ghost of miles

Same topic, same rules as the moderators choose to define them. World stats as of this morning: Worldometer Coronavirus Here in the U.S. we’re at 1.1 million plus cases and nearly 66,000 deaths.

OK, this is some sort of semantic disagreement, then. “Enforcement” connotes to me an authoritative/authoritarian body applying a decree—“Thou shalt not have any meat to eat!” Not a disruption of the market/supply chain because virus outbreaks have gotten so bad at plants that some have temporarily closed. They are now being forced to re-open by order of the federal govt. That to me is much closer to a definition of “enforced.”

Bingo! Same point I made on Facebook recently. And it’s not “enforced vegan-ism”... the only “enforcement” that’s happening is federal leadership ordering meatpacking plants to remain open despite the widespread outbreaks of Covid-19 among plant workers. Here in Indiana we’ve had a really bad outbreak at a plant in Logansport, with at least 50 percent of workers testing positive.

Didn’t connect with Scott till yesterday to place my order and will be part of the second wave of shipments. He seemed happily staggered by the response to Thursday’s email.

Ask Google and ye shall receive! Jeopardy “DJ Jazzy” category

Somehow missed this when Nate posted it in late March as part of WBGO’s “Deep Dive” series. Quite a remarkable essay about the film and its context. “Lensing The Mob”: Jazz On A Summer’s Day 60 Years Later

Yep, although there's apparently a bit of a hold on it right now for an unspecified reason. But Scott says Michael definitely still wants to proceed with it.

What's wrong with WHO? Or have you been imbibing the Kool-Aid that certain leadership has been distributing? I mean, c'mon. (Because I really doubt that you have, but otherwise I can't fathom that statement.) Anyway, if you want to dispute the statistics and the analysis that Konyndyk puts forth in that thread, that's one thing. To disparage him because of an association with WHO doesn't really do an iota to invalidate the concerns he's laying out there. Marshall's saying that if we continue to plateau, as we seem to be doing now, that yes, we're looking at a continuing high monthly death rate--and one that could increase as the country moves to reopen. But even if it doesn't increase, holy crap, 60,000 deaths a month for the next few months?! (I'm not advocating for a continuing strict lockdown, btw... that's not the point of my prior post. I *am* advocating for a realistic grasp of the shit we're dealing with, and frankly that shit is far worse because of the colossal failure of leadership we've seen at various levels, but most especially at the federal, and the woeful state we find ourselves in for moving forward.) You've lived in NYC and I've just visited there a few times in the past several years, but the city's already moving towards 20,000 dead, and not just elderly folk in nursing homes, but transit workers, health-care workers, etc. You can't tell me that things wouldn't be far worse and the death/infection toll much higher and the medical system overwhelmed if the city hadn't gone on lockdown. It's NYC, for crissake--in normal times everybody's packed together on the subways, indoor and outdoor venues... this virus spreads so easily already. I haven't seen any models for what March and April would have looked like without a lockdown, so it's hard to say how bad it would have been. As it is it's bad enough. I mean, bodies are literally piling up in NYC right now. And God help the rural areas across America, where coronavirus cases are increasing, often in places where there are no longer any hospitals. My statement about undercounting was not made to connote conspiratorial intent (though since I posted, this story popped up, which does seem like a move to control the data we're getting out of one state). Although I'd agree that China almost certainly under-reported their death figures. I'm alluding to the low ratio of testing we're still at overall in the U.S., the excess death rate increase that suggests the toll could be twice as high as the official figure, etc, and the issues that this New York Times article addresses (April 5, less than 4 weeks ago, and the U.S. death count hadn't hit 10,000 yet--seems like long ago at this point). But let's just push all those issues to the side and assume that the official count is pretty much accurate. It's 65,598 in the U.S. now... that's 1400 more deaths from COVID-19 reported just in the two hours since I put up my post. And again, that's with a lot of restrictions still in place and most people practicing some form of social distancing. I really would be interested to see a model that projected what the toll might be without all the things that have been done to try to keep this plague in check. As it is, Marshall's completely right to say that the IMHE model is becoming a bit of a joke. I share his perplexity at their having issued a projection just two days ago that's so clearly out of line with the day-to-day data... early August?! We're going to hit that mark a week from now or less. Everybody wants the economy to resume some sort of function again that will put us on the path to some sort of recovery. I'm unaware of a single expert, politician, commentator, or anybody else who doesn't want that (unless again you're drinking the Kool-Aid that a certain network and certain officials of influence are spewing out there, and that is some highly toxic shit, my friend). In fact, it's precisely the fear of this thing getting even worse and wreaking more havoc of all kinds that's making some urge that we proceed with caution. Intensive testing, contact tracing, all kinds of things to be done (and Konyndyk spells them out iirc in that thread) to make it less likely that lifting restrictions will come back to bite us in the ass, hard. In the meantime, there seem to be some potentially favorable developments in the way of possible treatments and vaccines, which is what we really need to achieve the new normal, whatever and whenever that may be. Like everybody else I have friends who've been hit hard economically by all of this, and I have two friends who nearly died from it (plus an elderly aunt who's tested positive but who's so far hanging in there), but who've now recovered. (One of them lost her mother to it while she herself was in intensive care and on a ventilator.) Another friend had to close his restaurant for good. It's a terrible situation. But I can't conceive of how much worse if would've been if we hadn't done (and continue to do, to one degree or another) what we're doing. In fact, we should have done a lot more and done it a lot earlier, and things would almost certainly not gotten as bad as they have. (And no, Sweden's not so hot either, despite the strange embrace of that country by a number of folks who normally disparage just about every approach to public life that a country like Sweden employs.) This is not just the flu. Maybe in a few years it will be, once we have vaccines, proven treatments, etc. In the meantime, we've got to be as smart and tough as we can be about dealing with it and figuring out how we move forward economically without screwing up all over again as we did in February and early March. Too many people have already died. We owe it to the transit workers, the nurses and doctors, the police officers and paramedics and all the others who've taken far more significant hits than the rest of us, that their deaths weren't in vain.

Going to pull it out right now for a fresh listen after seeing this thread pop up again. Any word on whether or not the forthcoming Mosaic set will include it? I haven't really seen (or else I've missed) what the parameters are going to be for that set, as to whether or not it will start with Lee-way or The Sidewinder, and whether it goes just to the end of the 1960s (which would mean concluding with Caramba, correct?), or if it will extend through this album instead.

One problem right now as far as data and what's likely to happen (especially now that numerous states are attempting some sort of phased reopening) is that the IHME model being used by the White House task force and many media outlets is, as Josh Marshall notes, seriously out of whack... and that's measuring it against the official COVID-19 death toll so far (which is almost certainly an undercount, especially when one looks at the "excess deaths" rate in the U.S. for the past few weeks): There is a common aphorism in the world of statistics: ‘All models are wrong but some are useful.’ It captures an important point: Models aren’t predictions as a psychic might make so much as attempts to organize data and think critically about uncertainty. The COVID19 model out of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has become something of a canonical model for the COVID19 epidemic in the United States, in part because it appears to have been adopted by the White House task force. I wanted to take a moment to look at just how far out of line it has become even with current data. The models estimates have bounced around a fair amount. It started high, jumped back considerably and has crept back up since. This isn’t a sign of a problem in itself. It is an attempt to model the course of a disease that didn’t exist six months ago. As we proceed it is supplemented with new data. But consider these numbers. The latest estimate, released on April 29th projected 72,433 cumulative deaths through August 4th – a range from 59,343 to 114,228. But as of this morning the Johns Hopkins University data tracker shows that 63,019 people have already died. And if we look at the data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project 13,252 of those have died (or at least been reported) in the last seven days. If we assumed the unlikely hypothetical that the average death toll in the first half of May were one half what it was in the last 7 days of April, the United States would blow through the IHME total on May 10th, almost three months before the model says it should. I’m no statistician but this is seriously out of whack and what is striking to me is that the latest projections came out only two days ago, when these numbers were as obviously out of whack as they are this morning. My point here isn’t to criticize. These numbers speak for themselves. But to the extent we’re going to have a model that at least organizes our thinking about the range of possibilities we need either a new model or a refactored one. I mean, accurate data models are just *one* of the issues we're struggling with right now. But we're well on pace to reach that new IHME April 29th projection three months ahead of schedule, as Marshall notes--May 10th is in fact a pretty optimistic calculation. The Worldometer Coronavirus tracker shows U.S. deaths as of this moment at 64,503. And when you look at the daily data for new infections and deaths, we're basically plateauing--that's with extreme lockdown measures in effect for much of the country. As Jeremy Konyndyk runs it down in this Twitter thread, we're looking at replicating March's death toll for the next few months--basically the equivalent of a Vietnam War fatality total every single month--unless a lot of things happen that right now don't seem likely to happen.

The 1991 issue of this is apparently out of print? John Coltrane: Live In Japan I just loaned my copy to a friend, and another friend joked that I'd better take out insurance on it. I'm sure it's been reissued in some form on some non-Impulse label... plus it's most likely readily available in the digital wilds or not-so-wilds of 2020. Starting to feel like Rip van Winkle, though... "Huh?! How could that landmark set that was released nearly 30 years ago at this point be commercially unavailable now?" EDIT: looks like there's been a relatively recent Japanese reissue.

An excellent two-CD compilation of 1950s and early 60s Mercury jazz, with annotations by Dan Morgenstern: I mean... damn!

Yep! Paul Desmond Live In Toronto

...and shipping as well! Paul Desmond Live In Toronto

I used to communicate with him from time to time but haven't done so for awhile (no particular reason). I'm friends with him on Facebook and he posted there about 10 days ago, so it appears he's still using that account occasionally. His last FB post was a photo of a bottle of wine, so he doesn't seem to have undergone a drastic personality change.

It’s been too long, my beloved.

More elaboration here. Man, that Eastern division would be brutal!

MLB considering as many as 15 plans for potential 2020 season

Via a tweet from Ted Gioia, some news about a forthcoming graphic novel about Bird in mid-1940s California: Chasin' The Bird: Charlie Parker In California

Wonder if they have a landlord who's been looking for a reason to push them out. My understanding (which could be incorrect) is that residential and commercial evictions are currently banned in NYC through late June: New York eviction moratorium (And hopefully that will be extended, since I don't think anybody thinks NYC will be anywhere close to being back to "normal" by then, whatever the new normal will be.)

Thanks for the heads-up about that!

Brutal. This sure as hell isn’t “just like the flu.” Also suggests—as do other factors—that the reported # of deaths linked to Covid-19 is an undercount.

This came out when I was a kid, never saw it but it popped into my mind recently as something that might prove interesting to watch... any other board members who’ve seen it?