A government record that says our love exists

Olympic ice dancing began this evening. In this case the contestants have to move to the music. I’m not sure what the requirements are for tonight’s event. It is called “street dancing” and the music is from the likes of John Legend, the Backstreet Boys, and Janet Jackson. The free skate is tomorrow evening (I hear sometime after a football game?). I’m pleased to see ice dancing men are more likely to have a beard. One of the dancers was Paul Poirier from Canada. The announcers, said that he had come out as gay a couple years ago. He danced with a woman partner to music by Elton John. Alas, the skating world it too uptight to allow two men to dance together. Tonight I watched NBC. They finished the skating by 10:30. I’m pretty sure, based on the clock on the wall in the rink, this was recorded last evening Beijing time. The most recent peak in Michigan’s COVID data is 4845 new cases in a day. This is a mere 17% of the height of the omicron surge five weeks ago. That looks pretty good! Cases per day haven’t been this low since October. On my current chart, with the vertical scale set by the recent surge, this indeed looks low. But it is only 54% of the peak at the end of March a year ago. There is still a lot of virus out there. Deaths per day, starting a week ago and going back another two weeks, has been ranging from 63 to 108. My program is now charting 713 days of data. Matt Glassman of the Government Affairs Institute of Georgetown University, tweeted:

Here's a simple guideline: don't trust elected officials to give you good substantive expert info; don't trust substantive experts to make policy decisions that balance competing values or stakeholder interests; and don't trust randos on the internet to do either.

He added that politicians are the only ones that can weigh policies that have competing values. But they shouldn’t be a source of expertise. Glassman doesn’t get into how this balance changes when the politician is corrupt and beholden to his backers. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted an article in The Atlantic in which Yair Rosenberg talked to Steven Shapin, a historian at Harvard. These are Shapin’s words:

We don’t know things directly. We know things through trusted sources. So part of the science that’s relevant in this situation is the science of credibility: how credibility is established, how people come to know things. One of the things I think that people mean by following the science is, “Look, there’s this guy, Fauci; he knows what he’s talking about, believe him. Look, there’s this guy, Trump; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; don’t believe him.” The problem we have today is a radical splintering in sources that speak about the world. In a sense, we’ve always had this, but now we’ve got such a diversity of voices that we’re asking laypeople to decide between Joe Rogan and Trump and Fauci, and determine who is speaking the truth about the virus. It’s a hard thing to do!

Elena Moore of NPR, in a report posted on Michigan Radio, said police at the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor started requiring trucks to leave the protest. It looks like nearly all did. However, as of this afternoon, the bridge is not yet open because pedestrians swelled from a few dozen to hundreds and were still blocking traffic. The Moth is an organization that invites people to tell a true story about their lives. The Moth Radio Hour episode that aired today featured Jim Obergefell telling his story at a Moth event in 2016. His name is on the marriage equality Supreme Court decision. He and his partner wanted marriage only if the government recognized it. After the case that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act Jim and his lover John got married. By then John was deep into ALS and died just a few months after the wedding. Jim wanted his husband’s death certificate to show him as surviving spouse. It was about a piece of paper, a government record that says our love exists. Jim’s story starts at minute 34 and went for 15 minutes. I heard parts of the other stories in the hour. They’re pretty good too. I usually don’t listen to The Moth, which is on Michigan Radio every Saturday. I was running errands today while it was on and listened. I’m glad I caught Obergefell’s story.