The First Long Hill Column on Testing was in August, 2020

Originally posted in the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine. 

The Test We Need To Pass

 

By Richard Morchoe 

 

What is to be done?  These words were part of the title to a pamphlet written by Lenin in 1902.  The question was, for him, about political struggle.  The same question, for us, is about life itself.  

 

For a good part of this year, the nations of the world have been dealing with a pandemic due to the Covid-19 virus.  No one I know has not been affected and your columnist will go out on a limb and guess that anyone who reads this has seen their lives changed as well.

 

Life seems to be opening up.  First, in a manner unplanned, as happened in the wake of the death of George Floyd and second, in the phased re-openings such as ours here in Massachusetts.  As we follow the steps outlined in the protocols we might get back to something approximating normal life, or what the governor has called the "new normal."  Maybe the new abnormal would be a better term.

 

Your columnist has been keeping an excel spreadsheet of the daily increase in cases and deaths recorded in localities where he has friends and relatives.  Excel, being flexible enough, more states and countries were added if there seemed to be something interesting happening.

 

Massachusetts is doing much better than it had been early on with the soldier’s home and nursing home deaths.  In this, we are similar to our sister state bordering to the west.  Indeed, if the states were for profit organizations with independent boards of directors, the chief executives would have been removed as the deaths of the elderly were reported.

 

Still, give Charlie his due, we have improved, but we are still registering new cases in the hundreds most days and deaths in double digits.  Clearly, the war is not over.

 

New York state and city started out on the same poor trajectory we did, but, like us have improved.  The city, even with the riots and continuous protests, is doing well.

 

Seattle, Washington, which had been doing okay, has lost it.  This seems to have occurred along with the rise and fall of CHAZ or was it CHOP.  You can't tell the players without a scorecard.

 

One southern state was kept tabs on.  Georgia opened up full of hope, and crashed.  The headlines from most of the other states from below the Mason-Dixon are similar.  With summer, we were supposed to see a lessening of the severity of the plague.

 

Asking around, it was explained to me that summer in the south is no longer summer, but air conditioning season.  Whereas when the weather warms up here, we go outside, down south, when it gets really, really hot, they go from air-conditioned house to climate-controlled car to air-conditioned work place.  They are not soaking up as much vitamin D as we are.

 

Foreign countries were doing great until they weren't.  Czechia masked up early on via citizen initiative and it worked well.  They seem to have loosened up and it shows.  

 

Uruguay, known for being the most un-corrupt South American country, almost completely ended Covid-19, but the virus is making a comeback in the lower hemispheric winter as it is in the formerly triumphant Australia.

 

New Zealand declared the plague over, yet sees a case a day diagnosed, but no deaths.  Singapore, a nation almost predicated on air conditioning, has new cases in the hundreds daily, but also no deaths, usually.

 

Is there any country that can be considered an unmitigated success?  Coming closest might be Taiwan.  Across a strait from China, it could have been a disaster, but they learned from the SARS scare of 2003 and a plan was in place.

 

They masked early, restricted entry to the country and enforced the rules.  Also, there has been an emphasis on testing.

 

Taiwan has done this without the World Health Organization.  It is not a member of the WHO because of China.  They have had a grand total of 451 cases and seven deaths in a country of just under 24 million.  Not a behemoth but neither is it a postage stamp.  It is an effort we should be jealous of.

 

Certainly, there is much to learn from other countries that have confronted Covid-19, even if there is only so much that can happen in our somewhat ungainly federal system.

 

By nature, we are optimistic on Long Hill, but looking at the daily case figures for our state, there is reason to fear a surge later in the year.

 

So, there is the question we asked at the beginning, what is to be done?

 

Testing!

 

The government and much of the media are putting an emphasis on a vaccine, but that is not at all certain.  

 

So, why should one be enthusiastic about testing.

 

Some prestigious institutions have lined up behind it for good reasons.  Harvard will allow students back on campus, but will test for the virus every three days.  A test you don't have to study for, what's not to like?  Princeton will limit the number on campus but test them regularly.  Other top-flight schools will be practicing similar regimens.

 

These choice colleges know that if you are going to train up the next elite, it's important to keep them alive to protect the brand.

 

Testing is not widespread enough yet, nor is the turnaround fast enough.  Right now, the capacity is sorely lagging.  Still, it is easier to improve testing than come up with a vaccine.  So more and faster testing units need to be made and an infrastructure to test often and evaluate quickly must be put in place.

 

When someone wants to highlight the seriousness of a condition they might compare it to another condition.  Jimmy Carter referred to the energy crisis of the 70s as the moral equivalent of war.  Others might say a crisis calls for a Manhattan Project on the scale of the crash program that led to the atomic bomb.  If ever there was a time that called for such a program this is it.  It should not be near the degree of difficulty as the development of nuclear weapons.

 

One method of getting there has been suggested by Nobel economist Paul Romer and two congressmen, one from each party (From The Hill, June 15, 2020).  Their solution is to offer a federal prize.  There are precedents as federal prizes have been used before to solve problems.  This is so crucial because as the authors write:

 

 "Testing allows us to pinpoint those who are infected and must isolate, while lifting lockdown for those who are uncompromised. Another prize competition focused on scaling up capacity to millions of tests per day will accelerate our return and establish a critical advantage when, inevitably, we face a pandemic like this again."

 

Enormous sums have been spent in this emergency, most of it not on the average citizen.  Attaining testing capacity is crucial.  We should be happy to reward those who succeed rather than those who fail as we have been.

 

Romer and his two colleagues are not alone.  The Rockefeller Foundation has released the National Covid-19 Testing & Tracing Action Plan which has the same goal as Romer and associates.  The Foundation will invest $50 Billion.  Its president was blunt, "The only alternative is more large-scale lockdowns."

 

Up on Long Hill, we cannot be sure we are correct, but following what appears the most logical course when we look at the numbers, testing seems the best choice.

 

What seems also to follow is that going down a path of fits and starts with partial re-openings and re-closings for the next decade will not work unless we get lucky with the vaxx.  

The Long Hill Report celebrated St. Patrick's day with the team from Bucket List Maple Syrup-Sweet!

Class Warfare Goes to the Stock Market

My column from the March 2021 issue of the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine

 

By Richard Morchoe

 

Occasionally, the Matrix opens up and there is a glimpse of the reality that has been hidden from sight and we see our place in the world.

 

Okay, it has been years since I've seen the movies and they are only imperfectly remembered, so I don't know if an analogy of the Matrix opening makes sense.  A better example might be the Wizard of Oz when Toto pulls aside the curtain to reveal who the wizard really is.

 

We had a similar incident last month when something that was not supposed to happen did.  In the financial world, some connected people had their slam dunk of a deal upended and the business news channels were caught wondering how to view the event.

 

It looked like the usual short play.  A company whose raison d'être was not a money maker had caught the attention of some people who saw that the price of the company's stock should go down. They would be more than happy to assist in the decline and make a few bucks doing it.

 

Now in buying stocks, one hopes the price will increase to sell at a profit.  How can one make money doing that with a stock that is a dog?

 

To do it with a loser issue, it is sold short.  That is the stock is borrowed and the borrowed stock is sold.  The short seller waits for the price to go down and then buys back the stock and returns it to the owner.

 

The difference between what it was sold for and what it is bought back for is the profit.

 

The hedge fund cool kids had every reason to believe this would work well, except it didn't.

 

The company that was to be the victim, GameStop (symbol GME), sold physical copies of computer games when gaming had gone mostly digital.  

 

Some hedge funds saw the opportunity and piled on, selling short more shares than actually existed.  Selling short shares of stock that do not exist is called "naked" short selling.  One may ask how is this legal?  Well, it isn't, and was outlawed during the Great Recession when the financial industry learned its lessons and bad things were never to happen again.  

 

Naked shorting continues to happen, but the jails are not full of the connected practitioners.  As George Orwell had it, some animals are more equal than others.

 

The GameStop play looked good for the raiders, but as Scots poet, Bobby Burns noted, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.”

 

The internet has changed the world.  Whether it has been for the better is a matter for debate,

 

Back in the Dark Ages, brokerages, charged hefty fees to execute stock trades.  For the average person to become knowledgeable about a company's shares demanded, at the least, a trip to the library and the information there was probably incomplete.  Thus, the number of people who invested who were not employees of financial businesses, was limited to those with resources and sufficient time to gain some expertise.  

 

Now, in these latter days, all knowledge is online.  Couple that with enterprises such as Robinhood that will execute customers' stock trades sans commission and the democratization of the market seems complete.

 

A multitude of people who follow WallStreetBets on the discussion site, Reddit noticed the shorting of the stock and like a hive swarm started buying GameStop.  When that happened, the short sellers faced having to buy back the stock.

 

A huge fly in the ointment is, if there are enough buyers, theoretically the stock could keep going up forever.  The hedge funds would go bust long before that.  As the financial lumpen proletariat grabbed their digital pitchforks to storm the castle, it looked like it was going to happen.

 

The peasant army bought enough shares such that Melvin Capital, one of the biggest short sellers had to be bailed out to the tune of three billion dollars.  The Bastille had fallen, Vive la révolution.

 

It was at this point that the curtain was pulled aside and not by Toto, or if you must, Agent Smith of the Matrix.

 

The establishment was not amused.  On business news channel, CNBC, host of the midday show Halftime Report, Scott Wapner, had as a guest Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of the venture capital firm Social Capital.

 

Wapner had a problem with the young billionaire.  Palihapitiya was standing up for the insurgents and Scott came off as a valiant defender of elite capital, but Scott kind of tried to do it in a roundabout way of seeming to sympathize with the poor little guys.  

 

Wapner suggested that GameStop was primed to fall and the little guy would need to be protected by regulation.  Chamath did not say Scott was crying crocodile tears but responded, “Don’t all of a sudden look at a short squeeze, where money is being made by retail, and say, ‘Hey. they could be and may be the bag holder in the future, so let’s make sure they can never participate in the future,” Palihapitiya said. “That’s crazy.”

 

Scott denied that was what he was saying and Chamath replied: “You are saying that!” ... “That’s the implication of what you’re saying.”

 

“I’m not saying they shouldn’t be able to participate,” Wapner countered.

 

“You’re saying they should participate on your terms—” Palihapitiya said.

 

“No!” Wapner shot back.

 

Palihapitiya countered, “On Wall Street’s terms, in a way where — when Wall Street can have the best of it, they can maybe participate on the side.” 

 

Scott claimed all he was looking for was a "hazard sign."  It was weak and not at all convincing.  

 

Wapner was clearly annoyed as if his young billionaire guest didn't know the team he was supposed to be on.

 

CNBC was not done.  They would have as an interview, Leon Cooperman, another member of the aggrieved rich.  "People are sitting at home getting their checks from the government, okay, and this fair share is a ######## (see note at the end*) concept.  It's just a way of attacking wealthy people.  I think it's inappropriate.  We all got to work together and pull together."  Of course, the previous sentence is certainly a  ######## concept as no one expects Leon to be down in the trenches with the plebs.

 

It was not just business TV; other respectable figures spoke out.  Former SEC Commissioner Laura Unger was concerned.  She compared the GameStop uprising to January 6th at the Capitol, "If you don’t have the police in there at the right time, things go a little crazy.”  She did admit it was to a "lesser degree,” but was the same “platform-created frenzy that people are operating under,” and added Wall Street was living through “trying times.” 

 

Of course, the "trying times" are hardly caused by the GameStop events.  They are, at most, a symptom.

 

CNN's Chris Cillizza penned "How Trumpism explains the GameStop stock surge."  At least he didn't blame Putin.  His idea was that it was anti-elitism as the driver.  Maybe so, but Chris' words could only be considered a defense of team elite.

 

Your columnist admits to cheering for the insurgency.  He tends to be a Carlinist as he agrees with the late George Carlin's famous quote about the distribution of power in this country, "It's a big club, and you ain’t in it."

 

I am not proud of the feeling, it is a bit of a churlish sentiment, but there it is.  Carlin's dictum may not be completely justified, but a heck of a lot of it is.

 

In the end, the revolt failed.  Robinhood, the firm that executes most of the trades for the GameStop buys stopped any further trading in the stock.  

 

Not unreasonably, there were thoughts that someone big had had a mafia style sitdown with Vlad Tenev (not to be confused with Vlad Tepes) head of Robinhood, who was told that something bad could happen.

 

Citadel Capital executes Robinhood's trades and thus receives information from the order flow.  It also ended up bailing out Melvin Capital's short position.  That could not have made them happy.

 

It turned out that was probably not the case and Robinhood had severe cash problems due to the huge volume of trades they had been called on to execute.  Tenev testified to that before Congress.

 

So, the glorious putsch was over.  Robinhood as a get rich quick avenue is as valuable as three card monte.  Still, for the occasional investor, there are worse things than commission free trades.  Just remember that the Citadel Capitals are harvesting your information and as they say, for social media, you are not the customer, you are the product.

 

Also, remember the sage investing advice of Mark Twain, who was probably the nation's greatest humorist: "OCTOBER: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks.  The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February."

 

*As this is a family magazine, we on Long Hill wish to spare our readers any vulgarity. Thus ######## represents the end product of bovine digestion.

`

 

 

 

Book Review as posted in the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine: James Nestor's Breath is, in itself a breath of fresh air.

James Nestor wants you to shut up...in a nice way

 

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art 

By James Nestor

Riverhead Books, 2020

Hardcover, 304 Pages

ISBN-10: 0735213615

ISBN-13: 978-0735213616

List: $28.00 Amazon: $16.80

 

By Richard Murphy 

 

An old joke has it that an elderly man was asked his secret to long life and replied, "First thing I did was inhale, second exhale, it has been inhale, exhale ever since.  Nothing to it."

 

It turns out, it's not that simple, and odds are, we are all doing it wrong.  A reaction might be ”what do you mean?  I haven't suffocated."  True enough, but our mouths and noses are a mess because we don't get it right.

 

James Nestor was going through a bad patch of subpar health.  His doctor suggested a breathing class of a technique called Sudarshan Kriya might help his failing lungs and he duly showed up for his first session.  It did not look promising.  He was unimpressed by the decrepit house the lesson was taking place in.  Fellow students seemed a motley lot and the instructor did not excite confidence.

 

The class did not start off with a bang.  He was instructed by an odd voice from a cassette to breath in and out through the nose, slowly, focusing on the breath.

 

As the evening continued, he was less and less feeling it.  Good manners and free admission kept him there.

 

His grudging tenacity paid off.  Nestor did not notice a transformation or change but it happened, “I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts leave my head. But it was as if I'd been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else.  It happened in an instant."

 

He noted some physical changes and had an even better feeling of well-being the next day.  Wanting to learn more led to a quest that would last several years.  The book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art would be the result.

 

Breath is his hunt for what has happened to us over time such that as a species we are having trouble with breathing and maladies associated with it.

 

The author introduces us to a "rogue group" of explorers he calls "pulmonauts” who have had some of the same questions he had.  Many early members of that tribe were not scientists, but tinkerers "who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them."

 

There were searchers among the ancients but, for us, it started in the Nineteenth Century.  George Catlin, the most famous artist of the West, was one of the first.  A lawyer, then a portraitist in failing health, he left it all to live among and paint the Lakota Sioux.  That is what he is most famous for.  

 

What he found was a people in excellent health who knew how to breathe.  Without dentists, he reported their teeth "as regular as the keys of a piano."  Mothers would train infants to grow up breathing through the nose.

 

Catlin would bind his own mouth shut so that he would sleep with it closed as did the indigenes.  Restoring health, he lived to a more advanced age than average Americans of the time.  

 

Another "pulmonaut" was Carl Stough, who, according to Nestor, was somewhat a man of mystery as he left little record.  In his time, however, he had a big following.  From Opera singers to dying emphysemics, thousands found him.  His key to breathing well: "the transformative power of full exhalation."  He figured out, for example, emphysema patients suffered not because they could not get air into the lungs, but because they could not get enough stale air out.

 

There are others who have led the way.  Konstantin Buteyko was an advocate of breathing less to get more.  Czech runner, Emil Zátopek won Olympic gold with a similar technique.  Wim Hof seems more than a little eccentric, but no matter.  All of Nestor's subjects are interesting and people to learn from.

 

The author himself was his own subject of exploration, taking up "freediving."  Freediving does not take place at an Olympic pool where they don't charge admission, though it originated in Greece.  It was there that he explored the "ancient practice of diving hundreds of feet below the water's surface on a single breath of air."  This was also the subject of another book he wrote.

 

Being successful in going deep might make one think his troubles were over, but there was so much research to be done and nothing could stop him, no matter how much he had to suffer for science.

 

In the first chapter, James reveals the disaster area that was his nose (It was disgusting), and will embark on a project that seems destined to make it worse.  He, with fellow pulmonaut Anders Olsson, will have their noses stopped up to spend 10 days mouth breathing for science.

 

Olsson seems even more of a monomaniac than the author.  He feared his father's fate, wished to avoid it, and started his crusade. 

 

A prosperous Swedish businessman, Olsson got a divorce, sold off his company and cars and large house, and moved to smaller digs.  He read everything and talked to scientists, surgeons, and anyone worth talking to about  breathing.

 

When the noses were opened, it must have seemed anticlimactic that just about every vital sign and metric had gotten worse.  The second part of the test, naturally enough, was shutting off the mouth and only breathing through the nose.  The improvement post-experiment was also not unexpected.

 

So, just don't breathe through the mouth.  Well, yes, but it is not that simple, as habits of a lifetime and especially, their effects are not easily reversed.  But, some can be cured and some ameliorated.  It is not easy, and seems kind of weird, but there are methods.

 

One of the strangest is proposed by the dentist and pulmonaut, Mark Burhenne.  Dr. Mark asserts that mouth breathing contributes to periodontal disease, bad breath and "was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene."  I feel less guilty about all those M&Ms I ate as a child.

 

What's his cure?  Before you go to bed, you don't have to bind your mouth like Catlin.  Instead, tape it shut.  Not sensing a mass conversion among readers, but there are results.

 

A five-year-old was cured of ADHD.  The vital gas Nitric Oxide is increased.  The author claims it ended his sleep apnea and snoring.

 

There is another problem that modern man and woman suffer from, small mouths.  It was noticed to happen in the mid 1800s, and leads to problems in eating, speaking and breathing as well as crooked teeth and overbite.  The cure: expand the mouth.

 

This is done by putting a device that expands the mouth into the mouth.  It is a plastic retainer and dowel screw that forces the upper palate to grow outward

 

Nestor submitted to wearing a similar contraption at night.  Around a year later, his small mouth had grown appreciably in size.  It works because the affected bones in the mouth, unlike others, can actually grow into one's seventies.  The author, due to the year of suffering, is breathing better, but at the bottom of the page he tells us it's all unnecessary.  One can get the same benefits by chewing gum a couple of hours a day.

 

Hard chewing is missing from the soft foods we eat and that contributes to diminutive mouths.  Humans are supposed to chew.  He doesn't recommend the bubble gum I got with baseball cards as a kid.  Rather, he suggests a sugarless Turkish gum.  No flavor, but not unpleasant.  You too can improve the structure of your mouth and breathe better.

 

One aspect of breathing that was a surprise is that carbon dioxide is as important as oxygen.  One would not think so, after all, scuba divers do not go under with carbon dioxide tanks.  Nestor claims we always have enough oxygen, even when we are short of breath.  It's the CO2 we need more of.  That gas has many functions in the circulation of blood, and when we lose weight, it is mostly exhaling the end product of fat as Carbon Dioxide.  Who knew?

 

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is a book that investigates many facets of the human respiratory system and few modern men and women are without problems.  James Nestor looks at more issues than are covered in this review and prescribes solutions for many.

 

In the first chapter, one of his interviewees asks "Why would we evolve to make ourselves sick?"  It is a flip answer, but fair enough to say, because we can.  We like our soft and rich foods.  Few would choose to live like the Sioux, maybe not even contemporary Sioux. 

 

The book is an adventure and Nestor writes well.  With no medical credentials, I cannot judge the science of Breath.  Still, the author is persuasive and my recommendation is personal.  Readers can evaluate Breath to their own judgement.  

 

Fletcher Clark of MassWildlife came on the Long Hill Report to speak about the amazing Quaboag WildLife Management Area

Fletcher Clark, Habitat Biologist with MassWildlife came on the Long Hill Report to speak about all the wonderful aspects of the Wildlife Management Area south of the Quaboag River in Brookfield and West Brookfield.

The Long Hill Report of February 17, 2021 Dick Vaughan's Conversations with...this time avec moi

 Dick Vaughan, Long time Central Mass businessman, political activist and civic trench worker has me on to his monthly show to opine on current affairs nationally and here in the People's Republic.

In the end, there was no Trump card to be played

Column from the February, 2021 Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine 

The Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz is most famous for the quote, "War is merely the continuation of politics with other means."  Might one turn it around and say politics is merely the continuation of war with other means?

 

Do the events of early January, 2021 resonate with the Clausewitz dictum or its opposite?  Either way, it has been disconcerting.

 

Are we close to civil war?  We asked our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of War or Politics by Other Means (LHIftSoWoPbOM for short) if we are on the verge of intramural incivility.

 

The Institute put more effort than usual into the question, which meant we had to wait for their thoughts as the post deliberation siesta was longer.

 

Their grand verdict, "The beginning of a civil war is difficult to predict, but you will know you are in one when it's been going on for a while.  Boy, will you know it."

 

One should be careful of how what happened at the capitol building is characterized, but such a convention has not been observed. Granted, the actions of the people who entered the Halls of Congress invited extreme comments, which is why it is important to be careful.

 

That said, your columnist admits to having had some hope when Trump came out of the woodwork to roil the nation's body politic even if his economic program was a mix of the usual and his name calling childish.  

 

What appealed to me was of all the major party aspirants, he suggested getting along with a nuclear power who, with us, could incinerate the earth and make any worry about global warming irrelevant.

 

His statement that what might come in Syria would be worse if Assad lost was obvious if we look at all our Middle East adventures and how they've turned out.

 

With our 24-hour news cycle and social media, what was said during the 2016 presidential campaign is down the memory hole and for the people who ran against Trump, it is probably better forgotten.

 

Former Ohio governor, John Kasich said, "frankly, it's time that we punched the Russians in the nose."   My memory is not perfect, and I cannot find that he was asked what he thought the Russians might do.

 

Chris Christie suggested we shoot down Russian planes which prompted Senator Rand Paul to say, "Well, I think if you're in favor of World War III, you have your candidate,"

 

The Democratic nominee, Hilary Clinton, also was for the no-fly zone idea, and why not?  She had warrior cred from the ongoing Libya debacle.

 

Candidate Trump did have the Iran obsession which was a bad idea, but leaving Afghanistan and not bugging Syria would have given less scope for that foolishness.

 

So, the Donald won and did little of what he said he would do, but was artful in blaming others.  His base, with some defections, stayed with him.  Where were they to go?  They were not courted by the Dems.

 

The 2020 election ended with recount theater.  Election skullduggery has a long history, but the incumbent exhausted all possibilities in suits in various courts and it was time to go.  

 

It was not to be.  Either Trump had a rational reason to believe the validity of his case or he was beyond sense.  How people reacted was based on partisanship, but the stage was set for the events of January 6.

 

Donald would encourage followers to go to the Capitol, bugged out and did not follow.  After, he was relatively quiet and more or less hors de combat.  One is almost reminded of historian Barbara Tuchman's book, The Proud Tower.  The future World War I premier of France, Clemenceau said of a would-be dictator who chickened out by suiciding at his mistress' grave, "the man on horseback" was only "the soul of a second lieutenant."

 

In light of the Capitol invasion, it would be interesting to take a look at a historical event of extreme behavior in the life of a legislature.  It was the day every senator was murdered by a mob.

 

The Senators refused to run and were slaughtered where they sat.  All of them. Scurrying would've been beneath their dignity.

 

Surely, dear readers, you are thinking this never happened, and your columnist a fabulist.  He begs you to remember that history does not begin with Lexington and Concord.  Much came before.

 

The year was 397 B.C.  The Gauls had just defeated the whole Roman army in one charge and entered Rome to rampage and plunder.  The senators (i.e. the original senate, not our johnny come lately) were older men who had no intention of running.

 

Now, this is not meant as a knock on our senators or lower house members.  Were I in Congress, I would have been first out the door.  It was easier for the Romans to maintain gravitas, not having to deal with twitter, constantly thinking about re-election and how one looks on camera.

 

The mob at our Capitol was not the Senone Gauls who took Rome.  They went in, vandalized, ran riot and left without firing a shot.  Some of it was silly cosplay (yeah, that's redundant).  Compared to Governor de Launay at the Bastille, it was a walk in the park.

 

How did it look abroad?  Oxford professor Stathis Kalyvas:

 

"Not a coup, not even a riot (these guys are strolling inside the Capitol) but a dramatic, unbelievable failure of basic policing

 

Coups require others to take advantage of this type of disruption and move swiftly, immediately, and decisively. Nothing indicates such dynamics are at play here

 

Having said that, the symbolic shock is enormous and its consequences hard to foretell"

 

His comment about policing is correct.  Capitol Police are a force directly under the control of Congress and the eye was not on the ball.  That it was not even near a coup is obvious as there was no detachment of insurrectionists to secure anything else.  As to the shock, it may turn out more than symbolic.

 

In this country, Mike Davis at the New Left Review blog was a little more salty in his column, Riot on the Hill: 

 

"Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue. (The aesthetic was pure Buñuel and Dali: ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.’)"

 

No matter, there have been lurid stories of how it was almost a rightist putsch.  They were shouted from the media rooftops, but quietly, if not obscurely, retracted.

 

The claim that Capitol Rioters wanted to capture and assassinate officials had to be corrected and were.  

 

This prompted Max Abrahms, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (discussed in the August 2019 issue column, Strangers on a Peace Train) to observe, 

 

"Over and over we’re seeing the media run alarmist headlines of right wing extremism since the Capitol attack that are walked back, retracted, or unsubstantiated in the report.

 

This is the same media that is warning about the dangers of disseminating unreliable information."

 

Professor Abrahms has also speculated that as the Bush Doctrine was, "We need to fight the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here."  The Biden Doctrine will be, "We need to fight the terrorists here so we don’t have to fight them there."

 

I am not sure about that as Biden is taking on his team many from the Obama administration that gave us Libya and Syria as well as Yemen.  Their specialty is foreign wars.

 

The new administration will also be taking on the usual suspects for most departments.  No one can be surprised at Janet Yellen at Treasury.

 

All in all, it is the restoration of the "party of government."  Trump changed nothing.

 

Let us all hope they know what they are doing.  It would be a heck of a thing if they made the recent ancien regime look good.