Low Vaccination Rates = High Death Rates

Tom Kando 

On January 19, the Sacramento Bee reproduced an article from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram by Cynthia Allen, titled “As Covid rises across the US, pandemic life is better in Texas.” This is just another example of the stubborn ignorance of millions of people who continue to resist mandatory precautions against Covid, including vaccines and masks. This author presents, again, the worn-out and wrong-headed argument that people are better off opening the economy (as is the case in Texas) rather than mandating vaccines, masks, and other life-saving measures (as happens more in the Northeastern states). These people prioritize avoiding minor discomfort above saving lives. 

I don’t mean to rehash this unnecessary debate, or remind you that previous generations had no problem with other vaccines (measles, polio, etc.) Or with mandatory seat belt laws, etc., etc. I don’t know whether there are more ignorant people now than in the past, or more here than overseas. But I’ll remind you that the US has 4.2% of the world’s population, but, shamefully, 21% of the world’s Covid cases and 15.8% of the world’s Covid deaths. And there is no evidence that this is because we test more than everyone else. 

I just want to give you some straightforward prima facie evidence that people like this Fort Worth woman are so very wrong. 
Using Johns Hopkins data, I ranked all 50 states for two variables: (1) The Covid death rates per million population and (2) the rates of vaccination per 100 population. The lists below show the results: Read more...

Stupidity: Our Worst Enemy

by Madeleine Kando

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil”

wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1943. He was a German pastor known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, for which he was imprisoned and later hanged. In prison, he wrote ‘Prisoners of War’, later published as ‘letters and papers from prison’, in which he tried to understand how Germany had entered such dark times.

Thinking about the nature of evil, he came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. It was stupidity.
“You can fight evil” he said. “It always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. Evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction. To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread.”

“But against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. To persuade the stupid person with reason is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer points out three important facts about stupidity:

First, it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. ‘There are men of great intellect who are fools and men of low intellect who are anything but fools’. If you know that something is evil, but choose to ignore it because others ignore it, you are not only stupid but you are also immoral.

Second, stupidity is acquired rather than congenital. ‘The power of one needs the folly of the other. It is apparent that a very strong upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgment, and they give up trying […] to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. […] One feels, somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself […]. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited.’ — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And third, it is less common in the unsociable or the solitary than in individuals who are inclined to sociability. It is a sociological problem rather than psychological.

    

If stupidity is applied to an individual, that’s one thing. I would qualify some of my neighbors as stupid. The one who cut down a 250 year old white pine because he didn’t want to bother raking pine needles in the fall. Or another neighbor who almost burnt down his own house because he started burning brush on an extremely windy day. But when a group of people starts acting stupid, believing that the Covid vaccine is the government’s way of implanting chips in your brain, it affects me and others in society.

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Different Votes for Different Folks?

Tom Kando

My Dutch friend Paul and I exchange views on various sociological and political issues. He recently brought up the idea of “weighed voting”, with an emphasis on age: Give young people’s vote a greater weight than old people’s. 

His rationale for this is that young people are inheriting the earth. They have a much larger stake in the (future) world than us old-timers. As climate change inexorably affects their future, their voice should count more heavily than ours, in determining future policies. 
So I’m thinking: Interesting idea, but not terribly original, as it is one variant of the generic and age-old idea of “different votes for different folks.” Actually, history has seen far more cases of votes being weighed differently for different groups, than the basic egalitarian democratic principle of one-man-one-vote. The preferential voting treatment of some groups over other groups has been the rule rather than the exception. 
The two basic questions are: 1. WHICH GROUP’s vote do you weigh more heavily and which group’s less so? 2. On the basis of which criterion or criteria do you weigh different groups’ votes differentially? 
Only in the 20th century have some advanced democracies come close to universal equal vote for at least all adults. Even so, we do precisely the opposite of my friend Paul’s suggestion, namely denying the vote to one fourth of the population on the basis of age. 

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