“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” P.J. O’Rourke
Intoxicated with Equity, people in the seat of power have handcuffed police – not criminals – and turned a blind eye to wanton violence. Convinced of their infallibility, they are foisting inflation and destroying our livelihoods stalking a greenie utopia. The four corners of our existence are being upended for a pure ideological fantasy.
There’s more in a blast from the past.
A young Anthony Fauci in the 1980’s.
Remember AIDS of the 1980’s? Doctors Fauci and Redfield, familiar apparatchiks of today, back then ignited an AIDS scare by peddling the idea of a “heterosexual breakout”. Life magazine crowed with a cover, “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS”. Later, researchers discovered the odds of transmission from vaginal intercourse to be 1 in 5 million. Intravenous drug use and male homosexual activity were the drivers of the disease. Bureaucrats Fauci and Redfield ignored their own epidemiologists to scare Congress into approving bigger budgets. The same culprits are, and were, in charge this time around. (Read about it here in a piece originally from the WSJ)
Life magazine cover from 1985.
The political realm is festooned with people who can warp history, science, and due process to advance rabid zealotry. Our latest case in point: COVID.
Throughout March and the rest of 2020 and into 2021, in the heat of the COVID panic, I condemned the lockdowns and threw aspersions at unbridled masking, school closures, and the decimation of small business. From the beginning, our federal government’s response was a clown car brimming with buffoons, the worst offenders in blue jurisdictions. They imposed the authoritarianism and the death toll continued to mount. Later, the virus receded, probably due to natural factors, the strangulations relaxed, and then the variants appeared, and what didn’t work the first time was brought back with a vengeance. First Delta, now Omicron.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo became embroiled in the controversy over nursing home COVID deaths due to his policies.
Biden took over the White House and the worst of California went national. Scapegoating of the unvaccinated is routine. The only thing missing is a yellow star on the lapel. If acts of public humiliation won’t bring them to heel, then mandates will threaten to take away their livelihoods, movements, religious fellowship, and the simplest human interaction. Is forced relocation to walled ghettos next? The administration is a one trick pony: get vaccinated or else.
80% of Americans over 12 are vaccinated with at least one dose. Getting to 100% is like reaching the speed of light in Einstein’s General Theory. The closer you get, the harder it is to go faster till you realize that you’ll never get there. 100% is pie in the sky. 80% is quite probably their max. So, why all the threats and abuse?
Could the answer lie in the totalitarian progressive’s reflexive refusal to accept disagreement? Are these aspiring tyrants so blinded with fury to admit of other approaches? Fact is, being vaccinated is neither a guarantee of not spreading the virus or getting it in any of its variants, unless the goal is to turn the people into 330 million voodoo dolls with needle jabs till kingdom come, not to mention the disordered emotional and cognitive development of our zoomed children.
Vaccines or no, where’s the therapies, i.e., treatments? If you get it in whatever form, we should be in the position to see our doctor, get a prescription, stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids (non-alcoholic), and watch old Law and Order reruns. You’re not going to get 100% of a nine-figure population to fall in line with your singular approach. Grow up, admit it. Treatments for everyone, vaccinated or unvaccinated. We are going to have to do it anyway as the virus spins off an endless chain of cellular cousins to outflank our jabs.
Demand the discovery of more and varied treatments. The vaccine moon shot should be equaled by one for treatments. Unlike the greenie junk and bloated giveaways, Operation Therapies is a real Build Back Better. Lest we forget, it has the additional advantage of making the overwhelming majority of us the incubators of the most powerful immunity, the natural kind.
Vaccines are good, the choking of social and economic life is not, and we should have more than one trick up our sleeves.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer addresses the media, May 20, 2020. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
The Progressives’ ideological DNA orients them to a lust for power. No better example can be found than in Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. She’s currently dithering between clamping down again or opening up under a regime of continuing restrictions such as masking, restaurant dining caps (50), and pleas to get vaccinated. Obviously, opening up means something different to a progressive than a normal person. They just can’t let people be free even when they loosen the reins. If they can get way with it, their reins will still be firmly attached to the popular bridle.
Read about Whitmer in a piece by Ingrid Jacques, deputy editorial page editor at the Detroit News.
Unbeknownst to our mandarins, the vaccine changed the entire virus paradigm. If you took the jabs, you’re risks for getting or spreading the bug are greatly diminished. When sick, the symptoms are manageable. You’re not a super-spreader and not likely to be an occupant of an ICU. You’re free . . . or should be.
If you choose to avoid the shots, it’s totally on you. You attend the public square at your own risk . . . or maybe the threat is still miniscule because of good health, being young, or you possess the antibodies due to prior infection or the fact that you’re just plain biologically gifted. What’s the point to the masking and closures if the means to escape its clutches is abundantly available and the only ones left in the danger zone are those willingly choosing to remain exposed?
If you’re a hypochondriac or borderline obsessive/compulsive, quarantine yourself. Walmart has home delivery and curbside pickup. Amazon and the rest of the online retailers would be happy to take your money without disrupting the tranquility of the couch.
Oh, I can hear the refrain from our progressive brethren that the refuseniks are costing us in higher insurance premiums, federal outlays, and hospital beds. Come on, that’s the “social cost” gambit run amok. It’s a dodge because it has no limiting principle and is therefore a blank check for state control of all aspects of our lives. Robust “social cost” and liberty are the matter and antimatter of a constitutional order.
Risk is a part of life. Get used to it. And some periods have greater risk than others. The Whitmers of our political landscape have no leg to stand on. It comes down to a lust for power by authoritarian busybodies riding under the banner of progressivism.
Jefferson put it quite succinctly: “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Biden’s tail-chasing health team. Clockwise left to right: Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Natalie Quillian, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Jeff Zients and Xavier Becerra
Have you noticed that some government heavies, mostly in the donkey party, are inching closer to resuming last year’s social and economic straitjacket? They can’t let it go. The virus variants and June-to-July spikes are said to be driving the fervor. But have you wondered that this is beginning to resemble a dog chasing its tail? The evolutionary twists and turns of microscopic bugs have always been with us. The CDC can’t repeal evolution. As soon as we get a vaccine, out pops a resistant strain and it’s off to the races to lockdowns and another “moral equivalent of war” to develop another vaccine. It’s turning into a never-ending cycle, or the dog not quite being able to seize its tail.
We did the lockdowns and the strangulation of social and economic life with the horrendous masking, school closures, home shut-ins, and the social distancing that treats everyone as a plague carrier. What’s all this doing to our psyches? Are we going at this all wrong? Yes, develop vaccines, but work even more fervently to uncover therapeutics. We already have a great head start.
In fact, more money and effort should go into treatments than vaccines. After the equivalent of a moon-shot dash to vaccinate for the current bug, we’re off to another spike facing an up-armored relative. If that is our focus, nothing changes. It would make more sense to make the bug less lethal through successful treatments. For vulnerable groups – and we know who they are – quarantining may be advisable till the danger passes. We should never again smother everyone because certain individuals have heightened sensitivities. We are learning what happens when you try to stop human beings from being human.
Our motto should be “Never again!” Target protections for the vulnerable, develop and maintain an inventory of the requisite therapeutics, work on vaccines, and, for God’s sake, allow us to be human again.
On second thought, keep this in mind: our government doesn’t “allow” us to be human. That’s the shtick of the Castro’s in Havana. They’re all into “allow” and “disallow”. All government actions in our country must be taken within the contours of our God-given rights. Think about that.
Shira Steinbeck, the parent of an 11-year-old in Pleasant Hill, recites an anti-distance-learning poem at the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. (Screenshot)
An article in today’s San Jose Mercury News article is about the attempted recall of five members of the Mt. Diablo Unified school board. One unintended outgrowth of the pandemic was the self-besmirching of a growing class of “experts”. These scientific and technical professionals quickly confused scholarship with activism. Others, such as elected officials skilled in the arts of public utterances and little else, seek the confirmatory esteem of a science that they scarcely understand. They bring with them an unexamined assumption which elevates a near-utopian sense of pristine safety to the exclusion of everything else. The result is a society with the wheels coming off . . . and parents irate over their shuttered multi-billion dollar schools.
Once we knew the nature of the virus, which we did within a couple of months, and had a collection of therapies, efforts should have focused on the vulnerable. Instead, universal masking, distancing, and a shuttering of lives and livelihoods proceeded apace. Schools were closed, or nearly so, and children lost a year-and-a-half of learning, something that’ll be difficult if not impossible to recapture. Of course, inequality will be magnified as those with the wherewithal continue to excel and those not so well situated languish. It’s amazing that those most concerned about “equity” are doing the most to worsen it.
The absence of a vaccine is frankly irrelevant at this stage.
The reigning safetyism is a disabling crutch. The ill-fruits are all around us. Massive academic failures for our Zoomed children, a riddled economy on the cusp of rampant inflation, the decay of personal agency in the government bribes (lavish unemployment benefits) to stay at home, and growing political and social discord are abundantly on display. Waiting in the wings are escalating interest rates and a gargantuan federal debt service for the exploding red ink that’ll eat up the federal budget.
The most stringent measures were universalized in a mammoth wet blanket that some potentates worshipping at the altar of safetyism can’t find within themselves to lift.
I say this not as a political partisan. Both parties were and are culpable. Many of the commentariat – left, right, and center – perpetuated the strangulation. Looking back on it, within a few months of the outbreak, measures should have targeted those facing the greatest harm. Concentrated measures were ignored in favor of totalitarianism.
Now it’s time for the common man and woman to find their inner Patrick Henry and right the ship. Go get ’em parents.
I have been accused of overly downplaying the COVID threat. In a nutshell, no, I haven’t. It’s a serious, very serious threat . . . to certain sectors of the population. It’s at its most threatening to particular persons, as is true with most infections.
We’ve known this for quite some time: the elderly and those with chronic health conditions are most vulnerable. But, today, we are acting as if the thing doesn’t discriminate. It does, and does with a vengeance in both its lethality and severity of symptoms.
Then again, so does the flu. The flu is fatal to the same groups, as well as others.
My source is an excellent overview by Lisa Lockerd Maragakis, PHD and MPH, on the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine – Health website, updated May 14, 2021.
Lisa Lockerd Maragakis, PhD
The internet is flooded with tons of articles on COVID. Most assume that COVID is synonymous with the Black Death, striking down all groups with great ferocity. They are just repeating the highly-reported error from the earlier AIDS epidemic. No, not everyone is vulnerable to AIDS. Ditto for COVID.
When I go to find the basis for the claim about COVID, there is nothing but someone repeating the assumption. No scientific analysis and no reference to any. It’s assumed to be true and the reporter is off to the races.
Not so fast. One of the trumpeted differences is COVID’s long term effects. Maragakis cites COVID’s long term damage to kidneys, brain, heart, and lungs. But, then again, she says that the flu may result in inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis), or muscles (myositis, rhabdomyolysis). Yes, there are differences, but any infection leaves a scar in our bodily system.
I’m sure that honest people can honestly disagree. But the problem lies in the fact that some of us aren’t honestly disagreeing. Political agendas poison the well. The dread of professional culpability for anyone’s death paralyzes “experts” into draconian policies. The rest of us, unaware of these social forces, are oblivious.
I am skeptical of legacy, mainstream media sources. All too often, these newsrooms are populated with the poorly-educated and semi-literate, and susceptible to ideological frenzies of the moment. And it shows.
I’ve been burned too much. Now, I want the meaty sources, not another blowhard repeating a mantra. If you make an assertion, damn it, back it up.
Pres. Biden’s first speech to Congress, May 28, 2021.
Dr. Now in TLC’s “My 600-Pound Life” is confronted with morbidly obese patients. The show reveals the gross flaws of human nature when people are advised to stop destroying themselves in gluttony. They lie, cheat – sneak pizza into their hospital room – and wallow in atrocious self-pity. Well, the first two of those behaviors were on full display last night before a joint session of Congress by President Biden, with the addition of demagoguery and an LSD-inspired disconnect from reality. To be sure, Biden isn’t the doctor; he’s the troubled patient.
And this on the heels of President Trump’s previous 4-year litany of “best ever”. He exaggerated. Biden out-and-out mangled the truth, probably intentionally lied, and presented all the integrity of a used car salesman. He out-Trumped Trump, and every other politician since Tammany Hall.
Let’s face it, last night’s spiel was a “Welcome America to Your New Soviet Future”. Where to start? Start where he started. He shamelessly claimed credit for the good news on the virus. The guy’s been above room temperature while in office for only 100 days, and he struts around taking credit for other people’s accomplishments. The vaccine came out of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed; the distribution and jabs began under the orange man; and the decline in the death rate began before a pandemic-mutilated election put Biden in the oval office. Of course, the contributions of the man from Mira Lago were erased from history. Welcome to Biden’s Bizzarro world.
Biden’s unwitting comic routine continued under the ages-old political tactic of distorting a crisis to stampede the public into the Leviathan. We should have known that we’re in trouble when “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” came off his lips. Funny thing that “worst economic crisis”: it was an overt government act to euthanize society in response to the virus. More accurately, it was a government-induced coma, and one that blue state governors want to extend beyond the horizon. Let’s get this straight: they engineer a deadening of life; work to continue the suffocation; and then exploit these outcomes to bring the Soviet’s Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) to America. The hutzpah is off the charts.
A portion of Times Square, NYC, a ghost town, during its lockdown order in 2020.
Speaking of Gosplan, Biden’s 26-minute prattle was Soviet central planning galore. He plans to flood the country with tidal waves of fiat, paper money – 4 trillions of it on top of his already-passed 2 trillion – for Democratic Party constituencies and hangers-on. He wants to buy off blue-collars with coerced unionization for everybody as he works to destroy their jobs in order to pander to Environmentalism’s zealots among aloof, semi-literate white-collars and uber-wealthy. Oh, he says, not to worry. The working stiffs will be drafted as laboring foot soldiers in the Great Leader’s greenie transformation of all of life, which is reminiscent of Stalin’s Industrialization campaign of the 1930’s, a scheme that had the unhappy consequences of massive official maldistribution of resources and stunning brutality: 10 million starvation deaths in the Ukraine (the Holodomor), ill-suited and untrained peasants herded into factories and new cities, and the production of a lot of crap. Wild imaginations of the powerful can kill you and your livelihoods.
Peasants on a collective farm receiving indoctrination during Stalin’s collectivization/industrialization campaign of the 1930’s.The confiscation of peasant grain to be sold on international markets to fund industrialization. The result is one of the worst famines in history. It’s a direct consequence of government policy.Starving children at an Ukrainian orphanage during the Holodomor (Ukrainian famine of the 1930’s)
The suicide pill of a $15 minimum wage was childishly asserted. Who’ll be forced to take it? The pill will be swallowed by the hundreds of thousands who’ll lose their jobs as employers shed folks who can’t produce $15 worth of product. It’ll be a boon to automation . . . as if we need any more reasons to hand over wads of cash to techie lefties.
A robot as a french fry tender at a Los Angeles White Castle. Those workers should be worried.
Be warned, the rest of this account depicts Biden’s and the entire Dem firmament’s rampant abuse of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Playing loose with the language is a hallmark of the blinkered ambitious. It was on full display last night. Take the word “infrastructure”. If you thought that it meant roads, bridges, water projects, the grid, oh how you misjudged the creative duplicity of ambitious people with too much power. “Infrastructure” means The Squad-economy. Say goodbye to your fuel-efficient sedan; say hello to a $50,000 electric cart, made affordable by making somebody else share the cost without their consent. Say goodbye to affordable and consistently available energy; say hello to blackouts, vast stretches of the landscape blanketed in solar panel plantations and artificial forests of huge steel-towered propellers, and utility bills that’ll force you into a hippie lifestyle. Greenie energy isn’t cheap energy, never has been.
White Water windmill farm in Palm Springs, Riverside County, CaliforniaUS solar plantation
“Clean energy” is another one of those abortions to clear thinking. Cut the crap; it’s code for the destruction of reliable energy – “managed decline” (?) – and its replacement with the kind that’ll be foisted on us after upending our entire way of life at humongous cost to us. See, our politicians only produce words, words that satisfy their unhinged imaginations but make a mockery of good sense.
Here’s more words. All this talk about the “21st century economy” isn’t the “economy of the future”. It’s the economy of the whimsical imaginations of people who are divorced from the mundane task of making and selling stuff in the real world, of people who live a Beltway existence, have the lifetime sinecure of a safe district, and a steady six-figure paycheck. Their whimsies become our nightmares.
Biden was not finished making a shambles of the Oxford Dictionary. He introduced “The American Families Plan” which has little to do with families, and more to do with padding the bank account of the NEA. The centerpiece turns “free” K-12 into “free” pre-K-to-senior thesis. 13 years at taxpayer expense quickly became 17, as if the “21st century economy” requires more sociology and grievance/identity majors. Once they get done with your child’s schooling, your kid will be ready for a job behind a Starbucks counter and primed to head to Portland in a black hood, ready for the ongoing fight against “white privilege”.
Antifa in Portland
As for “free”, nothing is “free”. We all know that, or do we? Don’t expect four more years in an ideological hothouse to enlighten the kids. “Free” is another one of those words to go through the etymological shredder.
The word “free” is frequently attached to “investment” in the steel trap of Biden’s mind. “Investment” is a nicer word for “spending”. Mind you, he’s not talking about “investment” to defend us and our way of life with a 350-ship navy. He’s talking about pumping money into more social programs. “Investment” actually means an expense in the reasonable hope of a profit. What is the reasonable result from many of the earlier “investment” boondoggles? Remember FDR’s New Deal that turned a market correction into a decade-long castration of national wealth and personal fortunes? Remember urban renewal? Remember AFDC? Remember public housing, Section 8? Remember the additional trillions pumped into public education over the past three decades with embarrassing results? Yes, remember Head Start? It’s proof that entrenched lefties still try to put lipstick on that pig. If you want a glimpse into Biden’s future for us, look at California.
California’s version of affordable housing: view of a homeless encampment on 17th Street between Wood and Campbell streets in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 18, 2017. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)Affordable housing in once-beautiful Santa Cruz.Affordable housing in California: a homeless man (center) sleeps at a homeless encampment along the Santa Ana River in Anaheim, California, on January 23. January 22 reports said authorities planned to clear out Orange County’s largest homeless encampment, with some 500 people living in tents.Skid row, LA, in sight of the downtown.San Francisco’s poop patrol cleaning up needles and poop from the sidewalks and streets.The smoldering ruins of Paradise, Ca. after the Camp Fire swept through the town.Poor maintenance of California’s Oroville Dam led to to serious spillway damage in 2017.According to the nonpartisan Transportation for America, California has the second worst roads in the country.A recent photo of Christmas in Skid Row, LA. Trash and filth in the shadow of tarnished glitterati,
He’s not done with saddling us and future generations with more debt. He plans to lard up the bill with more “free” (meaning somebody else pays) stuff: day care, family leave, etc. The only ray of light is the child tax credit which gives working families a voucher, in essence, to escape his Education Department’s and DOJ Civil Rights commissars. It might be worth Biden’s gift for parents to have the option of getting their kids out of Biden’s public schools, the ones that are riddled with the mayhem of “restorative justice” discipline, school boards under the thumb of the teacher unions and the mentally bankrupt Schools of Education, and the racist indoctrination of critical race theory and other mind-numbing ideologies. How long will it be before Biden discovers that he unleashed a form of choice that he hates: school choice? Parents, take the checks before the teachers’ unions wake up and put the kibosh to it.
The flood gates for more government are further thrown open when the word “right” is promiscuously tossed around as Biden did by attaching it to healthcare. If something is declared a “right”, then it must be guaranteed, guaranteed equally to all. The 13th Amendment prohibits enslaving providers to give it up, but no such protection applies to the taxpayer. A “right” in this context means that taxpayers, now and in the future, must pony up.
Just think about it: how can a product or service, scarce by definition, be guaranteed to everyone in the amount that they demand? Scarcity means a limit to the number of doctors and nurses, medical facilities, money for same, equipment and supplies, and the rest of the supply chain inputs. To pretend it to be a “right” – and that’s all it is, a pretension – is to eventually reach the reality of resources being sucked away from the other necessary components of life. You’ve got healthcare, but the cost of housing, food, and heating goes through the roof. In the end, your healthcare will be limited by quality and some form of rationing. That’s the real world, but it’s not where we find the minds of the donkey party and our president at the dais last night.
Crowds in a medical practice’s waiting room. Crowds will be commonplace when healthcare is made into “right” and “free”.
How will the giver-in-chief pay for these additional trillions and trillions? “Pay” goes into the same meat grinder of meaning with the rest of the relevant vocabulary. It’s a flight of fancy away from the real capital flight. You see, if he succeeds in raising your employer’s taxes, he or she adjusts. Some flee the jaws of Biden’s IRS, and they take a few jobs with them, maybe yours. In the end, a hike in taxes always disappoints. The money coming in doesn’t match the lofty expectations, but the spending certainly continues as before. As for those that head for the tax haven of Ireland, Lizzy Warren (D., Mass.) wants to man the exit points with agents to corral the flight to freedom. Sounds like East German guards at the Berlin Wall.
East German guards at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. A harbinger of Lizzy Warren’s agents to capture people trying to flee her party’s fleecing of the American entrepreneurial class?
It’s interesting to note that Biden’s threshold for tax hikes is $400,000. 400,000 bucks encompasses a well-paid techie lefty and places the bar high enough to protect another valuable constituency: dues-paying members of the teachers’ unions, an essential constituency if you running for office with a “D” after your name. Comfortable suburban white-collars can’t be irritated with tax increases at a time when the Dems need their support to replace other lost constituencies. No need in angering a demographic that you rely upon to continue the revolution down the road.
Biden then gets to another one of those tactless monikers: “fair share”. He throws it out there as if he said something profound. He didn’t; he demagogued it. He should know, as does Pelosi’s CBO, the top 20% pay 69% of all federal taxes. What’s “fair share”? A 100%? This is pure malicious demagoguery. It’s either a lie or Biden is absolutely clueless. You choose.
The speech then mashed together two huge self-negations: his fascination for the rigid ideology of climate change and his promise to protect America’s national interests. Tell me, how does that work? He acts to run down the country with massive regulations, taxes, and life-degrading mandates as he promises to put China in a box. The Paris accord, which he demands that we re-enter, exempts China and India from most of its most deleterious edicts while they fully fall on the U.S. It’s a plan to chop off one of the U.S.’s legs in the race with Red China. Strangulation of the domestic economy makes mute the promise to make Red China play fair. Biden is doing to us what the Red Chinese would do if they could.
Is Biden an unwitting Manchurian candidate?
The whole speech was a combination of how-to-be-Argentina and government-by-leftist-junta. Calm, soothing tones are meaningless if you’re rampaging the train of the country off the rails. “Sleepless in Seattle” became “Shameless in DC” last night.
*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?
The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.
These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.
Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.
These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.
Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.
“Until I know this sure uncertainty, I’ll entertain the offered fallacy.” (William Shakespeare, “The Comedy of Errors”)
Electron microscope at the University of Bath, UK.
I can’t leave the subject of the coronavirus alone; riots and “defunding” the police be damned. Everything about the virus says so much about ourselves and our current state of affairs.
An image of the new coronavirus taken with an electron microscope. (photo: U.S. National Institutes of Health/AP)
“COVID-19 Is Not the Flu”, so stipulates the title of John McCormack’s piece in the May 18 edition of National Review. It’s the primary assumption that drives most everything that has been written and said on the subject of our current contagion, the coronavirus. Hugh Hewitt, another of the center/right commentariat, is fond of prefacing some of his remarks on his radio show with “in the year of plague”. Is the sickness a “plague” and is it “not the flu”? Honestly, I don’t know, and neither do they, and neither does much of the army of others who have contributed to the widely publicized tale about the virus. They claim a confidence that is unwarranted.
The storyline on the contagion is its proclaimed near-apocalyptic threat to civilization, so much so that we have come close to ending society. Thus, we are required to live a life of imitation and strangeness: an ersatz sociability through a mask, distance, digitization, and no touching; a dangerous fiddling with people’s livelihoods through arbitrary edicts of “essential” and “nonessential”; and the unwitting deputization of a horde of unthinking scolds.
I stand corrected. The unthinking scolds are thinking, but they could be reasoning from a host of unexamined assumptions.
One unexamined assumption occurred to me as I was reading McCormack’s essay. His comments were composed at a time of what could be referred to, in hindsight, as high hysteria. While in this public state-of-mind, nothing, as far as I am aware, has been written or said on the possibility of the distorting effects of focusing so many resources on this virus that comparisons with other pestilences are impossible. The distorting effects contribute to an emotional and socio-political environment that then corrupts the raw data. The rationale becomes the equivalent of a house of cards but is sold as rock solid.
The field of physics presents an excellent illustration. Scientists have long been aware of the possible impact of their detection methods on the object of their interest. The mere act of observation can alter the nature of it and distort their findings. As a result, they must be constantly conscious of this “observer effect”. Are our public policy experts, political leaders, and punditry class mindful of it in areas beyond science? Given what I’ve seen, heard, and read, I kinda doubt it.
I’ll use McCormack’s piece to lay out the conventional explanation for the gravity of this virus. His argument that it isn’t the flu, and shouldn’t be treated like it is, relies on an analysis that probably suffers from the observer effect. The observer in this case would be the public and private entities with a singular laser focus on this thing. No sickness has ever drawn this much attention in recent times. The final public and private bill for our reaction to this contagion hasn’t been finalized. As of today, the federal government has pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into relief and treatments. The Federal Reserve will inject $1.5 trillion to finance the response. How quaint for Sen. Everett Dirksen to opine in 1933, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” We have to add a zero to keep up with the numbers rolling out of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
A few trillion dollars of observer makes for one mammoth potential for distortion.
In addition, the states have thrown another billions, if not trillions, into the kitty. California’s governor Gavin Newson estimated in April that the initial drain on the state’s treasury will amount to $7 billion (We’re still in Dirksen land), with more billions by the end of the year. Many states have seen their fiscal ledgers tip into the red, maybe way into the red. The word “bankruptcy” now applies to more than the businesses that they have driven into insolvency with their loose labeling of “nonessential”.
The upshot: all this activity has generated more data on this contagion than any other. To make the case that this candidate for mayhem is worse than prior ones, McCormack trots out the numbers for H1N1 of 61 million infections and 12,500 deaths over 12 months. The death toll for the flu season of 2018-19 runs about 34,200, he says. How do we know that these numbers were a product of a run-of-the-mill “good enough” as opposed to the frantic hyperactivity for corona? The difference in response between the culprits colors the numbers to such an extent that they could become incomparable.
In the earlier instances, the beginning and end dates for the infection might be more casually agreed upon. In quite another, contact tracing is conducted with all the intensity of Nazis ferreting out those with the “poisoned” blood of the Jews. The start/finish is pushed further and further out as more and more attention is devoted to it. The difference in the intensity of scrutiny creates a classic apples and oranges fallacy. Like isn’t compared with like.
Then, overreaction feeds more overreaction. Borrowing from science once again, we have now created a system feedback loop of frenzy feeding into more frenzy. Our collection and analysis of feverishly acquired data doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurs in an atmosphere of fear and doom.
It’s likely that the overhanging sense of dread will stampede governments into monumental actions that will culminate in subsidizing moral hazard in the realm of data collection. The money for defraying the costs of the epidemic will reward the promiscuous assignment of cases to the coronavirus category. The numbers are corrupted. The situation produces grossly uneven numbers depending on an official’s susceptibility to the corruption.
Macomb County, Mich., Chief Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz in April was quoted as saying, “I think a lot of clinicians are putting that condition (COVID-19) on death certificates when it might not be accurate because they died with coronavirus and not of coronavirus.” In addition, “Are they [the coronavirus death numbers] entirely accurate? No. Are people dying of it? Absolutely. Are people dying of other things and coronavirus is maybe getting credit? Yeah, probably.” Numbers get inflated in a surrounding climate of subsidized frenzy.
The shear volume and intensity of observation warps our perception of reality. It makes more difficult the useful the sort of comparisons which are critical for ascertaining the magnitude of the threat. The more we peer into a contagion, the more we make those numbers incomparably unique.
All of us are observers who have been made more obsessive about this disease by a world of extraordinary connectivity. We know in an instant what is happening anywhere. If our government is drawn to a particular happenstance, it’s ferocity of activity will combine with our own to disfigure our judgment. I can only wish that our chattering classes were as aware of this humbling aspect of our nature.
Lately I’ve been trying to catch up on my backlog of National Review issues, like the ones of April 6 and April 20. There’s much for me to agree with in the magazine … and some points of disagreement. I’ve noticed something else, however, during this pandemic. The magazine is headquartered in New York City. Its contributors may be scattered all over the country – with many residing in the City or its environs – but they come to focus on the city, which requires many trips to reacquaint and remind them of the City’s circumstances. I can’t help but think that they have an East Coast or Northeast orientation. Does the pandemic experience in the City overwhelm their perspective on everything relating to COVID-19?
What do they see when they tune in their devices or look outside the window? New York City and neighboring New Jersey are the epicenter of disease in the US. Accordingly, the overall tenor of the magazine in the April issues is dark, one of doom. My perception of the publication’s treatment – yes, I admit to being overly subjective – centers on the dire condition of death and crippling illness in the region where they live, work, and may have been raised. Understandable.
Heaven knows, the virus is highly contagious and deadly to certain groups, regardless of national geography. Yet, a quarter of deaths to the virus comes from one state: New York, and the overwhelmingly majority of those concentrate in New York City. The Overton Window (the range of “acceptable” discourse and views) for the magazine’s staff and all media centered in the city must have been influenced by the experience.
A body wrapped in plastic that was unloaded from a refrigerated truck is handled by medical workers wearing personal protective equipment due to COVID-19 concerns, Tuesday, March 31, 2020, at Brooklyn Hospital Center in Brooklyn borough of New York. The body was moved to a hearse to be removed to a mortuary. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
You might say that my Overton Window is similarly constricted by my residence in sparsely populated northwest Montana. There’s no registered cases or deaths of COVID-19 in Sanders County (a county without a traffic light), with Montana being lightly touched by the disease. Geographical bias is a problem. One advantage, though, of living outside the urban infection and death centers is to better appreciate the bad consequences of instilling an induced coma to the social and economic parts of an entire nation.
Similarly, a mother will refuse to see her lovely little darling as a juvenile delinquent in spite of the evidence. Our experiences and emotional attachments color our view of the matters before our eyes. Welcome to National Review headquarters, most of big media, and Sanders County, Mt.
Some of the magazine’s editors and contributors are strong supporters of federalism, to their credit. Some writers have taken a slightly different tack in supporting the shutdown, or are at least defensive of it. Some states never fully shut down; others went all in, and continue to do so. Federalism at work … to a point – to the applause of many of the magazine’s contributors.
Overhanging it all is an overlay of federal policies – also generally supported by the magazine’s staff – that induced that national coma. As in a coma, many bodily systems atrophy after prolonged hibernation. Are we truly prepared for Great Depression, Part II? Is there a full appreciation of what it will entail? I doubt it, especially after much personal exposure to MSNBC (much in New York City), the networks (much in New York City), and even CNN which is headquartered in Atlanta. Most of CNN’s programming emanates from New York City and Washington, DC. The publishing industry also crowds into the city. What happens in New York City seldom stays in New York City.
And a dangerous virus crowds into the city as well. The crowding of people presents an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of dangerous microbes, always has. Public sanitation campaigns and systems can only take you so far. People are still piled on top of one another and spend much time cheek-by-jowl in subways and hives of the hospitality industry. Add to this the fact that the range of personal hygiene in any population extends from obsessive/compulsive to bachelor/couch potato. As the virus parties through a densely packed population, a lockdown seems appropriate to the denizens of the City – many of them in the media – but maybe not so in places where an existence in “flats” is much less a fact of life.
New York City subway pre-corona.
Charles Murray writing for the American Enterprise Institute makes a similar point. The gravity of the disease has a population density dimension. The observation makes an excellent case for the salutary effects of sprawl, and the therapeutic benefits of many and expansive suburban parks, tennis courts, golf courses, and bike paths that exist in exurbia. A spread-out population might be a healthier one.
American urban sprawl, or just a healthier low-horizon city?
The thought will be heartily condemned by your run-of-the-mill central-planning greenie trying to replicate Hong Kong everywhere in the country. To them, sprawl is of the devil. If their design leaves the country open to pandemics, well, so what?! As per AOC and her Squad fan club, they’d love a planet with far fewer people anyway. AOC has already announced her support for infertility. Speaking metaphorically, it’s no skin off her back … or ovaries.
For those of us in the empire of sprawl, our incidences of infection and death are much below de Blasio’s mecca. Thus, why the national shutdown, or more accurately, the broad imposition of the creepy-mask look, the shuttered businesses, and enforced unemployment due to China’s city-loving incubus? The empty streets of Missoula, Mt., weren’t much different from the thoroughfares of New York City.
North Higgins Ave. in Missoula was mostly empty on the morning of April 3, 2020. (photo: WILLIAM MARCUS / MONTANA PUBLIC RADIO)
Again, why? Don’t answer by saying that it could be the same in the Helena. “Could” is a nasty word for the rational governance of one’s life. We “could” be invaded by a superpower like the Grand Duchy of Fenwick as in the “The Mouse That Roared” (It’s a hoot so take a look.).
The “science” – the thing that lefties ubiquitously proclaim but seldom understand – of the virus is mostly well known, not so with cures or therapies, or the accuracy of the stats to brutalize the population into cultural and economic suicide. A country as vast and diverse as ours should not be cowed into broadly shutting down or coming close to it by ending much of our social and economic life.
Target, target, target is the sensible response. Target with quarantines the ravaged areas. Target public and private moneys on cures and therapies. For the rest of us, leave us alone. A hurt economy is far better than a wrecked one.
The principle of holes is very relevant to our current situation. A v-shaped recovery is impossible if our hole has become a miles-deep shaft. The bounce will come up short if the lighted hole of the surface is a small dot as we look up. The window that dominates our media empires might makes us less cognizant of this reality. NYC-centrism may unnecessarily end up crippling us for quite some time.
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.
