Portland woman getting dowsed with white paint after challenging “protesters” for damaging property.
We are sorting each other out; however, events have accelerated the process, like the coddling of violent anarchists by woke metropolitan governing establishments. Moving vans have been pulling out of California for decades, and now the itch to relocate has spread up and down the Pacific coast from Seattle to San Diego. The driving force, unbeknownst to urban politicos, is something that they like to call “progressivism”, but in reality it’s “socialism” (public control – not ownership – of economic activity). Combined with the cultural leftism that is resplendent in urban public policies, a noxious brew of codes and mandates is offered up that is not conducive to healthy living.
Here is one mother’s account of what has happened to her beloved Portland.
Signs at a protest against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Ore., July 30, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
It’s better to put a face and life (and lives) to the great migration. Her rendition of the situation indicates that the problem is much broader and lies much deeper than a particular set of city councilmen or mayors. Granted, local elections aren’t attention-getters and turnout is low, but the majority who does show up at the polls is remarkably, consistently, and militantly of the left down to their personal values. These are popularly-elected governments. And as a result, the tolerance of the Sermon on the Mount has been turned into open and pervasive hostility for the few remaining holdouts of tradition.
“Joanna” in the article describes the stance of her liberal/left neighbors change from friendliness to sneers and bitterness for her support of Republicans and Trump. 2016 was a watershed in her mind. Everything went south as many residents on her street became surly after the rest of the country seemingly rejected their vision of the better world. To borrow a woke term, many urban denizens were “triggered” by the folks in flyover country actually voting their interests and values.
Trump sign vandalized in Eastern Shore, Md., Juyly 4, 2020.
The scene, in my mind, must have been reminiscent of Bolshevik agents in the 1920’s and 30’s stoking hatred among peasants for the ones who happen to be a little better off. Only in this case it isn’t Central Committee operatives doing the dirty work. Minds have been shaped for years in the fashionable media-saturated existence of our urban complexes and too much formal public education without wisdom. Portland has been a basket case for years, and the rest have been teetering on the edge of oblivion for quite some time.
The Great Skedaddle II, ironically, is now starting to include more than the few remaining Republican holdouts in our metroplexes. As one pundit (a Democrat) put it, law-abiding Democrats are joining the caravans. Even they can’t stomach the consequences of their beliefs.
Our left-leaning media, hot for any evidence of disenchantment with Trump by their blatant showcasing of anti-Trump groups like the Lincoln Project, missed, or simply ignored, the even more eventful sea change in the Democratic Party. In the July 7 Democratic primary in New York’s 16th Congressional District, Jamaal Bowman defeated Eliot Engel, a three-decade veteran of Congress.
An old-style liberal of the JFK stripe, Engel faced a socialist – which is a more truthful word for radical progressive – in the person of Bowman, and lost. The Party is stampeding left, pulling the old party war horses along with them, and nary a word from the media about this coup d’tat. Now, this is a party more at home with Marx than James Madison — when they aren’t busy concocting excuses for toppling his statue.
Oh how 15 years can make a big difference. In a 2005 interview, Engel said the despicable (despicable to the ears of the Squad and BLM), “We, as a country, aren’t perfect. We’re all human, we all make mistakes. But I think our vision—what we want to share, what can be taken from our experience—is overwhelmingly positive. I don’t agree with the Blame America crowd.” Sounds about right to me; however, today, those words are more likely to only come out of the mouths of Republicans. Today’s Democrats are fire-breathing advocates for the construction of their soviet.
Like Trump or no, him and his party are opposed by a socialist revolutionary party. That is the pertinent fact on the ground.
I was watching Fox News this morning as I was making breakfast for my family and, low and behold, there was a piece on the controversy of mail-in balloting. They poo-poohed the concern about the potential fraud in massive postal voting. The whole report was a crock.
They narrowly focused on malfeasance once the ballots get to the county clerk, trumpeting all the checks in place there to prevent it. That’s NOT the real threat! Come on! The problem lies at the other end of the process: the ballots arriving at the homes.
Let me lay it out for our journos: we are seeing the end of the Australian ballot – i.e., the secret ballot. What’s that? It’s how we vote: go to a polling place, receive a ballot, and then vote in a booth. No one knows how you voted and no one can intimidate you into voting a particular way. Say goodbye to it.
Mail-in voting murders the freedom of the person to vote their conscience. Tens of ballots can arrive at a residence and plopped on the kitchen table … and who knows who’s filling them out. Do you really think that a signature underneath a perjury statement matters? Get real.
Anybody who has performed canvassing with voter registration rolls (they’re public documents by the way) will notice the single residence with 5, 6, or 8 registrations. What’s to stop one person voting 8 times? Answer: NOTHING!
Our media is a fount of ignorant reporting. No wonder opinion polls favor the monstrosity. The public isn’t informed of the ways that widespread voting-by-mail can produce one huge scam.
Rioters throw back tear-gas canisters fired by federal law-enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., July 29, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
Please read the interview between National Review’s Michael Brandon Dougherty (a man of the right) and Michael Tracey ( a left-leaning independent journalist) found here.
Michael Brandon DoughertyMichael Tracey
What you have been reading and viewing in mainstream media about our current urban disorders is a sham. It is the duty of the responsible citizen to ferret out fact from fiction, there being much to filter and uncover. The needs of our current moment require something more than quips on Facebook.
A party line was evident since the disturbances first erupted in our cities a couple of months ago. The Democratic Party line is to characterize the events as “peaceful protests”, with emphasis on “peaceful”. Jerry Nadler (D, NY), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, went so far as to characterize contrary reports of violence as a “myth that’s being spread only in Washington DC.” The word “peaceful” is ubiquitously attached to “protest” in Dem Party circles and throughout much of our biased legacy media: CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and big city urban dailies like the NYT and WaPo. But is it true?
No, no, no! Tracey went across the country reporting on the events. He didn’t find “peaceful protests”. He discovered something that can only be described as an insurrection. While ostensibly the “protests” started as an outcry against racism, at the tip of the spear were white middle-class urban twenty-somethings, and the victims were overwhelmingly minorities, many black. Far from there being only marches and speeches, Tracey discovered a bombed-out, boarded-up, and vandalized urban landscape stretching for blocks, a hulking mass of dystopia.
A portion of downtown Minneapolis after the riots.
Portland he describes as “unique”. It has been in a permanent state rebellion for years. So, why are the Democrats so keen on hiding the truth about Portland, et al? One answer: politics! Since the election of Trump, the “Resistance” became the “Movement”, not that there’s much difference between the two. The “Movement” encompasses more than the armed militia of the Democratic Party on the streets of Portland – BLM, Antifa, and other muscular utopians – but also the cores of our major cultural institutions. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Russia at the dawn of revolution depicts a similar malign disorientation. The threat is real and broad based.
Louis Vitton store front, downtown Portland, May 29.
We are facing a real revolutionary march down the well-traveled road of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror and the Bolshevik’s Red Terror. This will not end in a pretty place if allowed to fester and grow. The American people will have to steel themselves against an onslaught of misinformation meant to advance a huge totalitarian-like power grab. So, please read.
Priest and landlord condemned before a Red Tribunal during the Bolshevik Red Terror..
Someone adds fuel to a fire set in downtown Portland during protests on Friday, May 29, 2020, in downtown Portland. (photo: Mark Graves/The Oregonian)
People wonder where we got the screaming college students who demand the immediate surrender to their opinions by everyone. People also might wonder where we got the roaming gangs of radical left twenty-somethings who claim the wisdom to pass judgment on centuries-old personages not advantaged from sitting at the feet of narrowly doctrinaire professors like they did. Seldom can it be said that fanatics are born. They are bred in the culture, family, and schools. Probably, the first two set the stage for the influence of the third.
Then these twisted minds filter out into corporate boardrooms, the professions, media, and teaching positions to perpetuate the cycle. I was reminded of the phenomena after reading a back issue of National Geographic Magazine from December 2018.
After the first four articles, I began to wonder whether I was reading “Mother Jones Magazine” under another title. They amounted to a single op-ed for bigger-getting-bigger government of the international variety, of cultural left agitprop, socialist redistribution, and the lionization of a once honorable activist who descended into rank partisanship (John Lewis, D, Md.). The National Geographic Society has been absorbed into collectivism’s Borg.
One common technique in the arsenal of today’s Left is “branding”. Subsuming totalitarianism under a catchy phrase – or “brand” – frequently does the trick. For example, the conservative-looking President and CEO of the National Geographic Society, Tracy Wolstencroft, opined on the need for a “Planet in Balance”. What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means: it means Control, control of the mind and everything else through government power.
Tracy Wolstencroft
It’s the same old ploy first pushed by Stanford’s great gift to the cause, Paul Ehrlich and his “The Population Bomb”. First Ehrlich postulates X number of people and Y number of resources and, voilà, we have disaster – unless we adopt Ehrlich’s tome to replace the Bible, erect a plethora of government carrots and sticks, and implement mammoth brainwashing in the schools-turned-reeducation-camps.
Wolstencroft goes through the trite litany of the usual suspects of overpopulation, apocalyptic climate change, and no more tigers, et al, and we arrive at the all-too-familiar ground of environmental totalitarianism. His unacknowledged eco-socialism, like all socialisms, has an alluring fetish for eco-totalitarianism. Of course, Wolstencroft’s gazillions earned in the securities industry will insulate him from the consequences of his beliefs while everyone else enters the new normal of personal malaise common to all socialisms. His kids will be okay; as for everyone else’s …?
Following Wolstencrofts’ sermon was chief editor Susan Goldberg’s softball interview of John Lewis in a piece titled “We Can Lay Down the Burden of Race”. Au contraire, Lewis can hardly put it down. He has spent a lifetime in the fever swamps of race politics. For Lewis, it’s Jim Crow and 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, forever.
John Lewis
He makes much of the Charlottesville “riot” (2017) but was dismissive of the rioting and looting in Ferguson, Mo., (2014). He called for an end to the violence in Minneapolis (2020), to his credit, but couldn’t avoid the society-wide “justice denied” mantra for which he clung till his last breath. He didn’t seem too concerned for the rights of property owners (black or white), the right to self-defense (black or white), the right to equal protection for Asians and “whites” in college admissions, while advancing the cause of other nations’ citizens who happen to be in our country in violation of our laws: an odd stance for someone who claimed to be a stalwart of justice for African-Americans as he ironically pushed the interests of another group (the “undocumented”) to the detriment of his own.
He just couldn’t let go of the race thing when he said, “… the scars and stings of racism are still deeply embedded in our society ….” He never wanted to get rid of it and kept moving the goal posts to retain its usefulness as a whipping boy. He’s like Christopher Reeves who couldn’t shed the stereotype of Superman. Lewis rose to fame fighting Jim Crow and he would forever claim its presence, even when the nation did all it could to eradicate it. Unlike Reeves, though, Lewis reveled in his race-baiting persona and rode it to fame and a career in politics.
There was no pushback by our stalwart (?) member of the fourth estate, Susan Goldberg.
The socialism line was front and center in the next piece on the Inupiat people of Alaska. A frequently repeated angle in the story was the tendency of the glorious Inupiat people to equally share the proceeds of the glorious hunt. All well and good for a small tribe wishing to remain the same, except they weren’t … remaining the same, that is. These folks weren’t wearing animal skins and possessed weapons and tools that didn’t come from the bones of the bowhead whale, the tools and weapons of choice for their ancestors. The outfit of an Inupiat hunter pictured in the article belied the impression of an indigenous people at one with nature. The rifle slung over the shoulder came from one of those factories belching pollution and exploiting hundreds of wage slaves in a scheme to bilk unearned profits from the masses, or so the young writer might have written if he wasn’t so enamored with patronizing another non-white colonized people (using the lingo of the “social justice warrior”).
Inupiaq Eskimo hunters carry a rifle and walking stick while walking over the shore ice along the Chukchi Sea, Barrow, Alaska. (photo: Design Pics Inc/Alamy)
To be honest, the depiction was one of manifest incongruency. Some association with capitalism must have its appeal for the brave Inupiat people. They seem to want a lot of our stuff. I would too if I was beset by a polar bear and had to resort to a sharpened piece of whale bone at the tip of a wooden shaft.
Wanting a lot of our stuff was one theme in the next excursion into a mind that tilts left. Who’d the editors choose to join the lineup? It was Jared Diamond, UCLA Geography prof and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He presented an incoherent piece of punditry that rambled through the 9/11 hijackers, ebola, social envy, and to his main point: inequality is the single biggest threat to harmony and the march to kumbaya (pidgin English for “Lord, come be here”).
Jared Diamond
Let’s take a timeout to unwrap the “inequality” thing. Definitions first. Don’t confuse “same” with “equality”. Things don’t have to be the “same” to be “equal”, and vice versa. It depends on your metric for both. If your measuring stick is quantity of wealth, as it seems to be for Diamond, he obviously means the equality in wealth and not a demand for people to be the same in all things as they pursue it. Diamond’s obsession is with “wealth”.
But is the inequality of it always and forever bad? Is it the principle cause of all bad things today? Color me skeptical. Inequality is found everywhere in nature. Why not with us? Everything from rocks to trees and from snakes to apes are not equal. Watch a herd of hippos and the dominant alpha male protect his harem. He’s got more than the rest of the male pachyderms. I’ve got a forest of pines on my property and none of them are equal. Some have obviously hogged more light. The only way for equality to exist is our forcible intervention to cultivate uniformity in a tree farm behind fences, something reminiscent of a gulag.
So with people. Individuals, tribes, groups, and societies vary in their accumulated wealth. I suppose that the riches could be resented if it was capriciously extracted by force. But what if it was sanctioned by time-honored custom? What if it was an outcome of some person’s natural affinity for acquiring it and having the freedom to pursue the natural affinity? Ditto for societies. Some possess an ethos that comports well with rising standards of living, and the acceptance of some having more, they being the catalyst for the wealth that unavoidably spreads to many, many others.
Got it? If not, read a little from Joseph Schumpeter.
Fon Ndofoa Zofoa III of Babungo, the Northwest province of Cameroon. He inherited 72 wives and 500 children after his father’s death. (photo: CNN)
Diamond can’t seem to grasp the naturalness of inequality. And he can’t grasp the fact that when you try to impose it, as in a tree farm, you never really get rid of it. You only changed the protocols for it. Instead of a Vanderbilt getting rich from providing a cheaper and more luxurious service to the public, the Bolsheviks created the grasping party and state apparatchik – the nomenklatura in Soviet-speak. If you want to talk about arbitrary, that’s arbitrary. The whole system is only possible if the state is the sole proprietor of the guns in the place – i.e., the police, secret and otherwise, and the armed forces (no posse comitatus laws here). Those unwilling to tolerate the scheme disappear or find themselves in the “tree farm”. Inequality oozes out despite their best efforts to eradicate it.
A Soviet-era poster of the heroes of the Soviet state.
Nonetheless, Diamond charges forward into his diagnosis of our greatest sin: inequality. You see, in Diamond’s words, the 9/11 killers were born of “inequality” in his final analysis. You see, in Diamond’s words, the conduit for inequality is globalization. From the interconnectedness of globalization, we are supposed to get envy on the part of the non-white everywhere. And envy translates into resentment, and then he gets back to the terrorism thing. His whole schema is a binge of rambling incongruity.
Yes, Jared, ease of travel and communication makes it much easier to spread the hatred of America as the Great Satan and provide the opportunity for boxcutter-wielding fanatics to turn airliners into missiles. But what genuinely animated them? Was it really their anger at not possessing a house in the ‘burbs? If you listen to their words, they are bitter about Western decadence. Remember, these are the same people who throw homosexuals off of six-story buildings. They want a return to their seventh century. Diamond, go ahead, try to uncover their hidden motivations through Jungian projection. I’ll rely on their words.
ISIS fighters.
The internet and diesel and fan turbines don’t make murderous zealots. People do that quite on their own. Who knows the origins of the world’s worst bad ideas? They have popped up since man first put stylus to clay. The last century and into our own was especially plagued by them. And some of them reside in the cranium of Jared Diamond. One could be Diamond’s infatuation with levelling. He won’t come out and say it but it’s all about international and national socialism. According to him, we must flood the zone – the zone being everywhere America’s upper and pampered middle-class are horrified – with dollars. Government-engineered Robin Hood is another way of saying “socialism”. Diamond is all into it.
But we’ve been doing it since the US first emerged as the numero uno economy at the dawn of the 20th century. After WWII, we jumped in with both feet with the Marshal Plan and endless foreign aid ever since. What has it earned us? We got the moniker of Great Satan and despots in poor countries peddling socialism as the path to power, and more inequality under their thumb. Redistribution, the go-to for the myopic like Diamond, hasn’t worked. It hasn’t even worked here with our own interminable War on Poverty. Is Diamond insane, following the well-known formula for its presence: repeating the same mistake but still expecting it to succeed?
A vacant and blighted home on Detroit’s east side. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
The error will be repeated so long as there is a constituency for it. The more, the merrier. One way to inflate the fan base is to internationalize it. Marx saw the advantage: Workers of the world unite! Diamond has no more use for the nation than Marx. He invents an “evil” – inequality – and pushes on to internationalism. People like Diamond have an instinct for it and quickly move to empower unaccountable international authorities to take what didn’t work in America – a War on Poverty – and implant it in a UN commissariat without the slightest say-so from the people who had their money appropriated. Internationalization is essentially autocratic bureaucratization. For Diamond, he doesn’t get it. He’s still wallowing in the ether of the heady days of the First International (1864), the agglomeration of 19th century socialist pinheads. He’s there with our century’s edition of the silly trope.
After four articles, the pressure had built up in me to such an extent that I had to respond. This is what goes for as “mainstream”. Nothing can be further from the truth, unless the poison of the past has suddenly become broadly chic again. In that case, we’re back to broadly popular insanity. If that is true, we’re in more trouble than I thought.
National Geographic Society and its signature publication is part of the problem, not the solution.
The word “callous” comes from the Latin “callum”, hardened skin. The idea of a nice pair of Nikes was unknown for most of human existence. A lifetime of barefoot travel means hardened skin and “callouses” on the feet. See the connection? So, can a lifetime of committed political zealotry lead to an emotionally hardened personality, one with a furtive substratum of acceptance of wrecked lives to achieve long-sought ends? “To chop down a forest splinters will fly” was famously invoked by Lenin to signal his desire to build a socialist utopia on a corduroy road of corpses. I’m wondering that somewhere deep down in the psyche of your average Left/Democrat officeholder lies a little Lenin.
Maybe the thought shouldn’t be so surprising given their affection for Lenin’s ends, just without the holocaust … or, then again, I might be too optimistic. There’s no doubt that avowed socialists are piloting the Biden campaign bus in more ways than one. Assisting them along the way are a cadre of public executives at the state and local levels. I can’t think of a better way for them to reach their socio-political nirvana and upend a detested incumbent cruising to reelection than to create the stench of failure around him by fabricating an economic depression and lawlessness in the streets. Instilling a sense of fear and dread in the public works wonders for those seeking power over the body of Donald Trump.
I’m loathed to think that people could be so cruel, but there they sit in their little local soviets. They create their own banners to hide the reality, like Cuomo’s “New York on Pause”. California’s Newsom was the first to jump at closing down 14.6% of the US economy. The others followed suit. Soon 44 million Americans were out of work. Thousands of small businesses were shuttered as “nonessential” while the big boys – supermarkets, big-box stores, etc. – were allowed to reinforce their near-monopoly because they were labeled “essential”. Economic feudalism engineered by government dictat.
The media picks up on the drumbeat. Indeed, they are the drumbeat. The incessant dark message of doom about a virus whose ill-effects were egregiously overstated and whose lethality was highly targeted on a narrow segment of the elderly was churned into an apocalypse … and an excuse for statewide and local totalitarianism.
No wonder that in a recent Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index poll 51% of parents were stricken with fear about sending their kids back to school in the fall. Forget about any conception of risk, about any conception that risk is chronologically uneven, that risk follows their kids the moment that they leave the house at any time. Applied consistently, helicopter parents should morph into gulag superintendents.
Soon, a sixth-grader becomes a fourth-grader after “distance learning” under the tutelage of distracted and overwhelmed adults and the ever-present allure of the nearby Xbox. Some parents are wealthy enough to keep the learning spigot flowing with hired help. Economic feudalism will be followed by education feudalism.
Then we have the same culprits in many cases – already experienced at the nullification of federal immigration law – thumbing their noses at the White House by allowing their streets and downtowns to be turned into playgrounds of violent anarchy. Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “We could have a summer of love!” in CHAZ? In-between the arrests of unmasked joggers in Central Park and the painting of Marxist Black Lives Matter graffiti on New York City’s avenues, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashes the police force, mutes his constitutional role as guardian of public safety, and pronounces justifications for mayhem. The scene is repeated throughout the country in any deep blue bastion.
The economic misery and violence are quietly sanctioned, or at least seems to be. These lefty poobahs don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to quell the disorder, or bring the kids back to school, or get the adults back to work. Oh, I forgot, it’s the virus and “race justice”, they say.
And, by the way, if it ain’t “race justice”, it’s “science”. They have tried to corner the market on “science”. Yes, “science” is helpful in decision making, but these politicos have choices to make. That’s why we elect people: to make choices. Recognizing relevant scientific information, though, isn’t a green light to the Disneyland of Bernie/AOC’s dreams. “Science” can give you the nature of the virus but it can’t tell you the choice to make among competing risks. Socialists like those who run the Democratic Party always think that “science” is their personal handmaiden and, funny, always ends up with them being ensconced in the catbird seat of some all-powerful commissariat. Hogwash! “Science” and despotism aren’t peas in the same pod.
In the end, if polls are any indication, the Lefties have proven successful in creating the stench of failure around Trump, even though, remarkably, they are wholly responsible for the anguish. Which brings to mind the state of education in America. What else could explain the easily-achieved bamboozlement of the American public? The Democrats discovered that enough blue state governors and mayors exist to put American society into a tailspin. Are they calloused enough to do it? Are they cunning enough? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious given the wide lane of misinformation and ignorance open to them.
On a 2 ½ hour trip to Missoula (Mt.) to pickup a gun that I ordered – oh how that might send some cosmopolitan types to the safe space of their prejudices – I was listening to Fox News on XM Radio. It was wall-to-wall coverage of the coronavirus … and how many different ways to spin dread. No matter where you go, CNN or MSNBC or the legacy networks, it’s the same ridiculously excessive treatment. Is there any serious audit of the proof to justify either the over-the-top monopoly of airtime or the extraordinary step of shutting down American society? From where I sit, I haven’t heard much questioning of the base reasons. So, I slashed my watching and listening to news channels and turned to entertainment offerings. I’m happier.
What do you get for all the coverage? You get a Freddy Krueger script from dusk to dusk. Mind you, The Nightmare on Elm Street was fiction, but so might be much of the newsroom chatter that makes its way to our tv screens. Horror is manufactured with numbers from a process similar to the one at Bingo Night at the senior center and plugged into predictions of a resurgence of the 14th-century Black Death, only later within the blink of an eye having to ratchet down the apocalypse from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1. The whipsaw has become so routine that a person is left in a constant state of bewilderment. I’m skeptical about anyone claiming to know the state of play.
The possibility that much of the coverage could be facetious might be due to the distortions from geographic isolation by our top-drawer media organizations. Many of their denizens look outside their New York City, or Acela corridor, offices and see coronavirus hell. No doubt, the situation has developed as an urban – more than that, cosmopolitan – phenomena. Yet, it is through these highly susceptible locations for pandemics that we receive our window to the world.
Conversely, people in the rest of the country look around and see restaurants shuttered, workers at home without work, their hospitals not teeming with the sick and dying but veritable ghost towns, people who venture out wearing N95 masks or looking like bank robbers, and eerily empty streets. Everyone is made to be spooked by a view of the world from New York. Should, though, everyone be scared to that degree in that manner? I am beginning to doubt it. To borrow from a Las Vegas ad, what happens in New York should stay in New York.
A health worker carries a dead body of a COVID-19 victim to container morgues in Brooklyn, New York.(TAYFUN COSKUN/ANADOLU AGENCY)
These purveyors in the concentrated epicenters of the epidemic have at their disposal the new bane of rational thought: statistical modeling. Not that statistical modeling isn’t useful. The problem lies in the raw data that’s shoved into them and the conclusions without profound qualifications that will accompany them. Back in 1979, I took a data processing class – yes, such a thing existed in 1979 – and was introduced to the acronym GIGO, garbage in and garbage out. Models are formulas put in lines of computer code. Sometimes the models are cracked, but more times than not it’s the numbers that are fed into them. Math doesn’t have a mind. It just does what we tell it do, and if we ask it to crunch bad numbers, it will do it. Models don’t peer into the mind of God. They are a reflection of our imperfect mind.
Mental garbage (in and out) is driving our public conversations. The embroidering that surrounds the talk on climate change is fed by the rubbish. The mangled logic goes forward in time as well as backwards. Either the barkers are captives of recent and present temp readings to put future global temperatures on an exponential rocket trajectory, or they’re soothsayers reading the entrails of ice cores, tree rings, or rock strata going back millennia to defend their preconceived future rocket trajectory. Probably both. Models don’t correct for the flaw; they exacerbate it. It’s done all the time now that we are powered by “Intel inside”. It’s still the same though: garbage goes into the chip and garbage comes out. The pronouncements are accepted by the mathematically illiterate as God speaking through the burning bush.
The virus from China breeds quickly in particular conditions, and so does loosey-goosey modeling during pandemics. In the case of the current illness, we have cases and deaths. What qualifies as a “case” and “death” varies from place to place. It varies according to the honesty in official places and the availability of honest-to-God and modern clinics in every village. Do you think both exist in adequate quantities everywhere on the globe? We shouldn’t take to heart any “global” numbers.
We shouldn’t take to heart Germany’s, Italy’s, especially China’s, and many numbers coming out of the US. Disaggregating the cause of death from a patient with multiple life-threatening conditions can be as complicated as unraveling the Gordian Knot. I don’t know if all nations even conduct a COVID-19 test upon death. I suspect many don’t. Some nations might be just plain promiscuous in assigning deaths to the virus. Some places test more people as others assess only those who walk into the hospital; therefore, morbidity rates bounce around like flubber (“The Absent-Minded Professor”, 1961). Then, the “experts” average the flubber and plug it into the “model”. Out of the formula comes the ski slope on graph paper at press conferences. And we have a shutdown of world society and an end to respect for the concept of livelihoods.
The professionals in white smocks then tell us that livelihoods must take a back seat to an all-out effort to prevent us from getting sick, as if nothing else matters. It’s another sign of the myopia of the professional. The “expert” may be a great doctor of medicine but understandably more limited in passing judgment in the social and economic realms. Doc may be great at treating your fever but don’t ask him or her about advice on adjusting your investment portfolio. Nonetheless, for the medical master, it’s a siren call to stop the virus at all costs, with one of those costs being our livelihoods.
The professional has a mental reflex to ignore the recognition of different levels of risk that accrue to people according to their varying personal circumstances. The self-employed plumber needs to generate income each week and is willing to take more risk. No, he mustn’t be allowed, the medical pro tells us. A single all-encompassing risk of zero is imposed on everyone, everywhere. Of course, the salaried, the whizzes with degrees, and jet-set crowd are much more financially secure and occupationally situated to handle zero-risk at little loss. Not true of anyone else. Yet, it’s the blinkered and biased view of the medical poohbah that counts.
Okay, okay, a health crisis demands the centrality of the medical professional. It’s not the importance of the doctor in a situation like this in question here. It’s the tendency not to temper their counsel with other voices. An epidemic has many implications and their acknowledgement should also have a role in the sausage-making of a government response. We should balance the concern about the spread of the disease with the quality of life after it. Yeah, we will have our life after the contagion, but will it be a life worth admiring?
Is this a scene we want to repeat after the pandemic?
Should an epidemic – one in which we don’t have an accurate picture of its extent and severity – be an excuse to destroy your job, your ability to make your way in the world? Is everything reduced to a risk level compatible to a person comfortable with zero, and with the outsized influence to impose it? Is it proper to stampede the populace with erroneous numbers, models, and projections, only to destroy occupations that made life worth living for millions? Surely, the pile of lost livelihoods will mightily surpass the body count the longer the Great American Shutdown persists. There are alternatives.
What should be done? Open up American life now, with caveats. Implement the measures of testing, masks, social distancing where practical, while recognizing locational differences. Start by loosening the shackles in geographical areas less affected and in critical industries. From there, phase in the opening of society as the severity warrants. The goal should be a resumption of life, sooner rather than later, even as we acknowledge that doing so involves risk. “Bending the curve” should apply to livelihoods as well as the infected.
Risk is part of life. Zero risk is utopian, and “utopia” is translated from the Greek to mean “no-place”. In other words, zero risk in unattainable. And when it is pursued, catastrophe is the result. Keep this in mind as you watch the parade of color commentators of the medical profession in the wall-to-wall coverage on COVID-19.
Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., paper goods isle on Sunday, 5/15/2020.
The photo (above) is of the paper goods isle of Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., on Sunday, 3/15/2020. A young mother with a couple of kids in tow had 2 30-roll bricks of toilet paper in her cart, the only tp that I saw in the entire store. Is this what modern-America panic looks like?
Shoppers at BJ’s Wholesale Club market at the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, N.Y., March 14, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
On that same day, we rolled into a gas-‘n-stop for fuel and corn nuts. A fellow customer waiting in line mentioned a wild rumor on social media that Trump is considering the closing of the interstates. Panic, once again, in the age of Trump?
Our eyes and ears are saturated with “pandemic” and doctors on tv with warnings galore. Social interaction has become a dirty word. It’s “coronavirus this” and “coronavirus that” everywhere we look. Is America starting to resemble in thought and deed the America of the 1938 radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles?
Are we, modern sophisticates, really so “above that”? I doubt it in the age of Trump. Trumpophobes see all external stimuli with real or imagined evil intent as emanating from Trump. “Trump’s Katrina” is bandied about in the same manner as “abortion” and “control of her body” comes off the lips of Madonna.
Maybe what’s at work is something I call “vortex thinking”. Most everything of consequence today goes down two vortices: Trump and climate change. The Polar Vortex of a few years back, with its bone-chilling temps, was blamed on … global warming. A tornado that passes through your backyard is pinned on … global warming. Etc., etc. Regarding Trump, anything that’s bad in your life is due to … Trump. Everything that’s bad to anyone at any given time is placed at the feet of Trump.
George Will – no fan of Trump by any means – calls the phenomena “Caesaropapism”. Our presidents are now accorded demigod status. They are expected to control the tides in the manner of Persian king Xerxes flogging the Hellespont for destroying his pontoon bridge in the advance of his invasion of Greece in 480 BC.
Xerxes’s soldiers flogging the Hellespont.
Depending on the group of boosters, a president is saintly or evil incarnate. He or she is expected to be a master marionette controlling the actions of 330 million individuals. Does “sophistication” now mean thinking like a 5-year-old? Apparently so.
Right now, we are experiencing the first natural disaster to be pinned on the next-Republican-president-in-line. Bush 41 was pasted with the rather mild recession of 1991-1992. Bush 43 had his hurricane. Trump’s is COVID-19.
What separates a hurricane and a virus from an economic downturn is the fact that recessions are, indeed, man-caused. They may occur due to a constellation of actions that were taken earlier in a president’s term, or, more likely, they erupt from the gestation of factors unleashed long before he took the oath. Ditto for the good economic times. For instance, back in 2008-9, the bills came due after many years of easy money and political pressures to extend mortgages to financially insecure people. Obama rode it to the presidency. Ironically, his wing of the Dem Party had a big role in setting up the dominoes.
Now we have the coronavirus. Yeah, it’s unique … like all the previous strains were unique. Sure, take all the practical mitigations available but remember, this thing, like the earlier ones, will have to run its course. We have one thing going for us: we aren’t the Athens of 480 BC, or Constantinople of 541-542, or Europe of the mid-14th century.
The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, 1562, is a famous painting that relates to the Black Death of the 1340’s.
Please, get some perspective … and stop hoarding the toilet paper!
Not to see Clint Eastwood’s latest film “Richard Jewell” is to engage in citizenship malpractice.
The real Richard A. Jewell, 1997. (photo: Greg Gibson/Associated Press, 1997)
Every citizen should see Eastwood’s portrayal of how well-meaning people in powerful government positions, allied to rambunctious reporters, can be so awfully wrong and mature into a malevolent force without even knowing it. It’s how prosecutors can pursue an individual, wrongfully convict the person, pursue harsh sentencing, and resist any effort to set the record straight. It’s how investigations are pursued on the flimsiest of “probable cause” and can morph into other investigations because it is heartily believed that the guy must have committed some crime somewhere, somehow. Does this remind you of the events leading to the current impeachment melee?
A notion gets stuck in the craw of government officials – call it a “profile”, an expectation about the kind of person who commit these sinful acts – and persists until action is taken to the detriment of all. Richard Jewell was slapped by the powers-that-be as symptomatic of the “hero syndrome” (creating a situation or crime to become a hero). The media’s and the FBI’s “rush to judgment” led to Jewell’s public humiliation as the Olympic Park bomber in 1996 – only 7 years later to find the real culprit, Eric Rudolph.
Eric Robert Rudolph being escorted from the Cherokee County Jail for a hearing in federal court in 2003 after being on the run for five years.
False ideas creep into the heads of mighty people in a burgeoning and energetic federal government. And if these people have guns, watch out! It’s how we can have a Ruby Ridge (1992). It’s how we can experience a Waco (assault on David Koresh’s compound, 1993). It’s how we can have serial investigations of a presidential candidate as a “Russian mole”, and later to try to pin something else on him when the first effort failed in the belief that he’s still corrupt to the core.
The Branch Davidian compound, Waco, Tx., Feb.28, 1993.
There’s something in the government ether from the 1990’s to the present that is so insidious. No, it’s not a “deep state”. It’s something endemic – or generic – to government. The Founders’ idea of government as a necessary evil is as true today as it ever was. It’s a lesson we had better repeatedly teach ourselves and our young.
“Speaking truth to power” became a cliché by people wearing fake vaginas on their heads the day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Well, take a look at “speaking truth to power”, the culturally powerful, or the culturally privileged – aka, Hollywood – by Golden Globe host, Ricky Gervais, last night. The line about most of those folks, all prettied up in tuxes and gowns, being less educated than Greta Thunberg rings oh-so-true. Take that Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.
I was stunned and couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. The whole monologue was great, but the spicy parts occurred in the last couple of minutes. It was far better than the speeches by the cranial vacuum-tubed luminaries. Enjoy.
