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Hysteria From Knowing Too Much

Philadelphia business closed due to the pandemic.

I can be accused of wanton speculation but I wonder if the pandemic and other matters of alleged existential threat – like climate change – have much to do with the fact that we know too much and don’t handle the information very well.  In my mind, the thought needs to be taken seriously.

And we throw these not-very-well digested factoids into the combustible environments of our politics, resulting in a double whammy: little perspective and political mud-slinging, making for political sludge.  No wonder we are throttled from one extreme to the next at any cry of “crisis”.  Don’t expect much help from our blinder- and bubble-induced media to calm the nerves.

The thought came to me as I was ruminating on the coronavirus situation.  I previously stated my belief that raw numbers with little context or perspective can be misleading.  The fact that the US has so many coronavirus cases, for instance, is a result of the fact that we are better able to uncover them.  Though, I am curious about the effect on the average flu season if we marshaled the same financial resources and powers of all levels of government on this single matter.  Would a “pandemic” be in the offing?  Would we be on a near-war footing?

The Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome on Tuesday, March 17. Thousands of flights worldwide have been cancelled as governments impose travel bans (photo:AP)

“But people are dying!” is the cry in the land.  Yes, and it’s the same response about climate change.  Regarding climate change, at no time in history are we better able to monitor the condition of the earth with the plethora of satellites, ocean buoys, and land stations at our disposal, producing a mountain of data.  To make the numbers meaningful, we try to make comparisons with the past from ice cores, tree rings, geological strata, etc, since Baylonian astrologers didn’t have the advantage of a GEOS-8 (weather satellite).

But let’s face it, the concomitant conclusions from a tree’s rings are extrapolations and, to put it bluntly, lack the oomph of a satellite reading of the temperature at the thermosphere.  Today, once our attention is drawn to a subject, it is put under a microscope to feed anything from sensible proposals to hysteria.

What draws our attention to a subject?  Frequently, sadly, it’s politics.  Progressives are constantly on the lookout for the next moral equivalent of war as the excuse to put more of government in the hands of “experts”.  It’s in their ideological DNA.  What better way to expand the reach of the administrative state than a pandemically-induced lockdown of a people’s entire way of life?  It’s the fulfillment and finest expression of their long-sought dream.

From Carter’s “moral equivalent of war ” speech to deal with the oil shortage, which will worsen from his cap on oil prices for domestically produced crude.

But are we really experiencing a pandemic?  Probably yes.  Yet, a proper understanding of the numbers might mitigate the response to it.  We might refrain from shutting down life in a region with none or few cases and concentrate our efforts on the places and populations most at risk.  Instead of sending everyone home for 3 weeks, we might implement and enforce rigorous personal sanitation, testing, and sending home anyone sick.  That way we don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs as we deal with the problem.  Impoverishment is an insane cost for an illness that 90+% of the infected will experience as a cold.

We are experiencing a far more serious epidemic in the insertion of political shenanigans into any manufactured or real problem.  Take a look at the Democrats’ wish list in the $2 trillion relief bill.  It’s socialist egalitarianism run amok, and has very little to do with addressing the illness.  Don’t tell me this isn’t about politics.

The problem, and the numbers, are soiled by considerations about November 2020. The media are a megaphone for it.

RogerG

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The Real Risk Factors

New York City residents in March 2020.

Mark Twain popularized this phrase of unknown origin: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Much of the talk about the pandemic is proving him right. CNN reports that the US has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world at 82,000. Such isn’t all that surprising since we are the home of top-flight and broad-based health care and research. We are rich and capable enough to uncover the instances. I’m sure that CNN meant this to be an indictment of Trump, but it should be less surprising given our capabilities.

The above isn’t the only instance of our media making a muddle of our public discussions. Take for example the talk about “risk factors”. Yes, there are genuine physical risk factors such as age and the notorious “underlying conditions”. Completely left out, though, are the social risk factors. Just look at a map to see what I mean.

The areas most vulnerable are fronting onto the global economy, with globalized populations (“diverse” in today’s woke parlance), and with a critical mass of compacted dwellers. In addition, these places are politically captured by the cultural and political Left. So, they are ripe for infection due to the pipeline for pathogens from tourism and the to-and-from travel of residents with foreign relatives. Many of these cities are ports to boot. The governing personalities are enthralled with the mistaken notion of the bigger the government, the better — an idea born to disappoint. Need I say more?

So, what are we to make of this after-the-fact finger pointing? Not much. Neither Trump nor de Blasio is to blame. These things are black swan events with very little warning, especially if the country of origin is an even bigger-government state with every reason to hide the truth. We could bankrupt the country in the futile effort to prepare for unknown unknowns, to borrow a bit from Donald Rumsfeld.

Then, what are we to do? Get back to work, except for the intensely infected cities and a few other areas. The one-size-fits-all approach to public policy is ridiculous. The places most affected need to be treated differently.  Lockdown and quarantine them. Everywhere else should carry on … and be leery of migrants from de Blasio’s Eden.

RogerG

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“… restructure things to fit our vision.” (James Clyburn, D, S.C., to the House Democrat caucus earlier this week)

James Clyburn (D, S.C.) before the press on March 24, 2020.

The above quote came out of a statement from the alleged “conscience” of American politics, James Clyburn (D, S.C.), and House Majority Democrat Whip.  The quip says a lot. It’s a “vision” similar to the end product of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism.  For Americans who vote Democrat, are you aware that you’re voting for collectivist utopians?  The debate over the pandemic relief bill brought this to light.

First, what’s the Marxist connection? Simple, it’s utopian egalitarianism in almost every sense of the word.  Marx’s dialectic is essentially a series of interconnected episodes of class warfare with an apocalyptic final one (Proletarian Revolution) to usher in the world of equality.  How’s that much different from the dream of the current leadership and base of the Democratic Party?

Clyburn’s remark speaks volumes.  “Restructure things” comes dangerously close to totalitarian social engineering, reminiscent of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.  Mao was really into “restructuring”.  What of Clyburn’s “vision”?  Of course, all secular prophets have a vision of a “better world”.  But Clyburn’s, Mao’s, and Marx’s “vision” probably isn’t the one that you and I have in mind.

The Socialist Feminists of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) protesting Trump’s health care plan on Jul. 5, 2017, in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. (photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press)

So, in the mind of Clyburn and company, for the country to get relief from the shutdown, the bill must be packed with the means to move us along the path to Marx’s end-state.  The Dems aren’t happy with simply taking care of the sick and unemployed.  They demand the measures that’ll cripple our economy and way of life, as in any place where it has been tried.

 

RogerG

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Not Wasting a Crisis, Part II

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Ca.) briefly facing reporters on March 23, 2020.

The phrase “Not wasting a crisis” really means to “exploit” the crisis. Do you have any doubts about this?  Well, to borrow another cliché, the other shoe dropped this past Sunday night.

Pelosi returned from her hiatus on Sunday and quickly put the kibosh to Senate Democrats working with their Republican colleagues on a rescue package to deal with the Great American Shut Down. She abruptly introduced a competitive measure which is larded with the Green New Deal, attempts to reverse the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, Sovietizing health care, and wokeness run amok. For her and the party’s left, the panic is the perfect vehicle to force down the people’s throats what a large majority of them wouldn’t tolerate in their right minds. This ain’t about the fight against a pandemic. It’s about a lefty jam-down.

The longer the shut down persists, the deeper the social and economic damage, and the greater likelihood of the emergence of a different kind of panic. It’s the stampede to the omni-competent state; everything else being laid waste. We are teetering on the precipice of losing the very basis of our way of life — a possibility heartily desired by the Antifa, the Squad, and the activist base of the Democratic Party.

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined at right by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., July 15, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The medical situation is what it always was: a health care challenge that arises every few years. Some threats are more serious than others, but this one is no excuse to shut down a way of life.

The sensible response involves a reliable test, and all those obviously sick and those who test positive staying home. We don’t need any more task forces, other than the search for a reliable test, vaccine, and treatments. For everyone else, go to work and get on with your life. Go to church. Get your kids ready for soccer. Visit a restaurant; go see a movie; go shopping. Stop this social and economic strangulation of a people, and reacquaint yourselves with the fact that life comes with risks — always has.

RogerG

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Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

Who’s not letting the pandemic go to waste for ideological ends?  A Dem leadership enthralled to its extremist base, that’s who.

The rescue package of $1.5 trillion was held hostage by Pelosi and Schumer who want moneys for their political hobby horses of new labor union powers, an increase in emission standards for the airlines, and giveaways for the money pits known as windmills and solar panels.  This extortion was demanded to qualify for the aid in the package.  What does this mean?  Many suffering employers will not participate and force them into layoffs.

Airlines will face increased costs to keep their employees working; employers will confront tricks to impose unionization on the work floor; and we get a chance to relive Solyndra.  Most issues have at least two sides with legitimate arguments.  The two sides in this episode are victim and victimizer.  The vicitmizers are the crazy Democrats and the victims are the many Americans trying to survive the pandemic.

It’s despicable.  Leveraging the misery to make political points is outrageous.

RogerG

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Are We Crazy?

California governor Newsom announced the closure of bars and other “nonessential” businesses in the state on March 15.

My oldest son fled California to our place in northwest Montana after Gov. Newsom’s shut down of the state.  Of course, the conversation turned to the topic of the pandemic.  I expressed my doubts about the wisdom of some of the extreme means to confront the virus.  He said that I may be taking the threat too lightly.  I said, “No, the threat is real but you can’t make idle a sizable portion of a labor force of 160 million people for any length of time.  A shutdown even for a month is unsustainable. ” More to the point, as Harry Callahan of “Dirty Harry” fame said, “A man’s GOT to know his limitations.”  Translation: A shut down has its limits … real, concrete-bridge-abutment-style limits.

Regardless, shutting down a population’s need to produce for any length of time and expecting no serious repercussions because you’re going to paper over the induced economic coma with “paper”, literally, as in paper money and bonds, is pure fantasy.  Think about it.  Squashing the livelihoods of the hospitality industry, suppressing production of anything bureaucratically defined as “nonessential”, eradicating a good slice of the transportation industry, etc., etc., will make the 25% unemployment rate of 1933 look small.  Moreover, piling debt obligations onto the backs of the grandkids smacks of something pretty close to immoral, and economically suicidal.

Who would have imagined the possibility?  Traffic is light on East First Street after the new restrictions by Gov. Newsom went into effect on March 20, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.  (Photo by David McNew)

Newsom’s gang in Sacramento – and Cuomo’s in Albany – are already operating on the thinnest of fiscal margins.  Crushing the revenue pipeline for any length of time will force these guys to cry “uncle”.  When the resultant mobs of the pitchfork brigades descend on the state capitol, the shut down will be in the rear view mirror.

Sure, getting sick has its hazards, but reverting back to hunting and gathering carries its own perils beyond a disease’s mortality rate.  Get real.  Rich societies – meaning those that produce lots and lost of stuff – make for rich health care.  You can’t have the latter without the former.  The Mayo Clnic and Johns Hopkins sounds better to me than the village shaman.

Health care after euthanizing a nation’s economy: a female shaman from the Clayoquot region of Vancouver Island.

RogerG

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A Bear in the California Woods

A LAUSD bus driver joins school workers at SEIU Local 99, which represents about 30,000 support workers, as they march at Marlton School in February 2018. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

40 years as a one-party state has made California very vulnerable to bear markets, like the one that we’re experiencing right now.  Sometimes black swan events can come in the form of a virus and the effects move down the money digestive tract to the California taxpayer.  Watch out taxpayers, pensioners, younger government employees and the whole gamut of local governments.

There are two bears stalking the state.  One is the huge bond and pension indebtedness and the other is the public employee unions.  The second one gave birth to the first one.

A local newspaper headline announces bankruptcy in Stockton, California June 27, 2012. (REUTERS/Kevin Bartram)

Here’s the scenario.  Unsustainable defined-benefit public employee pensions – the most expensive to maintain, as opposed to the defined-contribution kind – requires a high rate of return to successfully service the payouts to retirees like my wife and I.  The coronavirus bear market has shattered the 7 percent rate of return to adequately fund CalPers, CalSTRS, and any others out there.  The pension bear was beget by the public employee union bear, the most powerful lobby in Sacramento.  Who’ll make up the loss?  If you said the taxpayer and lower-rung government employees, move to the front of the class.

The pension fund managers will go to the one-party state, which is housed in the state capital, to make ends meet.  These clowns will then try to bilk more out of the “rich”.  Already the top 1% of the state’s income earners account for 50% of the state income tax, which contributes 60-70% of the dough to the state’s coffers.  What’ll happen?  You guessed it: capital – meaning the “rich” – have already begun to flee to places like Incline Village just across the border in Nevada.  Others seek refuge further points east.  For a state that prides itself in its open heart for refugees, why is it so intense about making them?

Watch for how totalitarian taxation leads to totalitarianism.  The State Franchise Tax Board is already manning up to scowl the nation for what it considers its truant millionaires and billionaires.  We’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say about California’s attempt to fleece the new-found residents of other states.  Does a state have the power to enter another state – literally or digitally – and force that state’s residents to prove that they didn’t spend 6 months in the People’s Republic?

The next in line to the guillotine will be local governments.  To meet their pension obligations, they’ll have to layoff workers.  It’s highly unlikely that the state with one of the highest combined rates of taxation in the nation can squeeze any more out of local residents.  To pay the bill, they’ll have to raise the contributions from a shrunken workforce.

And what’ll happen to current retirees (like myself) whose retirement decisions were based on contractual obligations over a 30-year career?  I’m nervous for the bear in the woods.  Little did we know that Reagan’s 1984 commercial would have relevance beyond the Soviet threat.  Watch the 1984 ad below to get my point.

The situation is clearly laid bare in a podcast interview of state Senator John Moorlach (R., Costa Mesa) by Will Swaim of the California Policy Center.   You can listen to the discussion by clicking on Moorlach’s picture.

State Senator John Moorlach (R, Costa Mesa)

RogerG

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Panic in the Age of Trump

Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., paper goods isle on Sunday, 5/15/2020.

The photo (above) is of the paper goods isle of Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., on Sunday, 3/15/2020. A  young mother with a couple of kids in tow had 2 30-roll bricks of toilet paper in her cart, the only tp that I saw in the entire store.  Is this what modern-America panic looks like?

Shoppers at BJ’s Wholesale Club market at the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, N.Y., March 14, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

On that same day, we rolled into a gas-‘n-stop for fuel and corn nuts.  A fellow customer waiting in line mentioned a wild rumor on social media that Trump is considering the closing of the interstates.  Panic, once again, in the age of Trump?

Our eyes and ears are saturated with “pandemic” and doctors on tv with warnings galore. Social interaction has become a dirty word.  It’s “coronavirus this” and “coronavirus that” everywhere we look.  Is America starting to resemble in thought and deed the America of the 1938 radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles?

Are we, modern sophisticates, really so “above that”?  I doubt it in the age of Trump.  Trumpophobes see all external stimuli with real or imagined evil intent as emanating from Trump.  “Trump’s Katrina” is bandied about in the same manner as “abortion” and “control of her body” comes off the lips of Madonna.

Maybe what’s at work is something I call “vortex thinking”.  Most everything of consequence today goes down two vortices: Trump and climate change.  The Polar Vortex of a few years back, with its bone-chilling temps, was blamed on … global warming.  A tornado that passes through your backyard is pinned on … global warming.  Etc., etc.  Regarding Trump, anything that’s bad in your life is due to … Trump.  Everything that’s bad to anyone at any given time is placed at the feet of Trump.

George Will – no fan of Trump by any means – calls the phenomena “Caesaropapism”.  Our presidents are now accorded demigod status.  They are expected to control the tides in the manner of Persian king Xerxes flogging the Hellespont for destroying his pontoon bridge in the advance of his invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

Xerxes’s soldiers flogging the Hellespont.

Depending on the group of boosters, a president is saintly or evil incarnate. He or she is expected to be a master marionette controlling the actions of 330 million individuals.  Does “sophistication” now mean thinking like a 5-year-old?  Apparently so.

Right now, we are experiencing the first natural disaster to be pinned on the next-Republican-president-in-line.  Bush 41 was pasted with the rather mild recession of 1991-1992. Bush 43 had his hurricane.  Trump’s is COVID-19.

What separates a hurricane and a virus from an economic downturn is the fact that recessions are, indeed, man-caused.  They may occur due to a constellation of actions that were taken earlier in a president’s term, or, more likely, they erupt from the gestation of factors unleashed long before he took the oath.  Ditto for the good economic times.  For instance, back in 2008-9, the bills came due after many years of easy money and political pressures to extend mortgages to financially insecure people.  Obama rode it to the presidency.  Ironically, his wing of the Dem Party had a big role in setting up the dominoes.

Now we have the coronavirus.  Yeah, it’s unique … like all the previous strains were unique.  Sure, take all the practical mitigations available but remember, this thing, like the earlier ones, will have to run its course.  We have one thing going for us: we aren’t the Athens of 480 BC, or Constantinople of 541-542, or Europe of the mid-14th century.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, 1562, is a famous painting that relates to the Black Death of the 1340’s.

Please, get some perspective … and stop hoarding the toilet paper!

RogerG

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The Census Hustle

SACRAMENTO, CA – JULY 29: Secretary of State Alex Padilla is photographed in his office on Monday, July 29, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)

I’ll be a “census enumerator” for a couple of months to do my very small bit to prevent declining blue states – like California – from poaching a representative or two from the others.  Actually, the motive is more than altruism.  They’re paying me $17/hr plus mileage.  But the probable antics of the deteriorating coastal-corridor states to pilfer what rightly belongs to others got me off my duff to join the fray.

California is pouring $187 million – compared to $10 million in 2010 – to find and/or invent humans so as to inflate its count.  They’re even implementing a phone survey, not knowing who’s really on the other end and possibly doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the count from the other end of the line.  Homelessness is rampant so tallying those folks – when they may not be around next week, next month, next year, or even in the land of the living – will make for abundant opportunities for hanky-panky.  For the chief statewide Democrat ward healer, Sec. of State Alex Padilla, keeping the state’s congressional count at 53 is a matter of life and death.

The most commonly cited number for the flight of native Californians from the state over the past decade is about 400,000, nearly equal to the loss of one House seat.  Meanwhile, other and more deserving states (mostly red) have blossomed.  With foreign immigration declining (legal and illegal), the state can’t count on that source to makeup for the losses to red states like Texas and Florida.

Make no mistake about it, this is about the maintenance of raw, partisan political power.  Padilla put it quite succinctly: “If people [bodies – real or imaginary – in California] don’t participate in the census, Trump wins. If we are successful in counting every Californian, Trump loses.” Translation: Screw the Republicans!

You can read more about the hustle in an August 15, 2019, interview with Padilla in the San Jose Mercury News here.

RogerG

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Today’s Recommendation, a Documentary: “One Child Nation”

Showing on Amazon Prime is “One Child Nation”, a deeply disturbing excursion into the cruelties of Communist Chinese social engineering.  Social engineering is the sine qua non of communism.  An allegedly wise cadre of elite apparatchiks sit on top of a society and pronounce from the summit measures to bring about the better world, as they are totally uncaring and devoid of understanding of the unintended consequences.  And for Communist China, the one-child policy is replete with state-manufactured horrors.

Don’t expect the host/narrator to endorse the pro-life position, though.  She doesn’t, in a rather befuddling way.  She equates in a perfunctory fashion the grotesqueries of the Communist policy with US and our state governments’ actions to restrict abortion.  Both are nonsensically lumped together in her mind as government attempts to “control a woman’s body”.  Don’t let that dissuade you from seeing the film if you are pro-life.  There’s enough in it to soil the entire concept of abortion and the social engineering endemic to an assumed omni-competent state, the kind that would be erected by Bernie or Joe.  The two differ only in scale.

From 1979 to 2015, the CCP enforced a 1.0 birth rate on the whole country.  It was barbarous both in its implementation and results. In 2015, the potentates pulled another number out of their hat: 2.0.

Abortion weighs heavy in the story, along with forced sterilizations, the killing of babies who survived the procedure, and the lingering psychological scars from participation in the campaign.  The malefactors even received awards for their “service”.  One Chinese artist in the 1990’s was shocked into opposition when he discovered fetuses (or babies, depending on your preference) in yellow and green plastic bags marked with “Medical Waste” in garbage dumps and landfills.

The Chinese artist who discovered aborted fetuses in yellow bags in landfills. Also pictured are fetuses that he collected, suspended in formalin.

The demography of China became tilted toward males as the females were aborted or abandoned to die, all due to a Chinese cultural bias in favor of the males.  Older people many years later were in tears reminiscing on leaving a baby in a box alone in the countryside or street, fearful of the repercussions for exceeding the quota.  Abandonment supplied the wherewithal for an new international adoption industry, much of the proceeds lining the pockets of government apparatchiks.  What happens when an entire population of over a billion is so emotionally scarred?

Like it or not, the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the legitimacy of abortion very skillfully.  If Sen. Charles Schumer had seen the flick, he might not had been so enthusiastic in his threats to a couple of pro-life-leaning jurists.  What he and, ironically, the film’s host ignore is the first question at root in the dispute: Is the entity in the womb (and all of us were an “entity in the womb”) a human being?  If “yes”, euthanizing a prenatal baby is an act of killing.  No amount of a person’s “control of their body” can atone for the immorality.  If “no”, the fetus is the equivalent of a tumor.  The Chinese artist puts the “no” position in an awkward spot when he displays dead pre-natal babies suspended in jars of formalin.  They look like my two sons at their birth; only these are dead.

Sen. Charles Schumer at pro-choice rally outside the Supreme Court , March 4, 2020.

See the film, but ignore the self-contradictory commentary at a short juncture at the end.  Whether forced or not, the flick puts abortion in a bad light.  If you’re pro-choice, abortion shouldn’t be construed as a sacrament, as some hard-core activists screeched outside the Supreme Court.  Whether it’s legal or not, it’s still a horrible thing.  No mistake about it.

RogerG