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A Few Thoughts On the Kavanaugh Confirmation Process

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I hate the Kavanaugh confirmation process.

Supreme Court Justices are some of the most influential people in the country, and a relatively young guy like Brett Kavanaugh will affect the course of things in this country for decades to do come. But despite thousands of news stories, I have very little idea what he’s likely to do if he gets on the Supreme Court.

From the little I can gather from sources I trust,

  • He’s a vanilla standard conservative nominee, not some kind of far-right radical.
  • He’s pretty good on free speech issues.
  • He sucks when it comes to the rights of the accused.
  • I like that he appears to want to narrow Chevron deference.

I’ll probably dislike a lot of his rulings, but no more than I would almost anybody else likely to be nominated.

But we’re not talking about any of that right now. Instead, there’s this enormous public debate over Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior toward women when he was in high school and early college. The accusations started with holding a girl down and grinding against her at a high school party, with a relatively strong witness for something that happened so long ago. The next accusation escalated to waving his dick around near some woman’s face, but even the woman involved admits her memory is sketchy.

Then publicity hound Michael Avenatti popped up with a client who claimed that Kavenaugh participated in multiple gang rapes, with guys at parties lined up outside rooms where they could rape drugged women. And now I’m hearing something about two guys assaulting a woman on a boat, and some guy has come forward to say that he, not Kavanaugh, attacked the first woman, and then another guy has come forward also claiming that he was the real attacker…and then there’s something about devil’s triangles and “boofing” that my long experience on the internet tells me I should *not* try to look up…

At this point I’ve kind of given up on following the whole mess. So many people on both sides have exhibited what Reason‘s Robby Soave’s called “shameful certainty“:

A lot of people nevertheless seem completely convinced, one way or the other. Quite coincidentally, their conviction that Kavanaugh has been slandered, or that Kavanaugh is a sexual predator, seems to line up perfectly with whether they oppose or support Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. If you like the guy, you know he’s innocent, or that it doesn’t matter. If you fear he will provide a decisive vote against abortion rights, you know he’s guilty. Fence sitters are betraying women everywhere, according to the left, or are letting the Democrats pull off a con, according to the right.

[…]

It’s frustrating that so many people are beholden to their partisan convictions and blithely insistent that they know whether Kavanaugh is innocent. That may be something not even Kavanaugh knows, since he may have been blackout drunk at the time of the alleged incident. It’s frustrating that so many progressives would believe the accusation automatically, no matter how distant or unverifiable it may be. And it’s frustrating that so many conservatives think protecting Kavanaugh and elevating him to the Supreme Court is so important that it’s worth forgiving serious wrongdoing in just this one case.

I’ve seen so many Tweets from the left arguing that Kavanaugh supporters want an anti-abortion rapist on the court because it’s a war on women, and so many from the right arguing that each new accusation shows how unscrupulous the left is in protecting their right to murder unborn babies. I’m sure there are people approaching this issue with an understanding of nuance, contingent reasoning, and a willingness to allow for evidence that does not support their political goals, but they are being drowned out by the noise.

The Republicans are pretty much still in control of this, and they still have the votes. So unless something comes out about Kavanaugh that is (1) clearly true, (2) bad, and (3) new, the chances of him ending up on the Supreme Court are almost as good as the chance that Black Panther will be feeling a lot better by the end of the next Avengers movie. But in either case, we’re going to have to sit through a big loud fight.

Jack Marshall Watch – 2018-09-25

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Time to round up a few of the things Jack Marshall has been talking about this past week or so.

Authoritarianism

On Wednesday, Jack started out with what he considers to be a mock definition of authoritarianism as he imagine’s it’s defined by Andrew Sullivan, or maybe the “New York Book Review” (whatever that is) or maybe the New York Times or the liberals or…I don’t know, the paragraph is a total muddle and doesn’t have any links… Anyway, he writes this:

The definition: Authoritarianism is when a President you don’t like exerts strong leadership within his powers to accomplish policy goals you disagree with. When a President you do like stretches and exceeds his Constitutional powers to achieve policy goals you approve of, that’s not authoritarianism. That’s great leadership.

Jack’s mocking definition implies that a President who “exerts strong leadership within his powers” somehow can’t be authoritarian, as if legal authority can’t be used to suppress freedom.

It’s Really About Ethics In Supreme Court Nominations

Later, Jack wrote about the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her in high school. As I write this, the story is a horrible mess that keeps getting worse, and I have no way of knowing who, if anyone, is telling the actual truth. Jack, to his credit, also recognizes that he doesn’t know who’s telling the truth, so he assumes for the sake of argument that she’s not lying. And then he continues his habit of attacking #MeToo victims by attacking her for complaining now:

I had pretty much concluded that Christine Blasey Ford was contemptible based on her willingness to impugn a public servant’s integrity, derail what should be an orderly and fair political process, and manipulate the U.S. Supreme Court’s membership using a three decades old allegation that involved, at worst, teenage misconduct.

The pearl clutching about impugning “a public servant’s integrity” is just weird. And for the record, Ford is not the one derailing the process. The Senate Judiciary Committee is doing that. Senator Feinstein, in particular, has a lot to answer for in her bungling and manipulative use of Ford’s accusations.

That doesn’t stop Jack from turning the insanity up to eleven:

In fact, it seems clear that she chose her course of action knowing that she could harm Brett Kavanaugh the same way. If the allegation was politically motivated, as I strongly suspect it was, she is unethical and despicable. If the motive was late vengeance for a teenager’s indiscretion, she is unethical and despicable.

Imagine someone you may have harmed when you were an immature teen. That individual never calls you to account, privately or officially. She never urges you to apologize, accept responsibility, or make amends, or gives you an opportunity to do so.

Hey ladies, Jack the Professional Ethicist says: If a man sexually assaults you, you owe him the courtesy of explaining what he did wrong, so that he can apologize and try to make amends. If you fail to do that in a timely manner, then aren’t you the one who’s really the problem? Shouldn’t you be asking yourself, “Have I done everything I can to help my attempted rapist become the best version of himself?”

First Ford attempted to harm Kavanaugh anonymously. Then, when that wasn’t going to work, she announced her accusation in the news media.

That’s a disingenuous account of what happened. Ford told her story in a letter to the Judiciary committee weeks ago, requesting that it be kept confidential. When Feinstein blabbed and the story began to leak to the media, she took responsibility for it under her real name.

What is being ignored by all those rationalizing Ford’s actions is that that the harm to alleged wrongdoers is magnified and multiplied the longer a victim delays calling for accountability.

That’s demonstrably false in this case, given that no one has charged Kavanaugh with a crime. The passage of time almost always works in favor of the accused, as evidence is destroyed, memories fade, and statutes of limitations run out. If this had come out when they were both students, it could have done a lot more damage. Of course, we’d never have heard about it, since people with criminal records don’t usually get to be federal judges.

It also creates the equivalent of ethics toxic waste. In a just society, nobody is pronounced guilty until guilt is proven, and nobody is publicly accused unless the offense is provable. A prosecutor who knows that there isn’t evidence to convict someone of an offense is violating prosecutoral ethics to bring charges.

No charges have been filed against anyone, and there are no prosecutors involved in this mess. Jack is trying so make some kind of analogy to criminal procedure, but he’s getting it wrong: Even by analogy, Christine Ford is not acting as a prosecutor. She’s a witness. She has no obligation to prove anything to anyone. She just has to testify to the truth as she understands and remembers it.

If Kavanaugh did what he is alleged to have done, he should still have the right to deal with the consequences, accept punishment if any, and be able to get on with his life, set a straight course, and prove his character and values as an adult. Wouldn’t anyone want that opportunity? Shouldn’t any 17-year-old miscreant have that opportunity? As I have already noted, Ford’s conduct is an anti-Golden Rule monstrosity.

This situation is not primarily about Kavanaugh’s rights or Kavanaugh’s due process. It’s about filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court with someone who will do a good job. The Senators who will make the decision have the right to hear from anybody they think will have something to say that could inform their decision.

In any case, Jack had a lot more to say about some of the other women involved:

Today competition arose for Ford in the “Most Unethical Non-Senator To Board The Brett Kavanaugh Nomination Ethics Train Wreck” pageant. Cristina Miranda King, a former classmate of Ford’s, decided to grab 15 minutes of undeserved fame by recalling that she “heard” about the incident.

[…]

Stuff you hear about in high school when you don’t know the participants or details is called gossip. It isn’t even hearsay.

It was just a comment she was sharing with friends on facebook. When the story went wide in the media, she clarified that she didn’t have any reliable information about the alleged incident.

Now 900 more unethical women, all alumnae of the Holton-Arms School, the private school for girls in Bethesda, Maryland Where Christine Met Brett, signed an open letter, voicing their support for Ford even though they don’t know her. She’s a woman, you see, and of course one who is impugning a man 30 years late, so she must be telling the truth. “Dr. Blasey Ford’s experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton,” they write. This convinces me that Holton Arms graduates a lot of bigoted idiots incapable of critical thought. These women have no valid reason to believe or disbelieve Ford with such certainty. Because they know that students have been assaulted at Holton Arms, this means that Ford must have been assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh? I dare anyone to support this “reasoning.” X must be guilty of conduct Y, because other people like X have been guilty of the same conduct.

Unethical women, as far as the eye can see…

That’s just one post. Jack has gone on and on all week about this. I’m just too tired to write it up.

Kaepernick Kunundrum

Almost anybody who bothers to learn about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem knows that he’s doing to protest racism and especially police mistreatment of people of color. Except Jack, who makes a tiresome pretense of not understanding:

Kaepernick, distinguished for his incoherent on field protest during the national anthem, instantly setting off the NFL’s version of #MeToo, as in “I want make my own pointless, annoying protest that I can’t adequately explain!,”

Sibling Quiz

Apparently, all six of Republican Congressman Paul Gosar’s brothers and sisters have spoken out in favor of his opponent, Democrat David Brill. Jack offers this item up as an ethics quiz about the siblings. When you see his list of possible responses, it’s not hard to figure out which way Jack is leaning:

Unethical. Family disagreements should not be exploited for political agendas.

Unethical. This is a pure Golden Rule breach.

Unethical. It’s an appeal to authority, as if they have any special expertise or credibility.

Unethical. It’s a cruel thing to do to a family member, and indefensible.

Ethical. They care more about liberal policy items than they do about him, and that’s OK.

Jack makes his position clear in the comments.

The vast, vast majority of ethical humanity would regard turning on a family members and trying to lose him his job absent any criminal activity but based purely on political disagreements as obviously wrong. The only possible counter argument is that their policy agenda is so crucial and ineffably right that it justifies the conduct.

Jack has often shown that he has very little respect for policy analysis. For example, he says it’s wrong to support politicians who make unethical choices in their personal lives (e.g. Bill Clinton) just because you like their policies. That’s kind of a weird ethics calculation, because their personal lives only affect a few people but their policies can affect millions.

That last response on the quiz is also a bit of a tell, because Jack specifically refers to “liberal” policy. Jack takes this attitude when the polices in question are liberal. He’s been much more tolerant of Trump’s personal choices, probably because Jack likes his policies. I can’t prove it, but I doubt that Jack would have written this same quiz if it was about a Democratic candidate being attacked by his pro-life siblings. I think he would be arguing that they were fulfilling their civic responsibilities. 

Finally, there’s some context:

In an interview earlier this month with Vice News Tonight , Gosar floated the theory, propagated previously by fringe personalities like Alex Jones, that billionaire George Soros somehow instigated or bankrolled the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who converged on Charlottesville.

Gosar also raised the false accusation that Soros, an 87-year-old investor and Holocaust survivor, “turned in his own people to the Nazis” in Hungary.

Gosar’s brother David told Phoenix New Times on Friday, “At what point do you draw the line in your family?”

Exactly. When someone around you is saying or doing things you profoundly disagree with, at some point you have to distance yourself from them to avoid appearing complicit. Even if they’re family.

Word Salad

Finally, on Monday, in a nearly incoherent post, Jack lets rip:

I have been criticized, and this blog has been attacked, for taking the position that the “resistance’s” effort to undermine democracy, weaken or national institutions, and move U.S. society toward increasingly totalitarian values and methods as a radical response to the election of Donald Trump is by far the most important and threatening ethics development in the culture. To paraphrase William Saroyan, I’m right and everyone else is wrong. The Kavanaugh fiasco proves it, and the latest smear tactic proves it further.

“Totalitarian values and methods.” Sure. We all remember that one time Stalin publicized a woman’s accusations of attempted rape against a powerful judge, who consequently endured the terrifying prospect of having to remain a powerful judge. The horror. The horror. The horror.

Jack Marshall Watch 2018-09-18

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Jack had a lot to say last week about the Serena Williams incident at the U.S. Open, but since I’m not interested in Serena Williams, the U.S. Open, or sports ethics in general, I have nothing to say. I also have nothing to say about Mark Knight’s editorial cartoon about the incident. Or any of Jack’s other posts about Serena Williams. Nor will I make more than a passing mention of Jack’s tiresome pretense of not understanding why players are kneeling during the Anthem at football games.

Later in the week, Jack touched on some science-related issues, starting on Wednesday, when he wrote about a report put out by something called the Center for WorkLife Law that examines bias in the legal workplace. Jack’s not impressed by the study.

At least the New York Times headline, for once, was accurate., at least the online version: “Lawyers Say They Face Persistent Racial and Gender Bias at Work.” Yup, that’s what the survey showed. What it didn’t show is that there really is such discrimination, how much there is, or how it manifests itself. Here’s part of the executive summary:

Prove-It-Again. Women of color, white women, and men of color reported that they have to go “above and beyond” to get the same recognition and respect as their colleagues.

  • Women of color reported PIA bias at a higher level than any other group, 35 percentage points higher than white men.
  • White women and men of color also reported high levels of PIA bias, 25 percentage points higher than white men.
  • Women of color reported that they are held to higher standards than their colleagues at a level 32 percentage points higher than white men.

This demonstrates, at least within the reliability of the survey, that minorities and women perceive that they are being discriminated against more than white males.

Jack is correct about the general nature of the study. It’s not a statistical smoking gun, it is based on self-reports by employees, and it is based on subjective perceptions. However, Jack slightly mischaracterizes the study when he says it is about perceptions of discrimination. From what I can figure out from the executive summary (the main report is hidden behind an expensive ABA paywall), the perceptions are actually about behavior and actions which can reveal discrimination. This is a subtle distinction, and I can’t really blame Jack for missing it.

A survey about perceptions of discrimination might ask lawyers a direct question like “Are women in your firm more likely to be the target of personal insults by their bosses?” The results would then be reported directly from the responses. E.g. “49% of lawyers report that women in their firms are more likely to be the targets of personal insults by their bosses.”

The survey under discussion uses a different approach. It would ask lawyers a question about specific behavior, such as “Have you been the target of personal insults by your boss?” The answers of men and women could then be compared. E.g. “49% of women report being the targets of personal insults by their bosses, verses 28% of men.” That’s a more powerful conclusion, because it compares women’s reported perceptions of their treatment against men’s own reported perceptions of their own treatment.

The quoted example above falls into the latter category, as do other questions mentioned in the executive summary. Obviously, there’s still room for bias in any survey this subjective, but it’s not as bad as Jack claims.

That’s a useless result. We have seen and read, for example, how various African American activists and celebrities like Charles M. Blow and Ta’ nahisi Coates teach their sons that police are racists, and that they must fear them. As a result, they interpret all interactions with police through this prism. One doesn’t have to be a research ethicist to conclude that this warps their perception.

Oh, geez, I can’t even with this… Does Jack really think black people wouldn’t worry about racist cops if they weren’t being deceived by race-baiting activists and celebrities?

In other science news, on Friday Jack attacked the Milken study on the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane María. I addressed the Milken study in detail in an earlier post.

On Sunday, Jack brought up the Kavanaugh hearing and the accusations of sexual misconduct coming from one of his former high-school classmates. Unsurprisingly, Jack thinks her accusation is unethical.

2. The accusation was over 30 years old, meaning that all aspects of it, including the recollections of the alleged participants, would be inherently untrustworthy. This is why we have statutes of limitations. UNFAIR, and IRRESPONSIBLE.

There is no statute of limitations on Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominees. It’s up to the Senators to weigh the value of her testimony

3. The accusation was, and still is, unsubstantiated by anyone else. UNFAIR, and IRRESPONSIBLE.

This isn’t a civil suit. Substantiating her claims is not really her responsibility.

4. The accusation was made against a distinguished public servant and family man with no documented blemishes on his record or character as an adult, stemming from an alleged incident that occurred, if it occurred, while he was a minor. UNFAIR

And? And?

Look, it wasn’t an “alleged” incident to her. She knows what she believes happened. So unless we’re sure she’s lying, there’s nothing unethical about saying things she believes to be true.

5. No complaint had been made against Kavanaugh by the accuser at any time in the intervening years, until his nomination by President Trump became a political rallying point for the Left. IRRESPONSIBLE.

I’m really tired of this argument, from Jack and everyone else who makes it. You say she should have complained earlier? Well then, in what forum should she have made her complaint? In 1982 she was a 15-year-old high-school girl attending a party with boys and drinking and no parents, and she may have been drinking herself. From her point of view, admitting any of that to her parents or school authorities or the police would just get her in trouble, making the whole incident even worse.

And once a few years went by, telling her parents or the school wouldn’t do any good, and telling the police after so long probably wouldn’t help either. There’d be no one she could tell that would be able to do anything about it…until the nation’s political engines presented her with an opportunity to get revenge. Kavanaugh’s nomination is the first time in decades she’s been able to tell her story to someone who could make it matter.

On Monday, Jack again touched on the Kavanaugh hearing, and Jack’s outrageous response deserves note:

Apparently the Trump administration has decided to pander to the worst of #MeToo fanaticism. I just heard Kellyanne Conway say “This woman should not be insulted, and not be ignored.”

Yes, she should be. She should be insulted because she has interjected herself into a Supreme Court confirmation based on a distant memory she cannot prove, denigrating a veteran professional based on alleged conduct that he may have engaged in as a minor

I can’t see any way Jack’s response is ethical.

On the Puerto Rico Hurricane Study

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A lot of Trump opponents are claiming that a recent study by the Milken Institute School of Public Health shows that after hurricane María hit Puerto Rico, the Trump administration’s relief effort was so shoddy that 3000 people died.

I’ll admit that letting 3000 people die sounds like something Trump would do, but that’s not actually what the study shows. It’s not an evaluation of the relief effort, and it doesn’t attempt to assign blame for any deaths. The study concludes that 3000 people died as a result of the hurricane, but it doesn’t have much to say about the specific causes of their deaths. In fact, the Milken press release announcing the study specifically says:

Additional research must be done to understand how the hurricane was involved in the excess deaths identified in this study. This would involve interviews of family members and others, as well as in-depth statistical analyses, to learn about the circumstances leading up to individual deaths. 

It’s important to realize that this study does not address the effectiveness of the relief effort. This study is about the inclusive death toll from the hurricane. That would include any deaths caused by an inadequate relief effort, but the study does not and cannot separate out those deaths from any others. So while the Trump administration’s relief effort might have contributed to the excess deaths described in this study, the study itself is silent on the matter.

That doesn’t mean Trump supporters are right about the study either. Let’s start with Trump himself:

“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…” –@realDonaldTrump

These deaths were not reported immediately because they did not happen immediately. And nobody reported the numbers until a long time later because it took a long time to gather and analyze the data. Public health studies take time.

…..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico! — @realDonaldTrump

The Democrats are certainly trying to make him look bad, but that doesn’t make the study wrong, and the study was not exactly done by the Democrats. It’s not hard to understand why Trump thinks this way, however, when you look at what other people are saying. Here’s Lou Dobbs’s nearly logic-free take:

Picking a few choice bits,

The President, by the way, is right. The study the president alluded to is one produced last month by the Milken Institute at George Washington University. Almost a year later, the number went from 65 people killed to 2,975 people, attributed to the storm.

Dobbs is clever with words. Saying “almost a year later, the number went from” implies that there’s some kind of trickery about the delay, rather than the boring truth that it takes time to do public health studies.

The finding wasn’t the result of a death toll count, a body count, nor a study of death certificates, but a public health study that subtracted the number of people who theoretically should have died over the same period from the number of people who were reported dead over that period.

This is why I called Dobbs take almost logic-free. He’s accurately described the study, but then he does nothing with it. He simply pronounces it wrong without ever actually making an argument.

After the report came out on August 28, last month, Puerto Rico’s Democratic governor officially revised the death toll from 65 to the new estimate. And why did he choose to Trust that study? Why not the Harvard study back in June, that found deaths related to the hurricane fell within a, well, a narrow range…are you ready? A narrow range from about 800 to 8000 people. By the way, that’s also an abstract and unconnected-to-any-evidence estimate, that even the liberal Washington Post found ludicrous.

The declaration that these two studies are “unconnected to any evidence” is simply false. The Harvard study was based on a geographically distributed random sampling of over 3000 households which gathered data about 9522 people. Based on the number of deaths found in that sample, they extrapolated to obtain rates for the whole island, and from that estimated excess deaths. This methodology is commonly used to estimate deaths when death records are unavailable, such as poor countries and war zones, and it is understood to give only a very rough answer, thus the extremely wide confidence interval.

The more comprehensive Milken study was based on thousands of official death records from the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics Registry (PRVSR), and its confidence range is a much narrower 2658 to 3290, which is probably one of the reasons the Puerto Rican Government prefers it. It’s just a better study. (Also, the government commissioned it.)

The numbers were inflated, and the President was right to call out the organizations who threw out science, statistics, and evidence to discredit the Trump administration.

Lou Dobbs is an ignorant ass. There’s a lot more legitimate science and statistics in these studies than in anything he said. And as for his assertion that the study is an attempt to discredit the Trump administration, the only actual evidence he offers is the original report of 65 dead immediately after the hurricane. And he gets even that wrong: Until the Milken study was released, the official death toll stood at 64.

John Hinderaker at Powerline has his own take, which is equally silly:

This is what is going on: Some “scientists”–read anti-Trump Democratic Party activists–constructed a theoretical baseline of how many deaths would be expected to occur in Puerto Rico during the months after Hurricane Maria. They then compared this baseline to the actual number of deaths, and voila! The actual number was higher than their hypothetical guess by 3,000.

Hinderaker’s use of scare quotes around “scientists” and his accusations that they are “activists” is complete bullshit that he just made up. There isn’t even any need to attack the study to defend Trump, because the study draws no conclusions regarding the Trump administration or the relief effort.

Hinderaker’s description is, however, a reasonably accurate description of the methodology. The only thing I’d add is that the theoretical baseline is produced by analyzing death rates in Puerto Rico in past years (the Milken study goes back to 2010) to produce a statistical model of deaths, and then using that model to project past trends onto the period of the study to estimate the expected deaths.

So all of those deaths–whether caused by cancer, car accidents, or whatever–are attributed to the hurricane. The study doesn’t even attempt to figure out which 3000 excess deaths are caused by the hurricane. These activists have not made any attempt to count the actual number of hurricane-related deaths.

When discussing “all of those deaths,” it’s important to remember that the death toll of 2,975 is an excess figure. From September 2017 through February 2018 (the period of the study) the PRVSR recorded 16,608 deaths. But the statistical model used in the Milken study estimate the expected number of deaths during that period at 13,633. The difference between the actual and projected death tools is where the figure 2,975 comes from. In other words, according to the study, only about 18% of the deaths during that period were caused by hurricane María. The rest were the result of normal causes, “cancer, car accidents, or whatever,” as Hinderaker says.

But that doesn’t change the fact that there was still a higher than expected number of deaths, which raises the question: If the excess deaths were not caused by the hurricane, if they were due to “cancer, car accidents, or whatever,” then why did those causes of deaths increase? If it wasn’t the hurricane, what was it? Hinderaker offers no alternative.

No one would use such a foolish methodology except for political reasons.

This is actually a standard methodology for estimating deaths in public health science. It’s necessary in situations where it is difficult to identify and observe the causal channels.

Estimating the number of deaths from a disease like Ebola is fairly easy: You find people who tested positive for Ebola and who died from Ebola-like symptoms. Count them, and you’ve got your answer.

Estimating deaths from a disease like HIV is a lot more complicated, because people don’t die from HIV. They die from things like tuberculosis, hepatitis C, Kaposi’s sarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and a variety of other diseases that kill people whose immune systems have been weakened by HIV. It can be hard to untangle the causes in these cases, and scientists have created the Coding Causes of Death in HIV (CoDe) protocol to help decide, in a consistent way, which deaths to attribute to HIV.

Classifying the causes of death can be complicated. Say a person with HIV is taking drugs which can produce vomiting as a side effect, and one day that person starts vomiting while driving, loses control of their car, and dies in a crash. Does that count as a death from HIV?

I have no idea what CoDe says about that scenario, but in general the answer to questions like that depend on why you want to know. If you are an actuary for an insurance company providing group life insurance to a company that employs people with HIV, it certainly counts, since you will have to pay that claim. And if you’re an economist studying the cost of HIV to society, not only would you count that death, but you would also count the collateral deaths of any passengers or pedestrians killed in the crash as well.

With a hurricane, the causal channels are even harder to analyze. The immediate deaths from storm surge, windblown debris, and collapsed structures are relatively easy to identify, but the hurricane also disrupts the infrastructure of civilization, and that can lead to more deaths. People with diabetes could face hazardous disruptions to their food, their insulin supply, and their healthcare. People on supplemental oxygen could lost power for the oxygen concentrators, and delivery of tanked oxygen could be disrupted. Patients on blood thinners could miss blood tests and fail to adjust their dosage correctly. Kidney dialysis centers could be out of power or supplies, forcing patients to travel further for care.

In fact, with random destruction taking out buildings, people will likely have to travel further for everything, and the extra driving alone will kill some people, even before the added risks from driving on debris-strewn roads with no traffic signals or street lights. People will die because they can’t call an ambulance with the phones down, or because the ambulances are all busy, or because the ambulances have to take longer routes to hospitals, or because hospitals are unable to operate at full capacity, or because hospitals can’t get supplies of needed drugs. People will kill themselves trying to salvage property from collapsed houses. People will fall off their roofs while repairing storm damage.

Hurricanes are a mess of causes that are difficult to sort out, which is why this study used a method that doesn’t depend on knowing the cause of every single death. A conceptually similar methodology was used to establish that cigarettes caused lung cancer. When the global lung cancer epidemic hit humanity at the end of the 19th century, nobody knew the cause. The cellular mechanisms of cancer would not be understood for many decades (and are still the subject of research today), so scientists had no way to determine the causal chain that led to lung cancer in specific patients. Nevertheless, by the 1930s scientists had gathered statistical evidence showing that the lung cancer rate was far higher in people who smoked cigarettes than in people who didn’t smoke. By the 1960s, the link was established well enough (even over the obstructive efforts of tobacco companies) to discourage people from smoking and to affect public policy.

The Milken study is similar in concept, except for the choice of control population. Cigarette studies used non-smokers as controls, because they could be drawn from otherwise similar populations. There’s no similar control population for Puerto Rico — no otherwise identical island population that wasn’t hit by a hurricane — so as a control the researchers used the same population that was hit by the hurricane, but from the years immediately before the hurricane.

By this point, someone will be screaming that “correlation does not prove causation!” That’s true, but it can certainly imply causation in a properly done study, especially when accompanied by a good explanatory theory. In this case, the theory is that hurricanes destroy infrastructure, thus increasing the danger to human life. That’s not a particularly controversial theory, and when you observe a hurricane followed by an increase in deaths, that tends to confirm the theory. Critics are welcome to offer better theories to explain the data.

(I should mention that the Powerline post also argues that Puerto Rico’s death rate declined in 2017. I’m not sure where those figures come from, but the IndexMundi source they site appears to get its data from the CIA World Fact Book, which describes the Puerto Rico Death Rate entry as a “2017 estimate.” Furthermore, since the death rate is calculated as the number of deaths divided by the number of people, it is sensitive to changes in the population size, and I suspect this estimate is based on U.S. census estimates of the Puerto Rican population. However, after María struck, about 8% of the Puerto Rican population, 300,000 people, decided to leave the island. That mass emigration did not make it into census estimates, but the Milken study used travel records to adjust its figures to account for the decline in population.)

My regular nemesis, Jack Marshall, also attacks the study:

I’ve covered the revised hurricane death tolls before. Nobody knows what the real figure is, and it is fair to question the newer estimates, which were produced by public health experts at George Washington University in Washington. Their report was commissioned by the U.S. territory’s governor, Ricardo Rossello, and he was looking for big numbers: the more deaths, the more U.S. aid.

That’s no reason to smear the scientists with accusations of falsifying data.

The news media misrepresented the study as well. Here’s Reuters:

[..] The study found that those deaths could be attributed directly or indirectly to Maria from the time it struck in September 2017 to mid-February of this year.

False! the study didn’t “find” that at all. It assumed it; it theorized it; it argued it. There is a material difference between finding something and assuming it’s there.

The results of a study are commonly referred to as its “findings.” Jack is either (1) an ass for pretending he doesn’t know that or (2) an idiot for not knowing that.

Jack also references a blog post by Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man:

I find this study highly suspect. One can find similar increased death tolls in other areas, but with autopsies, witness statements, etc. that make it possible to analyze them properly. Example: the opioid epidemic that’s ravaging several US states at present. Death rates due to the misuse of opioids are climbing dramatically, but in every case, the cause of death can be measured, medically confirmed, and verified. How do we know that opioids weren’t responsible for at least some of the “excess” deaths in Puerto Rico?

I’m sure opioids were the cause of some of the 16,608 deaths in Puerto Rico in the five months after the hurricane, and it’s possible there was even an increase in opioid-related deaths after the hurricane, and if someone can dig up those figures, the Milken institute should probably revise its data (assuming that the increase in opioid-related deaths is not itself due to the hurricane).

What about deaths caused by vehicles? How do you know whether an accident was due to increased traffic, caused by aid distribution after the storm, or a drunk driver? The first might be blamed on the hurricane; the second, certainly not.

Again, the 2,975 deaths are an excess figure, so offering alternative causes of death is insufficient. Any alternative theory for the deaths needs to explain why the death rate for that cause increased when it did. If some of the excess deaths are due to drunk driving (or opioids for that matter), what happened to make the drunk driving rate increase in the months after the hurricane?

Without medical and other evidence, one can’t assign a definitive cause to each casualty; but the study conducted there did not examine such evidence. It only looked at numbers, and made assumptions.

Obviously, the Milken study is not definitive. We could get a much better idea of the death toll from hurricane María if someone did a careful study of each of the 16,608 deaths during this period to determine the cause. Unfortunately, the data just isn’t available. The CDC has guidelines for a special death certification process to be used after a natural disaster which would have gathered some of the needed data, however the Milken study reports that those guidelines weren’t followed in Puerto Rico, largely due to lack of training of medical personnel and poor communication by authorities. In addition, the PRVSR offices were damaged by the hurricane, and death certificate filings were substantially disrupted.

To gather the necessary data now would require defining a protocol and training a team to review medical records and interview friends and family members of the deceased to determine the complete causal chain leading to their death. That’s the (very expensive) study you’d need to do to lay this question to rest.

But no one has done that study, or any study better than this one. So until someone does, the Milken study remains the best and most accurate attempt ever made to estimate the death toll from hurricane María.

Jack Marshall Watch 2018-09-10

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Jack started the week with a bang, as he tore into… wait, let me check my notes… Senator John McCain’s funeral, which he describes as “a perfect example of hypocrisy for the ages.”

It was undeniably uncivil to dis-invite the President of the United States from what would otherwise be a display of unified and bi-partisan Washington community respect for a departed public servant. That was an insult, and intended as one.

Maybe, but it was also a courtesy to McCain’s family and friends. I certainly wouldn’t want President Trump at my funeral, because I love my family and wouldn’t want to subject them to that. It’s arguable that McCain also did Trump a favor, because you know that if Trump was there he would have said some stupid shit.

Jack likes rules, so here’s a rule that applies: Don’t invite a clown to perform at a funeral.*

Insults are not civil. The retort to this is that the President was not civil to McCain, which is true. However, if the professional duty of civility is waived by another’s breach of it, then there is no such duty.

Correct. There is no such duty. This is not like a customer service situation, where employees are supposed to remain unilaterally polite even to the rudest of customers. Civility is a two-way street. If you don’t give it, you have no right to claim it from others. Trump is reaping what he has sown.

McCain’s own daughter launched the proceedings with her own uncivil rant, saying in part, “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness—the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.” Later, she added, “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.”

Defending her father at his funeral? What a bitch! Why wasn’t she thinking more about Donald Trump’s feelings!

In addition to being uncivil […] the attacks on the President, like Meagan McCain’s, were cowardly. The man (and the office) being savaged wasn’t present, and the crowd was united in its hostility to the target. George Washington’s 110 Rules of Civility cover that kind of conduct neatly:

89. Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust.

I guess by the time Washington got to number 89 he was just padding out the list, because that makes no sense. It’s an impossibly restrictive standard. Also, I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure Washington had some nasty things to say about King George. And if Jack is really concerned about speaking ill of the absent, why is he calling Meagan McCain a coward when she’d not around? For that matter, Jack also criticizes Senator McCain, who is about as absent as it gets.

Seriously though, I don’t know what Washington meant when he wrote this, but the usual social rule about not speaking ill of someone behind their back is an admonition against spreading rumors that they won’t know about therefore cannot attempt to counter if they are untrue. That’s not relevant here because Meagan McCain was’t passing around rumors. She was expressing an opinion. And she wasn’t saying this behind Trump’s back. She spoke in public, in front of the news media, where Trump could easily find out about it and respond.

On Tuesday, Jack complains about this passage from a story about the family of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, after a police officer was sentenced to 15 years in prison for killing him:

Edwards also acknowledged that before the start of the murder trial she was pessimistic about the prosecution’s chances, after watching police shooting cases like those involving Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Clinton Allen, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher and others.

Jack objects, not without some merit, to the article’s grouping together of those cases.

Michael Brown attacked a police officer and was shot.

That’s a fair description, given what we know. But Jack doesn’t stop there.

Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy, died as the result of a series of mistakes by all involved, at the hands of a police officer who never should have been allowed to carry a gun. Rice’s death was negligence, not murder.

Tamir Rice was innocent, and he was shot dead by a police officer, and no one was ever charged for killing him. Jack’s remark about it being negligence changes nothing. No one was charged with negligence either. It’s not hard to see how this would make someone worry that a child shot dead by a police officer might not receive justice.

Philadro Castile, a black motorist who insisted on reaching into his pocket for his license after announcing to a panicky officer that he was carrying a gun, was shot after the officer screamed, “Don’t pull it out!” more than once. I don’t think any jury would guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in that fact pattern, and the officer’s jury didn’t.

This is a bit disingenuous. For one thing, you wouldn’t know from Jack’s description that after the officer screamed “Don’t pull it out!”, Castile did not, in fact, pull out his gun. Jack also omits the salient fact that the officer also asked Castile for his driver’s license and registration. In other words, he told Castile to get something he’d have to reach for, and then shot him for reaching for something. This is bad police work and arguably a criminally bad shooting.

Jack also has this to say:

I honestly don’t know what the right approach is to sentencing police officers who kill citizens without justification or cause in the throes of panic, bad judgment, poor training, or tragic error. I believe that the perilous job police officers perform should be a mitigating factor in sentencing.

Which contrasts disturbingly with his next post, about some people who encountered a moose near a bike path and accidentally frightened it into a body of water, where it drowned:

This is a pointless, tragic, negligent killing of an innocent animal. No photograph is worth the life of a vole, much less a moose, yet too many human beings are so addicted to recording the images of their oh so fascinating lives that they disconnect the ethics alarms and common sense alerts that should tell them instinctively that…

  • Intruding on nature threatens and harms it.
  • Reality is not best experienced through a camera lens.
  • Nobody else can enjoy a natural scene when human beings insist on imposing on it.
  • The welfare of the wildlife should be the first consideration, not an afterthought.

What is an appropriate practical punishment for tourists who do things like this? Fines are not enough, and I guess public flogging is excessive.

These people didn’t intrude on nature. They were in their community. The moose was the intruder. That’s not the moose’s fault — moose will be moose — but Jack wants these people punished for not understanding the risk of a situation they stumbled into by accident.

On the other hand, when a trained police officer working for by the community deliberately inserts himself into a situation where he unnecessarily shoots someone, Jack is all “Eh…I don’t know…it’s complicated…there are mitigating circumstances…”

I doubt Jack literally thinks Moose Lives Matter more than black lives, but the juxtaposition of those posts is food for thought.

On Thursday, Jack wrote about the an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times by a member of the Trump administration who claims that Trump’s staff are managing him like a toddler to keep him from screwing things up real bad.

If the op-ed is not a hoax, and if there are, as the writer says, highly placed members of the Trump Administration who are pretending to be loyal government employees but who are actually trying to undermine the President and his policies from within, then the assertions by conservatives and Trump supporters of the existence of a “deep state,” much mocked by the news media and Democrats, have been accurate all along.

Not even close. The “deep state” refers to career bureaucrats who are so well entrenched that pretty much just keep doing what they’re doing no matter who is president. The author of the op-ed, and everyone he refers to, are the “best people” that Trump picked to be in his administration. This is a problem he brought on himself.

In his Friday morning round-up, Jack took on Twentieth Century Fox for removing actor Wilder Striegel’s scenes from the new version of Predator after actress Olivia Munn discovered he was a registered sex offender. He had served six months in jail on charges of risk of injury to a child and enticing a minor by computer in connection with a 14-year-old girl.

Jack’s response is a thing of beauty:

This reminds me of the scene in Ship of Fools when a passenger is exiled from the captain’s table on a German ship because a Nazi complains that he is Jewish.

I did not see that coming. I know Jack supports the War on Drugs, but he must have been smoking something to think it was appropriate to compare this situation to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. 

I don’t like the way we treat sex offenders in this country. The registration requirements and living restrictions are draconian, yet there is little evidence that sex offender registration reduces crime rates. But not wanting a registered sex offender to appear in your big studio film does not make you Hitler.

I know some registered sex offenders. One of them is a good friend, and a terrific human being in all respects that I have observed. I would cast him in a play I was directing, and in fact have. If an actress objected, or anyone else, my response would be the same as it would to a performer who complained that he or she had discovered that my friend was part black, Muslim, or a transsexual.

On the other hand, if she discovered that one of the performers had been brought to American illegally by his parents when he was eight, Jack would probably want her to call ICE on him.

On Saturday, Jack posted from his business trip to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and the second item is 100% classic Jack. He’s angry about an article listing countries where you would probably enjoy retirement more than in the United States, based on something called the 2017 Global Retirement Index.

The entire attitude underlying this article, “16 countries where you can retire ‘happier’ than in the US.” is selfish and irresponsible. You are an American citizen and this is a participatory democracy. I don’t care if you’re retired; you still have a lifetime obligation to contribute to society, your community, and the nation.

No. No you don’t. Nobody owns you like a piece of fucking property. And you certainly aren’t owned by the government. You’re free people and you can do what you want.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a guy who gets so angry over people coming here from other countries would also get angry over people leaving. This is just Jack showing his ugly totalitarian streak. It’s values like this that make me think it’s a waste of time to leave comments on his posts.

Jack also writes about some unexpected encounters he had with transgender people on his trip. Don’t worry, it’s more amusing than horrifying.

At our hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, a convention of either transvestites, transgender individuals, or some combination of the two dominated the hotel. The organization was “Himmaher”…I think I’m spelling it right.

He’s not spelling it right. The first entry Google finds for the word “”Himmaher” — and I had to force a literal search — is Jack’s post.

I’m just guessing, but I think Jack must have been staying at the Riverside Hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, which from September 6 through 8 was hosting the Southern Comfort Transgender Conference. The conference occupies four of the hotels’s conference rooms: The New River room, Abeona room, Merritt room, and…the Himarshee room. I’m guessing Jack saw or heard that last room and thought it sounded like some kind of transgender reference. It’s actually the Native American name for a nearby river. (Jack has sort of corrected this in his post since.)

I had several illuminating encounters. I don’t know that this is true of all such people, but the members of this association or club all seemed to want to make any non-club member they saw as uncomfortable as possible. Yes, that’s unethical.

Yes, that must be what they were up to. They’re freaking the squares. It’s the only possible explanation for a convention of hundreds of transgender people walking around looking like they are transgender people.

But what these people seemed to be seeking was imposed ethics zugswang. If you looked directly at them, the response was a chip-on-the-shoulder, “Go ahead and stare, honey: never seen a freak before?” If you appeared to be avoiding staring—I regard a six-foot ex-male standing in the middle of a hotel lobby in a wig, skimpy bathing suit, 6 inch heels and speaking loudly in a base voice as parading a psychological problem or ten, and deserving the same social courtesy I would offer to a Tourette’s victim or a hebephrenic—then the individual decided to make it a project to get you to stare, as if your failure to provide the attention they craved was an insult.

So it’s all a trap, you see. Transgender people are trying to make you feel guilty for not starting at them, but when you look at them, they snark at you. Don’t say Jack hasn’t warned you!

*Unless, of course, the deceased and/or close family and friends are actual clowns, in which case a sketch suitable for the somber occasion may be appropriate. Windypundit does not discriminate against clowns. We are less tolerant of fools.

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