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.
Social psychosis: noun, a widely-spread mental disorder characterized by disconnection from reality which results in strange behavior in mass, often accompanied by a mass perception of stimuli (voices, images, sensations) and other hallucinations.
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Progressivism as a political movement is based on one overriding assumption: history is a long march toward a more sophisticated, rational, and all-round better existence. The problem is, it isn’t. There are fits and starts, technological improvements, yes, advances in science, yes, and well-meaning attempts, but not all “improvements” are improvements. Some are a product of hysteria and periods of intense social psychosis that represent a step backwards to our more atavistic side. Our bestial nature never went away, and four years in college classrooms won’t eradicate it. We are probably in another one of those spasms of flight from reality.
Don’t expect our recent crop of elected leaders to appeal to the better angels of our nature. They haven’t been especially good at filtering the nonsense. Indeed, some have stoked it. President Obama was famous for admonishing his opponents for being on the “wrong side of history”. It’s the same stilted form of thinking. What he shows is that he is fully marinated in the same “march of history” stuff that warped the minds of Karl Marx, Marcuse, and today’s Ta-Nehisi Coats, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo of critical race theory fame. The last three took Marcuse, and by extension Marx, to give us another one of those iron laws of history that handcuffed their minds, as it did many of their 20th-century predecessors who constructed some of the worst tyrannies to the unremitting disgrace of humankind.
The current phase of frenzy was 30+ years in coming. From the child sex-abuse witchhunts of the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s through the nexus of the election of Donald Trump and aftermath, the resurgence of a revised Marxism and its manifestation in street violence and indoctrination into nearly every corner of the culture, to our current COVID panic, we seem to have lost our marbles. Events can be a catalyst, but so can personalities. These episodes can be linked because they have so much in common: they are manifestations of a social psychosis.
One factor boosting this mental dysfunction is an unfortunate byproduct of the ubiquity of electronic media in the form of tv in an earlier era and today’s internet. Thoughts and paranoias move at light speed. Today, social media and our instantaneous interconnectedness intensify an already powerful stimulant. Thanks to the ever-present electronic social communion, the unease spreads like wildfire, taking form in loose theories, unquestioning faith in media-grabbing public personalities, radical activism, and government coercion.
What sparks these episodes? The angst can be rooted in a little-noticed alteration in family chemistry. The shift from the social ideal of a single breadwinner to two working parents may have elicited a broad anxiety about the care of children, a lingering discomfort waiting for a trigger. The trigger came in the 1983-4 McMartin Preschool case in Huntington Beach, Ca. Child-talk to public officials, and that common staple of our times, the degreed “expert”, took the banter of children to place seven adults in the dock. It took six years of litigation to exonerate the defendants, at the expense of ruined reputations, the lingering emotional scars of the innocent at the hands of public officials and their lackeys, and millions of dollars of public and private money.
The outcome of the McMartin Preschool case didn’t staunch the jihad. As it was working its way out, the crusade waited for an avatar in the person of Dade County DA Janet Reno (future AG for Bill Clinton) to concoct a formula to turn the child-talk into convictions. The Miami Method, as it was called, relied on university-trained child therapists to extract the stories, physical evidence that was spuriously associated with the tales, and multiple witnesses in the form of children who went through the child-therapist mill. Three people would be railroaded – the Fusters and Grant Snowden – until Reno ran into 16-year-old Bobby Finjnje. He refused to plea-bargain, went to trial, found others who could expose the Method’s gross errors, and was exonerated. The fever broke in Miami.
Bobby Finjnje at age 16Janet Reno and assistant as State’s Attorney for Dade County.
It still raged elsewhere. In such far-flung places as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Washington State, Martinsville in Saskatchewan, Canada, and New Zealand, the illicit holy war persisted. Then, like magic, the hysteria disappeared by the mid-1990’s. Odd thing: fantastic tales of satanic rituals of sodomy and bestiality have a date-certain shelf life. Poof, it’s gone.
But the emotional virus was mutating below the surface.
Sometimes, the frenzy can grow out of other emerging socio-economic circumstances. Many have noticed the current divide in our country between the winners and losers in the new society emanating from the rise of our time’s latest edition of the global free market. Mind you, the global free market isn’t necessarily composed of free market societies. It’s just that all countries, whether free or unfree, are to be treated alike, no matter the impact on any one nation.
The winners in this brave new world are concentrated by geography. Urban centers became the epicenter of a new transnational commercial elite. They are concentrated in certain zip codes for work and residence. Allied to them are the elite prep schools and universities who help create and perpetuate an incestuous petri dish of culturally homogeneous elite social pools in these nodes.
What of the losers? They’re everywhere else. They reside in flyover country. They are found in places that have been caricatured in city-centered media as overrun with uncouth and ignorant oafs. For the beautiful people, they are the flotsam to be ignored on the way to the ascendancy of the “better” people, meaning them.
BigTech’s oligarchs
The bifurcation seldom ends well. If it persists, and resentment simmers, it won’t take much for a media-savvy personage, speaking in the right tone and tenor, to lead a counter-revolution. In 2015, that person arrived in the form of Donald Trump. He was combative, seemingly spoiling for a fight at every turn. He spoke for the forgotten, for the people who bore the brunt of the new prejudices and bigotry of the narrow set of elites coalescing at the commanding heights of the culture.
Remarkably, he won in 2016 and spent 4 years at war. The nouveau culture’s self-anointed vanguard elite spent 4 years at war with him and everyone associated with him, including his supporters, which culminated in the 2020 election and Trump’s single-minded crusade to undermine the results at the expense of everyone else in his party. The January 6 capitol riot erupted as 800-1,000 of his enthusiasts stormed Congress.
Trump at his January 6 rally
What did the party get for all the tumult? It’s a mixed bag. The Republican Party managed to squeak by with some victories down ballot as well as the loss of two Senate seats in Georgia.
What makes people perform unspeakable acts, such as rampage into the capitol, based on the drumbeat of an influential figure? The well-spring is the anxiety from stressed lives that was evident in prior witchhunts. Sometimes the underappreciated rally to an avatar who stylistically gives voice to their resentments. It’s not his ideas so much as it is his demonstrative qualities, the pugnaciousness. He’s deeply admired for these personality traits, not his brain. At this point, the movement reflects rabid fandom more than an exaltation of possible statesmanship.
The zealotry of the fan is evident in Trump’s famous line from the 2016 campaign trail:
“The polls — they say I have the most loyal people … I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Judging by the shenanigans on January 6, maybe not going so far as to turn a blind eye to murder, still, his most rabid followers would become a mob for him.
Though, it’s not as if Trump supporters had nothing to complain about as election day unfolded. The election laws in many places were contorted by partisan activism arising out of the urban/academic petri dish of our progressive jet-set. Standards of accountability were set aside in such a way as to get their bête noire, Trump. Legal, yes, in that no court has overturned the count. Disreputable, yes, in that nobody knows what happened in many locales when ballots were scattered in the mail, mysteriously made their way to a multitude of unsupervised drop boxes, and then on to their unobserved processing in counting rooms. Ballot harvesting was rampant in many places; honest verification was non-existent; and the vote-counting saga continued for weeks. Who wouldn’t at least scratch their heads at this circus?
The pandemic was the crisis too good to waste in order to make a hash of the election. It was used not only to create an election monster but, as it turned out, to introduce all-encompassing state control to a frightened populace. The pandemic proved to the nouveau elite an excellent opportunity to conduct a grand socio-political experiment testing the popular limits to a great expansion of government power.
Our ideological and social sorting by geography showed a distinct difference in submission to this new regime. An entire segment of our population, the urban part, who are routinely dependent on government services, have a preternatural tendency to accept authority, especially if it comes from the much-ballyhooed “expert”, many with the same credentials in tow as the influential residents in uptown high-rises and the outlying well-to-do ‘burbs. In other words, these new potentates have the additional advantage of being respected for having the same social qualifications as a sizeable portion of the governing coalition. Social comradery goes a long way in instilling fealty to “experts”.
The chief commodities of the “expert” are safety and a shield from risk. The notion of trade-offs – something is given up to get something else – is an alien concept to people who have lived their lives in the protective womb of uniformed and credentialed experts. Insulated from realities, citified people become easy marks for hysteria. The zero-risk myopia of administrative agencies, taken as the voice of God, can be easily transmuted into instances of personal bullying in the public square.
The true-believers’ public threats and denunciations for not wearing a mask in outings to the grocery store are not unusual.
The obsessive penchant for outdoor mask-wearing, even while strenuously exercising, and alone, is common. Being absolutely petrified about sending their children to school in an unthinking response to a threat that is smaller for the kids than the flu pre-COVID is a prevalent reaction. Mask-wearing became a totem of God’s mark of saintliness. All crazy, all unhinged.
Wearing a mask while jogging.
The panic and hysteria show in polls. Rural areas are more hesitant in regards to COVID mitigations and more reluctant to get the vaccine. Urban areas, just the opposite. Yet, the vaccinated, the vast majority in municipalities, show a greater degree of fear about a return to normal and engagement in public activities than the unvaccinated. It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the vaccine. Or, more importantly, is it evidence of something more troubling in the urban mind: a deeper, irrational dread of any risk not countenanced by the beloved “expert”? These people are naked on the barricades without their departments of public health, sanitation, public safety, transportation, urban planning, and water and power.
The strong sense of exposure in times of stress leads to anxiety and the anxiety leads to a population always on the brink of hysteria. It’s pure irrationality. COVID provides the latest example of a population pushed to the event horizon of public madness. Early on, prudence dictated strong measures till knowledge and treatments were discovered – not necessarily a vaccine. Within a few months, vulnerable populations were identified and treatments developed. While COVID isn’t the flu, it certainly is for a sizeable chunk of the population: the healthy and the young. Protective measures should have quickly focused on the aged and those suffering from chronic conditions. They should have been quarantined, not the whole of society in massive stay-at-home orders. It was a sledge hammer to fix a watch, and now we are paying the price.
For a people without a sympathy for risk, and in possession of an abject faith in the protective shield of the “expert” in government posts, they are extremely hesitant to leave the bubble of corseted “protections”. Their life will soon become as distorted as the late 19th-century female body after being bounded for hours by a corset. The mental and emotional capacities of self-reliance and confidence of urbanites will atrophy, like ladies’ abdominal muscles in a bygone era, after 18 months of universal mask-wearing, business closures, stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and distance-learning. The horror at the thought of cutting the apron string is palpable.
One of the unintended consequences of the smothering is that the isolation may have primed people on the emotional brink to fall headlong into fanaticism. Confined to Zoom and reluctant to venture outdoors, some were cramped in a prison of their own mind and pre-selected media preferences. In such a rarified and enclosed atmosphere, unacceptable ideas and actions may move into the realm of the acceptable. It’s a fused magazine of powder waiting for a spark. Enter George Floyd and Derek Chauvin.
The miscreants subsequently hitting the streets and passersby, and torching the downtowns, always a demographic speck, weren’t evidence of a popular uprising, but preposterous ideas, still preposterous, were starting to be taken seriously by our influential trend-setters. Big Everything – sports, media, Fortune 500 – began to sing a radical tune. Unable to prove actual racism, faculty-lounge extremists opted for mysticism. Amazingly, it caught on. The scientifically unprovable charges of systemic racism and the unscientific theorizing of critical race theory (CRT) were treated as physical realities on the order of the sun, wind, and earth. With their finger in the air of an artificial gale from a faculty-lounge wind machine, the culture’s hegemons repeated the chants of the new cult.
The normal check for sanity of broader social interactions in a normally functioning society were knee-capped. Normally, an ounce of good old-fashioned scientific skepticism would be enough to put the kibosh to the nonsense. In these times, not so fast.
Diangelo and Kendi, chief propagandists for CRT
CRT isn’t so much a real theory as it is a kind a Nicene Creed for race-hustlers. It starts with the conclusion – we’re a racist nation – and moves to condemnation – “systemic racism” and “white privilege”. It can’t be proven in any meaningful sense. The use of statistical disparities is “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” run amok. Racial statistical differences aren’t proof of much of anything, least of all a society who has it in for blacks. No tie can be made between the evidence – the variance in numbers – and the conclusion – systemic racism. The variances can be explained in many ways without “racism” ever rolling off your lips. It’s jump-to-conclusions time.
The hustler’s gambit of “equity” is simply a cover for vengeance. Those of lighter skin shades are expected to pony up with racially-based benefits till the numbers come up equal, in a statistically artificial state of “equity”. In a more rational time, this was good old-fashioned reverse racial discrimination, and patently and justly illegal. Not for today. Not in today’s climate of dysfunction-induced hyper-aggravation.
2020 riots in NYC
This isn’t progress. It’s a mania that happens so often that a person has to wonder if it is a built-in feature of the modern banality that we happen to call “progress”. Are we really that much better than the past’s socially psychotic behavior in the pogroms, witch trials, India’s anti-Muslim riots, the Ottoman’s second-class status for Christians, Rwanda’s Tutsi genocide, or today’s inner-city street thugs who routinely target Asians and anyone with a lighter complexion? There’s good reason to believe that the beast is always at the gates.
Jefferson’s faith in education as the cure-all is illusory. It can’t be if it is as corrupted as the malady it was meant to heal. Human failings are as persistent as is our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. They are everywhere, even in our “progress”.
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.
Dr. Robert Redfield on CNNWuhan virology lab, China.
The origins COVID-19 are still a mystery. Many questions about the virus have been distorted into political ones. One source of the politicization is the desire to gain power and use it to fulfill a certain vision of society. When a person’s opinions and conclusions run counter to the contrived story, they are silenced, mocked, and ruined. This is politics at its most heinous. This is happening to anyone associated with Trump, defending tradition, and protective of what’s good about the country’s history and values. The truth is the first casualty.
As a result, many questions go unanswered, particularly if the answers don’t fit the erroneous but useful narrative. No better example can be found than the persistent unknowns about the coronavirus and the related pandemic. If “xenophobia” is the cry-of-the-moment, anything is grabbed to deflect attention away from China, especially if the barkers are working hard to make Asians believe that they are an oppressed minority, oppressed by the cultural elites’ favorite bogeyman: white supremacy. Thus the overheated attempt to blame nature or anyone and anything but China – a bat for instance.
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – AUGUST 14: A woman raises her fist at the front of a march down Washington Avenue to protest racism. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Stats are squashed that might threaten the hand-picked story line of the virus’s magnified lethality, a threat that proved advantageous in allowing them to flex the muscles of their all-powerful administrative state. One such number is the date of origin. If it leaked out of a Wuhan lab earlier than previously thought, let’s say, the number of infected grows and that number may work to reduce the morbidity rate of the virus. A key part of the plot will have been undermined, something to be resisted at all costs.
Therefore, serious and honest research into origins can present a dual hazard for them: truth wrecks the xenophobia plot thread and might show the administrative state’s suffocation of life to be a colossal waste. Thus, the Left has two good reasons to rally their troops in the media and academic circles to sully any semblance of free thought and real science.
Colin Kaepernick’s “systemic racism” career is monetized by corporate America in this case by Nike.
Dr. Robert Redfield, below, has a few strikes against him in the eyes of the reigning Left: he’s an accomplished virologist, worked under Trump as head of the CDC, and dares to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan lab as early as September. So, In the fall of 2019, it’s possible that the virus was seeded in China and, from there, to the rest of the world. Many people got it, survived it, mistook it for the flu, some succumbed, and the rest of the world waited till February and March 2020 to hit the panic button.
Once panic was lit, parents became paranoid to send their kids to school; businesses and livelihoods were decimated; romantic life was suppressed as we hid ourselves behind our modified burqa; scenes of public rage at dissenters became commonplace; the surreal scene of watching drivers alone in a car and masked was not unusual; and good and bad came to be defined by how comprehensively a public official clamped down on their society. Timothy Leary in one of his LSD-induced fits couldn’t have produced a weirder script.
Watch the courage of Dr. Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, who bravely refuses to be cowed in a CNN interview. And you know what? CNN, the most Democrat-friendly operation this side of MSNBC and the Democratic Socialists of America, didn’t go into full mob-rage, as is their practice. His contention that the virus emanated out of the Wuhan lab around September or October couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Watch the clip.
We’ve had a year of a smothered human existence in reaction to COVID, with some advocating its extension with no end in sight. I’m starting to worry about what we have done to ourselves. Our understandable desire for an immediate, near-term gain – stop the pandemic cold – probably has come at the expense of a long-term slide into a more desperate reality. What we did was novel, and worryingly portentous. In the end, we neither stopped the pandemic with the shutdowns, or the costs. Dark clouds loom.
Storm clouds over Austin, Tx. (Photo: Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman)
To this day, it’s surprising to me how blithely the population accepted the decrees from political figures who are inherently enthralled by a new class of janissary, the bureaucratic “expert”. It’s the bane of Progressives: they can’t help themselves. They long ago surrendered their judgment, and the independent judgment of free citizens in a free republic, to blinkered specialists with great power.
Now look at what it’s gotten us. These lockdown measures – universal mask-wearing, shutdowns of life, school closures, an amputated social existence – may have irreparably damaged our children’s psyche and their long-term prospects. What have we done to our kids after a year, or more, of sentencing them to solitary confinement during an important slice of their developmental years?
The worries don’t stop there. Others have tried to put numbers to the future devastation. Taking into account the avoided medical procedures, sacrificed productivity and earnings, disrupted educations, isolation-induced stress and abuse, the National Bureau of Economic Research calculates a 3% increase in the mortality rate and .5% drop in life expectancy in the next 15 years. Stretched out over 350 million people, that’s a carpet-bombing of a noticeable portion of the commonwealth.
And just think, none of these measures stopped the disease, if you compare jurisdictions across the country who varied quite dramatically in their response. No discernable positive impact can be detected for the worst that the likes of Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer – and now Biden – have inflicted on their people. It came down to herd immunity – something disparaged by those in a panic – which was facilitated by the discovery of a vaccine.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Shutdowns, social distancing, and mandatory mask-wearing look to be, at this juncture, irrelevant . . . and destructive. And remember, that’s not all: the hyperinflation of 1923 Weimar Germany may be waiting in the wings. All the chickens haven’t fully roosted yet.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Pres. Biden in his CVOID speech from the White House on 3/11/2021.
Did you tune into Pres. Biden’s COVID speech last night (3/11/2021)? I did, and bunkum works as its chief characteristic.
The first part of the pitch was devoted to empathy for the lives cut short, the businesses ruined, the miseducation of the young, and the demolition of a country’s social life. He said this as if it occurred by magic. It didn’t. These were outcomes of deliberate government actions that were most enthusiastically implemented by Democrat overlords, and are still clutched by them with a death grip. It’s extremely odd to express empathy for fallout that people like him caused. It’s absolutely mindboggling to watch.
The middle part of the truncated harangue could be summed up as vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Not mentioned was the fact that the vaccines were Trump vaccines with a Trump rollout that was cut aborted by a semi-election of mail-in ballots.
Also, to be sure, getting vaccinated is a good thing, but getting our lives back is equally, if not more, important. We have known since the middle of last year who is vulnerable and how to treat the bug with a host of therapeutics, with or without a vaccine. It’s clear that the most stringent measures should have been targeted on the vulnerable rather than a strangulation of the lives of everyone. To be honest, I could do without Biden’s cries of empathy as he promises to prolong the agony.
We now know that the straitjacket didn’t do much good. Federalism provided a live experiment, and it showed that cemeteries didn’t get any fuller in the more open states in comparison to the ones in perpetual lockdown.
The worst was saved for last: The Threat. If we don’t follow the mindless decrees of his power-hungry appointees and bureaucrats-as-“experts”, we may as well shred what remains of our Constitution. There will be no back to “normal”, and we’ll be forever stuck under the thumb of our new autocracy.
The spiel would have made more sense if Biden was Dorothy and he/she was tripping down the yellow brick road.
*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.
Example: Delano Jt. Union High School District (DJUHSD) Reopening Plan, California
Not everyone is a scientist, but everyone can have a scientific mentality. Fact is, most don’t, and many of those become sneering haranguers like the CNN reporter condemning the Tampa Bay Super Bowl crowd at a popular eatery for not wearing masks. She doesn’t possess a scientific mentality because, if she had, she would have to hedge her judgment about masks with many caveats, like a real scientist. There are many scientific reasons to question the efficaciousness of masks, and many of the other COVID measures that have stripped us of our livelihoods and humanity.
Many of the assertions on COVID that entered the brain of our CNN reporter came from scientists who are more bureaucrat than scientist. They are accorded the final word as if the whole of science can be shoe-horned into the behavioral norms in the rarified atmosphere of the government office building. Their science is a stunted one suffering under the interplay of government employees jostling for job security and career advancement. It’s a unique social ecosystem that mangles science, usually to the lowest, or most stringent, common denominator to avoid blame for failure and a black mark in their personnel file.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, currently Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser, previously Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
The rest of us outside the world of government employment are expected to bend a knee.
The attitude is more prevalent in the states and localities who are immersed in a love affair with government as the most important agent for human betterment – i.e., where progressivism has an iron grip on thought (blue states and localities). Anything out of the mouth of Anthony Fauci is treated as gospel, and off they go to public shaming and kneeling before the latest round of edicts out of the mouths of bureaucrats, that essentially act as “cya” for job security.
By so doing, our kids are approaching a full year without meaningful instruction. It’s clear that children aren’t walking super-spreader events. Yet, another class of government employee, the unionized public-school teacher, refuses to go back to educating them. Believe me, zooming isn’t teaching. It’s a form of play-acting: teachers sit in front of the computer camera and screen and who know what is happening at the other end, and everyone from the school board to the teachers to the principal’s secretary act as if the real thing is happening. It isn’t, as evidenced by kids dropping out, and off the servers, and the record number of F’s across the nation.
“Distance Learning”
A scan of my old employer’s website (www.djuhsd.org) brought to light a system – bureaucrats are infatuated with “systems” – that a King Minos, the developer of the maze to hold the Minotaur, would appreciate. At the top of pyramid – or maze – is the California Department of Public Health and its map of color-coded tiers of county infections rates to guide all government actions. And on top of them is the entire apparatus of the one-party state. Like a kaleidoscope of constantly changing hues, a county would find itself flipping back and forth from draconian to looser controls in a chaos that would make radical disruption a normal part of life. Interpretation of the continually changing map is the responsibility of another set of bureaucrats, the county department of public health.
Any plan for reopening the schools must adhere to the noise coming from the state and the county’s interpretation of the noise. The district issues their own plan with “phases” while adhering to the fluid and unpredictable circumstances. One week is the announcement of schools’ reopening; the next week is a lockdown. The bottom line for your kids: zooming for God knows how long.
And the striking fact about all the heavy-handedness is that it isn’t making a difference. More mask wearing, school closures, social distancing, and lockdowns hasn’t made an appreciable difference lowering infection rates and deaths. For instance, Texas and California are quite similar, except for the unemployment rate (7.2% to 9.9% respectively), and one being more open and the other in near perpetual lockdown. At least in Texas, a person can still go to work, to a restaurant, and school and run the same risk as a Californian who is stuck in the house, or marked by such gripping fear to refrain from even going to the park.
Maybe it’s as Ross Douthat said in his recent New York Times column: many of us, particular those in our culturally progressive urban areas, are longing for a secular messiah – a god-politician or god-expert – to deliver us from our travails. Politics and bureaucracy are poor places to look for deliverance.
In the meantime, many kids are getting dumber. It looks like we’ll have to inflate the number of H1B visas for engineers from the CCP’s China. Zooming in America won’t produce them here.
US President-elect Joe Biden, arrives with Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris to announces his economic team at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 1, 2020. (Photo by Chandan KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)
Today, science is routinely weaponized for political ends. Not surprisingly, it’s the people who know the least about it who abuse it the most, like the power-seekers whose educational preparation is limited to the verbose college subjects – subjects reliant on the manipulation of the written and spoken word, the “soft sciences”. Graduates of international relations and communications studies, for instance, promiscuously trot out “science” to boost their ideological prejudices. So, for them, “science” becomes their go-to means to feed their socialist inclinations. It’s the bane of our times.
Take two cases to illustrate the point: climate change and the pandemic. Climate change – “global warming” in an earlier incarnation – is riddled with Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. And many unknown unknowns by the way. We definitely can take temperatures readings throughout the layers of the atmosphere and at the exosphere (top). We know pollution in the form of carbonates, etc., and cloud cover, can create a warming effect. But beyond those facts, politically exploitable grand predictions are the rankest of speculation. The unknowns are trampled asunder to get right to the activists’ solution of giving them and their fellow-travelers power, to the ruin of us all.
As the Gospels reported Jesus as saying on the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Jim Geraghty, a reporter for National Review, in a recent article illustrates the persistence of the many unknowns about the pandemic. In the beginning of the COVID affair – or I should say when we first noticed its presence – we didn’t know much. Nonetheless, confident announcements obscured the ignorance.
At this time of innocence, prudence justified strong but short-term measures: lockdowns, school closures, masking, social distancing. The development of therapeutics and the knowledge of who is vulnerable should have led to a lessening of the grip. It didn’t. Once power is acquired, it’s awfully hard to give it up, proving once again that power is intoxicating.
Dr. Fauci testifying before Congress in June 2020.
At this juncture, many confidently talked about the date that the virus first entered the U.S. Now we’re getting the idea that we really don’t know, and neither do our masters. Honestly, our “experts” were aping each other in confusing the moment when they first noticed it with its actual appearance in the country or the world. With each new tranche of evidence, we’ve had to push back the start date in halting steps. This has significant implications about the virus and our response to it.
The official appearance of the bug in China has been moved back from December to October to “late summer and early fall” of 2019. Geraghty quotes the South China Post, NBC News, and US intelligence sources to raise suspicions of a far earlier pandemic birth date. Cell-phone activity in the Wuhan lab vicinity suddenly went dark for 17 days in October and satellites pictured unusually-packed Wuhan hospital parking lots “in the months before the pandemic became international news”. How much time before October was it mistaken for the common flu? “Late summer and early fall”?
Satellite photo of Wuhan parking lot unusually filled with cars, October 2019 (source: Taiwan Times)
If it had an earlier start date in China, did it have an earlier start date in other parts of the world? China didn’t shutdown flights to other parts of China till the last week of January 2020, and other countries didn’t stop travel till the next month. If the virus first appeared in “late summer and early fall” 2019, for how much time was it mistaken for the flu? Since international travel wasn’t suspended for the whole of the last third of 2019, and the virus was active, there was ample opportunity for the virus to spread to God knows where. It could be anywhere floating about on cruise ships, visits to American college campuses, malls, Disneyland/Disney World, Las Vegas, etc. How many Americans contracted it and nobody knew, least of all the patient, doctor, and our vaunted public health experts?
Visiting group of undergrads from the PRC to Stanford’s School of Engineering, 2017.Recent photo of PRC tourists at a Las Vegas casino.
During this time of ignorance, many people who may have had it didn’t die, were treated, and a few may have succumbed, which matches our experience with any virus. For 90+% of the population, symptoms range from a cold to a nasty flu. As in all outbreaks, the vulnerable are the people with weakened immune systems, the aged with age-related conditions, and for that matter anyone with serious medical problems.
It’s entirely possible for the thing to fly under the radar for an extensive period of time before somebody with a microphone hits the panic button. Was the panic justified? Yes, maybe no. I’m reluctant to draw a hard and fast conclusion, but let’s just say that my BS-sonar is registering pings. Stringent measures in the beginning are excusable, but when we know more – not when we get a handle on its spread – they should be adjusted to fit that better understanding. So, instead of nearly everyone under stay-at-home orders, lockdowns with accommodations should have been limited to the vulnerable. Similar targeting should apply to masking, social distancing, and school in-person attendance. Instead, our scalpels were put away in favor of sledge hammers.
Social distancing in an American park.
We have mangled science and our lives. Back in March of 2020, I proclaimed that “We Can’t Do This”, the “this” being lockdowns. The costs in the trade-offs were too severe. Now we know that many of the powerful were making decisions to wreck our lives as if there were no gaps in their knowledge. Heck, as it turns out, they still don’t know when the bug started to circulate. It’s probably been with us much longer than anyone knew.
In the end, our power-hungry politicos and their supporting cast of lickspittle and self-aggrandizing “experts” have soiled the reputation of science. A good reputation once lost is hard to regain.
