitive proof, but only judgment in the face of diverse evidence. My bias is that in such situations I lean toward a contrarian view. 

There are three factors which I consider to be plausible reasons for the decline of COVID:

Warmer weather is arriving

Doctors are learning how to treat COVID from others’ experience

Saturation / herd immunity—most people have already been exposed and have built up immunity

1. Respiratory illnesses tend to be seasonal. Reasons for this are not fully understood, and there may be several factors [ref, ref, ref]. Every year, there is a flu season, and deaths from flu are down almost 100-fold from winter to summer.

Is COVID19 likely to be an exception to this rule? We already see that cold countries have much higher incidence and much higher death rates from COVID than warm countries.

India may be the most striking example, a very hot country with weak central controls and a large population that is unreached by medical services. There has been no effective lockdown in India, yet COVID deaths per million population are comparable to the US.

The above leaves me very hopeful that, like SARS and MERS and countless strains of cold and flu that went before it, COVID is dying out as spring weather sets in.

In this week’s Science magazine, an article (summarized on ScienceBlog) argues that unlike these predecessors, COVID may not slow down with warm weather. As I read it, their basis for this claim is that these other seasonal illnesses spread sufficiently to engender herd immunity in the spring, but because of lockdown COVID has not crossed that threshold. Both these assumptions, in my view, are suspect. There is no scientific agreement why respiratory infections are so deeply seasonal, but it’s an empirical fact. If it were just about herd immunity, then we would see some waves of cold and flu that start in the spring or summer and die out by fall; but we rarely see this. And below I argue that if COVID is as contagious and as persistent as is claimed, then we (America and the world) may be acquiring herd immunity already.

2.  In just a few months, doctors have shared their successes, and there are now several promising treatments (though there has not been time for blinded, controlled clinical trials).

3.  It’s more difficult to know whether herd immunity is already being established around the world. We depend here on experts and on computer models. Here’s an expert (Professor Knut Wittkowski, head of Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatics):

COVID is reputed to be extraordinarily contagious, and if that is so, I would argue that the kinds of half-measures used in the US and other Western countries are slowing but not preventing spread of the virus. People are still shopping in supermarkets and drug stores. Labs are claiming the virus remains active on surfaces we touch for 24 hours, but we are still freely sending and receiving mail and packages. 

If claims that non-symptomatic carriers can be contagious are credible, then surely a majority of people have been exposed by now, enough that our immune systems have generated the first few antibody-producing B cells, which can multiply rapidly (exponentially) when we are exposed to more virus.

If claims that non-symptomatic carriers can be contagious are not credible, then why are we locking ourselves away from people who look and feel perfectly healthy?

Herd immunity is the population’s usual way to stop an epidemic, and social distancing may have slowed the acquisition of herd immunity, but by now we have all touched someone who has touched someone who has touched someone who has been exposed.

Possibility number 4: Can we credit the lockdown for present decline of COVID?

There are many politicians and policymakers who will line up to take the credit for COVID’s decline. We would all like to think that the individual sacrifices we are making these months have achieved a collective purpose.

Empirically, we can never resolve the counter-factual, “what if we had not locked down?” The best we can do is to compare regions that have locked down to regions that have remained open. If we do this, then, subject to the caveat that all these numbers have been gamed in the reporting, we have to conclude that the evidence for effectiveness of lockdown is not strong.

The scale on the left is in deaths per million population. For comparison, the ten most recent flu seasons in the US have caused death rates ranging from 34 to 175 (according to CDC).

Rates of COVID deaths vary widely. But countries that have locked down do not appear to have an advantage over countries that have not.

As of this writing, there are 8 US states that have not locked down by executive order: Arkansas, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming. Their death rates per million are, respectively, 11, 15, 7, 12, 27, 9, 6, and 3, all well below the national average of 77.

Looking at the state and country data, it appears to me that lockdown has been a response to high COVID mortality, rather than a preventer in advance of mortality. Perhaps this is the nature of political humans, to respond only after a threat becomes serious. But as policy, it is (to use the technical term) bass ackwards. Quarantine measures are very effective in early stages of an epidemic, but of limited usefulness once the epidemic has gotten its toehold in the population. 

China locked up quickly, cutting off all travel out of Wuhan in late January. Rules were liberalized and commerce resumed 2 months later. This makes sense. The US waited too long to lock down, and now, at a time when isolation measures are least useful, they are being intensified. I fear that the economic, psychological, and cultural consequences of this new wave of restrictions will be severe, while the epidemiological benefit will be marginal.

Theoretically, is there reason to believe that limited social contact and economic activity slows the spread of the disease. Yes, without a doubt. But is there reason to believe that it can affect the number of people who will eventually be exposed? Much less clear. I would say, only if the disease is truly wiped out in its early stage, before it becomes widespread and engenders herd immunity.

Costs

Heaven knows we all could use a few weeks of vacation. But we wouldn’t choose to spend it indoors, apart from our friends, deprived of cultural events and social supports, church, Kiwanis and AA meetings and yoga classes and folk dancing and community theater. 

Congress has appropriated $2.3 trillion for the Covid Relief Act (CARES), but some claim the true cost is $6 trillion. On Wall St, the S&P lost $10 trillion in March. If we were willing to spend any tiny fraction of this money on a rationally-designed program of public health, the number of lives saved would be far greater than the highest estimate of COVID’s potential toll. Diabetes is an eminently preventable disease that causes more deaths every year than COVID will cause over its entire lifetime, and NIH spends $0.0002 trillion to prevent it. 

Millions of small businesses are bankrupt. Tens of millions of people are unemployed. Depression and isolation have major impacts on health, much more so if they are prolonged as some are proposing.

Politics

I am all too aware of the potential for scientific opinion to be swayed by money and political influence. In the shadow of these unimaginable economic costs, there are a few who are profiting handsomely. Why did so much of the CARES money go to banks? Why is so much of the reporting promoting a vaccine to rescue us from COVID, when many past attempts to develop a coronavirus vaccine have been halted because test animals died. Vaccines are the most profitable segment of the pharmaceutical market, and drug companies are spared by law the costs of safety tests and are indemnified from legal liability.

The thing that keeps me up at night is not fear that I might catch the disease, but fear that Constitutional liberties in America are being systematically erased. “Hate speech” laws are being used to censor inconvenient political truths. The US government is barred by the First Amendment from direct censorship, but Google and Facebook and Twitter are immune because they are private companies, and they collectively have enormous influence on what we can find out and what we can discuss.

Dear readers, this is how fascists take power. They don’t say “Ha ha ha HA…now I’ve got you where I want you.” Rather, they get everyone scared, declare an emergency, and they offer to save us all from danger.

Read Naomi and Naomi. Remember the Reichstag fire. Discover, if you have not already, the shocking history of Operation Northwoods. Read Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1936). 

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson so often that he might as well have said it.

source https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/04/15/overreaction/

[playsfordaaays-blog]

Wellington Theatre 2016

First post, 22nd January NZ time, hi!

Adam Goodall’s excellent article on the Pantograph Punch, "I Am More Important Than Shakespeare": Ten Moments in Wellington Theatre 2016 opens by analysing the general state of Wellington theatre in 2016. Given that I don’t know anything about the state of Wellington theatre in 2015 or 2014 or in any previous year, I can’t do anything similar here. In 2015, I started to be interested in theatre and went to a few plays, much fewer than this year, drawn by an interest in the theatre department at my then-new school Wellington High and by going to the plays put on by the Wellington Young Actors, a company which my friend Gabe Parkin is a member of. However, I didn’t really have anything approaching an understanding of what was even happening – I didn’t so much as know who The Bacchanals were until about December, and I managed to miss A Christmas Karel Capek. 2016 has been my first year in theatre, as it were, it’s been my first year where I’ve been attending plays regularly and keeping up with developments and criticism. As such, all I can say with my lack of context is that the year in theatre has been good, and that a lot of people have made good plays during it. This list is about those plays.

First item: my top ten plays of the year, in the order I want to give them attention

Hudson and Halls Live!

Everyone loved this play. It got fantastic reviews, apparently did very well at the box office (though I’m unaware of any available figures, I’m just going off how many people I heard talking about it and the large audience I saw it with) and swept the Wellington Theatre Awards. I’m slightly resentful of that last one – it wasn’t even from Wellington! – but I can see where the judges are coming from. Hudson and Halls was a very funny and completely engaging play. The most interesting part of the play for me was the core conceit that this was a live filming of an episode and that we were the studio audience, which allowed for the audience to be very naturally involved in the action because we were present in the diegesis.

The Trojan Women

I put this here primarily for the text. Greek tragedies aren’t put on terribly often, and this one was very rewarding to see. The new translation by Simon Perris was very good, and because of it you can now cite “f*** you and die” as a quotation from Euripides. The production itself was strong, with good performances that handled the meter well. Particular note should be given to Katie Alexander, playing Kassandra with captivating intensity, and to the Mad Max (mostly Fury Road)-based design. (I’d credit the designers, but the program contained the credits in a separate piece of paper and I’ve lost that piece of paper! I’m getting names from Theatreview, and I can get from there that Ashleigh Dixon and Rudimiller Mafi are the costume designers, but there may have been other people doing other aspects of the design and I’ll credit them if I find the credits.) I think that the entrance of Athena, borne aloft by a team of ten Greek men dressed like Fury Road’s War Boys, was probably the coolest thing I’ll see in a theatre for a long time.

Smells Like Xmas          

I started writing this post just a couple of days before I published it, but I was considering starting much earlier (yay procrastination!) Several weeks ago, I was considering making a start, but I thought I should wait until that Saturday, the 17th, when I would see my last two shows of the year: The Better Best Album Party That Anyone Has Ever Been Two and Smells Like Xmas. I considered it unlikely that any candidate for this list would arrive so late, but I was wrong. Binge Culture’s Christmas show was a great success of experimentalism. Its series of skits were often abstract and sometimes difficult to follow, but they were always absolutely hilarious. I’m of the understanding that Binge Culture has quite a good reputation; judging by this, it’s well deserved.

Hamlet

Quite a lot of people heard about this production, most of them were misinformed as to its nature. It was at the Pop-Up Globe for a single day, which is what most people know about it. It was actually touring the North Island, with the Pop-Up being a brief but notable stop. I don’t have that much to say about it, other than that it was a very solid production and that the all-female casting worked very well.

Titus Andronicus

2016 was a very good year for Aotearoa Tituses. This play, once one of the least popular, had three productions this year: one in Auckland at the Pop-Up Globe, one in Hamilton, and this one, in Wellington. It was the only one of these productions I saw (of course), and it was very good. Put on by a brand-new company going by the name of the Lost Shakespeare Company, which states that it is dedicated to putting on more obscure Shakespeare plays, it was a solid minimalist production. One thing that was very notable about it was that it had no fake blood or gore effects; a startling choice for this splatterfest of a play, but one which worked very well, allowing it to play more like a straight tragedy and clearly presenting the themes and characters in the lessened presence of shock.

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Another Auckland import! Sam Brooks had two plays running in early December: Making Friends Collective’s production of Wine Lips, which I missed, and this, his own production of the semi-autobiographical play which seems to be his signature. Another one where I don’t have much to say about it, just that it’s a complex, well-written and well-acted piece of work, and that Brook’s Bruce Mason Award is well deserved.

Well

I really wish I had a script of this. Well was a piece of verbatim theatre by new feminist theatre company Women Aren’t Wolves, dealing with mental illness from the perspective of people who have it. As a document it was vital, providing a space for people with mental illness to define their conditions in their own terms. The descriptions stated that they wanted to explore “what it means to be well”, and this production met that goal admirably.

Rukahu

James Nokise is completely amazing. I don’t think that there’s anyone disputing this. This play was simultaneously one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year and a searing piece of cultural comment and criticism. Some of this was lost on me, as I don’t really know enough about the sort of theatre he’s parodying to understand how his character, Senior Pacific Artist Jon Bon Fasi, applies to how real-life Māori and Pasifika theatre is handled by CreativeNZ and the general theatrical establishment (if that is his target, I think it is), but what I could understand was incredibly insightful. Nokise could write a book, but that wouldn’t get the audiences he wants, and it wouldn’t be as funny. This is what political theatre is for, and I’m not sure it even is political theatre.

When We Dead Awaken

This show was massively underappreciated. I’ve heard very little talk about it – there are quite a few reviews of it floating around, sure, but only because it toured the North Island and was reviewed in the newspapers where it went. It certainly had flaws, with the acting sometimes lacking variance in intonation, but this production of Henrik Ibsen’s symbolistic final play was extraordinarily powerful. Stripped down to just under an hour (an Ibsen play!), it was particularly notable for its blocking, its design (though the colour pallet was composed exclusively of my favourite colours so I am biased), its music, and the vocal work of the actors. I saw the first performance in the Fringe Festival and the last one at BATS in October, and both times the ending made me gasp from the catharsis.

Galathea: Into the Bush                                                

Ania Upstill had a strong year, first directing Love’s Labours Lost for Summer Shakespeare (which was OK), then Hamlet, then this. This play was an update of John Lyly’s Elizabethan play Galathea (or Gallathea or Galatea) about two girls being disguised as boys and sent into the forest by their fathers to escape being sacrificed to Neptune and falling in love while in the captivity of Diana’s Hunt, all surrounded by the machinations of various gods. Typical Elizabethan story. Opening a week and a bit after Trump’s election, this play wasn’t just funny (and it was very, very funny), it was happy, it was celebratory, and it represented a great variety of and was primarily aimed at LGBT people. All this made it very appropriate for the time, in a different way to most things of which that can be said. Representation will be increasingly important under Trump, both to humanise the people he’ll dehumanise and to create a space for said people. The humour, the acting, the theatrical skill, and the politics of this play are all things I hope I see more of in the plays of 2017.

Second Item: Shows I missed but really wish I’d seen

Shot Bro: Confessions of a Depressed Bullet

The Vultures

Mana Wahine (I need to make a note of the Kia Mau Festival next year!)

No Post On Sunday

The Fence (directed by the older siblings of one of the WHS Shakespeare directors this year!)

Wine Lips

A Trial and/or It’s a Trial!

Rose Matafeo: Finally Dead

Perhaps, Perhaps… Quizás

Not In Our Neighbourhood (though there’ll probably be another chance to see it)

Third Item: Now For Something Completely Foreign

It wasn’t a New Zealand play at all, but I saw a cinema screening of the RSC Hamlet with Paapa Essiedu and it was completely incredible. Keep an eye on Essiedu, he’s probably got a strong career ahead of him based on his performance. Keep an eye on anyone involved in this, really. This is possibly the best play I’ve ever seen in my limited experience.

Fourth Item: Ten favourite plays with enthusiasm translator (like the Obama anger translator but for enthusiasm)

Hudson and Halls Live!

Really funny! Good theatrical technique!

The Trojan Women 

Yay tragedy!

Smells Like Xmas        

Experimental! Hilarious!

Hamlet

Yay Shakespeare!

Titus Andronicus

Yay Shakespeare!

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Yay well-written character-based drama but also with jokes!

Well

I know things I didn’t before!

Rukahu

Best editorial is a comedy show!

When We Dead Awaken

Really impressive presentation of interesting overlooked text!

Galathea: Into the Bush                                               

Spreaded non-holiday-related cheer! (I realise spreaded isn’t a word)

Fifth Item: Shows I’m Looking Forward To In 2017

The Undertow

January. Four history plays about Wellington, viewable two at a time or in one ten-hour session with intervals.

Stoge Chollonge 2006

February. Fringe Festival. Comedy show about Stage Challenge and 2000s period piece.

Possible Bacchanals show

Only exists if David Lawrence manages to get out of the Pop-Up Globe or much less likely, if they go on with less of his involvement. Lawrence has said that he does really want to do something with The Bacchanals for the election year

Nearly Inevitable PSA Show

Almost certainly coming to the Comedy Festival. With an election year AND President Trump for meat.

Anything Ania Upstill makes next year

Anything James Nokise makes next year

Good luck for next year! I don’t think there’ll be much good for the world, but theatre’s going well, however much that even matters!