Masks Again

 My wife and I followed recommendations on covid throughout 2020. We wore the masks, avoided crowds, and did the “social distancing”. We went months without seeing our grandchildren except via video conferencing.  The only restaurant meals we ate from March though the end of the year were takeout. We cancelled trips and missed a family reunion. We took the Moderna vaccine as soon as it was available to us in January of this year and dutifully waited our two weeks after the second shot. I have consistently advised friends and relatives to get vaccinated.

I will not be following the recent directive to go back to the mask, not because I am sick and tired of the whole mess, though I am. I will ignore the directive because I do not  think it makes sense for someone in my situation.  Because of the vaccine my risk of catching covid is low. Also because of the vaccine, if I do get it, I very likely either will never know it because I had no symptoms or will have only the equivalent of a head cold. That is because, on the evidence, the vaccine works. I have never worn a mask or avoided contact with people to avoid colds or flu. I took the flu shot, washed my hands a lot,  and took my chances. Thanks to the vaccine my risk from covid is low enough that I will be doing the same thing now.

  I do not know if a vaccinated person with an asymptomatic and thus unknown infection can infect an unvaccinated person. It doesn’t seem impossible, but I’ve heard of no study showing it happens with any meaningful frequency. I do know that healthy kids under twelve are at very little risk of serious illness from covid, which makes me oppose orders for them to suffer through another year of masks at school. I also know that  adults who have neither been vaccinated nor recovered from the disease have made a decision to take their chances, and I see no reason to demand that others be inconvenienced to make that decision perhaps very slightly less risky for them.

I am lucky to live in a state that will not be calling in the cops to enforce the directive.  People here will have a choice, and I expect life to continue reverting to normal. But I do hope that more of the holdouts everywhere will go ahead and get vaccinated. It will be good for all of us to get this thing behind us, especially the poor people in the places that are locking down again at gunpoint.

As an aside this directive is moronically bad marketing for vaccination. It usually works better in selling something to someone to point out something he will gain or enjoy from it. Apparently our public health bureaucrats don’t see it that way and think it will work out fine to tell people they still cannot have normal lives even after vaccination but will be running around in masks indefinitely regardless. It also probably is not a good marketing approach for officials to tell people the reason they should obey the mandate is because officials said they should. The “do it because I’m the Mommy” technique does not work well kids, and sensible adults can find it really annoying, as they should.

Anti-Vaccine Propaganda

People often miss the important difference between having a right to do something and that something being a right or reasonable thing to do. People have a right not to get vaccinated for covid. It’s a free country. Adults refusing vaccination do not create serious risks except for each other. (Those of us who are vaccinated are either immune to the disease or well enough protected that if one of us gets infected, he probably either will never know it or will have only the equivalent of a mild head cold. Kids under twelve are at  very little risk of getting really sick and should become eligible for vaccination in a few months. Also as another aside, I mean to exclude from consideration here people who have already had the disease because I do not know whether or not their acquired immunity is robust and long lasting enough to make vaccination unnecessary.) But what they have decided is wrong. I feel sorry for many of them who have been conned, manipulated, or just plain frightened into making a bad decision. 

I have no sympathy for the politicians and people in mainly the conservative media who are doing the conning, manipulating, and frightening. They have a right to do what they are doing, but what they are doing is wrong – cruelly, foolishly, yahooishly wrong.  Not everything in life should be political. Conservatives are supposed to know that. The decision to or not to be vaccinated should be a reasoned, pragmatic, medical one, not a political statement.  The fact that some authoritarian Democrat governors and other officials have gone too far too gleefully in bossing people around during the epidemic is irrelevant to the question. So are the absurd things coming from the teachers’ unions and the misrepresentations, lies, and panic mongering  coming from people in the traditional media. So are the political biases of Tony Fauci and the character and policies of Biden and Harris. Yet some conservative politicians and media people behave as though they were, and that getting vaccinated is somehow caving in to the Dems and their flacks in the media while going unvaccinated is standing up against them. They also make light of the epidemic itself - treating the new, more contagious version of the disease and even the present increases in serious infections as something of a joke. Some of them spread scare stories about harmful side effects of the vaccines while neglecting to mention how rarely they happen and even repeat silly monster movie stuff such as stories claiming the vaccines alter people’s DNA.

They should know better, and they surely should think about the harm they are doing. For old and already very sick people, getting vaccinated can be a matter of life or death. For the young and healthy vaccination can be both a way to feel and be safer and to help get their lives back to normal. For kids  vaccinating enough teens and adults (and soon the kids themselves) can be a way allow them to ditch the masks  and return to a normal childhood. It is hard to excuse preaching against it to make trivial political points.

Girls' and Women's Sports

People in the Biden administration and various mainly Democrat governors and state legislatures have decided that boys pretending to be girls and men pretending to be women should be allowed to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. While this is neither the strangest nor the most important thing going on with the transexual craze in the country, it is interesting.

Girls and women are at a disadvantage to boys and men in strength, speed, and quickness. That is why schools and colleges have separate programs for girls and women in sports including soccer, softball or baseball, basketball, volleyball, swimming, track and field, tennis, and even golf when they do not have them in chess, debate, law review, engineering design or other competitions where physical differences between the sexes do not matter.  The separate programs are necessary to give large numbers of girls and women a chance  to participate   in organized sports that they would not have if competing for places on teams against boys and men.  This is well known and until recently was well accepted.

Now many people and often the same people who for years have lobbied for more money and attention for women’s sports have decided that allowing the guys into girls and women’s sports is fine and fair to all, providing the males declare they want to be viewed as female. Holding that position requires rejecting and declaring invalid the reason for having separate teams for girls and women and leads fairly naturally to the conclusion that schools and colleges should just have teams, one for each sport, that anyone of any actual or declared sex can try out for.  There is irony there.

People Not Getting Vaccinated

 My wife and I took the Moderna vaccine for covid as soon as we could and were delighted to do so.  We saw and still see getting vaccinated as an obviously sensible and prudent thing to do. Since getting the shots in January I have encouraged others I know, particularly others over fifty,  to do the same. Some have, and some have decided they won’t. The ones deciding not to get vaccinated are not fools or paranoiacs. They are not against vaccines in general. They do not think the shots contain a secret microchip which will allow Bill Gates to track their movements. They just plan to pass on this one.    According to the news there are millions of Americans who have made the same decision. Rather than insulting them, it is worth thinking about what might have contributed to their decision.

The first thing that comes to mind is simple fear. These days people are easy to scare.  They have been indoctrinated to be so. Through about the first  two thirds of the 20^th Century there was a general impression among the public and in journalism that advances in science and technology were good things which made people’s lives better. Many people still think so, but in the last fifty or so years fear mongering politicians and people in media have created a counter trend of unreasonable fear of everything from being poisoned by eating apples to causing the end of the world by having a hamburger, and especially  of anything to do with “chemicals”. The vaccines are made of chemical compounds, and they were created by corporations. The same people who have spent decades portraying anything chemical as dangerous and pharmaceutical companies as evil now seem surprised that people are wary of new chemicals developed by pharmaceutical companies. The environment is right for claims that the vaccines alter people’s  DNA or give them cancer or corrupt the purity and essence of their precious bodily fluids to be taken seriously.

There is also mistrust of government. Lying, bumbling, and covering up are standard features and practices of the government, and people can see that irrespective of their political preferences. (I doubt if very many people would consider both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to be competent, effective, straight shooters who did their jobs well and honestly.) People do not trust the government and its public relations people in the media because they are not trustworthy.  They have earned their “credibility problem”.

What should people in government do to make more people willing to be vaccinated? What they are doing now is not working well, and I doubt if sending evangelists door to door will do much good either. I would suggest that they change their marketing approach and try something very unusual for them. They should treat skeptics as reasoning adults, admit that their statements, demands, and actions on the epidemic in the past have sometimes been wrong, heavy handed,  and unnecessary, agree that all vaccines carry risks and that these were developed very rapidly while offering evidence they have worked out well, concede that young adults have little to worry about from the virus, resist the temptation to bring up race, gender, or Trump in the pitch, and ask, not order, people to get vaccinated to make things safer for everyone and get this thing over with. They also might consider finding a better salesman than a shifty, pompous old man so arrogant that he equates questioning his opinions to an attack on science itself.

Federal Holiday

Slavery ended legally in the confederate states on September 22, 1862 when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the rebelling states effective January 1^st, 1863. Of course in practice the proclamation took effect in confederate territories only as the Union army occupied them and enforced it. Slavery was banned everywhere (there were a couple of hold out, non-confederate border states that had  not banned slavery on their own) when the 13^th Amendment was ratified by the last necessary state legislature on December 6th, 1865 after passing congress in January of that year. Either of these significant dates would have been a natural choice for a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, it took a while for units of the Union army to get to and control all areas of the confederacy.  By June 19^th there was a Union general in Galveston to command the military district of Texas, and on that date he issues a general order informing people in the state that that all former slaves in Texas were free, having been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The order was not an insignificant thing. Any former slaves in Texas who did not already know it needed to learn they were free, and the former slave owners surely needed to be told who was running things. But it was only a local order restricted to Texas and announcing an emancipation that in law had already happened.

Over time June 19^th  came to be celebrated as a festive holiday related to the end of slavery, and it is the one congress picked as a federal holiday, which is okay, though one of the other two would have made more sense in terms of historical significance. 

I do agree with the opinions I have heard – sometimes said seriously, sometimes jokingly – that new federal holidays are a good thing in themselves. Any day the employees of the federal bureaucracy are off is a day they cannot be harming and restricting the productive members and useful activities of society.

  

Willie Mays' Missing Years

I think Bill James wrote somewhere that while in general one should judge a ballplayer’s career by what he did and not by what he might have done, there were two exceptions – men whose careers were interrupted by wartime service in the armed forces and black players who were kept out of the big leagues by segregation.   In each case there is an easy rule of thumb for adding back what was missed.

 For a black player who got to the majors later in life than he would have if the game had not been segregated, one can look at his performance in his first couple of years in the majors,  estimate at what age he would have come up to the majors if not for segregation, and guess that he would have had similar numbers in the years he missed. For service in the armed forces one can be more precise,  taking  a player’s record the last year before he went into the service and the first year after he returned, averaging them, and estimating that he would had about that kind of performance in the missed years. The main beneficiaries of this are players who served in World War II – Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Joe Dimaggio, and especially Ted Williams who also missed almost two years of playing time serving in the Korean War. To me it puts Williams second only to Ruth in career performance at the plate.

People often forget that the same calculation can be applied to Willie Mays. After a good rookie year in 1951, he missed most of 1952 and all of 1953 serving in the army during the Korean War. Then he had a very good year in 1954. Adding the missed years back makes his remarkable statistics even more so. He turned ninety a few weeks ago, one of the few great players of my childhood still around.