Posted on

Never Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Posted on

A Debate We Need to Have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Posted on

Do We Really Know What We Are Doing?

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.

Roger Graf

Posted on

The Great American Hijack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progressives, shame, shame on you.

RogerG

Posted on

A Post-Wuhan World

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

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

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

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

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

H1N1 of 2009

The coronavirus of 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Posted on

Hysteria From Knowing Too Much

Philadelphia business closed due to the pandemic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Posted on

The Real Risk Factors

New York City residents in March 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Posted on

“… restructure things to fit our vision.” (James Clyburn, D, S.C., to the House Democrat caucus earlier this week)

James Clyburn (D, S.C.) before the press on March 24, 2020.

The above quote came out of a statement from the alleged “conscience” of American politics, James Clyburn (D, S.C.), and House Majority Democrat Whip.  The quip says a lot. It’s a “vision” similar to the end product of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism.  For Americans who vote Democrat, are you aware that you’re voting for collectivist utopians?  The debate over the pandemic relief bill brought this to light.

First, what’s the Marxist connection? Simple, it’s utopian egalitarianism in almost every sense of the word.  Marx’s dialectic is essentially a series of interconnected episodes of class warfare with an apocalyptic final one (Proletarian Revolution) to usher in the world of equality.  How’s that much different from the dream of the current leadership and base of the Democratic Party?

Clyburn’s remark speaks volumes.  “Restructure things” comes dangerously close to totalitarian social engineering, reminiscent of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.  Mao was really into “restructuring”.  What of Clyburn’s “vision”?  Of course, all secular prophets have a vision of a “better world”.  But Clyburn’s, Mao’s, and Marx’s “vision” probably isn’t the one that you and I have in mind.

The Socialist Feminists of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) protesting Trump’s health care plan on Jul. 5, 2017, in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. (photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press)

So, in the mind of Clyburn and company, for the country to get relief from the shutdown, the bill must be packed with the means to move us along the path to Marx’s end-state.  The Dems aren’t happy with simply taking care of the sick and unemployed.  They demand the measures that’ll cripple our economy and way of life, as in any place where it has been tried.

 

RogerG

Posted on

Not Wasting a Crisis, Part II

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Ca.) briefly facing reporters on March 23, 2020.

The phrase “Not wasting a crisis” really means to “exploit” the crisis. Do you have any doubts about this?  Well, to borrow another cliché, the other shoe dropped this past Sunday night.

Pelosi returned from her hiatus on Sunday and quickly put the kibosh to Senate Democrats working with their Republican colleagues on a rescue package to deal with the Great American Shut Down. She abruptly introduced a competitive measure which is larded with the Green New Deal, attempts to reverse the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, Sovietizing health care, and wokeness run amok. For her and the party’s left, the panic is the perfect vehicle to force down the people’s throats what a large majority of them wouldn’t tolerate in their right minds. This ain’t about the fight against a pandemic. It’s about a lefty jam-down.

The longer the shut down persists, the deeper the social and economic damage, and the greater likelihood of the emergence of a different kind of panic. It’s the stampede to the omni-competent state; everything else being laid waste. We are teetering on the precipice of losing the very basis of our way of life — a possibility heartily desired by the Antifa, the Squad, and the activist base of the Democratic Party.

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined at right by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., July 15, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The medical situation is what it always was: a health care challenge that arises every few years. Some threats are more serious than others, but this one is no excuse to shut down a way of life.

The sensible response involves a reliable test, and all those obviously sick and those who test positive staying home. We don’t need any more task forces, other than the search for a reliable test, vaccine, and treatments. For everyone else, go to work and get on with your life. Go to church. Get your kids ready for soccer. Visit a restaurant; go see a movie; go shopping. Stop this social and economic strangulation of a people, and reacquaint yourselves with the fact that life comes with risks — always has.

RogerG

Posted on

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

Who’s not letting the pandemic go to waste for ideological ends?  A Dem leadership enthralled to its extremist base, that’s who.

The rescue package of $1.5 trillion was held hostage by Pelosi and Schumer who want moneys for their political hobby horses of new labor union powers, an increase in emission standards for the airlines, and giveaways for the money pits known as windmills and solar panels.  This extortion was demanded to qualify for the aid in the package.  What does this mean?  Many suffering employers will not participate and force them into layoffs.

Airlines will face increased costs to keep their employees working; employers will confront tricks to impose unionization on the work floor; and we get a chance to relive Solyndra.  Most issues have at least two sides with legitimate arguments.  The two sides in this episode are victim and victimizer.  The vicitmizers are the crazy Democrats and the victims are the many Americans trying to survive the pandemic.

It’s despicable.  Leveraging the misery to make political points is outrageous.

RogerG