Black Lives Matters: The Lid Comes Off The Con

 I have said now for at least a couple years that Black Lives Matter is a label, not a proper organization. Jen Monroe at her Substack has recently detailed the painful unraveling of whatever shambles existed of that organization, and particularly, what happened to $60 million in donations now that "[b]oth Andrew Kerr of the Washington Examiner and Sean Campbell of New York magazine reported on the lack of leadership and transparency within the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation."

To recap –- the nation’s premier social justice organization does not have a functioning board of directors, nor an office, and $60 million that nobody is willing to say who is in control of. According to BLMGNF’s bylaws, the executive director has control of all funds related to the corporation but it seems it has not had anyone in that role since Cullors left.

It turns out the most visible arm of BLM has murky finances, former officers buying themselves real estate in multiple tony addresses, and no visible leadership — none of which is a surprise. This is a more extreme form of the general problem of "awareness" in charities, which always amounts to an excuse for self-referential fundraising. Given the state of racial hucksterism, I fully expect that even this brazen cash grab will result in a shrug among their corporate donors, whose major interest is in shooing away bad press.

The Senator From East Virginia Takes On Licensing Of PetSmart Groomers

 Shoshana Weissmann’s Twitter persona as the Senator from East Virginia is the cover story for her advocacy on a number of subjects with the R Street Institute: DMCA Section 230, social media regulation, and especially, occupational licensing. Charming, smart, and funny despite the numerous trolls she attracts daily, she gets to a lot of stories that would otherwise miss my attention. One such that escaped me from 2018 was a tawdry story of New Jersey PetSmart groomers actually killing dogs in their custody — and PetSmart immediately turning this into an opportunity to pretend that licensing dog groomers would have fixed this situation!

PetSmart should absolutely be held accountable for these losses. Harming dogs in this way is both unconscionable and illegal. The state of New Jersey ought to step in and investigate. However, a pet grooming license will do little to help protect dogs from negligent or reckless groomers.

The New Jersey bill would require individuals to pass an exam, be at least 18 years of age and “of good moral character” to obtain a groomer license. The problem, however, is that large corporations like PetSmart will have no trouble getting licenses for their groomers. PetSmart is a major company with the financial means to train its staff and ensure that its groomers have licenses. In fact, PetSmart already trains its groomers.

Instead, adding licensing requirements will prevent smaller groomers from practicing — including struggling small businesses, teens who have learned to groom to earn some extra money, and other individual groomers of poorer means who have been grooming pets for years but cannot afford the training.

Now, it should also be mentioned that among the dogs that died, 20 of 47 were brachycephalic breeds — in other words, dogs with congenital breathing disorders bred into them. This is not an excuse, of course, but it does help to understand why some of them died, anyway. It in no way excuses PetSmart’s absurd reaction, which would kick people out of the business who had not killed any dogs.

Review: The French Dispatch

There was a moment when I was in a Westwood theater watching L.A. Story where the plot amiably loped toward a weekend getaway at an upscale resort hotel. The hotel's name slipped out of Steve Martin's mouth so stealthily that, when the establishing shot showed the name "El Pollo del Mar", I exclaimed out loud, "Chicken of the Sea?" And the entire audience erupted. The French Dispatch is full of moments like that, and even though I have much less experience with French than Spanish, it's a big part of the buffet of little comedic moments that constantly wash over you.

The action centers on Bill Murray, who plays mainly a supporting role as Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the publisher of The French Dispatch; around him is one of the most talented ensembles I've seen in years, including Benicio del Toro, as the homicidal painter Moses Rosenthaler who eventually seduces his prison guard Simone (Léa Seydoux, who somehow manages to be naked and funny at the same time). Frances MacDormand gets another typically dissolving character role as the crusty Lucinda Krementz. The third act utterly belongs to Roebuck Wright (as Jeffrey Wright) and Steve Park (as Nescaffier, one of the film's many punning names) in an absurdist kidnapping and culinary caper. I laughed almost the entire way through it, and harder than any film of the last decade that I can immediately recall. Run and see this one.

The New IOC Transgender Participation Rules Are Unfair To Biological Women

 The International Olympic Committee released its new framework for transgender and intersex athletes Tuesday. Hard as it is to believe, it is even worse than the old 2015 rules, which required testosterone level verification — despite the utter lack of science behind this. (The problem is the ineradicable changes wrought by male puberty: even after a year of hormone therapy, M2F transsexual athletes retained the vast majority of their strength advantage.)

The document itself is a pastiche of delusion, starting with its first section. Titled "Inclusion", all else follows from that idea, namely, that anyone who claims to be female should also get to compete with them in athletic events. The rest is filled with rationalizations for how this is to happen and why. Quoting Fair Play for Women's response (emboldening all mine):

UK sports governing bodies now have two different sets of guidance to consider, and on this point they agree. The new Sports Councils Equality Group guidance also concluded that testosterone suppression was pointless. But unlike the IOC, they kept sight of the implications: there is no fair way to include people who’ve been through male puberty in female competitive sport. Women will always be disadvantaged. That’s why a separate category for the female sex exists in most sports in the first place.

The IOC claims it has taken notice of the UK Sports Councils Equality Group’s output. It’s hard to see how. The IOC’s new guidance has abandoned the science and says there should be “no presumption of advantage”.

“No athlete should be excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”

What does this mean? It means that being transgender is no longer to be counted as having any relevance at all for sporting eligibility. No one is arguing that we don’t need separate female and male (or open) classes. Without them, females would barely get a look-in. Yet the IOC is saying being born male is not a factor.

“Transgender status” is what permits a male to compete as a female when there’s a massive advantage, ranging from 10% at the low end, in running and rowing, to 35% in weightlifting. This advantage is unaffected by gender identity. It would be laughable, were it not so disappointing, that the IOC has thrown out the fig-leaf of testosterone suppression and ended up with self-identification.

 The gasoline that will keep this car moving is the fact that there is necessarily a limited supply of M2F transsexuals wanting to participate in women's sports. That does not make this any more fair to biological women.

COVID Hospitalization Stats Ain't What They Used To Be — And That's Good

It's been a while since I posted anything here, but this was so important, it was vital to get it out, on the grounds that it's important to change your opinion when the data changes. For a very long time, I've said that the "with COVID/of COVID" hospitalization and death dispute was mainly a distraction, one designed to minimize the disease burden from people who didn't want to believe the pandemic was worth all the bother others invested in it. It's now fair to say that COVID-19 hospitalization data isn't as meaningful as it used to be. Researchers tried to find out how many people were really in the hospital for severe COVID, but because it is a "must-report" disease, hospitalization counts include people in the hospital for other conditions who incidentally test positive for COVID-19. The way to understand this, then, is to get a handle on just how sick people with COVID are:

Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.

The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.

So that's mainly a good thing: it means nearly half people in the hospital aren't generally in the ICU for COVID, but that they're for some other reason. It would be interesting (but obviously much more complicated) to get similar numbers for deaths.

Administrivia: Sidebar Update

 Cleaned up some dead links and changed links on the sidebar.

India's Vaccine Nationalism Disrupts COVAX And More

 The horrific scenes coming in from India have vaulted that nation to the top of the single-day COVID-19 death tally, not a statistic you want to lead the world in, and this is just the official totals. (For various reasons, the actual number may be substantially higher.) Unsurprisingly, then, the country that has done more to mass produce vaccines than almost anyone else has announced an export ban through October as doses are being diverted to combat disease in India. The ban will affect, at least, Johnson & Johnson (made by Biological E), AstraZeneca's Covishield (Serum Institute and Dr. Reddy's), Novavax (Serum Institute), and Sputnik V (Dr. Reddy's). While we don't know which countries are affected here, the Reuters report makes it sound like it will be mainly south Asian nations and anybody hoping to get vaccines via COVAX, the WHO's distribution network (140 million doses were diverted from the latter). There's some hope from the US:

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Monday his country would export at least 20 million doses of the Pfizer (PFE.N)/BioNTech , Moderna (MRNA.O) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) shots, on top of 60 million AstraZeneca doses he had already planned to give to other countries.

But those are drops in the bucket compared to demand. Vaccine nationalism was always going to be a problem, and anyone claiming otherwise hasn't been paying attention.