*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?
The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.
These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.
Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.
These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.
Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.
Example: Delano Jt. Union High School District (DJUHSD) Reopening Plan, California
Not everyone is a scientist, but everyone can have a scientific mentality. Fact is, most don’t, and many of those become sneering haranguers like the CNN reporter condemning the Tampa Bay Super Bowl crowd at a popular eatery for not wearing masks. She doesn’t possess a scientific mentality because, if she had, she would have to hedge her judgment about masks with many caveats, like a real scientist. There are many scientific reasons to question the efficaciousness of masks, and many of the other COVID measures that have stripped us of our livelihoods and humanity.
Many of the assertions on COVID that entered the brain of our CNN reporter came from scientists who are more bureaucrat than scientist. They are accorded the final word as if the whole of science can be shoe-horned into the behavioral norms in the rarified atmosphere of the government office building. Their science is a stunted one suffering under the interplay of government employees jostling for job security and career advancement. It’s a unique social ecosystem that mangles science, usually to the lowest, or most stringent, common denominator to avoid blame for failure and a black mark in their personnel file.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, currently Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser, previously Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
The rest of us outside the world of government employment are expected to bend a knee.
The attitude is more prevalent in the states and localities who are immersed in a love affair with government as the most important agent for human betterment – i.e., where progressivism has an iron grip on thought (blue states and localities). Anything out of the mouth of Anthony Fauci is treated as gospel, and off they go to public shaming and kneeling before the latest round of edicts out of the mouths of bureaucrats, that essentially act as “cya” for job security.
By so doing, our kids are approaching a full year without meaningful instruction. It’s clear that children aren’t walking super-spreader events. Yet, another class of government employee, the unionized public-school teacher, refuses to go back to educating them. Believe me, zooming isn’t teaching. It’s a form of play-acting: teachers sit in front of the computer camera and screen and who know what is happening at the other end, and everyone from the school board to the teachers to the principal’s secretary act as if the real thing is happening. It isn’t, as evidenced by kids dropping out, and off the servers, and the record number of F’s across the nation.
“Distance Learning”
A scan of my old employer’s website (www.djuhsd.org) brought to light a system – bureaucrats are infatuated with “systems” – that a King Minos, the developer of the maze to hold the Minotaur, would appreciate. At the top of pyramid – or maze – is the California Department of Public Health and its map of color-coded tiers of county infections rates to guide all government actions. And on top of them is the entire apparatus of the one-party state. Like a kaleidoscope of constantly changing hues, a county would find itself flipping back and forth from draconian to looser controls in a chaos that would make radical disruption a normal part of life. Interpretation of the continually changing map is the responsibility of another set of bureaucrats, the county department of public health.
Any plan for reopening the schools must adhere to the noise coming from the state and the county’s interpretation of the noise. The district issues their own plan with “phases” while adhering to the fluid and unpredictable circumstances. One week is the announcement of schools’ reopening; the next week is a lockdown. The bottom line for your kids: zooming for God knows how long.
And the striking fact about all the heavy-handedness is that it isn’t making a difference. More mask wearing, school closures, social distancing, and lockdowns hasn’t made an appreciable difference lowering infection rates and deaths. For instance, Texas and California are quite similar, except for the unemployment rate (7.2% to 9.9% respectively), and one being more open and the other in near perpetual lockdown. At least in Texas, a person can still go to work, to a restaurant, and school and run the same risk as a Californian who is stuck in the house, or marked by such gripping fear to refrain from even going to the park.
Maybe it’s as Ross Douthat said in his recent New York Times column: many of us, particular those in our culturally progressive urban areas, are longing for a secular messiah – a god-politician or god-expert – to deliver us from our travails. Politics and bureaucracy are poor places to look for deliverance.
In the meantime, many kids are getting dumber. It looks like we’ll have to inflate the number of H1B visas for engineers from the CCP’s China. Zooming in America won’t produce them here.
Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City was famous for his finger-waving nanny bans on Big Gulps, super-sized fast food, and decrees on salt levels in restaurant foods. He wasn’t content with warning labels. He should have been content with warning labels. In contrast to Hizzoner, I’m suggesting only a warning label be placed on every college application – not in 2-point font in a footnote at the bottom of the page – to caution every parent and student of the danger in going to college in America. It might read something this:
“Warning: Any student matriculating to this college or university may procure revolutionary beliefs and a record of convictions for assault, murder, destruction of public and private property, threats to the rights of others, and other acts of disorder in furtherance of a historically proven dystopia.”
The connection between college and malignant left-wing radicalism is at least as strong as the relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer.
There are many historical instances of crass and brutal left-wing radicalism coming from the ranks of the college-educated with disastrous results. Take Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – aka Lenin – for instance. His dad (Illya) was a college professor at the Penza Institute for the Nobility, and his sons were college students: Lenin at Kazan University and his older brother, Alexander, at College of Simbirsk and the University of Saint Petersburg. Later, Alexander would be executed in the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Czar Alexander III. The radical bona fides of the siblings were insinuated in the college culture of the time. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn amply described the setting in many of his writings. Sound familiar?
Lenin as a university student
If it sounds familiar, it should . . . because it is! Let’s take a look at what happened to Michael Brase, a second-year dental student at the University of Iowa. David Johnsen, the dean of the University of Iowa’s College of Dentistry, mass-distributed an email condemning Pres. Trump for withdrawing federal funding for the propaganda and Maoist struggle sessions known as “diversity training” – in the words of the executive order, “race/sex stereotyping” and “scapegoating”.
Brase responded in a logical reply to Prof. Johnsen’s opinionated missive: “By condemning Executive Order 13950, does the [College of Dentistry] support using federal funds to promote trainings that include race/sex stereotyping and/or race/sex scapegoating?”
For Mr. Brase, the sh#! hit the fan. Brase was quickly ordered to appear before a disciplinary hearing for “unprofessional behavior”. Rather than prostrate himself before his accusers, he went to the press and his elected representatives in the Iowa state legislature whose House Oversight Committee launched an investigation. Facts were made clear and the lefty cabal in the professoriate was exposed. Under the glaring spotlight of public scrutiny, the professorial lynch mob scattered like cockroaches who were startled by the light. The professorial ring leader, Prof. Johnsen, ended up delivering a mea culpa.
Or take the experience of Economics Professor Frank Gunter at Lehigh University. He had the temerity to deliver a talk on poverty in response to the Biden Administration’s request for faculty advice, but his views didn’t jibe with the lefty groupthink on campus (see below). He dared to counter three myths about poverty that are constantly trotted out by lefty faculty and racialized students in furtherance of the revolution. The three falsehoods according to Prof. Gunter are the following: (1) poverty is a matter of race – racial minorities are its chief victims; (2) poverty is a generational curse – once poor, always poor for generations; and (3) the poor have no agency because they are victims of large, impersonal forces (“systemic racism”, articulated in “critical race theory”).
For this, the lefty hive on the U. of Iowa campus erupted into a swarm. Black Lives Matter went to the barricades and the College of Business – Gunter’s teaching assignment – feverishly tried to blunt this exercise in academic free speech and academic freedom. The lesson is clear: stick out your neck for truth and be forever ostracized.
That’s the setting for our young adult freshmen who wish to broaden their minds and opportunities. Parents, they may enter college one way, and may exit completely different. And don’t assume it’ll be an improvement.
The pervasiveness of the above experiences is frightening. It’s also absolutely disgusting. State legislatures get to work and mandate the warning label.
Xavier Becerra as California Attorney GeneralLittle Sisters of the Poor on the steps of the Supreme Court in 2016.
Let’s face it, “fact-checking” radiates from the same noxious fever swamp of ideological zealotry that dominates most newsrooms in Big Media. An example is the herd of “fact-checkers” rushing to defend Xavier Becerra’s verbal gymnastics in yesterday’s (2/25/2021) confirmation hearing to hide the fact that he assiduously worked to force religious charities into sinning. With a straight face he said,
“I have never sued the nuns, any nuns. I’ve never sued any affiliation of nuns, and my actions have always been directed at the federal agencies.”
Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post
And with an equally straight face, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Salvador Rizzo, came to the demagogue’s defense: “It’s misleading to say Becerra sued the nuns . . . . the California attorney general has not filed lawsuits or brought enforcement actions against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a charity run by Catholic nuns.”
The Sacramento Bee chimed in as if the two newsrooms were working off each other’s Twitter feed. This vaunted exemplar of truth in the fourth estate bellowed that Becerra “did target a federal government exemption”, not a specific group. Then, the clowns went on to smear Sen. Ben Sasse’s assessment of the obvious as “misleading”. If this was a football game, the WaPO and SacBee were the pulling guards for a wide sweep left.
Kate Irby, Sacramento Bee fact-checker
The vast majority of today’s journalists aren’t referees; they are huddling with one team. Their team was caught with a teammate who wanted to coerce not just one group of nuns but every church and denomination with traditional morality and a calling to help the needy. To be clear, Becerra did target the nuns (Little Sisters of the Poor), and nearly every tithe-paying Christian, Muslim, Jew, and pagan.
Becerra began the feud in 2017 when he couldn’t tolerate the fact that many established churches have beliefs that he decreed shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of Obama’s edict in Obamacare that everyone, including nuns, provide birth control and abortifacients in their health coverage, a sin for them and many other people of faith. For Becerra, if they don’t cooperate, they must be made to cooperate. Trump saw the injustice in this authoritarian act and granted religious exemptions. Becerra, as the not-so-Golden State’s AG, sued the Trump administration (one of 100 lawsuits in his personal jihad against Trump) in a case that appeared in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as California v. Little Sisters of the Poor.
So, it’s worse than an assault on one faith group. The commissar wanted to force all of them into perdition, or get entirely out of Christ’s mission to help the needy.
Becerra’s verbal slight-of-hand reaches right up there into the highest ranks of public buffoonery. Earlier, his comrade, Sen. Alex Padilla, came to the defense of his fellow California revolutionary by invoking the race card in his gambit to one-up Becerra in tomfoolery. The race card is a pity card. He sat next Becerra to invoke pity for the times that he and Becerra were the only Latinos in the room. What? What’s that got to do with handing over control of the nation’s healthcare to a lefty zealot? A person’s high level of melanin doesn’t inoculate the person from foolishness. One can be Latino, Anglo, Asian, Black, a man or woman, gay or straight, and a man-one-day-but-a-woman-the-next, and still be stupid.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D, Ca,), foreground, and Xavier Becerra behind the mask in yesterday’s confirmation hearings.
“Fact-checking”, and much the rest of the fourth estate, can no more be trusted than the race-hustlers seeking a promotion at taxpayer expense, like Becerra. Our public discourse more resembles the babblings of an asylum than the interactions of mature adults. The problem: others around the world are watching the madness. What a sobering thought.
“The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances.’ The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing . No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.” President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive icon, 1913
The Democrats are in power, and that means the ideology of progressivism will be in the cockpit. Progressivism is a form of authoritarianism with the rulers being an elect among the clerisy (“a distinct class of learned or literary people”) under the honorific title of “expert”. “Experts” rule, elite colleges coronate the rulers with spurious certificates of competence (degrees), elite coastal social networks in exclusive nodes confer status, and the common people are shunted into the increasingly meaningless debating societies called legislatures in the states and Congress.
This mongrel is the malignant dream of “progressives”, since at least the late 19th century, to unseat the Constitutional mechanisms – separation of powers and checks and balances – that were established to protect the public well-being from inherently flawed human beings in the possession of great power. The “science” of the expert is forever on their tongues. But we aren’t getting dispassionate men of “science” to rule over us, as per the progressive dream. We’re getting the same mediocrity, or worse, but with the gloss of a college resume’.
UC Berkeley BA graduates, 2016
The Founders tried to warn us against placing too much power in the hands of any small group of apparatchiks. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fleshed out the danger in their correspondence.
Jefferson, as the golden jubilee of the nation (50-year) approached, denied the request for his attendance at the festivities due to “ill health”. But he had some weighty words that our aggrandizing progressives would be wise to heed:
“. . . the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
A sheepskin with “science” on it does not bestow boots and spurs for one person to ride another. The flaws of humanity remain in spite of a commencement exercise. Wisdom and moral character are not automatically conferred by a curriculum riddled with lefty bromides, or any other litany of coursework for that matter. Ambition, avarice, vanity, egotism, etc., remain in spite of acquiring a six-figure student loan debt.
Our new aristocracy
John Adams would make sure everyone at his time understood the menace that is posed by our defective nature. He maintained to the end of his life that “human Reason and human Conscience [are] not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” He went further when he wrote that the passions “insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party”. Our politicians’ favorite bromides of “follow the science” or “scientific consensus” is jargon to cover their poorly reasoned ideological prejudices.
Some of Adams’s words would send many of our snowflakes into thumb-sucking safe spaces. The priesthood of critical race theory would rush to their political allies in the Democratic Party to have him air-brushed from history like the old Bolsheviks who were erased from the pictorial record in all Soviet publications after their execution by Stalin.
Adams had no patience for equality of result, and thus no need for an “equity” crusade. He would say that equality in law and soul is not the same as equality in material effects and natural endowments. The former is proper and fitting, the latter isn’t. People aren’t born with equal capacities.
Yes, he would agree that being born into an elite family is an advantage, obviously, but it isn’t determinative. Look at him. He was the son of a cobbler and farmer. As he wrote at the end of his life to drive the point home,
“To teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life is as great a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.”
Inequality of status and wealth is the natural condition of humanity according to Adams. A jihad against inequality can’t eliminate it, only replace one group of barons for another. The equity commissars will be every bit an aristocracy as those inhabiting the grounds of 18th-century Versailles.
Orwell captured the rise of the new privileged ruling class in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal / but some animals are more equal than others.”
Guess who will be “more equal than others”? They’ll be the legions of venal consultants leading the charge against the wreckers of the “systemic racism” conspiracy, or the armies of activists who shifted employment from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Justice Department. It’s the rule of powerful apparatchiks with their secret police and army of sycophantic informers in corporate boardrooms and in all other areas of life.
Robin Diangelo (l) and Ibran X. Kendi, the commissars of critical race theory.
The progressives’ dream seems to be an echo of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s surveillance state and social credit system. Censorship is rampant. It’s lurking underneath the jargon of “misinformation” and “hate”. External control of thought, speech, conscience, and action is everywhere. We were sold on free trade with China in the hope that they would become more like us. Instead, we are beginning to look a lot like them.
CCP large monitor surveillance
In a nutshell, we are living at a time of the near completion of the progressives’ campaign against the Founding. And it sucks.
Biden, wife, Harris, and transition team, January 2021
The Democrats are in power, and that means the ideology of progressivism will be in the cockpit. Progressivism is a form of authoritarianism with the rulers being an elite among the clerisy (“a distinct class of learned or literary people”) under the honorific title of “expert”. “Experts” rule, elite colleges coronate the rulers with spurious certificates of competence, elite coastal social networks in exclusive nodes confer status, and the common people are shunted into the increasingly meaningless debating societies called legislatures in the states and Congress.
Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus response coordinator, speaks with the rest of Biden’s COVID-19 Response Team, January 27, 2021.
This mongrel is the malignant dream of “progressives”, since at least the late 19th century, to unseat the Constitutional mechanisms – separation of powers and checks and balances – that were established to protect the public well-being from inherently flawed human beings in the possession of great power. The “science” of the expert is forever on their tongues. But we aren’t getting dispassionate men of “science” to rule over us, as per the progressive dream. We’re getting the same mediocrity, or worse, but with the gloss of a college resume’.
Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1805
The Founders tried to warn us against placing too much power in the hands any small group of apparatchiks. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fleshed out the danger in their correspondence. Jefferson, as the golden jubilee of the nation (50-year) approached, denied the request for his attendance at the festivities due to “ill health”. But he had some weighty words that our aggrandizing progressives would be wise to heed:
“. . . the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
A sheepskin with “science” on it does not bestow boots and spurs for one person to ride another. The flaws of humanity remain in spite of a commencement exercise. Wisdom and moral character are not automatically conferred by a curriculum riddled with lefty bromides, or any other litany of coursework for that matter. Ambition, avarice, vanity, egotism, etc., remain in spite of acquiring a six-figure student loan debt.
John Adams, c. 1800/1815, oil on canvas by Gilbert Stuart.
John Adams would make sure everyone at his time understood the menace that is posed by our defective nature. He maintained to the end of his life that “human Reason and human Conscience [are] not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” He went further when he wrote that the passions “insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party”. Our politicians’ favorite bromides of “follow the science” or “scientific consensus” is jargon to cover their poorly reasoned ideological prejudices.
Some of Adams’s words would send many of our snowflakes into thumb-sucking safe spaces. The priesthood of critical race theory would rush to their political allies in the Democratic Party to have him air-brushed from history like the old Bolsheviks who were erased from the pictorial record in all Soviet publications after their execution by Stalin.
Nikolai Yezhov, pictured right of Stalin, was later removed from this photograph at the Moscow Canal. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images & AFP/GettyImages)
Adams had no patience for equality of result, and thus no need for an “equity” crusade. He would say that equality in law and soul is not the same as equality in material effects and natural endowments. The former is proper and fitting, the latter isn’t. People aren’t born with equal capacities.
Yes, he would agree that being born into an elite family is an advantage, obviously, but it isn’t determinative. Look at him. He was the son of a cobbler and farmer. As he wrote at the end of his life to drive the point home,
“To teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life is as great a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.”
Inequality of status and wealth is the natural condition of humanity according to Adams. A jihad against inequality can’t eliminate it, only replace one group of barons for another. The equity commissars will be every bit an aristocracy as those inhabiting the grounds of 18th-century Versailles.
Orwell captured the rise of the new privileged ruling class in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal / but some animals are more equal than others.” Guess who will be “more equal than others”? They’ll be the legions of venal consultants leading the charge against the wreckers of the “systemic racism” conspiracy, or the armies of activists who shifted employment from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Justice Department. It’s the rule of powerful apparatchiks with their secret police and army of sycophantic informers in corporate boardrooms and in all other areas of life.
The progressives’ dream seems to be an echo of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s surveillance state and social credit system. Censorship is rampant. It’s lurking underneath the jargon of “misinformation” and “hate”. External control of thought, speech, conscience, and action is everywhere. We were sold on free trade with China in the hope that they would become more like us. Instead, we are beginning to look a lot like them.
In a nutshell, we are living at a time of the near completion of the progressives’ campaign against the Founding. And it sucks.
US President-elect Joe Biden, arrives with Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris to announces his economic team at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 1, 2020. (Photo by Chandan KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)
Today, science is routinely weaponized for political ends. Not surprisingly, it’s the people who know the least about it who abuse it the most, like the power-seekers whose educational preparation is limited to the verbose college subjects – subjects reliant on the manipulation of the written and spoken word, the “soft sciences”. Graduates of international relations and communications studies, for instance, promiscuously trot out “science” to boost their ideological prejudices. So, for them, “science” becomes their go-to means to feed their socialist inclinations. It’s the bane of our times.
Take two cases to illustrate the point: climate change and the pandemic. Climate change – “global warming” in an earlier incarnation – is riddled with Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. And many unknown unknowns by the way. We definitely can take temperatures readings throughout the layers of the atmosphere and at the exosphere (top). We know pollution in the form of carbonates, etc., and cloud cover, can create a warming effect. But beyond those facts, politically exploitable grand predictions are the rankest of speculation. The unknowns are trampled asunder to get right to the activists’ solution of giving them and their fellow-travelers power, to the ruin of us all.
As the Gospels reported Jesus as saying on the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Jim Geraghty, a reporter for National Review, in a recent article illustrates the persistence of the many unknowns about the pandemic. In the beginning of the COVID affair – or I should say when we first noticed its presence – we didn’t know much. Nonetheless, confident announcements obscured the ignorance.
At this time of innocence, prudence justified strong but short-term measures: lockdowns, school closures, masking, social distancing. The development of therapeutics and the knowledge of who is vulnerable should have led to a lessening of the grip. It didn’t. Once power is acquired, it’s awfully hard to give it up, proving once again that power is intoxicating.
Dr. Fauci testifying before Congress in June 2020.
At this juncture, many confidently talked about the date that the virus first entered the U.S. Now we’re getting the idea that we really don’t know, and neither do our masters. Honestly, our “experts” were aping each other in confusing the moment when they first noticed it with its actual appearance in the country or the world. With each new tranche of evidence, we’ve had to push back the start date in halting steps. This has significant implications about the virus and our response to it.
The official appearance of the bug in China has been moved back from December to October to “late summer and early fall” of 2019. Geraghty quotes the South China Post, NBC News, and US intelligence sources to raise suspicions of a far earlier pandemic birth date. Cell-phone activity in the Wuhan lab vicinity suddenly went dark for 17 days in October and satellites pictured unusually-packed Wuhan hospital parking lots “in the months before the pandemic became international news”. How much time before October was it mistaken for the common flu? “Late summer and early fall”?
Satellite photo of Wuhan parking lot unusually filled with cars, October 2019 (source: Taiwan Times)
If it had an earlier start date in China, did it have an earlier start date in other parts of the world? China didn’t shutdown flights to other parts of China till the last week of January 2020, and other countries didn’t stop travel till the next month. If the virus first appeared in “late summer and early fall” 2019, for how much time was it mistaken for the flu? Since international travel wasn’t suspended for the whole of the last third of 2019, and the virus was active, there was ample opportunity for the virus to spread to God knows where. It could be anywhere floating about on cruise ships, visits to American college campuses, malls, Disneyland/Disney World, Las Vegas, etc. How many Americans contracted it and nobody knew, least of all the patient, doctor, and our vaunted public health experts?
Visiting group of undergrads from the PRC to Stanford’s School of Engineering, 2017.Recent photo of PRC tourists at a Las Vegas casino.
During this time of ignorance, many people who may have had it didn’t die, were treated, and a few may have succumbed, which matches our experience with any virus. For 90+% of the population, symptoms range from a cold to a nasty flu. As in all outbreaks, the vulnerable are the people with weakened immune systems, the aged with age-related conditions, and for that matter anyone with serious medical problems.
It’s entirely possible for the thing to fly under the radar for an extensive period of time before somebody with a microphone hits the panic button. Was the panic justified? Yes, maybe no. I’m reluctant to draw a hard and fast conclusion, but let’s just say that my BS-sonar is registering pings. Stringent measures in the beginning are excusable, but when we know more – not when we get a handle on its spread – they should be adjusted to fit that better understanding. So, instead of nearly everyone under stay-at-home orders, lockdowns with accommodations should have been limited to the vulnerable. Similar targeting should apply to masking, social distancing, and school in-person attendance. Instead, our scalpels were put away in favor of sledge hammers.
Social distancing in an American park.
We have mangled science and our lives. Back in March of 2020, I proclaimed that “We Can’t Do This”, the “this” being lockdowns. The costs in the trade-offs were too severe. Now we know that many of the powerful were making decisions to wreck our lives as if there were no gaps in their knowledge. Heck, as it turns out, they still don’t know when the bug started to circulate. It’s probably been with us much longer than anyone knew.
In the end, our power-hungry politicos and their supporting cast of lickspittle and self-aggrandizing “experts” have soiled the reputation of science. A good reputation once lost is hard to regain.
I was there at the beginning, the birth of a luminary. I was a grad student at California State University, Chico, about 90 miles north of Sacramento, Ca. Not a fan of talk radio, occasionally I’d pick up the AM radio signal of Sacramento’s KFBK for news and information. Serendipitously, I happened to be tuning in when the station was auditioning a guest host after their headliner had been forced to resign after making an ethnic joke. The replacement was funny, entertaining, and the style was light and beckoning. He stayed. He was Rush Limbaugh.
My wife remembers me coming home from the campus one day and laughing. I told her of the funniest radio program that I discovered from just cruising the dial. It was the beginning of Talent on Loan from God.
From where did the star of Rush arise? Limbaugh as the beneficiary of a generational rethink that was taking place in the late 1970’s. He came at the right time.
Men of the radical left raise their fists during the “Days of Rage” anti-Vietnam War demonstrations organized by the militant Weathermen in Chicago. Oct. 11, 1969.
Again, in an earlier incarnation as a grad student, this time at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970’s – I seemed to be in perpetual grad-student mode at that time in my life – I attended a campus open-air talk in 1977 or ’78 on the state of national affairs. Hyper-inflation, the humiliation of the fall of South Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the attendant slaughters and holocausts, and the sinking mood in a seemingly impotent country were current events, not the third-to-last chapter in a high school History textbook. When questions were allowed at the end of the talk, I remember shouting a rhetorical query on the cause of our malaise, “What about our rampant consumerism?” That shows where my mind was, as it was for many of my age at that time. It was nonsense, absolute nonsense.
Open-air anti-War speeches, UC Santa Barbara, 1970Anti-War protest, UC Santa Barbara, 1970.The 1970 Isla Vista riots, adjacent to the UC Santa Barbara campus, with the Bank of America building burning in the background behind the line of Sheriff deputies. The campus had quieted considerably by 1977 when I arrived as a grad student.
The horrifying scenes of the fall of Saigon and the ghoulish totalitarian genocides coming out of the place that we abandoned, Southeast Asia, shocked me. My philosophical transition started. I began to discover a new counterculture, one long in existence and counterpoised to the left/liberal Ivy League hegemony, an older relative of the smothering orthodoxy that dominates our cultural commanding heights today. Milton and Rose Friedman, the Chicago School of Economics, Thomas Sowell, Arthur Laffer, George Gilder, Jean Kirkpatrick, Jean-François Revel, and National Review soon followed. The candidacy of Ronald Reagan politically encapsulated the trend. And for the average lunch-pale man and woman, there was Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh became a cultural event. He was the right’s SNL. His stunts offended the liberals in the newsroom at KFBK. In their stunted minds, conservatives were dour people of mundane prospects. But with this guy, they were parodied and they didn’t like it. Still don’t.
Rush standing before a Sacramento billboard that was paid by someone who obviously disliked Limbaugh. Limbaugh was at KFBK from 1983-88.
From his perch in the studio, for instance, he followed the progress of a coast-to-coast nuclear freeze march that was meant to stymie Reagan’s attempt to counter the Soviet’s buildup of nuclear missiles in Europe. Limbaugh would find their location, call someone in the town at random, and ask them about the marchers. He’d crack jokes with the resident about the lefty marchers traipsing through his or her town. It was great radio, and enough to cause you to stop what you were doing and listen.
Who can forget the Rush dictionary? There were “feminazis”, women that he characterized as not able to get a date with a man, nor wanting one. There was the story of watching a woman “farding” in her car. He took awhile to explain that “farding” meant the application of makeup. The Kennedys were a rich vein of humor, particularly Ted who had a hard time finishing a statement without blubbering. Limbaugh did to liberals what liberals have been doing to the rest of the country from their monopoly perch of their own Versailles that stretched from Manhattan to Hollywood to the Ivy League.
And then there was Dan’s Bake Sale in 1993. It started as a conversation with a caller, Dan, who said he couldn’t afford the Limbaugh Letter because his wife didn’t like Rush. Rush borrowed his idea of a bake sale to pay off the national debt and suggested the idea to Dan. The idea caught fire among “dittoheads” and before anyone knew it, 65,000 people gathered in Ft. Collins, Co. Think of it as Rushstock ’93. Rush was rockin’ fun.
Rush was fun and the Left was exposed as killjoys. The left dished it out but couldn’t take it. There’s been a role reversal: the liberal establishment and their media mandarins have become the “Church Lady” without the church. Snowflakes spitting and fuming and disrupting anyone who can’t countenance their inanities were bound to produce real time material for the lively mind of someone like Rush. In those early days, Rush could take these cranks without any self-awareness and turn them into entertainment, and the object of a little deserving ridicule as well.
The “drive-bys” still harbor resentment for receiving what they have been dishing out for half a century. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, on today’s Hugh Hewitt show couldn’t bring himself to say anything positive about Rush when given the opportunity. Crickets. Wikipedia devotes an entire section to his personal problems (divorces and addiction to pain killers) and another one trying to impose the opinions of “fact-checkers” over his. This isn’t fact-checking; it’s opinion cancellation. Julia Wick, Los Angeles Times staff writer, came out with this gem, “… he helped bring conspiracy theories and racist, misogynistic vitriol into mainstream political discourse ….” They hate him for laying bare their pretentiousness. The emperors and empresses have no clothes.
Rush, RIP. We’ll miss you.
If you’ve got time, grab a cup of coffee and take a glimpse of Talent on Loan from God: his 2009 speech to CPAC.
When we look back on today, will we view it as our crazy time? Or will we see this time, and the history before the virus, through the eyes of a broadly neurotic people publicly nurtured into the obsessive cleanliness variant of the obsessive-compulsive disorder? With the new administration, I’m beginning to wonder. I’m starting to doubt whether we will be ever allowed to be fully human again.
If so, say goodbye to a free republic and hello to a nanny state on meth.
Jake Tapper and Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director, from Sunday, Feb. 14, 2021.
Hints of the omnipresent and muscular nanny state have been arising out of the Biden administration. Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s CDC Director, announced earlier this month the need to get back to some sense of normality by reopening the schools even without a complete vaccination of all teachers. She walked back the statement a week later. On “Face the Nation”, she worried about a new variant, the UK variant (B.1.1.7), and the likelihood of more. Later, Jake Tapper of CNN pressed her on reopening the schools, and that means in-person instruction. She back-peddled. She stated that over 90% of children live in “red zones” of high infection rates and thus limited classrooms to K-5 with the mandatory butchering of the classroom experience behind desk and face shields, compulsive cleansing, and the scattering of kids behind 6-foot DMZ’s. She tied any return to something resembling normal to infection rates. In other words, with the perceived threat of variants and the persistence of the outbreaks, we might be hovering in a forever state of totalitarian controls and shutdowns. Is that any way to live?
That’s not all. Clearly, totalitarianism lurks at the core of the policy. Any return to a normal human life will hinge on “universal” – meaning perfect – obedience to the state’s edicts.
If “universal” masking is ordered, it had better be followed by everyone to the letter at all times. But that’s impossible. Remember, in the case of the schools, these are kids. In the case of adults, people slip. Absolute compliance is an impossible standard. Or maybe I should amend my account by saying that it might be possible with the kind of police state that would make the Castros envious. The same would have to be true throughout the regime on everything from perfect compliance on 6-foot social distancing to stay-at-home orders to the banishment of social and economic life. Perfect, compete obedience with the long arm of the state . . . forever.
Police arrest parishioners in Moscow, Idaho, as they participated in a public psalm sing in defiance of mask and social distancing mandates, September 23, 2020.
It’ll have to be forever because the virus may not, probably will not, completely disappear. If it hangs around like the lazy, obnoxious relative after Christmas, it’s 2020 forever, there being no limiting principle. What was sanctioned in March of 2020 is the precedent for an unending contortion of existence – if not for this bug, for any pathogen of mysterious origin. After all, mother nature is infinitely creative.
And this will be true in spite of a vaccine. Any new variant and new pathogen will incite the suffocation of society. If history is any indication, and given our knowledge of nature, new threats will appear. The acts of simple living could be forcibly ended nearly at the beginning of each flu season, till another herculean effort to create a vaccine succeeds. We may spend more time in lockdown than out of it.
Imagine an entire existence of a people living in a constant state of pins and needles. This could be our future . . . until the peasants with pitchforks (the guns having been taken in prior decrees) rise up in rebellion and expel the commissars. A point of saturation will have to be reached at some point. The experience of peasant rebellions in history isn’t a pleasant one.
One question overhangs the entire episode: Why do the American people seem so docile? Have we bred citizens or sheep? There are good reasons to challenge our response to the virus, not the science about it. Why haven’t we rose up in broad acts of civil disobedience, as in MLK’s campaign against Jim Crow? At this juncture in our history, I can’t avoid the strong conjecture that the citizens of today aren’t citizens of the 19th-century settlement of the frontier. We are different, profoundly different.
Sheeple?
The change is palpable, and something to worry about. The truculent John Adams was more direct: “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
Or, how about this gem: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There [was] never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” Are we about to prove him right?
The current hysteria is anthropogenic, and could well spell doom to a free republic.
Defacing a Confederate monument in Portsmouth, Va.
Thomas Sowell, the noted economist and public intellectual at the Hoover Institution, said in the most recent documentary on his life that his gateway out of his poor neighborhood was books. Yes, books. A friend at an early age introduced him to the New York City public library. From there, his life’s journey coursed its way from the military, through college, a PhD, and from Marxism to a deep skepticism about the whole enterprise. It led to employment at the US Dept. of Labor, the questioning of government’s attempt to elevate mankind through fiat (such as a minimum wage law), and various university teaching gigs, the authorship of many fine books on economics and culture, and his current post at the Hoover Institution.
Thomas Sowell
Why mention Thomas Sowell? His life’s story is an example of the influence of books on a person’s life. Books, combined with the collegiality of the classroom, can strengthen the mind muscle. The setting can instill the desire and mental acuity to ruminate, test, and explore ideas. Books present to us a smorgasbord of what others have thought and did from the ancient past to the present.
Well, and this is most disturbing, we are about to lose it all. That is, we are about to squander the ability to produce seasoned, mature minds. A massive mental erasure is taking place as we and our children are taught to disparage the past by seeing it through the contrived lens of chic thought. It’s a grand undertaking to shove everything, including ideas, down the vortex of racism, systemic or otherwise. As such, there’s no need to pay attention to the books of dead people. The experience of mankind is reduced to the fetid imaginations of today’s pop stars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It dominates one of the two established political parties, is attached to the coattails of its politicos, and is smeared through policy and government actions. We’ll all be smeared by it.
It’s how college is reduced to the equivalent of totalitarian “struggle sessions”. It’s how the language is corrupted in order to stifle free inquiry. Last summer’s wave of statue defacement and destruction is a public manifestation of the phenomena. The zeitgeist’s tentacles are evident in Big Tech’s censorship, the reeducation of corporate employees in propaganda workshops, and the soiling of everything from Big Sports to school curriculums. Sowell’s view of the value books as the mental gym for cognitive maturity is replaced by the mass production of mental midgets.
A small snippet on the importance of books is an insight from Gordon S. Wood’s Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It involves two things: common law and seditious libel. The legal principle of seditious libel is rooted in common law. For us, today, the concept of seditious libel sends shivers down our spine because of its recent dark history of government brutality to punish dissent.
However, the circumstances of earlier times presented a different story. The common law is found there, in the misty past. Common law closely corresponds to traditions that take on the force of law. Most commonly, they originate in the decisions of local magistrates who have to grapple with situations not foreseen, nor expected to be foreseen, in the statutory law. They develop over long stretches of time, and become the acknowledged precedents to handle similar situations in like manner.
Got it? Without the past, one definition of justice – treating like situations alike – would not exist, and we would be at the mercy of the impulses of the mob or the passions of spasmodic majorities who capture the powers of the state. Rampaging mobs through the streets of 5th and 4th-century BC Athens, nor the impulses of all-powerful assembly super-majorities, doth not make for public peace and tranquility.
A mob murdering Hypatia of Alexandria, a Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician, in 415 AD.
Seditious libel ( the crime of publishing material that brings the government and its officials into contempt) fits into the common law due to conditions common in an era before institutionalized law enforcement. Police forces with their administrative structures and collective bargaining agreements didn’t exist. A single sheriff, and whomever he could coax to join him, couldn’t be the sole means to enforce compliance to a magistrate’s decisions. A great deal of voluntary assent and respect for the officer and office was considered essential for social harmony.
A depiction of the reeve, Oswald, in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The reeve became the chief administrator in a lord’s shire. The word “sheriff” is a combination of “shire” and “reeve”.
The traditional aura that accrued to an official and his office was instilled by essential institutions such as the family and the Church, but also with the common law principle of seditious libel. Throwing aspersions on an official was tantamount to throwing aspersions on the office and therefore undermining the ability of a society’s officials to maintain public tranquility. Respect for both the officer and office was critical to maintaining order.
A man convicted of seditious libel in the stock in a 17th century English woodcut.
Books are the means to gain such insights. Without them, our libraries would be limited to one shelf in one rack, and filled with a few volumes of the excrescences of some fashionable halfwits who have discovered their moment.
It’s also very dangerous. Trashing the past frees your fashionable tyrants from restraint. Pol Pot’s “year zero” talk is fully anchored in a repudiation of the past and its customs. Today, we are abundant in such talk. For instance, “change” is a trite theme in the repertoire of modern Hollywood’s scriptwriters. It prizes a break away from the past to create someone’s gross conception of Shangri-La. It’s gross if you have some idea of where these ideas have led people in prior times. I suspect a profound ignorance of earlier human experience.
In this undated photo provided by Documentation Center of Cambodia, the late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, center, greets Khmer Rouge cadre in Phnom Penh airport, Cambodia.Khmer Rouge labor campChild soldiers of the Khmer Rouge who proved to be vicious killers in the camps.Skulls, discovered in 1981, lie in the killing fields of Choeung Ek, Cambodia.
Even when they portray the past, it’s done through the tunnel vision of today’s obsessions. History becomes another tool in the furtherance of contemporary thought fashions. It’s a distortion, but who cares, as the lessons of real history are turned into just another form of confirmation bias?
That’s where many of us have chosen to be: at a place not to be disturbed by custom, or anything else that can rock us from the safety blanket of our own falsehoods. Sadly, many of us don’t know them to be falsehoods because there’s nothing else rolling around in their heads to unsettle the mind. When those in power are in the grip of the banality, watch out, for there will nothing left to provide refuge from the whirlwind, custom and the lessons of the past having disappeared down the memory hole. At this point, we get the pleasure of repeating the horrendous errors of humanity’s worst flaws: one of them being willful but mentally comfortable ignorance.
Indeed, this is the dawn of the era of no need for customs, fueled by bad learning. It won’t end well.
Flames rise from a liquor store and shops near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a protest over the death of George Floyd. (AFP / Kerem Yucel)
