Back in March at the peak of the virus panic, I posted my dismay at the onset of the intentional near-strangulation of human activity from coast to coast, ocean to ocean, border to border. I reasoned back then that we couldn’t and shouldn’t lockdown almost everything and think that we can get away with it for very long. Well, we were beginning to come out of it and, lo and behold, our power-hungry czars are pushing us back into it. This re-strangulation is an affront to reason, prudence, and humanity.
It’s happening across the country. Our potentates of commissioners, mayors, governors, and army of zero-risk utopians hiding under the moniker of “scientific experts” – albeit in contradiction to other “scientific experts” – are re-imposing masks, re-shuttering businesses, and coming as close as they possibly can to making America a sputtering ghost town once again.
A man walks past an apartment building bearing signs of joblessness and worry. (photo: ANDREW HARNIK/AP)
This morning, I learned that the Board of Health of Missoula County has issued a decree for the mandatory wearing of masks in public. And once again, another deep blue urban node (yes, we have those too in Montana) is spearheading the way back into the straitjacket. What’s this with the Left-liberal attraction for the totalitarian temptation (to borrow from Jean Francois Revel’s 1977 best-seller, The Totalitarian Temptation)? They get an erotic giddiness when they sense an opportunity to control the comings and goings and doings of an entire people. This will flounder and fail like the previous bout of authoritarianism.
The totalitarian temptation as an affection for Marx: Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz, Germany. (animaflora | us.fotolia.com)2016 election map by precinct: blue for Cinton, red for Trump. The greatest enthusiasm for lockdowns are in those blue dots, places of significant sympathy for the ends and means of Marx.
It’s a twisting in the wind in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. No collection of commissars can control the lives of tens of thousands of people, let alone millions. Somebody will deviate despite their newly minted dictum and out goes the virus. You can “bend the curve” in the short run as you extend the “curve” into the long and longer run … or until the magical elixir of a vaccine is concocted which, as in most viral vaccines, won’t be a silver bullet. Or, better yet for our power-hungry ninnies, they experience the joy of a Biden victory speech on November 4.
The prospect of a vaccine pushes out the government-manufactured misery for at least the next several months, long enough for a depressed electorate to accede to AOC-inspired governance. Biden will be irrelevant since he is nothing but a floating piece of wood in a rampaging river.
Biden in his basement.
We must get away from the strangulation and do what we were getting around to doing as we were opening up: therapies for the infected and isolation for the vulnerable. The development of natural immunities is the only path to health, as opposed to the slow suffocation of life and livelihoods by government dictats leading us into the world of decay and despair for as far as the eye can see.
Stop the madness. If deep blue districts want to smother their societies, those disinclined to that existence should … Move! No society can thrive with an off-and-on switch in the hands of newly empowered despots.
Remember that scene in “Singin’ in the Rain”? You know, the one of the switch-a-roo when the audience learns that Lina Lamont’s (Jean Hagen) singing is a fraud because the curtain is drawn to expose Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) as the real voice.
Lina was faux singing in much the same manner as we experienced a faux Fourth in PBS’s A Capitol Fourth. It was a desultory performance of retread performances strung together with satellite social-distancing recitals and no audience anywhere. When it came to the fireworks spectacular at the end, it was spectacular but proved as empty as Lina’s voice because the Mall was a ghost town. A celebration needs a crowd, period.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth 2020 hosted by Vanessa Williams and John Stamos.
Similarly, is this what is meant by the “new normal” for our schools: an hour in front of a computer monitor with the occasional writing prompt and textbook assignments? Some schools may open but your kids will enter a classroom of everyone masked, kept far apart, and wearing gloves, as in a sci-fi horror movie. If so, parents pull your kids out of these schools and away from the silly distance-learning, and run as fast as you can with the kids in tow to more reasonable locales. The tactic is to real learning what child abuse is to proper parenting.
This year’s July Fourth was also Jekyll and Hyde affair. I went from the insipid PBS production on the tube (Hyde) to outside and the vibrant popping and the wonderful flares of explosions and light from skyrockets (Jekyll) all around me. Just knowing that people were gathering with friends and loved ones to ignite the display added so much more to the electricity of the moment. John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, “It [the Fourth] ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Exactly.
The choice of songs in this year’s PBS edition were suspect, especially in light of the ongoing anarchy in city streets. The producers seemed to be keen on a theme of social healing. The show opened with the song, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”. Nothing wrong with that, but rioters, looters, and vandals don’t need love; they need to be arrested. The angry marchers in our Democrat-run cities and states were exploiting George Floyd’s body to advance a series of lies in pursuit of an overturning of America. A socialist revolution is an afront to the America that we love. The cries of “systemic racism” are as easily disproven as “defund/abolish the police” could be shown to be deadly. Our times don’t call for a “healing” but demand a complete refutation of the movement’s falsehoods. Our times don’t call for “healing” but demand the re-imposition of decency through arrests, convictions, and incarceration.
People loot Hot Topic at The Pike in Downtown Long Beach, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Photo by Brandon RIchardson)Protestors demonstrate outside of a burning fast food restaurant, Friday, May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
This mangling of our July Fourth was brought to us by policy proscriptions corrupted by politics. The longer that we make our public spaces ghost towns and mar our faces with masks and treat each other like lepers, the more we destroy economic life. The more livelihoods are smashed, the more resentments grow toward the man in the White House. And that’s the ultimate goal: remove Trump, takeover the federal government and impose high taxes, feverishly pursue a quixotic crusade against a shadowy “systemic racism”, foist the totalitarian Green New Deal on us, and straitjacket us in a quicksand of red tape, thanks to a growing army of the administrative state. The Democrats will succeed in producing the results of a lockdown without a virus, to the detriment for the vast majority of Americans – but not for them since they’ll be the new Soviet nomenklatura.
Heck, the Democrats even want to disarm us by turning the Second Amendment into dead letter as they try to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Neither our livelihoods, our persons, or our children’s future will be safe. Every time somebody’s bad actions goes viral, out comes the angry marchers, looters, rioters, and vandals and up goes the torching of businesses, beatings, killings, and another wave of erasures of the symbols of our national heritage. You can do nothing but run for the hills – and maybe not even that if they succeed in criminalizing the oil industry.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a news conference after several dams breached in Midland on Wednesday, May 20, 2020. (photo: Rebecca Cook / Reuters)
Why else the resuscitation of the Democrat’s enthusiasm for secession, if not as part of the full court press to get Trump? Since Trump’s inauguration, blue-state governors, county commissioners, school boards, and mayors have done all in their power to nullify federal immigration law in their zones of authority. Public health isn’t immune to their designs. While Trump is consigned to the role of helpmate, the blue-state neo-Napoleons in governor’s mansions strap the lives of their residents. They keep a boot heel on the neck of the people’s comings and goings. They gamble that a depressed people will turn against the man in the oval office.
And when it comes to mayhem in their streets, blue-state suzerains turn a blind eye as Trump is made to look bewildered. Pardon me for suspecting that they harbor designs to make Trump appear impotent.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth symbolized the worst of our times in both form and content. The program’s musical content, in some instances, was the wrong message for the wrong time. And its form was an implicit sanction for the continued suppression of American social and economic life. I turned to the antidote of a DVD of James Cagney’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.
“Until I know this sure uncertainty, I’ll entertain the offered fallacy.” (William Shakespeare, “The Comedy of Errors”)
Electron microscope at the University of Bath, UK.
I can’t leave the subject of the coronavirus alone; riots and “defunding” the police be damned. Everything about the virus says so much about ourselves and our current state of affairs.
An image of the new coronavirus taken with an electron microscope. (photo: U.S. National Institutes of Health/AP)
“COVID-19 Is Not the Flu”, so stipulates the title of John McCormack’s piece in the May 18 edition of National Review. It’s the primary assumption that drives most everything that has been written and said on the subject of our current contagion, the coronavirus. Hugh Hewitt, another of the center/right commentariat, is fond of prefacing some of his remarks on his radio show with “in the year of plague”. Is the sickness a “plague” and is it “not the flu”? Honestly, I don’t know, and neither do they, and neither does much of the army of others who have contributed to the widely publicized tale about the virus. They claim a confidence that is unwarranted.
The storyline on the contagion is its proclaimed near-apocalyptic threat to civilization, so much so that we have come close to ending society. Thus, we are required to live a life of imitation and strangeness: an ersatz sociability through a mask, distance, digitization, and no touching; a dangerous fiddling with people’s livelihoods through arbitrary edicts of “essential” and “nonessential”; and the unwitting deputization of a horde of unthinking scolds.
I stand corrected. The unthinking scolds are thinking, but they could be reasoning from a host of unexamined assumptions.
One unexamined assumption occurred to me as I was reading McCormack’s essay. His comments were composed at a time of what could be referred to, in hindsight, as high hysteria. While in this public state-of-mind, nothing, as far as I am aware, has been written or said on the possibility of the distorting effects of focusing so many resources on this virus that comparisons with other pestilences are impossible. The distorting effects contribute to an emotional and socio-political environment that then corrupts the raw data. The rationale becomes the equivalent of a house of cards but is sold as rock solid.
The field of physics presents an excellent illustration. Scientists have long been aware of the possible impact of their detection methods on the object of their interest. The mere act of observation can alter the nature of it and distort their findings. As a result, they must be constantly conscious of this “observer effect”. Are our public policy experts, political leaders, and punditry class mindful of it in areas beyond science? Given what I’ve seen, heard, and read, I kinda doubt it.
I’ll use McCormack’s piece to lay out the conventional explanation for the gravity of this virus. His argument that it isn’t the flu, and shouldn’t be treated like it is, relies on an analysis that probably suffers from the observer effect. The observer in this case would be the public and private entities with a singular laser focus on this thing. No sickness has ever drawn this much attention in recent times. The final public and private bill for our reaction to this contagion hasn’t been finalized. As of today, the federal government has pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into relief and treatments. The Federal Reserve will inject $1.5 trillion to finance the response. How quaint for Sen. Everett Dirksen to opine in 1933, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” We have to add a zero to keep up with the numbers rolling out of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
A few trillion dollars of observer makes for one mammoth potential for distortion.
In addition, the states have thrown another billions, if not trillions, into the kitty. California’s governor Gavin Newson estimated in April that the initial drain on the state’s treasury will amount to $7 billion (We’re still in Dirksen land), with more billions by the end of the year. Many states have seen their fiscal ledgers tip into the red, maybe way into the red. The word “bankruptcy” now applies to more than the businesses that they have driven into insolvency with their loose labeling of “nonessential”.
The upshot: all this activity has generated more data on this contagion than any other. To make the case that this candidate for mayhem is worse than prior ones, McCormack trots out the numbers for H1N1 of 61 million infections and 12,500 deaths over 12 months. The death toll for the flu season of 2018-19 runs about 34,200, he says. How do we know that these numbers were a product of a run-of-the-mill “good enough” as opposed to the frantic hyperactivity for corona? The difference in response between the culprits colors the numbers to such an extent that they could become incomparable.
In the earlier instances, the beginning and end dates for the infection might be more casually agreed upon. In quite another, contact tracing is conducted with all the intensity of Nazis ferreting out those with the “poisoned” blood of the Jews. The start/finish is pushed further and further out as more and more attention is devoted to it. The difference in the intensity of scrutiny creates a classic apples and oranges fallacy. Like isn’t compared with like.
Then, overreaction feeds more overreaction. Borrowing from science once again, we have now created a system feedback loop of frenzy feeding into more frenzy. Our collection and analysis of feverishly acquired data doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurs in an atmosphere of fear and doom.
It’s likely that the overhanging sense of dread will stampede governments into monumental actions that will culminate in subsidizing moral hazard in the realm of data collection. The money for defraying the costs of the epidemic will reward the promiscuous assignment of cases to the coronavirus category. The numbers are corrupted. The situation produces grossly uneven numbers depending on an official’s susceptibility to the corruption.
Macomb County, Mich., Chief Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz in April was quoted as saying, “I think a lot of clinicians are putting that condition (COVID-19) on death certificates when it might not be accurate because they died with coronavirus and not of coronavirus.” In addition, “Are they [the coronavirus death numbers] entirely accurate? No. Are people dying of it? Absolutely. Are people dying of other things and coronavirus is maybe getting credit? Yeah, probably.” Numbers get inflated in a surrounding climate of subsidized frenzy.
The shear volume and intensity of observation warps our perception of reality. It makes more difficult the useful the sort of comparisons which are critical for ascertaining the magnitude of the threat. The more we peer into a contagion, the more we make those numbers incomparably unique.
All of us are observers who have been made more obsessive about this disease by a world of extraordinary connectivity. We know in an instant what is happening anywhere. If our government is drawn to a particular happenstance, it’s ferocity of activity will combine with our own to disfigure our judgment. I can only wish that our chattering classes were as aware of this humbling aspect of our nature.
Protesters run away when police move forward near the White House during a protest over the death of George Floyd in Washington D.C., the United States, on May 30, 2020. Demonstrations and riots have spread to cities across the United States after a video went viral of George Floyd being suffocated to death by a white police officer in the midwest U.S. state of Minnesota on May 25. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
Right now, riots and General Flynn are competing with the epidemic for headline news space. All of them can only be reasonably processed by taking a breath and waiting for pertinent facts to arise and a cooling-off period to assess the situation in an adult fashion. Understanding the George Floyd case will take more serious and steady minds than those possessed by Democrat firebrands and a crowd of urbanites-turned-street-thugs. We’re quickly coming to realize for the umpteenth time that it doesn’t take much for chaotic home lives to become chaotic streets.
On the Flynn front, the suave Obama may turn out to be what he was all along: a smooth-talking community organizer who made the upper echelons of the federal government an arm of his Democratic Party. Bad news for General Flynn and the 2016 victor over Obama’s anointed successor. It’s only beginning to tumble out. Frequently, first impressions are wrong in love and headlines.
Former U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn departs U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., December 1, 2017. (REUTERS/Jonathan ErnsC)
It’s no less true about the virus shipped to us from China. The reaction of our “better” people was lackadaisical at first and then immediately went to Nigel Tufnel’s (Spinal Tap) “11”. I have long suspected that big decisions were made on very little evidence, and much of that false.
A good deal of the reaction depends on where you sit, as I’ve said before. Our media central nervous system centers in New York City and runs up and down the Bos-Wash spinal cord, the most densely packed region in the country. .2% of New York’s population was killed by the bug. The inhibitions to a surrender of the mind to raw emotions was dramatically lowered by simply looking out the window (or, more properly, the “window” of our many connected devices). Can you really say that the view wouldn’t overwhelm a person’s rational calculus?
Sure, the same can be said of someone living in a lightly affected region, like my Montana. Both perspectives are probably wrong, but can we ignore the reality that more facts have emerged and more alternative voices have had a chance to weigh in? The virus is contagious and not nearly as lethal as Oxford’s crystal ball gazing that gave us 2.2 million deaths. The disease has trended downward from the Black Death apocalypse to something just above flu season.
The common cold.
I can’t help but wonder that the huge numbers of infected are at least partially a result of the massive total war approach for dealing with this particular candidate for mayhem. We know more about the reach of this virus than probably any of the more recent varietals of flu, including the strange strains of fall 2019. We have always been swimming around in a sea of pathogens. That won’t change when this culprit fades. By concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, we exaggerate its relative magnitude. Great and highly focused efforts inherently distort perspective.
The 100,000 deaths figure demands reexamination. Not that the number is wrong (even though it can be contested from a number of angles) but we have no reliable comparison with other infectious diseases because they were never accorded this level of rectal examination.
The trigger for this piece was the discovery on the CDC website of a “case fatality rate” (CFR) of 0.26% for corona (thanks Robert Verbruggen). That contrasts with the run-of-the-mill CFR ranging from 0.5 to 1.0. What’s up with that? Another example of the downward progression of the disease’s lethality.
Are we about to experience another round of disappointment for those panting for the next “Moral Equivalent of War” so as to stampede us into the Green New Deal or a woke utopia? Ignoring the ski slope fall in the actuality of a cataclysm, some still act as if the mirage of the March state-of-play has magically become as true today as it was false back then. They are as stuck in the past as Bernie Sanders and AOC are wallowing in their long-dead Scandinavian socialism. AOC’s “Scandinavia” has the same totemic value for her as the use of “selfish” and “reckless” by today’s wannabe authoritarians.
Was it all worth it? You now, the shutdowns, shelter-in-place, masks, social distancing; the loss of 10-25% of small businesses; the movement of millions of workers from the workplace to unemployment; the rise in depression, suicides, domestic violence, and substance abuse; the release of “nonviolent” inmates to “nonviolently” prey on their neighbors; and the damage to the health care of anyone not suffering from a fever and pneumonia. And let’s not forget the destruction of social life by the loss of grandma’s hugs, big-family dinners, the social bonding of the handshake, antiseptic romance through a mask, and human interaction reduced to a digital image on a screen. We may as well go all-in for sex-bots and any motorized version of a person in grey hair.
She’s a model … James with Harmony in The Sex Robots Are Coming. James is among the protagonists of The Sex Robots Are Coming, an investigation into the development of animatronic, AI-enabled silicone sexbots, and part of Rise of the Robots season on British tv.
More of the same is likely to come. These geniuses have yet to distinguish this contagion from any prior, contemporaneous, or future one. If the strangulation of society is justified for this rapidly declining threat, buckle up for the next fall/winter. As some addicts have said, taking the first hit of coke makes it easier to snort the next line, and the next, and the next, and ….
I am not sure if we are careening toward Orwell’s Oceania or Huxley’s World State. Either way, I’d hate to see the books moved from fiction to nonfiction on the Amazon website.
Patients wearing face masks and personal protective equipment wait on line for COVID-19 testing outside Elmhurst Hospital Center, Friday, March 27, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
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The Basic Limiting Principle: “There are certain limiting principles which we unhesitatingly take for granted as the framework within which all our practical activities and our scientific theories are confined. Some of these seem to be self-evident. Others are so overwhelmingly supported by all the empirical facts which fall within the range of ordinary experience and the scientific elaborations of it (including under this heading orthodox psychology) that it hardly enters our heads to question them. Let us call these Basic Limiting Principles.” *C.D. Broad in his scholarly piece, “The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy”, 1949, in the journal Philosophy.
C.D. Broad
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While listening to a recent National Review podcast of “The Editors”, the discussion among the editors turned to the issue of masks, as a prophylactic in government guidance or commands regarding the epidemic. I recall that the general consensus of the 3 editors was supportive. The more their view settled in my head, the more disturbed I became. Broad’s limiting principle came to mind, as did the possibility of severe social and psychological disfigurement from this “new normal”. My conclusion: this has to end sooner rather than later.
One editor, Charles C.W. Cooke, true to his libertarian bias, equated the mask to the right to bear arms. The comparison is foolish, but I get it. The Second Amendment is integral to our understanding of ourselves as a self-governing people in a citizen republic. How does mask-wearing fit into that constitutional construct? It doesn’t, unless disguising one’s appearance in public is the “new normal”. Conceal-carry doesn’t undermine fundamental social interaction like conducting public life from behind a mask.
Charles C.W. Cooke
For the podcast participants, a great emphasis was placed on its usefulness in an epidemic, citing Asians in 1 million+ urban centers who are accustomed to wearing them in their pollution-addled air. Granted, but the excuse of an epidemic had better be carefully defined with much more than boundaries of geography and longevity. However, the treatment of this contagion is morphing into a never-ending crusade. We are about to confront the limits adumbrated by sociologist Robert K. Merton in his law of unintended consequences as we continue to treat the issue as the 14th-century’s Black Death. A simple plank (masks) in the program to fight the disease may result in something more than “flattening the curve”. It will flatten our psyche and our social connectivity. The emotional, social, and economic negative spinoffs will be profound.
The practice of hiding much of our face in public, and a good portion of everything else, is indicative of near-totalitarian social and political regimes. Does Sharia and the burka remind you of anything? Do the Guidance Squads of the Islamic Republic of Iran remind you of anything? No need to worry about the niqab’s impracticality for ID photos. Women are not supposed to drive … and vote, be educated, be business leaders, or stray too much outside the home in many of these places. The rule applies to only women, but it conveys an alarming assumption about the person. Hiding the face – or a good portion of it – is incompatible in a free society of free individuals.
How do we freely interact if the person is a stranger and if the contact isn’t carefully staged beforehand? Identification from the bridge of the nose up is nearly impossible; the voice is muffled as in the electronic distortion to protect a Mafioso turncoat; the initial attraction of people to each other is marred by the absence of two-thirds of the face. Identifying criminal suspects becomes impossible since the photo on the ID is difficult to match with the hidden face, unless the thing is removed thereby defeating its purpose. Plus, how do you distinguish the bank robbers from the crowd of seeming bank robbers on the street? The whole thing is ludicrous for finding a mate and protecting people’s savings accounts.
It’s beyond ludicrous. It’s creepy. Have you noticed the mangling of the social space under a regime of masks and social distancing? Yes, I’ll add social distancing since it is the policy cousin to the masks; its purpose being the same: reducing the risk of picking up and transmitting the bug. A restaurant resembles Madam Tussauds wax museum with mannequins seated at tables to give the patrons a phony sense of bustle in an atmosphere of lockdown. I’m reminded of the makeshift suburbia in nuclear tests. Others have invented ghoulish alterations to eat and drink through the things. Does the “new normal” look like this? Huxley or Orwell couldn’t have surpassed what we are proposing to do to ourselves.
Mannequins in The Inn at Little Washington, a Michelin three-star restaurant, reopening shortly in Washington, Va., May 20, 2020A “typical American family” of mannequins who were subject to an atomic bomb test at “Doom Town” in Yucca Flat, Nevada. (Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images)
And then there’s the plastic experience of simulating a touch, handshake, or hug through a broadband image on a monitor. Now we are one step closer to the digitized world of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” (acted by Tom Cruise in the movie). Masks, mannequins, and Thanksgiving dinners limited to the immediate household and TV images of grandma and grandpa promises to be our “new normal” if some of our overlords get their way. What happens to a society with much less personal contact? We become a people awfully resembling solipsistic automatons, a shadow of our former selves.
The “new normal” verbiage, and what it advocates, with its masks and ersatz social life, should be dispensed with immediately, except in targeted locations with flare-ups and serious rates of infection. Charles C.W. Cooke, this isn’t the same as a coal mine. Masks are limited to miners, not as a public ethos for everyone. Apples and oranges, buddy.
Once breached, the standard of masks imposition comes easier the next time. If it was good for the coronavirus, why wouldn’t they be good every flu season … or permanently? After all, human beings are walking founts of pathogens, at all times. Forget about that passionate French kiss. Forget about foreplay. Expect an intensification of the birth dearth. I wonder what romance looks like behind masks and a restaurant of mannequins. My guess: it’ll be as rare as the births.
Too bad the Wampanoags in the 17th century didn’t have their own blue-state governors. They wouldn’t need the warrior face paint to appear fearsome since they’d be frightening enough in a N95 mask. They’d also be around today in greater numbers given their complete lack of herd immunity to the Europeans’ influenza, smallpox, measles, and typhus. But then again, knowing the probable negative effect of masks on romance, they’d still experience empty maternity wards. They’d still end up with the same declining numbers.
Herd immunity (the possession of the antibody in enough people to dampen a contagion’s spread) is the key. Here’s how it worked in Harris County, Tx., regarding a measles outbreak.
Being as isolated as they were – and as we are trying to be with sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and masks – the Wampanoags were virologically innocent children waiting for death. Since Wampanoag medicine didn’t include vaccines, they either faced death or salvation from a European retreat from the continent. Given the acquisitive nature of human beings, the latter didn’t happen. For us, we can simulate herd immunity with vaccines, but the things are partially successful and difficult to create. Holding out for one in the meantime could result in some of us ending up like many of the Wampanoags or experiencing a Kafkaesque mangling of life and society, or both.
Depiction of 17th-century Native American smallpox victims.
My choice is to aggressively clamp down in hotspots at the onset to limit the devastation, then loosen ASAP. We must be mindful that after a while the social and economic costs come to be insurmountable. Lockdowns should be narrowly construed and then dropped like a hot potato. 2 months is too long in the absence of flare-ups, and even then only applied locally.
Herd immunity or no, vaccine or no, we must recognize that the risk of contagion is always present. Paraphrasing Matthew 26:11: you will always have pathogens among you. It’s a truism that should restrain us from doing the same thing again. No nation can endure the constant and ugly prospect of an on/off life overhanging us every fall and winter. The lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, shelter-in-place, and masks came with no real sunset provisions. If you live in the disease’s epicenter in the Northeast, you might look upon the smothering and mauling of social and economy life differently. Anywhere else, it’s grotesque in the extreme.
Down with masks and the rest of it. As per C.D. Broad, we have to acknowledge the explicit and inherent limits.
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.
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.
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”.
“Waco”, the miniseries currently airing on Netflix.
I was surprised and disappointed that Clint Eastwood’s “Jewell” didn’t do better at the box office. The poor showing wasn’t due to a lack of cinematic craftsmanship. It was well-made and acted with a riveting script. I have only speculation, but it sure seems like today’s public is squeamish about such offerings. Could it be a byproduct of a broad revulsion of our incendiary politics? Escapism might be more appealing because the quality of our public discourse is so appalling. That’s my guess. I hope that Netflix’s “Waco” doesn’t experience the same fate. It cries out to be seen.
Eastwood’s story is riveting, as is “Waco”. Richard Jewell was tarnished by nothing more than a FBI profile (of the “lone bomber” and the “hero syndrome” psyche hypotheses) – profiling being an investigative technique to narrow the range of suspects, not to ignore evidence and hound a person. An institutional psychosis grips and propels agents toward a particular suspect or set of actions to the exclusion of any other possibilities. All of it is based on nothing more than an abstraction that straitjackets the minds of government agents.
The potential for tunnel vision, fueled by this institutional psychosis, intensifies as the responsible agency is administratively removed from local circumstances. The FBI in 1996 was obsessed with Richard Jewell in Atlanta, and the ATF/FBI in 1993 was consumed with Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, outside Waco, Texas, as the US Marshals Service and FBI were with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Caricatures were formed and plans made from afar, and then imposed on a locality. The fallout included Jewell’s unjustifiably tarred reputation, 79 dead in the inferno at Waco, and the killing of Weaver’s wife, Vicky, and son, Sammy (age 14), at Ruby Ridge. We might as well include the yang of the Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168, to the yin of Waco. Innocents all; lives cut short. It’s not a matter of saints and sinners. It’s a matter of a grotesque abuse of power that is broadly ignored as such. Easy to do when decision making is centralized and distant.
Randy Weaver and family. Federal authorities would kill his wife, Vicky (next to Randy) and son, Sammy (seated at his mother’s feet).Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, southwest of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.
By the way, what was with the 1990’s? Now that’s a question awaiting serious consideration.
Far more troubling for us today is the public’s apparent assent to this state of affairs. Are we becoming the type of people who are increasingly willing to turn over our right to govern ourselves to a narrow class of specialized “experts” employed in government service? Are we becoming sheep? One has to wonder.
Interestingly, the character of Janet Reno had a brief appearance in Netflix’s “Waco”. She approved the final assault on the Branch Dividian compound when informed of unproven accusations of child abuse at the Mt. Carmel estate. Janet Reno cut her teeth on successfully prosecuting child abuse cases in the 1980’s as chief prosecutor of Dade County, Florida, and rode her success to fame and the office of Attorney General of the United States under Bill Clinton.
Janet Reno takes the oath as attorney general during a ceremony at the White House on March 12, 1993, while President Bill Clinton watches. (photo: Barry Thumma/AP)
Oh, one important fact about Janet Reno: she devised a prosecutorial recipe – the infamous “Miami method” – for carrying out a mammoth miscarriage of justice by railroading many innocent people into long prison terms and setting off a daycare child-abuse hysteria that gripped the country in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Almost all of the convictions have been overturned and ample payouts awarded for false prosecution by states and localities who followed the Pied Piper of Dade County. The story is vividly portrayed in PBS’s “The Child Terror” and in the work of journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz in publications like the Wall Street Journal. From her perch in Washington, DC, Reno was inflicted on the Branch Davidians.
A page from the PBS website for “The Child Terror”.
Part of the problem in our thinking is the nomenclature for the government headquartered in DC. You know, the one surrounding The Mall. We try to avoid calling it what it is: a “central” government. “Central” is unsettling to a nation who sees itself as geographically and culturally diverse with the accompanying and long-established regional loyalties, and a governmental structure to reflect it. If you doubt the belief’s persistence, attend a pro or college football game. Regionalism is rampant.
The word “federal” in reference to the one headquartered in DC is the odd duck in the field. “Federal” pertains to a system of state and national sovereignties, not just the central one. The word is an awkward fit when applied to those manning our national bureaucracies. More accurately, they are “national” or “central” government authorities.
The fuzzy wording hides the reality that the DC government has been centralizing since Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office in 1913 (or maybe it was TR in 1901). The zenith of concentration is a very high plateau of power for our DC authorities running from the New Deal of the 1930’s through the Great Society of the 1960’s to our current Great American Shutdown. The decentralizing efforts of the Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich triumvirate were just hiccups along the way.
Let’s count the ways of DC’s consolidation of power. How do we, the general public, view our national chief executive? George Will’s use of “caesaropapism” for the popular conception of the presidency is apt. DC has been a hot real estate market since FDR’s alphabet soup of “federal” agencies. The commerce clause of the Constitution has been exploited to impose a national floor on wages, the amount of allowable particulate matter in a locality, our car’s fuel economy, whether to cut down a tree, bans on guns that look mean, and nearly everything between … including light bulbs. Huge swaths of our population are dependent on a national bureaucracy’s paycheck or handout. The Supreme Court through its edicts has turned the states into handmaidens of DC. With its ATF, Marshals Service, and FBI, DC has extensive and expansive police forces with a very long reach. Many of them in personnel and behavior mirror the other armed branch of the central government, the military.
The DC government is primed and ready to be at war with its citizens. I have warmed to the complaint about the militarization of law enforcement. Long a talking point of the left, it nonetheless has resonance in light of the increasing recruitment of ex-military into law enforcement, the formation of law enforcement special forces in the form of SWAT teams, and tactics and equipment more appropriate for storming Baghdad. David Koresh looked out the window of his Mt. Carmel compound and saw something familiar to Wehrmacht and Russian officers as they viewed the soon-to-be battlefield of Kursk in 1943.
Tanks in the final assault on the Branch Davidian compound.
Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge might have thought that he was beset by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars like Lt. Colonel Hal Moore’s battalion in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 (captured in Randall Wallace’s and Mel Gibson’s film, “We Were Soldiers”). “Enemy” patrols and snipers surrounded his family cabin, but he didn’t have Moore’s advantage of airpower and artillery. More aptly, he was Custer at the Little Big Horn.
The thread of concentration runs right through the past and onward to the Great American Shutdown of 2020. The potentates in DC without reservation, in essence, commanded us to stop living. It was a nationwide cease-and-desist order to end the actions that define living. Many governors – mostly blue state ones – see themselves as mini-Woodrow Wilsons, or caesaropapists, and began arresting dads playing with their children in parks or surfers 30 yards offshore. When a local government stood in his way, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom steamrolled Newport Beach. Many of them announced the extended euthanization of their states well into June, maybe beyond. Do you doubt any of them, if they won the presidency, would hesitate in making the act of going to work a crime or using their immense law enforcement powers to assault any group not culturally and politically correct? The real viral threat is this massive abuse of power, not a bug from China.
SAN RAFAEL, CA – MARCH 22: McNears Beach County Park in San Rafael, Calif. was among the parks to close in Marin County on Sunday, March 22, 2020. (Sherry LaVars/Marin Independent Journal)
The stage is set for an edict to kill society at the start of every flu season. Is that even possible? Yes, it’s possible, but not sustainable. It’s no more sustainable than to allow more law enforcement power to accrue in the DC headquarters of the FBI, ATF, and other branches of centralized police forces.
We need to be constantly reminded of the dangers. See Netflix’s “Waco” for a refresher course.
Modesty, humility, and courage are ancient virtues. They are also universal and timeless ones. The supreme mitigating factor in all that we do is the law of unintended consequences. In other words, crap happens. Humility and modesty should restrain blustery confidence. Courage is a necessity to counter an inane conventional wisdom. Trying times, like the present pandemic, put all of us to the test. Inanity surrounds.
Inane conventional wisdom #1 is the blind acceptance of saving lives at any cost – literally, any cost. Sure, save lives, but you can’t throw caution and limits to the wind as you do it. The law of unintended consequences kicks in. Take for example economic ruination and all that it portends. If past is prologue, the well-trodden path of hyper-inflation is littered with well-intentioned public policy. Shelter-in-place is destroying associations of every kind, up to and including businesses. We must gird ourselves for the very real possibility of inflation-run-amok. Price inflation from product shortages will be accelerated by monetary inflation from our political chiefs’ insistence on a national shutdown. Get ready for a double whammy, and all that comes with a wrecking of the national wealth.
Inane conventional wisdom #2 is a mindless worship of anything “data-driven”. What data? Have you ever questioned those numbers? How are they arrived at? Throwing numbers at a problem goes hand-in-glove with throwing paper money at it.
Cases and deaths flow into graphs and charts to stampede the public into accepting what are the equivalent of imperial decrees. I’m reminded of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth: numbers are playthings to create new “realities”. In the hands of today’s Democratic Party and the Squad, the “new reality” is a universe of socialism.
At root are pressures to assign a digit to the most politically useful category. Cause of death is too easily accredited to the favorite of the moment, COVID-19. During a normal flu season, the low-hanging fruit for a disease are people suffering from multiple and chronic health threats. Did they die of the flu or was it their preexistent weakened bodies? In the hospital, the coin flip for cause of death will always come up tails, tails being the flu. Ditto for COVID-19.
The “cases” number is also playdough. Here, the choice of the COVID-19 category for a patient is on firmer ground with tests to identify the presence of the bug. As I’ve written before, though, the total is an ever-moving goalpost. Power-hungry politicos shout in blood-curdling tones of a death rate of 7% and millions in the morgue. The omnibus total, however, is a product of an incomplete denominator because of the lack of sufficient antibody testing and an unacknowledged ignorance of when the bug entered the US. However, today, everywhere you look, the number of cases is swelling. People had it, didn’t know they had it, recovered, and went on with their lives. Thus, early and many later prognostications were a sham. But shams can be politically useful.
John Hurt as Winston Smith, in the Ministry of Truth, from the movie “1984”.
Do we really know what we are doing? I’m beginning to doubt it. We over-confidently proclaim our omniscience, scorn unintended consequences, and blindly march into catastrophe. We are proving that science and fact are as easily manipulated as Winston Smith discovered in Orwell’s 1984.
