Review of "Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home" by Heather (Anish) Anderson

From my review of Heather Anderson's "Thirst" over on Goodreads where I rated the book at 4 out of 5 stars:


Finally a hiking memoir worth reading. Anderson writes movingly and well about her record setting FKT of the PCT. We feel her thirst and wince at descriptions of the intense suffering she forced on her body as she hiked 40 or 50 miles a day for two months. If that were all that the book contained, it would still be well worth the time to read it, but there's more, a lot more.

Anish has managed a rare feat; she's made her suffering universal, accessible and relevant to the wider world. Without beating us over the head with it, the tale of her hike becomes the heart breaking story of how she found herself and her mission, and it hints at how we might do the same, long walk or no.

I've rated the book at four stars, and that may need some explanation. I don't withhold a star because of any flaw with the book, but because I don't think Anderson has finished writing. This is her only book so far, but I believe she's got more stories to tell and will only get better with time. So think of a four star rating as encouragement for her to keep writing because as wonderful as "Thirst" is, I believe she's still got better stories to tell and I hope she does.

CDC mission failure

I said back on March 19th of this year that the CDC had failed in their core mission.  Somebody else has noticed the same thing: that the CDC has been spending too much time and money on politically correct bullshit instead of sticking to their mission of protecting us from disease.  The link is below and after reading the article all I can say is "Damned straight."

https://reason.com/2020/05/13/mission-creep-and-wasteful-spending-left-the-cdc-unprepared-for-an-actual-public-health-crisis/

Is herd immunity really an option?

https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-exactly-is-herd-immunity-supposed-to-work/

There's the link to the story.  Below are my thoughts on it.

The article mainly asks questions, not provides answers.  It does make me wonder what the costs in deaths would be to reach herd immunity.

There's just not an easy answer to this situation.  We either stay away from each other, with the consequent damage to the economy and a death rate from suicides and poverty-related events, or we try for herd immunity, with the breathtakingly high death rates, or we end up with something in between, like maybe a vaccine.  Reading this makes me think we are not getting through this virus attack without a lot of pain no matter what the scenario.

I do hope this is too pessimistic and that the 0.5 death rate is still too high an estimate.  Half a percent sounds like pretty good odds to me individually, but applied to a population of over 300 million that's still a lot of people dead.  The point made about repeated waves of the virus over a period of years also makes me wonder if death rates would go down successively as it kills the more vulnerable members of the herd first?  

Seems most likely to me that the virus is here to stay and will become part of the background noise after a while, one cause of death among many.  From a mental health perspective, that may be the healthiest way to think about it, the way we think about the flu today.  I just hope we can get there more or less intact and sane.

Ferguson's follies

Reacting to multiple news stories about Neil Ferguson's inaccuracies in his model, notably:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/professor-lockdown-modeler-resigns-in-disgrace/

https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

Damn.  I wish I hadn't paid so much attention to that model early on, and wouldn't have, had I known his history.  Again, the media has woefully misled us by foisting these doomsday scenarios on us without any context or even a cursory attempt to look into the background of the people purveying the models.

I fervently believe that if we had good information to read, given our enormously plugged-in social app using society, the American public would come to a pretty common sense consensus and move forward.  The weakness in that belief is the quality of our information.  Not only is it incomplete, it's often deliberately incorrect, shouted at us by idiots who don't understand what they're reporting and who refuse to entertain the slightest hint that they might be wrong or have more to learn.

multiple failures

Mostly I find that if it's a choice between conspiracy and incompetency, incompetency is usually the right answer.  But right now who knows?  If we could get good information we could make up our own minds, but our media have completely failed us in this case (and elsewhere).  Rather than give us factual data and trust us to use it wisely, our media seeks to cast every story in a good versus evil mold, and they get to tell us who's on which side.  That sort of gotcha reporting is shameful; we deserve better. 

The other horrible failure is in our regulatory state and the bureaucracy that has grown up to support it.  Both the CDC and the FDA screwed up big time and the US wasn't prepared for this, or any other, pandemic.  The entire mission of these and other agencies is to protect Americans.  Instead, they've become bloated centers of lifetime sinecure for people whose existence proves the Peter Principle while they seek only to perpetuate and grow their budgets.

We'll all, I believe, acknowledge the wisdom of regulations that protect us, like everyone agreeing to drive on the right hand side of the road.  But when regulations fail to provide any benefit, we need to ask why the hell our tax money pays these people?