This podcast was inspired by Karen Vaites extremely well documented piece on the recent improvements in reading in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama.

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There haven’t been a lot of bright spots in American education in the last few years. The learning loss from Covid has become more obvious as the years have worn on and the only state that has seen improvement in their reading scores since 2019 is Louisiana.

Wait, Louisiana? I’ve been loosely following education data for over a decade and Louisiana has famously been toward the bottom of the reading and math assessment tests. As recently as 2013, they ranked in the bottom 5 states for 4th grade reading.

But in the last 5 years, Louisiana isn’t just the only state that improved their reading scores, but they’ve improved it substantially, rising 0.3 grade levels since 2019. The next best state lost 0.1 grade levels. That is an enormous difference. What on earth happened in Louisiana?

Fortunately, I read and follow Karen Vaites. Karen is a reading education advocate who I first met in 2022 when she presented an enormously helpful and optimistic vision for helping parents advocate against Covid restrictions in schools. She is not apolitical so much as she tenaciously brings the focus back to the kids and helping them get the best education they can.

Karen recently wrote about the “Southern Surge”. This is her term for the literacy playbook that was pioneered by Louisiana and has been adopted parts by Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. If you look at the chart above, you’ll see that all 4 of these southern states are in the top 10 for stemming the learning loss since 2019.

To understand this stunning success, we’re also talking with Rod Naquin, a Louisiana teacher who has been neck deep in the curriculum and policies that have led to this wonderfully good news for southern students.

We Can Improve Education

There is a certain “doomer” perspective on education that says that most studies showing improvements in education are due, not to better teaching methods or better curriculum, but to selection effects. Basically, private schools do better because they select the smart, rich kids out of the population. School districts that score higher aren’t better at teaching, they’re just richer.

While there is some truth to this, I’ve seen it lead people to a place where they don’t believe there is much of a difference between good and bad education, only good and bad students. They don’t believe you can really improve education at a population scale.

The Southern Surge argues otherwise. Furthermore, from our conversation here and digging into the details, it becomes clear that there isn’t a rigid blueprint toward improving reading for young students. The improvements come from teachers who understand the fundamentals of the science of reading and are given some flexibility to apply the appropriate curriculum and strategies with their students.

It’s also clear that this only works if everyone cares about the students. Teachers have to care and work hard with students to help them improve. Administrators have to care enough to guide the teachers toward better curriculum. Politicians have to care enough to provide funding for incentives to get teachers into workshops on how to teach advanced reading. The final point of this is that all this care finds its way to the students, who start to care about this thing that everyone around them cares about.

We can improve our educational system, but we have to do so with clear eyes and a relentless drive toward the results we want. We have to have patience. Louisiana is so far ahead because they started earlier. We hope to see similar accelerating improvements from Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee in the next 5-10 years. Hopefully, a further validation of this strategy will help it spread and we can turn around from the tragic educational loss of the pandemic.

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I’ve been following Kat Rosenfield on Twitter (I am never calling it X) for what feels like a long time but then again a lot has happened in the last few years. She’s been a very principled voice against cancel culture when it was coming from the left and, in a surprising move to many, continues to be against it when it is coming from the right.

I laughed at the following because it seems that we are in the early days of a very substantial shift in attitude and I see many on the right giving voice to these pro-social-censorship attitudes.

So I invited Kat to talk about this. Kat has this really interesting theory that the machine that was built up around cancel culture simply is not going to go away and that we’re probably just not going back to the before times.

We also talked about politics in publishing and art and about the deep thirst that people seems to have for solid entertainment that isn’t preachy and has no ax to grind.

I had a great time.

Show Notes and Links

I asked Kat what writers she follows and likes who address these issues and here is her list:

At The Atlantic, she recommends Connor Friedersdorf and Tyler Austin Harper.

On Substack, she recommends Meghan Daum who hosts The Unspeakable podcast.

With the Free Press, she recommends Larissa Phillips, River Page, and Rupa Subramanya.

Kat writes for The Free Press and writes really engaging thriller novels.

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In the last issue, I walked through the presentations to the panel of independent experts at the CDC’s ACIP meeting in favor of the new bivalent vaccine booster. These presentations focused on the low levels of efficacy we have been seeing from both the vaccine and the subsequent boosters and heavily imply that the newest booster is a necessity for protection against COVID coming into the winter season.

It’s important to understand the role that the ACIP recommendations play in vaccine administration. ACIP is comprised of 15 voting members selected to represent the breadth of research and practical medicine concerning vaccine administration. Voting ACIP members may not participate directly in vaccine research, as that would be a conflict of interest. They also may not be employed by or have any direct financial interest in vaccine development or manufacture. ACIP aims to draw from the highest levels of expertise while forbidding even a hint of economic interest.

This is, I think, the best possible approach. It is safeguarded against a number of potential pitfalls and explicitly designed to protect the interests of the public. Which only makes what happened last month that much more grotesque.

To understand what happened in last month’s ACIP meeting, we have to keep our eye on the recommendation placed before them for a vote. I’m honestly not sure where this recommendation came from. Perhaps it was developed by the FDA to align with the emergency use authorization or developed by the CDC to match the FDA’s work. However it came about, it was certainly not crafted by the ACIP members. The recommendation that they ended up approving reads as follows:

A single booster dose of the bivalent Pfizer / Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is recommended for individuals ages 12 years and older for Pfizer (18 years and older for Moderna) and at least 2 months after receipt of a primary series or prior monovalent booster dose, under the EUA issued by the FDA.

How this recommendation was approved is a fascinating journey of objection and frustration among some of the least confrontational, most helpful doctors in the country.

To set the stage for this discussion, we have to understand that, even before this meeting, the FDA had revoked the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the previous vaccine booster in anticipation of the approval of the bivalent vaccine booster. This means that if the bivalent booster recommendation was not approved, no COVID booster would be available to anyone, not even the most vulnerable or aged citizens. The choices were either to recommend this booster or to have no booster available. There was nothing in between.

Compound that reality with this chart (presentation source) presented to the ACIP members. The model that generated this chart was not called into question, and most ACIP members simply assumed that the failure to approve this booster vaccine would, in fact, result in nearly 10,000 deaths.

With all that background, let’s talk about how the ACIP bivalent recommendation went down.

After the presentations, there was a time for debate and comment from the ACIP members. You can watch that on YouTube and, if you’re not interested in listening to all 3 hours of it, you can use my notes from the presentation as a guide to find the most important parts.

There were a few big issues that the ACIP members had with this booster. The biggest problem was voiced by Dr. Pablo Sanchez, who noted that the booster vaccine that they were supposed to be recommending had no clinical data associated with it, which is to say it had not yet been tested on humans. This booster is targeting the BA.4/BA.5 variant but the clinical data was about a version of the booster that targeted the BA.1 (which is still considered Omicron).

The vaccine boosters approved in Europe were for the BA.1 vaccine, but the US government had already purchased 171 million doses of this newer but untested vaccine. This put enormous pressure on the ACIP panel. They couldn’t recommend the BA.1 vaccine partly because there wasn’t an FDA’s EUA for it, but also because it simply wasn’t manufactured for use in the US. Securing enough doses of the tested vaccine would take months.

The fact that the FDA had already issued an EUA for this vaccine came up as a problem again and again. There were complaints about the recommended age range for the booster. Participants suggested that the CDC recommendation be altered to recommend this only for people over 50. They were told that the wording around age recommendations could not be changed without causing substantial legal problems related to the EUA.

The committee also argued against the “at least 2 months” recommendation, saying that the booster should be administered at least 3 months and ideally 6 months after a COVID infection. Again, they were told that the wording could not be changed without threatening the EUA and thus leaving elderly and vulnerable people without any booster for the coming winter months.

It’s incredible to take a step back and look at what has happened here. The CDC came to their independent experts with an untested vaccine, presented them with a recommendation to which they objected on multiple grounds, and informed them that, if they did not approve the given recommendation, there would be no booster for the elderly and vulnerable and 10,000 people would die.

The only thing that placated the experts was the assurance that their true recommendations would be included in the clinical considerations. In this assurance, the CDC simply lied to its experts. None of this information has been presented in the clinical considerations document.

As an added insult, Ashish Jha, the White House COVID Response Coordinator, has been working with “employers, colleges, and schools” to roll out the new boosters. That is to say, they are specifically targeting younger people, the group that the ACIP participants specifically said should not be targeted.

I’m disappointed that the ACIP did end up voting for the recommendation, but I’m astonished at the disdain with which the CDC treated its expert panel. They presented these doctors with an all-or-nothing recommendation and ignored every objection that was brought up. By revoking the old booster EUA, they boxed these experts into a corner and told them that they would be responsible for thousands of deaths if they refused to approve.

And they didn’t seem even the slightest bit embarrassed by this. If anything, they seemed incredulous that there was any objection at all. At one point, the committee was told that complaints about authorizing an untested vaccine should not be made because “we cannot go backward and change things [ie manufacture the BA.1 booster instead of the BA.4/BA.5 booster], so I’m going to suggest that any additional comments (should) look ahead, look forward. We can’t change what is put in front of us today.”

This disdain for the advice of independent experts in favor of rubber-stamping a historically controversial vaccine was incredibly distressing and antithetical to the intended purpose of the ACIP group. My main comfort in all this is at least it is happening out in the open. At least everyone can see the presentations and listen to the objections the experts had to the CDC’s awful recommendation.

Disney Shorts: The Nifty Nineties (1941)

This short presents Mickey and Minnie as denizens of the 1890’s, which must have been really fun for audiences in the 40’s to see the recent past nostalgically portrayed this way. I’ve long contended that the point of Back to the Future wasn’t “let’s see our parents as kids” but a wide-eyed step back to marvel at how much had changed in 30 short years. In the same way, The Nifty Nineties shows Mickey and Minnie in a Brass Era car, attending a vaudeville show, and watching a morality tale slideshow against the dangers of alcohol.

The short also featured music authentic to the 1890’s. It’s fairly well in step with Disney’s tender romanticization of small town life and romanticization of the recent past.

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Whenever there is a new vaccine approval, I try my best to watch the CDC’s ACIP meeting surrounding that approval. The latest presentation was on September 1st and concerned the approval of Moderna and Pfizer’s latest COVID vaccine. This latest vaccine is a bivalent vaccine, which means half the dose of the vaccine targets the mRNA sequences of the “ancestral virus” (the virus from March 2020) and half the dose incorporates the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 mRNA sequences.

Meeting Materials

ACIP Videos for Sept 1st meeting

Notes on the meeting (Google Doc)

In order to understand many of the presentations in this meeting, you have to start with the understanding that all the presentations were designed to steer the participants towards making the following recommendation, the wording of which was very precise:

A single booster dose of the bivalent Pfizer / Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is recommended for individuals ages 12 years and older for Pfizer (18 years and older for Moderna) and at least 2 months after receipt of a primary series or prior monovalent booster dose, under the EUA issued by the FDA.

The data presented was designed to drive the ACIP participants towards this recommendation but, in doing so, painted an incredibly unflattering picture of the efficacy of the existing vaccine options.

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Startling Results From Unpublished Data

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a CDC presentation work so hard to convince me of the poor efficacy of the existing vaccine regimen. In their efforts to argue for the necessity of the new vaccine booster, they presented chart after chart of preliminary unpublished data the CDC had collected, and it demonstrated an incredibly weak case for the existing vaccines.

For example, while presenting the argument for the importance of a second booster, they showed a chart demonstrating that there was no efficacy difference between a completed 2-dose vaccination and a vaccine + booster.

This startled me; I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone from the CDC present evidence that the first booster dose wasn’t effective. They followed this up with a chart that shows that vaccine efficacy starts lower than we anticipated (85%-50% effective rather than 95%) and dwindles down to about 0% effective within 5 months.

This isn’t just about symptomatic infection, the efficacy rates for keeping kids out of the emergency room during the Omicron wave were simply atrocious, so bad that you could really only consider these vaccines effective in children within 2 months of their latest dose.

The data was slightly better for adults but even vaccinated + 2 boosters had barely 60% efficacy against hospitalizations.

Furthermore, while making the case in favor of updated and recent boosters, the CDC made the rather astonishing case that a previous COVID infection was, in fact, substantially more protective than the vaccine in the long term. In fact, when looking at individuals who had natural immunity through a previous infection, the primary series of both the Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccine did not appear to make any long-term difference in the prevention of symptomatic COVID among those with a previous infection.

This presentation was meant to promote the importance of booster doses, but I just sat there with my jaw down. I knew that previous infection was protective, but I had not yet seen this data, presented with the blessing of the CDC, demonstrating that previous infection was actually far superior long-term protection than the vaccine alone.

Furthermore (as I mentioned when I first started reviewing this meeting), the rates of a serious adverse reaction (myocarditis in teenage boys and young men) are much higher than was previously reported. The main data that was shown was from US reporting but it was reinforced with data from Canada, which showed similarly high rates of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men.

The intended takeaway from all this was meant to be that we need the ACIP group to recommend the latest vaccine because the existing vaccine regimen leaves individuals woefully unprotected. But the result was that they made a very strong case that, despite what we have previously seen and despite what we have previously been told, the existing vaccine leaves individuals woefully unprotected.

I don’t think the situation is actually as bad as what we see in these charts. Especially as so many people have had a COVID infection, we can hope that the more protective natural immunity will provide the long-term protection that we apparently do not get from the vaccines. But this flies so directly in the face of what we have been told and what I’ve said about the vaccines based on the data I’ve seen from the vaccine reports and from the CDC. I’m not sure we can so drastically alter the expectations around vaccine efficacy without calling into question the certainty with which they were promoted as the ultimate solution to the pandemic.

I originally intended this to be a single piece on the ACIP presentation, with the first part about the startling data that was presented and the second part about the manipulative and misleading tactics used by the FDA against the ACIP members. I’m realizing now that that second part is so important and so startling that it requires its own piece so as not to fatigue you, my dear readers.

Disney Shorts: Donald’s Better Self (1938)

This is a fun early Donald Duck short that portrays Donald not as an adult, but as a school boy. Waking up in the morning, Donald is coaxed out of bed for school by his angel and then tempted into truancy (and then into smoking!) by his devil.

The gags are a little thin and we spend far too much time watching the devil make fun of Donald for not smoking correctly (“You smoke like a baby!”), but I think it was an interesting visual choice to have Donald’s angel and devil selves merge and unmerge perfectly with his corporeal form. This leads to a few really compelling visuals. One of these closes the short as Donald’s angel moves in step with his physical body to grant Donald wings and a halo for the grand altruistic act of simply going to class.

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About this time last year, I was anticipating the start of the 2021-2022 school year and watching with some level of horror as the issue of mandatory masking in schools became a political and cultural flashpoint. After months of reading and researching, I concluded that masks in schools were not appropriate. That was one of the most important things I’ve written.

Sadly, some places are still looking to bring back COVID mitigations in schools and disrupt a fourth year of schooling. As I’ve tried to grapple with this worldview, I realized that parents trying to stop this may need a blueprint for how to act on the restrictions hurting their kids. I asked around about who might be able to give advice and that led me to speak with Karen Vaites.

If you’re still fighting with a school district over COVID restrictions, I hope this podcast is helpful. Karen was wonderful to talk to, and I hope you’ll find this discussion full of practical advice for helping kids go to school as they should.

I’d also like to point to Viney Prasad. Prasad has been one of the most helpful doctors I’ve been reading in the last three years. He’s been a smart and grounded voice advocating for normalcy, and I cannot recommend him highly enough.

How To Make an Impact at Your School

To make this podcast a little more digestible and the lessons a little more visible, I’ve summarized the important points below:

* Connect with other parents. Twitter really is the most important place for finding new information, and it’s where many parents started connecting to organize to bring their kids back to schools. You can quickly find the few hundred voices who are leading the charge on evidence-based COVID policies as well as other parents and advocates you can work with.

* There is influence in numbers. Before you try to set up a meeting with your superintendent or principal, gather a coalition. It is easier to get a meeting with a school superintendent with three parents than it is when acting as a single voice. You will get a different reception as a group than as an individual. Make an effort to head to these meetings with as many like-minded people as possible.

* Be kind and show grace. We need to be respectful and polite when meeting with educators. No one wants to listen to someone who is taking out their anger on them. Fair or not, we all put up defenses when someone goes into attack mode. Don’t be the person that causes the decision-makers to get defensive.

* Lean on the existing evidence. Even though this pandemic has crushed faith in institutions and experts, people are still impressed with and moved by credentialed information. Because of this, be sure to make your case with credentialed evidence. The Urgency of Normal is an initiative driven by scientists and doctors that promotes the removal of COVID mitigations in schools and makes that case with an avalanche of evidence. Download their toolkit and lean on it as you make your case to your school district.

* It’s all about the kids. We’re not just trying to avoid the next mandate, we’re still winning hearts and minds. There are still fair-minded people to be won over who just haven’t heard the case made in a calm and clear way. Few are convinced by anger and frustration, even if those emotions are warranted. Centering the case around kids’ needs is still the best way to change policies and win partners.

Postscript: The Benefit of the Doubt has Become Counter-Cultural

This is my newsletter, which means I get to occasionally indulge in some more emotive frustrations. This is one of those moments.

My conversation with Karen was a genuine breath of fresh air. I love talking to people who want to push politics aside and talk about how we make decisions, influence people, and make the world better for our kids. That’s the important stuff.

But not even 24 hours after our conversation, the New York Times published this outlandish piece about how parents who objected to mask mandates and vaccine mandates were sucked into a horrible world of conspiracy theories. While Karen was talking to me about how we need to make friends and smooth over political differences for the sake of our children, the New York Times was finalizing an article about how people like me and Karen are part of an insane group of crazy people who don’t believe in science.

This is hard for me, but I imagine it is harder for my friends who are less political and want to focus only on the needs of their children. It’s enormously unfair to have a national newspaper slander them as crazy anti-science idiots even as they are trying desperately to bring people together with studies, evidence, and careful recommendations of credentialed experts.

Even the people interviewed for this story found themselves aghast at the narrative in which they became entangled.

There may be some shortcut for bridging the gap between journalists and honest individuals. If I knew what it was, I would do a five-part series on it to make it as visible as possible. I would pay Twitter money to promote it.

The “return to normal” vision is not a bunch of weirdos. It’s a vast swath of careful, intelligent individuals who want to create a smooth, clean path for children to walk through in this uncertain moment. While we have a vast range of political opinions, our singular focus is on making sure children are growing up in a stable world.

The stupid part of me wants the mainstream media to push these friends of mine out of acceptable left-wing circles. This is because I’m a horrible partisan who wants to suck all the smart people into my political orbit and leave everyone outside my political ingroup at the mercy of a skeleton crew of yes men who are afraid to make any statement that isn’t pre-approved by their political masters.

But the normal part of me remembers that the children in New York City and San Francisco are just like my kids and not pawns to be played for political benefit. American political parties are too broad and too strong for this kind of realignment. What the New York Times is doing is laying the groundwork to excommunicate a significant swath of people from polite society in blue regions.

This is, as Natalya noted, the death of nuance. It is increasing fragility in our society, which isn’t really noticeable until the moment when we suddenly need those strong bonds in a time of crisis.

This is why I’m glad to align with people like Karen who are working hard to unite us by appealing to our commonalities.

Disney Shorts: Tire Trouble (1943)

This is a great Donald Duck short because we get all the moodiness and anger that we expect from Donald without him being mean to anyone. Donald is out for a joy ride in his cherry red jalopy when his fun is suddenly interrupted by a flat tire that he must repair.

This being Donald, everything goes wrong. He can’t get the jack to work, he can’t get the inner tube to patch, he can’t get the tire back on the rim. The entire short is a nonstop cascade of funny mishaps at Donald’s expense. He is the personification of every struggle we’ve ever had to fix what is broken. He takes our frustrations and rolls them up into a 7 minute short so we can laugh at him instead of ourselves.

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This is my interview with Ryan Ellis, an IRS Enrolled Agent and a veteran tax expert. He is on Twitter at @ryanlellis and has recently written on the ghost of taxes future for the Wall Street Journal.

Ryan and I had a fun chat about what exactly is happening with taxes this year. We talked specifically about the chaos that was born out of the Advance Child Tax Credit and why it is throwing so much complexity into what would normally have been a straightforward tax problem.

I like doing my taxes. Yes, it is a maze of rules and structures, but I like rules and structures. It’s like a puzzle game except that, if you plan appropriately and learn to play the game the right way, you get money. I find that immensely satisfying.

This year I got my taxes done early, sent them in, and soon received a letter from the IRS informing me that I had not done some basic calculation correctly. This seemed unlikely to me since I’m pretty careful when inputting my information and TurboTax usually catches those kinds of errors.

Nevertheless, the IRS seemed determined that I owe them a pretty decent chunk of money.

I’m ultimately unworried for myself concerning this snafu. I have a good sense of what to do and how to respond to the IRS on this. But I read this problem as a hint of what could be an enormously chaotic tax season. If simple transcription calculations are being flagged as problematic, the average person isn’t going to know how to deal with that. Getting a letter from the IRS means going back to check or redo a tax return, which is a pretty big stressor for many people. Additionally, if you’re waiting on a refund, the IRS getting an essential piece of information wrong is going to delay your refund until you get things sorted out. If this happens to a lot of people, that’s going to be a lot of stress, a lot of letters, and a lot of money left in a state of limbo.

So I reached out to see if I could talk to someone who might have more experience and a larger view of the situation than I have and Ryan Ellis came to my rescue.

The Child Tax Credit Boondoggle

Back in mid-2021, the Biden administration came up with what was supposed to be a brilliant game-changing idea: instead of giving people their child tax credit at the end of the year, give it to them in the form of cash every month. This was brilliant because 1) people would get a check for cash every month, seeing how the government is giving them money, and 2) it didn’t cost the government anything, they were just shifting the timeframe of this tax credit. This was an awesome PR idea, an easy win at virtually no cost.

But that easy solution had to work its way from “good idea” to “how are we going to implement this” and, somewhere along the way, that simple and easy solution became a mess.

To start out, those 6 months of advance tax credit was money that people were used to getting back on their tax refund and many people have planned their tax finances around this reality. Messing with that pattern was inevitably going to cause problems down the road.

But that problem was just the beginning. If you’re married with kids, you probably have two identical Letter 6419s from the IRS, one for you and one for your spouse. The idea from the IRS was that sending two letters to the two custodians of the children would allow married couples to file separately and still claim a portion of the child tax credit on each return. But you have to know that these letters are not duplicates of one advance tax credit sent to two people but that each letter represents half of the total tax credit split between two people. They must be added together and input into Schedule 8812.

Ryan pointed out in our discussion that this is fairly typical of how tax policy is done. It is created by highly educated, upper middle class professionals with simple and stable income streams. It’s a good idea in theory, but that theory has to reach down into implementation and be able to butt heads with the messy family, income, and custodial situations that many people confront. The path from policy theory to implementation generates a bevy of complex and cumbersome forms and rules which ultimately leads to more chaos than benefit.

The IRS is a mess right now. It seems likely that many millions of families will be getting some form of discrepancy letter this year over what should be a straightforward part of their tax return. The most valuable advice Ryan had was to respond to any IRS correspondence in a clean and clearly recorded way, sending letters via certified mail and faxing a dozen copies to the IRS.

That’s the best way to protect yourself in the chaos that is currently overwhelming the IRS. Make sure you read Ryan’s WSJ piece to prepare yourself for what we’ll be seeing this time next year.

Disney Shorts: The Art of Self-Defense

This is another narration-heavy Goofy short that starts out recounting the history of dueling and fisticuffs, from the days of the caveman to the dawn of the 20th century. We then join Goofy at the boxing gym where he prepares for a fight, inevitably messing up every training exercise, ultimately losing a humiliating match against his own shadow.

This is a fairly unremarkable Goofy short. Outside of the history jokes, there are a few decent physical gags along with several unimaginative ones. It’s cute and reasonably fun, but nothing exceptional.

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This week I interviewed Josh Centers, an author, homesteader, and prepper who is just handing out prepping advice like candy at Unprepared.life. We talk about prepping, nuclear war, positive mindsets, and how weird people get about the smallest things on the internet.

Josh was Twitter’s main character (the person everyone is talking about) after this tweet a couple weeks ago.

I found the outrage over this tweet inexplicable. Obviously, if you want to survive nuclear war, you’re going to need realistic optimism and have a positive mental attitude. It would also help if you did some basic preparation… just in case.

When I was a teenager, a lot of people in my church got very worked up over the Y2K bug and started prepping for a major social, economic, and governmental disruption that did not occur. That was my introduction to “prepping”, and it was a poor one. My family did well out of that experience. My parents didn’t buy barely edible long-term food supplies as many of our friends had. My mom just got a lot of extra canned food and dried goods that she would probably end up using anyway (and she did).

That “big event that changes everything” is not Josh’s style of prepping. He talked about getting on the ground floor of preparedness by making sure you have a fire extinguisher and a first aid kit. That’s all. No food stores, no fallout shelters. Just make sure you can put out a fire or be able to help in a medical emergency before the ambulance gets there.

Prepping is one of those funny things where you can spend a weekend knocking the big items off your to-do list for less than $200 or you can re-orient your entire life around it. I love how knowledgeable and passionate Josh is on this, how many of the hard questions he’s spent time thinking through, and how approachable he makes the topic.

Listen or watch the interview for the whole conversation, but I wanted to call out a couple of the resources Josh mentions:

Ready.gov - This is a website hosted by the federal government with resources to help individuals and families make a plan and be ready in the event of some natural or manmade disaster.

LDS Preparedness Manual - This publication is not in any way an official Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) publication, but a sort of crowd-sourced compilation of best practices for disaster prep on everything from food and shelter to communication to financial preparedness.

Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearney - This is the bible of surviving through the worst possible scenario. Josh mentioned that his first reaction to it was “this guy is a lunatic” but as he looked into it more, he discovered that Cresson Kearney was a highly respected engineer and researcher and this book is a deep and extensive look at how to survive through the worst possible cases of nuclear war.

One of my favorite things I’d like to pull out of this conversation is how YouTube has become the greatest education tool of our lifetime. If you want to know how to do something, there is someone somewhere on YouTube who will walk you through it step-by-step. As Josh notes, YouTube will teach you anything. How to skin a rabbit, how to breed a rabbit, how to butcher a chicken, how to grow a garden, how to use a tourniquet. There is an awful lot of practical knowledge out there in the world and for some reason, a bunch of it is on YouTube.

I loved talking with Josh because he is an example of what I described last year as the “non-expert specialist”. He has no formal training in preparedness, but it turns out that curiosity and an eagerness to learn are far more important than any degree or formal expertise. He walked through all the things he has learned to do (he’s a blacksmith!) because he wants to be able to do it in case he needs to and the list is extensive. He took inspiration from this quote from a Robert Heinlein quote that I love, so I’ll end this newsletter with it:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I love this quote for its optimism and its ambition. I don’t know how to do half those things, but I do still want to learn. I’m glad there are people like Josh out there eager to help teach me.

Walt Disney Shorts: Shanghaied (1934)

Oh yay, there is a link for this one.

I really like the spirit of the early black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons. Mickey and Minnie are both very spunky characters with a lot of energy and, while they are always the good guys, it is often in response to Peg Leg Pete’s plain and unadulterated villainy.

Mickey and Minnie have been shanghaied (kidnapped) by Pete and his crew of pirate derelicts. Mickey frees himself, fights Pete, rescues Minnie and they defeat the entire crew. There is hardly any dialogue in it at all, it’s all action and gags. It’s smartly animated, a great example of the tightness of these early cartoons. This cartoon is almost a throwback to the early DW Griffith thriller melodramas that are all almost entirely about establishing danger and the tense narrative drive toward rescue and victory. This is a classic short that still manages to deliver on that drama while running it through the slapstick of early cartoons.

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I’ve got to put a content warning on this one. The language is maybe PG-13 but the phrase “b******t” makes a pointed and repeated appearance simply because it is the best phrase to describe a lot of the things we are talking about.

I’ve known Razib Kahn for a damn long time. Twitter archeology isn’t very good since every smart person has long since deleted their old stuff, but we’ve been glancing off each other for close to a decade.

I remember being excited for him when he landed a gig with the New York times only to become outraged when they dropped him, not for anything that he had written, but because he had written for an online publication that hosted other writers who wrote “bad things”. This was the first time that I recall a cancellation-by-proxy, where someone is fired and cancelled not for what they said but for their proximity to the “bad people”.

Razib now writes on Substack at Unsupervised Learning, an incredible publication on population genetics. He recently wrote a passionate defense of the recently deceased biologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson was massively accomplished and influential entomologist and evolutionary biologist who, upon his recent passing, was subject to a Scientific American article that can only be described as a hit piece on the recently departed.

Razib, the decent man that he is, took offense at this, talked within the back-channels of geneticists and evolutionary biologists, and decided that someone had to write a rebuttal. He took it on himself to coordinate this effort and, when Scientific American refused to publish it, he published it on his Substack.

What followed absolutely turned my stomach. I watched in fury as several of the people who signed Razib’s rebuttal backtracked in the following days, ganging up on him for these strange imagined crimes.

Just as Razib was my first introduction to “cancellation by proxy”, he became my first introduction to “cancellation by proxy by proxy”. I’ve never seen Razib exhibit any prejudice, show any antipathy to anyone (except for those monsters who murdered the Bangladeshi atheists), and yet people were denouncing others for associating with him because they say he associated with other bad people. This two degree cancellation is new and novel and, if that is the direction we are headed, we are in for a very bad time in the next decade.

Razib is my friend. He is tenacious and loyal, but he is realistic. He holds no grudges against the people who stabbed him in the back, recognizing that we all live in a social reality and, for some people, that reality means they have to choose between what they believe (or what they wish they believed) and maintaining their professional and personal relationships.

Even as I write this, I feel bad for putting this is a negative light. I write as if I have some distain for people who backtrack when they discover that taking an ethical stand has social consequences because I genuinely hold that distain. But when I talk to Razib about it, he defends the backstabbers. He reminds me that these people are real people living in a real world and it is unreasonable to demand that they sabotage their own careers, their familial and professional relationships, in support of an internet friend.

This is hard for me. This kind of betrayal makes me furious. But he’s right. It’s better to say to these friends, “I understand, you did what you have to do” and maintain those relationships in spite of the betrayal. In Biblical terms, this is the heaping of burning coals onto their heads.

The grace Razib shows in all of this is the envy of most Christians I know. It is like he is granting me permission to not be furious. Razib inspires me to show more grace than I’m inclined to show.

I love that. This is the “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude that Razib exemplifies.

The next 10 years are going to be hard for people who feel like they need to speak up about injustices to the condemnation of their peers. People are going to have to make choices about what really matters to them and some are going to see the scales for some friends tip in a direction that we may not like. We will need to develop an art of relationship that is able to build connections and friendships, knowing that some of these will betray us. We’ll need to learn who those are and not hate them for their betrayal while not trusting them with our thoughts. This is not something I was ever taught in my youth, but I think it will be a vital skill.

Yes, this is very Rhett Butler, but the ability to adapt to the changing times will give us all a great deal more freedom as we learn how to differentiate between being friendly and being friends.

Disney Shorts: Pluto’s Housewarming (1947)

This is one of the most beautiful Pluto shorts. There is no narration. In fact, there are no words at all in this short, just the emotive presence of the three characters: Pluto, Butch, and the turtle character. This is the platonic ideal how to write a superb cinematic short.

Pluto is moving his bone collection from his old run-down doghouse into a new and beautiful one. Upon his move, he must contend with a turtle who takes over his home. Upon resolving that situation, Pluto finds that another larger dog has taken his house. The remainder of the short is the conflict that allies Pluto and the turtle against the invasive bulldog.

The entire short is a testament to the emotive nature of animation and the ability to tell a story with visuals alone. We get a full-featured narrative without a single word spoken, based only on the facial expressions and the often exaggerated actions of the characters. This is an animated vaudeville performance and it’s a delight.

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This week, I had the privilege to talk to Michael Brendon Dougherty about his experience with COVID as a pundit and a parent living in upstate New York. I asked him on after he mentioned some frustration that his extended family experienced a rather substantial COVID outbreak and nearly everyone got it, the rich and the poor, the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

Michael has been early to some of the most important moments of this pandemic. He was highlighting Chinese journalists trying to speak to the world back in January 2020 and he wrote an absolute classic on masks in June 2020, where he notes that a long-term masking strategy is antithetical to the Western cultural mindset.

To prep for the interview, I read his book My Father Left Me Ireland, which we didn’t really talk about but you should still pick it up because it is excellent.

A huge thank you to Michael for agreeing to the interview. I’m including a summary of the discussion below for everyone who doesn’t have an hour and a half, you can jump to the fun parts.

1:15 - How It All Started - MBD describes learning about the virus in January of 2020 and becoming interested in it before anyone was really talking about it.

5:46 - The First Two Months/Shutting Down Schools - Early in March, a friend in Hong Kong advised MBD to pull his kids out of school. Later that same week, the schools shut down.

6:42 - The Unsustainability of Zoom Life - MBD describes the difficulty of quarantine with three children under six years old. “It was very quickly revealed this was not a tenable way to live for a long time.”

7:46 - Learning More - More data was revealed, including the fact that transmission in schools and outdoors was not a problem. “Eventually, we started learning more about this disease and my opinion started shifting.”

8:26 - Kids and Mental Health - With the reopening of schools in September came mask requirements for kids. Anxious and stressed adults were making the kids stressed in turn. MBD describes the difficulty of trying to explain the threat of a potentially deadly virus to children. The mental health component is what caused MBD to become against masking kids. “You can’t explain to a six-year-old a one-in-millions chance.”

10:15 - Policies vs. Reality - Even after understanding that the virus seemed to be dependent on social and seasonal patterns, there was little effort to reel in mask mandates and other policies. “It seemed to me like we should start trimming our interventions to fit what we’re actually seeing.”

11:07 - Media Narratives/Red States vs. Blue States - The discrepancies in COVID cases between the upper and lower half of the United States were to due seasonal, not policy changes, but the media seem hellbent on driving a red vs. blue narrative. MS says “[The media] sets up this us versus them, good versus bad, sick versus healthy dichotomy that’s really hard to decouple when the situation switches.”

12:58 - Vaccines/Misinformation - The initial claim and goal of the vaccine was that it stopped transmission of the virus by 90%. However, the reality was that while vaccines prevent serious disease or death, COVID was a constant and endemic disease. Stopping the spread simply was not a viable goal. MBD: “The ‘all-or-nothing’ approach has been destructive.”

15:09 - Protect Yourself vs. Stop the Spread - I talk about the difference between taking the necessary steps to protect yourself if you’re elderly or immunocompromised and forcing everyone else to take those same precautionary measures in the name of “stopping the spread”.

16:33 - Hospital/ICU Capacity - MBD explains that the sentiment behind stopping the spread was to prevent overwhelming the hospital system, but few hospitals were actually at above-normal capacity.

19:25 - Political Blame-Shifting/CDC Guidelines - MBD discusses the game between the CDC and policymakers where the CDC maintains that their recommendations are just guidelines, not rules; politicians make those guidelines into rules and say they’re just following CDC guidelines. Neither one is taking responsibility for these mitigations. I note that CDC guidelines are not in line with available data, they’re just a list of things that might stop the spread of the virus.

21:17 - Mitigations in Europe/Masking Children - MBD visited his father in Ireland over the summer and describes the difference in mitigations in Europe compared to America, which included no mask regulations for children under 16.

27:35 - Why Stay in New York? - Moving away from New York would take MBD away from his extended family, most of which is concentrated locally. “I’m not yet ready to be a refugee in my own country.”

30:19 - The Debate is On the Left/Liberal Journalists Waking Up - MBD says the left finally seems to be moving in the right direction when it comes to COVID policy.

31:27 - Big Pharma - Moderna and Pfizer have a financial incentive to advocate for more doses. “We are the human challenge trial. Once you’re beyond three doses, you are beyond what’s been tested in any significant way.”

36:29 - Vaccinated People Catching COVID - MBD: “I don’t anything could have done more damage to the reputation of vaccines than the way things have proceeded since the summer.”

40:13 - Potential Vaccine Risks Ignored by Media - MBD talks about how the problems with menstrual cycles after taking the vaccine were largely ignored by the media or dismissed out of hand. The risk should be seriously considered by someone trying to get pregnant. 

43:23 - Media-Controlled Narratives/Decentralization and Social Media - I wonder how decentralization of the media will change overarching narratives, and MBD notes how the social media bubble is so different from the “normie,” fear-driven media bubble.

47:27 - How Political Leadership Affected Regulations - MS: “I think a lot of people needed to have a Democratic president in office while this is happening to see the difference between one versus the other. Because they needed to know that actually, this isn’t controllable. There is not a thing you can do to stop this, especially at the federal level.”

50:39 - Long-Term Historical Effects/Mental Health - I noted that the kids who were around during the pandemic will grow up and retroactively change the narrative based on what they observed. MBD likens it to the Vietnam War: “Everyone kind of pretends they were more against it than they were at the time.” A case of suicide in Ireland leads to a discussion of the broader mental health implications of pandemic policies. 

53:17 - Effects, Culture, & Symbolism of Masks - I note that it’s hard to meet or recognize people with masks. MBD asserts that we won’t adapt to the masks because seeing each other face-to-face is too much of our culture, shaped by ideas in the Christian liturgy like the beatific vision, as opposed to a “veiled” culture like Islam.

1:01:28 - Who Has the [Emergency] Power? - I recounted how school board representatives in Washington had no discernable positions on COVID. MBD comments that the school board says it has no authority to change COVID regulations, forcing people to go higher in the chain of authority. MS: “It feels like you have to own the process from the literal teacher who teaches your child up through the governorship in order to, as a parent, control what’s going on.”

1:07:21 - Expert Rule - We discuss how the attempt to “depoliticize politics” has just led to a kind of aristocracy within government that insulates congressional representatives from responsibility. MBD: “It’s this idea that somehow there are these people who are qualified to translate the science into policy, and the people that are qualified to do this are insulated from the prejudices of the people that are being governed, and that will improve government somehow. But it’s the exact opposite. It’s precisely because they are so insulated from popular opinion that they put through guidance that is disruptive and unfollowable and then, in turn, disrespected.”

1:10:32 - The Constitution vs. Utopia - MBD: “Our form of government, messy at is, imperfect as it is, acknowledges the problem; the governed in some way have to tolerate the government […] and here is machinery for producing a legitimate, tolerated government that is not always just, but has room to be adjusted.”

1:13:28 - Predictions - I mention the implausibility of halting COVID reporting; MBD describes how the media was able to pressure Boris Johnson into implementing a lockdown. MS: “The way around this is to stop paying attention. It’s to stop watching the data, stop caring, stop putting it on the news.”

1:18:10 - Natural Immunity/The Trouble With Variants - It’s hard to make vaccines for coronaviruses because they evolve so quickly, and the vaccines may not be as effective against variants so a large part of this is hoping and guessing.

1:21:34 - The Strategy Going Forward - I mention how I look to Ron DeSantis as a reference point for how we should be dealing with COVID—that is to say, the only path forward is to say “we’re done”. MBD points out that COVID is never going away and our policymaking going forward should reflect that reality.  

Disney Shorts: The Vanishing Private (1942)

I love the World War 2 Disney shorts. As part of the war effort, Disney produced a ton of work for the military in which they were barely compensated for the cost of making the films. But there are also these wonderful shorts that were meant to help the morale of the people at home and the boys over there by painting Army life in a lighthearted way. Most of these cartoons featured Donald Duck as the hapless private and Pegleg Pete (who apparently regrew his leg) as the onerous drill sergeant.

These shorts are all great. This one, however, is perfect. Donald is tasked with camouflaging the canons and discovers invisible paint in the research division. He then paints the canon to be invisible and, through a series of unfortunate but entirely predictable circumstances, becomes invisible himself. This leads to a fantastic comic escalation between Invisible Donald and Pete that is just packed with good gags and misunderstandings. Such a great piece.

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