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The Pandemic and Our Window

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.

RogerG

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Never Again

Hugh Hewitt, normally one of the sane people in the media storm in the age of Trump, has joined the ranks of militant busybodies that were unleashed by the current sickness hysteria. A couple of days ago he was agreeing with a caller (a medical doctor, so someone with medical street cred) on the need to continue the mitigations: social distancing, masks, business closures, etc. The day after, he was ranting from his WaPo op-ed about running into groups of joggers and bicyclists on paths who were not practicing his meddlesome measures. He crafted his complaint as one of selfishness and foolishness of the non-compliant. I was incensed … not at the bicyclists but at him.

He would say, and has said, that the numbers and science are on his side. What drivel. Yes, policy making during a pandemic demands the use of statistics and science. But these are some of the ingredients in the recipe for making good policy, not the only ones. Think about it: science has produced many ways to safely abort a baby, but is abortion even acceptable? On such matters, science and numbers can only take you so far in the determination of what ought to be done.

The limitations on science and numbers go beyond the moral issues. They extend to all decision making, and especially to ones that have great impact on the country. It should begin with a presumption on the boundaries for action. In other words, what is acceptable? In combating terrorism in Baghdad, is it appropriate to nuke the city? (Oh, by the way, don’t think that it didn’t come up in many a ribald beerhall conversation around the time of The Surge.) For me, the thought was beyond the pale. The same consideration should be at work in response to a communicable disease. Options like the mass execution of the infected are too horrible to contemplate … and so should the euthanization of the social and economic life of a continental country of 330 million people. Going back to Dirty Harry: “Man must know his limits.”

Who would have thought it was possible? LA freeway without traffic jams during the current California lockdown.

And that’s what we have done with the American lockdown. We’ve decided to nuke Baghdad, so to speak.

There are so many holes in Hewitt’s logic – and others like him – that if it was a ship, it’d sink. Forcing a population of 330 million to take on the appearance of bank robbers is foolishness in the extreme. An argument in support of the nonsense relies on the highly contagious nature of the virus. Wait a minute. All viruses, as well as bacteria, are contagious and dangerous to certain classes of persons. Yes, Hugh, no surprise, the things are small enough to swim in aerosols (suspended fine droplets of moisture). Always have.

But there’s a fallback position for the would-be authoritarians. Wait for it: they proclaim that this one is particularly deadly. Well, to be honest, it’s lethal only to vulnerable groups, but these people are vulnerable to any malevolent bug, and there are many, many of those without the coronavirus in the mix. Hewitt’s stance is actually a demand that many of us will come to know only a third of a person’s face from here on out. Apparently, for him, it’s the new normal.

I guess that the discovery of masks on a couple of dimwits who just held up the local Wells Fargo can no longer satisfy the new post-pandemic standard for “probable cause” when so many of us have a few in the glove box, thanks to Hewitt, others like him, and that band of “experts” straying way outside their lane.

Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist at a bank in Odessa, Tx., January 2020.
Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist in a bank in Lower Gwynedd, Penn., September 2019.

Furthermore, why bother putting anyone in a police lineup with half the face gone? Criminal investigations will be farcical in Hewitt’s brave new world. The only parallel that comes to mind is the demand by some Muslims for their women to be photographed in the burqa for government-issued ID’s. A crowded DMV under the current protocols would logically require a photo of everyone in a full burka or at a minimum in Jesse James mode. Of course, what good are the pics with two-thirds of the face veiled?

Voter ID laws are similarly made useless since the picture is undecipherable. The electorate instantly becomes whoever happens to be breathing – or not breathing in the case of Chicago – on US soil at the time of the election, a fervently sought end state of the Pelosi Democratic Party. It’s an interesting way to repeal protections of the ballot from fraud.

Exceptions? Come on, what Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and every other power-hungry politico in high office isn’t salivating at the opportunity to embrace full burka getups and the N95 bank-robber look in state-issued id’s and driver’s licenses if need be? But how will cops identify a pulled-over driver with everyone disguised in their mask? It certainly will be easier for under-aged teens to buy beer as they approach the counter with the same mask that appears on their older brother’s driver’s license. Clerks will have to learn the science of forensic facial recognition absent two-thirds of the face … or, more likely, the booze age limits will become passé.

See, the scheme is so unworkable in the long term. It’s a short-term response that some meatheads want to make the “new normal”. Amazing!

There is no limiting principle in the logic of the shutdowns, every-man-is-an-island mode of social interaction, ending gatherings and the First Amendment’s right of association, the mask-wearing nonsense, and government squashing the livelihoods of millions as businesses are forcibly shuttered. You simply can’t take a meat axe to the social and economic parts of life and still have anything resembling a life.

Some have proposed that the epidemic should be treated as a war, like Trump and ironically his “progressive” foes who are constantly on the lookout for the next “moral equivalent of war”. What they’re after, more accurately, is total war. Total war is the complete involvement of the community from kids collecting scrap metal in the neighborhood, to bond drives, the militarization of the work force, to all kinds of conservation and rationing schemes. But here’s the kicker: all war plans presume the existence of an economy. No economy, no war material, and no war. They want total war without the “total”.

The advocates of William James’s “moral equivalent of war” in response to the virus have killed off much of the economy. And given their rationale, they would inflict the prescription on us anytime the same, mutated, or cousin of the bug makes an encore. Can you imagine our economy and social life sitting on pins and needles every flu season? Stress on the people goes through the roof, uncertainty for all investment is the “new normal”, business and commerce becomes unsteady as they constantly look over their shoulders at the latest moves by some commissar, and workers and everybody else can’t plan ahead. Get used to that word “depression”. That will be our new normal.

We can’t do this, this shutting down of life. We can’t continue with social distancing, universal sheltering-in-place, the masks, and an end to work life – or its constriction. And what’s with this planned obsolescence of the neighborhood school, with its lifetime memories of friendships, teachers, band, cheerleaders, games? We can’t do this, and never should have done it. Instead, we need to do something more sensible: limit restrictions to the infected and vulnerable, pump private and public moneys into therapies and cures, and leave the rest of us to conduct our lives in accordance with our conscience and our God.

We should be admonished to proclaim “never again”. “Never again” applies to genocides, and it could also refer to the horror wreaked on our social, religious, and work lives. Never again. Please, never again.

RogerG

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A Debate We Need to Have

New York mayor Bill De Blasio at one of his press conference.

Hugh Hewitt on his morning radio news show recently recounted from his Washington Post column his anger at bicyclists on a bike path in unapproved groups not wearing masks. He reacted as if they were morally irresponsible. I was floored by his over-the-top reaction, disturbingly aware that many others probably share his troubling opinion. I most emphatically don’t.

Family biking on Long Island, NY, April 28, 2020.

Our responses to this virus should ignite a debate about what is permissible for government to do. Events frequently expose deeper issues at stake. Here, during this epidemic, are we to have a government that can end the very and most basic act of living, suspending the behaviors that make up a life, any life? Do we realize that we have quietly condoned a Leviathan suffering from an obesity of power? The lockdown, both national and by the states, raises these overarching questions.

While in Costco last week, the store mandated masks to be worn and passed them out at the entrance. I overheard a conversation among two customers in the store with one person extolling the virtues of the mask. The other was in general agreement and not disposed to push back. They answered the question in one way. But the view cries out for pushback. Have sovereign citizens all of a sudden become field hands under the control of political overseers, no one being allowed to dispute their overseers’ dictats?

The masks are a signifier of this deeper problem. There is official and peer pressure to wear them. We are told that they prevent us from spreading the virus to other people. Do they? Maybe in some instances but not in others. The virus like other viruses will spread from touching products on the shelves in the same Costco that requires us to wear masks. Masks reduce the flight of the bug but it will still land on something touched by someone reaching under the thing to scratch or remove bodily fluid, and from there to the hands, eyes, and every place under the mask of another patron.

Plus, can you imagine a cardio-vascular exercise routine as we partially reintroduce carbon dioxide back into our lungs while sweat pours underneath the things? The experience makes for one more excuse for a couch potato to not shed the spare tire. Gyms – corporate or personal – might go the way of Sears or JC Penneys.

And how long must we put up with it? Hewitt says through the summer. But that’s the problem: these measures are so open-ended. There’s a never-ending array of reasons to continue to corset our noses and mouths with the things: a second surge (or a third, fourth, ….), the bug is still lurking somewhere, etc. And, let’s not forget, that greatest of all fear trump cards: kids will die if we don’t get them used to noticing people from the eyes up.

To make the encumbrances more attractive, businesses have even popped up to sell us more stylish versions, like a Riyadh bizarre selling burkas with bling. Pardon me, the thought is appalling.

In the end, should all facets of a person’s existence be surrendered to the fear of catching a virus? At a certain point we must accept the risks of a traffic accident as we drive to work, getting salmonella from our dinner salad, a slip and fall as we shuffle between our work desk and the boss’s office, carpal tunnel syndrome from pounding on our computer keyboard, and catching a germ from a friend in a prayer circle. Risks must be accepted to live the life that God gave us.

Mandates for masks, sheltering-in-place, social distancing, massive business closures, and an end to all gatherings in “large” groups is more than an expression of prudent health measures. It’s an expression of totalitarian control. Freedom carries with it dangers, always has. And so does ensconcing near-omnipotent power in the hands of a select group of “experts”.

Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist, of Imperial College in London, and the author of the projection of 2.2 million deaths in the U.S from the coronavirus.

Lenin was surrounded by “experts” in revolution. If experience is an indicator, they were good at it … bringing about revolution, that is. They just weren’t much good at anything else, as the assorted misery, shortages, and bloodshed in the ensuing decades would attest. I’m not wiling to turn over my life to the dictates of narrow-minded “experts”.

“Experts”, as I’ve said before, are specialists. By definition, they only know one thing well. The decisions of a community will always require much more than that, such as impacts on livelihoods, our religious life, and that thing called the Constitution. A broad-reaching decision should never be the sole province of a compressed group of “experts”.

Please watch this 54-minute session of the Hillsdale College symposium, “The Coronavirus and the Constitution”.

RogerG

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The Great American Hijack

President Xi Jinping of Red China and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. What do they have in common? Answer: authoritarian power. Xi’s power naturally comes to him because he’s a communist. Whitmer’s comes from her habit – the same one belonging to all progressives – of never letting a crisis go to waste.

Progressives are always on the lookout for a “moral equivalent of war”. It’s in their philosophical DNA. They can’t help themselves. The reason is simple. They need to invent or manipulate a crisis to shock the public into accepting a transfer of immense power to them to remake society according to their lights. It’s not Constitutional; it’s dangerously extra-constitutional.

The coronavirus presents the perfect opportunity for them to seize the golden apple of power. I suspect that the belief is at the root of the early and grossly misleading casualty prognostications and Pelosi and Schumer’s obstructionism. The Great American Shutdown is really another example of the Great American Hijack of a crisis — or a recurring primer on how to expand the power of the state to control and direct the population.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi during the impeachment-palooza.

At nearly every opportunity, the progressives’ drive to expand state power shows in their budget proposals, their choice of interest group allies – totalitarian environmentalists, public sector unions, college faculties, the plaintiff’s bar, the misnamed civil rights lobby, etc. – and in their nonstop endeavors to obstruct Trump and Republicans. The progressives’ earlier grand design for our life, before they had the coronavirus, was the Green New Deal. Now they have a pandemic to play with.

William James in 1906 coined the phrase “moral equivalent of war” as a rallying cry for progressives to use to gain power. Ocasio-Cortez is the latest progressive/socialist political barker to embrace the tactic.
Ocasio-Cortez drumming up support for her Green New Deal version of the “moral equivalent of war”.

The scheme is becoming clearer now that we have more information about the disease and its spread. Gloom and doom were leveraged for a power grab. The seizure of power to kill an economy was publicly justified because of predictions of 2 million deaths in the US. Others in the field of epidemiology blew the whistle. Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford brought to light the key flaw in the Cassandras’ cries (Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Washington Examiner). The exaggerated estimates were a product of good algebra and BAD numbers. Known deaths were compared to the number of known cases. But we don’t know the ACTUAL number of cases. We can’t know because we don’t even know when the virus entered the US and haven’t performed enough antibody tests to give us a clue.

The first known case of COVID-19 in the US has been pushed back to Feb. 6 as based on recent antibody tests in Santa Clara County, which probably means that the virus was circulating in California as early as January given the virus’s 2-week gestation rate (LA Times). That is the state of play now. Who knows how much earlier as more antibody tests are conducted? The trajectory is earlier, not later.

Point: Known cases of infection is an ever-expanding number as we uncover more subjects with the antibody, which profoundly alters the morbidity rate downward. So, 4% becomes .5% and then becomes ..?.. The progressives’ dream of a shock-and-awe campaign to drive the public into their utopia is disintegrating as the morbidity rate plummets.

So, what of the validity of the Great American Shutdown? I can’t blame any public official for acting on the information at hand. Still, more caution should have been evident till a better picture takes shape, especially if rendering unconscious a nation’s economy is contemplated. Many of us will come out of the Shutdown only to face foreclosure, bankruptcy, and unemployment. Broad despair at Great Depression levels is hardly justified to curb a health threat that nobody could honestly describe … except those who are eager to be dishonest in order to socially engineer their vision of the better world.

Progressives, shame, shame on you.

RogerG

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The Cult of Experts

Chinese experts fighting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at the front line meet the press via a video press conference, introducing treatment of the COVID-19, in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, March 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

Not long ago, I learned of a person who was recently berated by an older acquaintance for his parents not practicing the dictats of shelter-in-place and the wearing of masks. The story is believable in the context of citations and/or arrests of a dad teaching his daughter to throw a baseball in a “closed” park or a surfer trying to catch a wave off a “closed” public beach. The pundit Kevin D. Williamson says that this is “ratfink” America at work. Today, America seems to be experiencing a major rat infestation. Why so many rats? The problem can be laid at the feet of the cult of the “expert”. Let me explain.

I’ve written of this before. America has acceded to the rule of “experts”, and the defenestration of popular sovereignty. Cop, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are united in the person of a civil service employee or political appointee wrapped in protection from popular accountability. We as citizens are increasingly out of the picture. We are left to the election of the participants in an increasingly meaningless debating society called Congress. We are habituated to the situation by the unceasing pounding of all things progressive in public schools’ curriculums and teacher training. The same weltanschauung permeates the popular culture.

A flow chart of the Progressive administrative state.

The “expert” is at the root of the scheme. The “expert” is degreed, preferably with a PhD. How did the master climb the mountain of high status? First, he or she jumped through the hoops of college general ed courses heavily burdened with victimology. Speaking of a pathogen, the matriculant was inculcated with the ideology by exposure to entire academic departments that are infected with it. Some owe their existence to the ideology: the Rainbow Coalition departments (Women’s Studies, etc.). They aren’t “studies” as much as they are ideology platforms. The Humanities and Social Sciences are particularly fetid. Remember this the next time you are treated by a doctor (MD that is) younger than you.

For instance, History – a subject I am most familiar – is often treated as a Progressivism apology tour. Nothing good happened till Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the beatification of environmentalism in the sixties.

There you have it for the typical college student before they devote the rest of their university sojourn – the majority of it – to their area of expertise, now that the corrupted general ed stuff is out of the way. That other stuff (general ed) is in the rear view mirror as they motor to their graduation and post-graduate destinations. The degree will certify their place in the pantheon of “experts”.

The word “expert” is an interesting one in today’s world. Really, in essence, an “expert” is a specialist. They have to be; the human mind is capable of absorbing only so much. For example, the explosion of knowledge in Biology has led to sub-categories, with sub-sub-categories, broken into sub-sub-sub-categories. Ditto for Computer Science and every other department in the college catalogue. The longer one stays in college to get that souped-up graduate degree, the more specialized the subject gets.

The intelligent design folks – much despised by died-in-the-wool Darwinists – have popularized the concept of irreducible complexity: a cell retains its complexity as we go deeper into its structure, thus drawing into question the necessary small adaptions for traditional Darwinian evolution to function. But the subject’s complexity also leads to a profusion of specialties. More true today than ever, experts are specialists!

Dr. Michael Behe of intelligent design and irreducible complexity fame vs. Darwin.

Soon we get the denizen of the administrative state whose forte is commonly limited to a very narrow slice of life. Yet, they have exaggerated importance in policy making that effects all aspects of a people’s existence. During this period of pandemic, naturally, experts whose bias is oriented toward epidemiology and medicine – and some things ideological as well – dictate policy that can destroy the economic and social parts of life. That’s the danger posed by specialists.

Ergo, the Great American Shutdown. For the expert, it’s an essential response. For everyone else facing their dictats, it’s a ravaged existence. A degreed, salaried, high-income person with substantial financial assets can afford to ride out the storm. It isn’t true for anyone whose kids, mortgage, and car payment requires a regular paycheck. These folks are ruined.

The specialized expert defines the parameters of risk when a situation falls within their wheelhouse. As one would expect, their explication of risk conforms to the sole regard of medical health. Their definition is much less considerate of different levels of risk due to circumstance. People who ride bikes run a higher risk of getting mauled by a 2-ton car than an aged pedestrian on his evening constitutional. An independent plumber comes into contact with more pathogens than a Google coder. Some are more willing to accept risk because their livelihoods require it. But the plumber doesn’t have the ear of Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, or Schumer as much as Anthony Fouci and the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Understandable? Yes, but the stew of policy demands other ingredients. Without the other additives, you might get poison.

What does the exalted role of expert get us? We all too often get a dose of scientific fact with a large smattering of personal bias. The hyper-charged politics of crafting policy brings out the worst in everybody, including our “experts”. Confirmation bias runs wild among media mavens who are on the lookout for experts to help them wield their ideological axes. So, if you are a writer with homeschoolers in his or her crosshairs, there’s no shortage of ed and psyche types with PhD’s attached to their names who are nothing but activists masquerading as experts.

If you are looking for an egregious example of same, look no further than Harvard Magazine, May-June 2020, “The Risks of Homeschooling”, by Erin O’Donnell (thanks Kevin D. Williamson for the heads up). The whole thing is a tome for ripping children from their parents and home and placing their upbringing in the hands of the government’s employees and schools. Stalin, Mao, and the rest of the 20th-century’s walk of shame would be proud.

Fact: Human beings with PhD’s after their names are still human beings. Plus, their specialties come with blinders. An epidemic should place public health experts at the head of the table. Just make sure that the other seats are filled with people of more well-rounded perspectives. If done right, we might come to conclude that the Great American Shutdown was a huge mistake.

RogerG

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We Are Up Against a Wall, Two of Them

Visitors to the New York Department of Labor are turned away at the door by personnel due to closures over coronavirus concerns on Wednesday. (photo: John Minchillo/AP Photo)

Turn on the tv, go online, or listen to the radio and the drumbeat is the same: “We are up against the wall with this virus and must do all that we can to defeat it.” Left out of the harangue is the presence of another wall. It is just as real. It is the societal one containing 99% of life. We are about to crash headlong into it as we avoid the illness and any accompanying deaths.

Is it wise to put the social and economic part of life – our society – in an induced coma for a prolonged period, till the utopian near-zero infection rate is attained? The goal, like the communist one of a classless society, is a destructive impossibility; one fraught with social and economic collapse. In a real coma, muscles and body systems atrophy. Bans on funerals, weddings, prayer services and communion, Little League, outings to the park, everything that makes us fully human, will leave a scar. Zoom is no substitute for flesh and blood interaction, as some of us may grow too accustomed to the social isolation. Will social isolation become the new normal for more of us?

In addition, a months-long timeout from work is a headlong dash into an economic wall. Skills and the work ethic atrophy. Businesses close, many forever. Many of us will be thrown into a long period of unemployment. The single-minded avoidance of a disease will mean the defeat of the illness at the cost of the livelihoods of millions. What are the health effects of wrecking the personal lives of millions? Imagine it.

Looking to the federal government to paper over the growing hole in production (the stuff of business) with, literally, make-believe money is an excursion into the mind of a child. You can’t divorce the growth of the money supply from the growth in the production of wealth. Dumping truckloads of money to fill a hole in production will only make the money worthless, if it doesn’t break the financial back of future generations. We replace the virus monster with two other monsters: a gargantuan national debt and Venezuelan inflation. Now that’s another real, unavoidable wall for you.

German children build a pyramid with stacks of inflated currency in 1923.

Even the economic guru of the Democratic Party, John Maynard Keynes, counseled against what Democrats, and the collective wisdom (?) of DC, habitually do: spend, spend, spend. Keynes advised governments to save in good times and spend in bad. We don’t save; it’s spend, spend, spend regardless. We’ve got the back end of his advice down pat, and pretend he didn’t say anything else.

The situation has taken on the characteristics of totalitarianism. My wife and her sister were returning a couple of days ago from California (for a very good reason, trust me) and confronted a sign on the door of a gas-‘n-shop in a lonely quarter of the California desert near the border with Nevada. It read, “Anybody shopping without wearing a mask will be arrested.” Stopping the coronavirus means complimenting the Communist Party of China with the adoption of their approach to governance.

Paramilitary officers wearing face masks to contain the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus walk along a street in Beijing, China, March 18, 2020. (photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

The wall of illness and death isn’t the only one that we face. Crashing into the wall of our social life and economic realities is just as real. Those economic cinder blocks, in particular, can’t be made to magically disappear in the same manner as the first half of Keynes’s advice. Apparently, I was wrong in thinking that the belief in magic was on its way out with the Scientific Revolution.

RogerG

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The Joys of Not Watching the News

On a 2 ½ hour trip to Missoula (Mt.) to pickup a gun that I ordered – oh how that might send some cosmopolitan types to the safe space of their prejudices – I was listening to Fox News on XM Radio.  It was wall-to-wall coverage of the coronavirus … and how many different ways to spin dread.  No matter where you go, CNN or MSNBC or the legacy networks, it’s the same ridiculously excessive treatment.  Is there any serious audit of the proof to justify either the over-the-top monopoly of airtime or the extraordinary step of shutting down American society?  From where I sit, I haven’t heard much questioning of the base reasons.  So, I slashed my watching and listening to news channels and turned to entertainment offerings.  I’m happier.

What do you get for all the coverage?  You get a Freddy Krueger script from dusk to dusk.  Mind you, The Nightmare on Elm Street was fiction, but so might be much of the newsroom chatter that makes its way to our tv screens.  Horror is manufactured with numbers from a process similar to the one at Bingo Night at the senior center and plugged into predictions of a resurgence of the 14th-century Black Death, only later within the blink of an eye having to ratchet down the apocalypse from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1.  The whipsaw has become so routine that a person is left  in a constant state of bewilderment.  I’m skeptical about anyone claiming to know the state of play.

The possibility that much of the coverage could be facetious might be due to the distortions from geographic isolation by our top-drawer media organizations.  Many of their denizens look outside their New York City, or Acela corridor, offices and see coronavirus hell.  No doubt, the situation has developed as an urban – more than that, cosmopolitan – phenomena.  Yet, it is through these highly susceptible locations for pandemics that we receive our window to the world.

Conversely, people in the rest of the country look around and see restaurants shuttered, workers at home without work, their hospitals not teeming with the sick and dying but veritable ghost towns, people who venture out wearing N95 masks or looking like bank robbers, and eerily empty streets.  Everyone is made to be spooked by a view of the world from New York.  Should, though, everyone be scared to that degree in that manner?  I am beginning to doubt it.  To borrow from a Las Vegas ad, what happens in New York should stay in New York.

A health worker carries a dead body of a COVID-19 victim to container morgues in Brooklyn, New York.(TAYFUN COSKUN/ANADOLU AGENCY)

These purveyors in the concentrated epicenters of the epidemic have at their disposal the new bane of rational thought: statistical modeling.  Not that statistical modeling isn’t useful.  The problem lies in the raw data that’s shoved into them and the conclusions without profound qualifications that will accompany them.  Back in 1979, I took a data processing class – yes, such a thing existed in 1979 – and was introduced to the acronym GIGO, garbage in and garbage out.  Models are formulas put in lines of computer code.  Sometimes the models are cracked, but more times than not it’s the numbers that are fed into them.  Math doesn’t have a mind.  It just does what we tell it do, and if we ask it to crunch bad numbers, it will do it.  Models don’t peer into the mind of God.  They are a reflection of our imperfect mind.

 

Mental garbage (in and out) is driving our public conversations.  The embroidering that surrounds the talk on climate change is fed by the rubbish.  The mangled logic goes forward in time as well as backwards.  Either the barkers are captives of recent and present temp readings to put future global temperatures on an exponential rocket trajectory, or they’re soothsayers reading the entrails of ice cores, tree rings, or rock strata going back millennia to defend their preconceived future rocket trajectory.  Probably both.  Models don’t correct for the flaw; they exacerbate it.  It’s done all the time now that we are powered by “Intel inside”.  It’s still the same though: garbage goes into the chip and garbage comes out.  The pronouncements are accepted by the mathematically illiterate as God speaking through the burning bush.

The virus from China breeds quickly in particular conditions, and so does loosey-goosey modeling during pandemics.  In the case of the current illness, we have cases and deaths.  What qualifies as a “case” and “death” varies from place to place.  It varies according to the honesty in official places and the availability of honest-to-God and modern clinics in every village.  Do you think both exist in adequate quantities everywhere on the globe?  We shouldn’t take to heart any “global” numbers.

 

We shouldn’t take to heart Germany’s, Italy’s, especially China’s, and many numbers coming out of the US.  Disaggregating the cause of death from a patient with multiple life-threatening conditions can be as complicated as unraveling the Gordian Knot.  I don’t know if all nations even conduct a COVID-19 test upon death.  I suspect many don’t.  Some nations might be just plain promiscuous in assigning deaths to the virus.  Some places test more people as others assess only those who walk into the hospital; therefore, morbidity rates bounce around like flubber (“The Absent-Minded Professor”, 1961).  Then, the “experts” average the flubber and plug it into the “model”.  Out of the formula comes the ski slope on graph paper at press conferences.  And we have a shutdown of world society and an end to respect for the concept of livelihoods.

The professionals in white smocks then tell us that livelihoods must take a back seat to an all-out effort to prevent us from getting sick, as if nothing else matters.  It’s another sign of the myopia of the professional. The “expert” may be a great doctor of medicine but understandably more limited in passing judgment in the social and economic realms.  Doc may be great at treating your fever but don’t ask him or her about advice on adjusting your investment portfolio.  Nonetheless, for the medical master, it’s a siren call to stop the virus at all costs, with one of those costs being our livelihoods.

 

The professional has a mental reflex to ignore the recognition of different levels of risk that accrue to people according to their varying personal circumstances. The self-employed plumber needs to generate income each week and is willing to take more risk.  No, he mustn’t be allowed, the medical pro tells us.  A single all-encompassing risk of zero is imposed on everyone, everywhere.  Of course, the salaried, the whizzes with degrees, and jet-set crowd are much more financially secure and occupationally situated to handle zero-risk at little loss.  Not true of anyone else.  Yet, it’s the blinkered and biased view of the medical poohbah that counts.

Okay, okay, a health crisis demands the centrality of the medical professional. It’s not the importance of the doctor in a situation like this in question here.  It’s the tendency not to temper their counsel with other voices.  An epidemic has many implications and their acknowledgement should also have a role in the sausage-making of a government response.  We should balance the concern about the spread of the disease with the quality of life after it.  Yeah, we will have our life after the contagion, but will it be a life worth admiring?

Is this a scene we want to repeat after the pandemic?

Should an epidemic – one in which we don’t have an accurate picture of its extent and severity – be an excuse to destroy your job, your ability to make your way in the world?  Is everything reduced to a risk level compatible to a person comfortable with zero, and with the outsized influence to impose it?  Is it proper to stampede the populace with erroneous numbers, models, and projections, only to destroy occupations that made life worth living for millions?  Surely, the pile of lost livelihoods will mightily surpass the body count the longer the Great American Shutdown persists.  There are alternatives.

What should be done?  Open up American life now, with caveats.  Implement the measures of testing, masks, social distancing where practical, while recognizing locational differences.  Start by loosening the shackles in geographical areas less affected and in critical industries.  From there, phase in the opening of society as the severity warrants.  The goal should be a resumption of life,  sooner rather than later, even as we acknowledge that doing so involves risk.  “Bending the curve” should apply to livelihoods as well as the infected.

Risk is part of life.  Zero risk is utopian, and “utopia” is translated from the Greek to mean “no-place”.  In other words, zero risk in unattainable.  And when it is pursued, catastrophe is the result.  Keep this in mind as you watch the parade of color commentators of the medical profession in the wall-to-wall coverage on COVID-19.

 

RogerG

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A Post-Wuhan World

The Duomo di Milano (Cathedral of Milan) before the pandemic and after. (Business Insider)

Most of the pundits in my universe seem to be predicting an end to the virus shutdown in most places by the end of summer at the earliest.  I don’t know.  For many of those heavily populated blue states with big balance sheets and paper-thin operating margins, the shutdown would be hard to survive past three weeks.  They are in a tug-of-war between bloated spending and deflating revenues on the one hand and an epidemic on the other.  They may be stuck in a conundrum of bankruptcy or deaths.

Looking past the peril of fiscal calamity facing blue states, what started in Wuhan, China, ought to begin a rethink about life after the pandemic.  Here’s my list of what “ought” to be under consideration – not what will be considered – as we look past the Great American Shutdown.

First, the social ramifications. Living in cities has always carried the risks – to go along with all the positives – of crime, family disruption, many vices, and pollution.  We are experiencing the lightning spread of a communicable disease as another of them.  A teeming critical mass of people is a breeding ground for disease.  Recently, the big cities have experienced a renaissance of popularity at the expense of small towns and rural areas.  Well, 20-somethings, you might want to reconsider.  A cheek-by-jowl existence in a densely packed area radiates infectious diseases at the speed of a tidal wave.

Visually compare a US map of H1N1 infections with a map of coronavirus infections.  Infections concentrate in metropolitan and coastal areas.

H1N1 of 2009

The coronavirus of 2020.

Furthermore, our cities are meccas for immigration – jobs being the powerful magnet.  A diverse and globalized population is one with the most interactions with large swaths of the outside world.  Many conduits exist for the entry of pathogens into these crowded places of people with many foreign relations.  If we are to have large-scale immigration, it must come with large-scale screening.  If we lack the means to screen the influx, we ought to reduce the number to a manageable level.

A large caravan of migrants from Central America, trying to reach the U.S., walks along a road Oct. 21, 2018, in Tapachula, Mexico. (CNS photo/Reuters/Ueslei Marclino)

Second, the economic ramifications.  Free trade, with modifications, is too good a deal to pass up.  We need it to discipline our unions (public and private sector), rent seeking, and crony capitalists.  But free trade with a totalitarian regime that recognizes no private sphere of life comes close to being a non sequitur.  Free trade becomes impossible, unless you are committed to a prostrate position before Chinese Communist imperial ambitions.  Our free trade orthodoxy should make more allowance for national security and economic viability.  The virus should remind us of the CCP’s nature and our past complicity in boosting them.  End the complicity, boost the skepticism.

In this vein, “decoupling” is the talk of the town. Some economic distancing from the CCP is warranted if for no reason than our wish to not run out of Advil.

Reducing our economic interactions with the CCP also means the construction of a strategic cordon of nations around them.  Strategic alliances often begin as commercial ones.  Draw to us the nations most at risk of being swallowed up in a Chinese version of Japan’s Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1930’s and 40’s.  The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), far from Trump’s claim to be one of the “worst trade deals ever”, was an essential step in the pivot to Asia to counter Red Chinese hegemony.  However Trump wishes to pursue it, he needs to stop the barroom philosophy and resurrect the concept with a vengeance.  Our experience with the China’s virus, and the CCP’s secretive response to it, demands a rethink of our relationship.

Third, the political ramifications.  Low-and-behold, federalism works.  Top-down control from DC, covering America’s 3.8 million square miles, is a farce.  Democrats love the idea especially when they sit atop the 3 branches in DC, even though it’s insane for a country that stretches across a continent and ocean. This isn’t France (7% of the land area of the US) or the Isle of Britain (2%).

In our system, this is recognized in the parceling of the country into sovereign states.  Yes, they are “sovereign”, meaning that they have constitutionally established powers.  An important one in this moment is the “police powers”.  When most of us think of crime, I’ll bet that 90% of the time we are thinking of the kind passing through our local PD’s, DA’s, and local/state courts without realizing it.  Charles Manson and his sick and murderous “family” experienced the justice of the state of California, not the kind issued from federal headquarters in DC.  Get the point?

Charles Manson is escorted to court for preliminary hearing on December 3, 1969 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by John Malmin/Los Angeles Times)

Three Manson Family murderers: Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. 1971.

The dispersal of power in our federalism system reaffirms Tip O’Neill’s (D, Mass., Speaker of the House in the 70’s and 80’s) “all politics is local”. Not every state wants a looney-bin government as in California.  That thing was chosen by the sovereign residents of that sovereign state — and maybe some foreign nationals as well.  Other states have chosen to be less inclined to flout the 2nd Amendment, be so tax-happy, and be so bewitched by the science fiction of apocalyptic global warming.  States can adjust to their circumstances … and craziness.  Thus, a near-quarantine in New York shouldn’t be copied in Kansas, a state with few coronavirus cases.

Crises are thought to be prime opportunities for the centralization of power.  Well, maybe that is more empty legend than anything else.  Right now, people are seeing their governors taking action and sharing equal time with Trump’s daily briefing.  It’s a visual reminder of the Civics education that many didn’t get in high school for many reasons having little to do with the classroom (lack of parental oversight being one).  It’s an excellent counterpoint to the adolescent elevation of the president to demigod status.

The president doesn’t rule by divine right.  He’s constrained by separation of powers as everyone is – or should be – in the federal Leviathan.  The public got another Civics lesson when Congress was debating the virus relief bill, which the Democrats tried to change from “relief” to their favorite of “social engineering”.  In addition, they got a huge dose of the sloppy sausage-making that is natural to any gathering of people who don’t agree.  A White House Caesar has to wait for the butchers to deliver the sausage – i.e., money.  His powers to throw money at the problem are quite limited.  The power of the purse, after decades of progressive/socialist erosion, still has a heartbeat.

As for the Democrats in DC (the hypothetical “loyal opposition”), the word for their state of mind is not so much “cooperation” as “revolution”.  The crisis has smoked them out as revolutionary opportunists.  They seem to be following the historical precedent of Lenin and his Bolsheviks.  Lenin wanted the War (WWI) to continue to go badly for Russia to create anarchy and more misery.  Sound familiar?  The House Dems tried to jam down the throats of the American public elements of the Green New Deal, many gambits of rabid wokeness, and slush funds for lefty sacred cows (PBS and NPR, etc.).  I have doubts regarding the appetizing nature of this sausage to a broader audience.

In fact, the metaphor of sausage is very apropos when thinking about our whole polity from Anchorage to Miami.  It’s an affront to the neat, tidy, and sterile designs of people like Woodrow Wilson, our first PhD social scientist president.  For him, efficiency in government meant corralling our elected representatives into a corner in order to carve out more power for a clerisy of “experts” who are ensconced in the executive branch and courts.  The scheme only makes sense to a progressive if they are in charge, something not completely true today.  Still, ever since, every so-called “progressive” is wrapped in the same mental straitjacket all the way down to Obama and Pelosi and company.  It won’t work, and oughtn’t work.

The virus should be a wake-up call. The free market sausage should contain more than meat.  The immigration policy sausage should recognize that too much isn’t good for you.  The city sausage might profit from shorter dimensions, and more production of the rural and town kind.  The federal sausage could benefit from a dispersal of manufacturing from DC to the hinterland.  In these ways, we can avoid a singular and all-encompassing sausage supply chain infecting all of us with contaminated meat, there being no alternatives after the attainment of Wilson’s dream.

New York’s Gov. Cuomo – a self-proclaimed “progressive” – is misleading when he says that the country after the pandemic will experience a “new normal”. The “new normal” ought not be so much a new outlook on life as the realization of the bankruptcy of his ideology and its policy proscriptions.

RogerG

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Hysteria From Knowing Too Much

Philadelphia business closed due to the pandemic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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The Real Risk Factors

New York City residents in March 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG