Levelling

                                                                                  

                                           Levelling

The Levellers, such as John Lilburne (1615-1657), Richard Overton (1631-1664), and William Walwyn (c. 1600-1681), were a group of radical libertarian activists and pamphleteers who were active during the English Revolution. They advocated individual liberty, property rights, constitutionally limited government, religious toleration, and free trade at a time when virtually none of these things existed in England. For their troubles, several of them were repeatedly imprisoned and their publications censored.

Richard Rumbold, a Leveller writing in 1685 before his execution in Edinburgh:


I am sure that there was no man born marked by God above another; for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.

Arrogance and Tyranny

                      Arrogance and Tyranny


It looks as if the ORs will be doing elective cases and that medical offices will be seeing routine patients. Up until now, people have been called and told they were either sick enough to have a procedure or not. The same was true for office visits. People were called and told they did not need to be seen right now although they had made an appointment because they thought they needed one.

This is reminiscent of those people who are being told to stay home because their jobs are "not essential."

This is not the way people live. Those who have questions about their health do not have a medical perspective. They want seen and given that perspective, they do not want to be called or messaged that they are not worth the trouble to see. People getting up and going to work every day do not do so without some reward; work--even to Marx--brought its own rewards. The "essentiality" might have a personal context that is quite high.

There are people who are shutting down the world. And they are judging which parts to keep.

Droplet Versus Airborne

                                Droplet Versus Airborne

Our knowledge about the Virus is surprisingly limited. Consequently our responses are not well founded. They may be sensible, but sensible is not scientific.

There are at least two ways to catch the coronavirus: By coming in close contact with infected individuals and touching contaminated objects and surfaces. In both cases, the root of the transmission is usually a cough or a sneeze. This is from droplets, mucus, and saliva of 5-10 micrometers diameter released by the infected person. The droplets are subject to gravity and fall, with the virus, to surfaces, clothing, and the floor. So, proximity is a logical factor in spreading the disease as are surfaces and clothes in the proximity of the infected person.

Now, is the virus airborne? That definition is different. Airborne spread occurs when the droplets evaporate before they fall, leaving a live virus with infective potential floating in space. So an infected person could enter an empty room and leave it infective. Those viruses can float for 1/2 hour.

WHO reports: “In an analysis of 75,465 COVID-19 cases in China, airborne transmission was not reported.” 
But we are facing a resurfacing of an old problem in science: Naked politics. Can the Chinese researchers be believed? Can WHO be believed? And what can we make of the lion-hyena relationship in Washington between the government and the formerly esteemed Press?

"And the Chicks for Free"

                        "And the Chicks for Free"

I remember my first big day in college when the generic speech by the president was delivered, a speech delivered by every school president across academia. He said, "Look to your right and your left. One of the three of you will not be here in four years." Why is that, I thought. Bad students? Bad screening? Whose fault is the failure of one-third of the students in the freshman class, students with a significant financial, personal and family commitment to their success? Half of American colleges and universities lose a quarter or more of their freshman class in the first year, according to University of Pennsylvania education professor Robert Zemsky. Forty percent of college freshmen don’t even graduate.

What is going on here?

Here is one take from the growingly confident Heather Mac Donald:

....“The priority for many college presidents is getting freshmen in the door and tuition dollars in the bank,” wrote UC Berkeley professor David Kirp in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “Nobody gets fired because students are dropping out.”

Higher education today resembles a massive Ponzi scheme. Colleges desperately recruit ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating. Before their inevitable withdrawal, those students’ tuition dollars fuel the growth of the bureaucracy, which creates the need to get an even larger pool of likely dropouts through the door to fund the latest round of administrative expansion. Administrative positions at colleges and universities grew at ten times the rate of tenured faculty positions from 1993 to 2009, according to academic consulting firm ABC Insights. By the 2013 school year, there were slightly more campus administrators nationwide than faculty; spending on the bureaucracy was equal to spending on all educational functions, including faculty. Tuition rose to cover those bureaucratic expenses, regardless of whether families could afford to pay it. Tuition at private four-year colleges grew 250 percent from 1982 to 2012, while the median family income rose about 18 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to ABC Insights. Since the 2008 recession, tuition at four-year public colleges rose 35 percent.

…….


Conservatively, half of American college students should not be in college at all; they are neither intellectually prepared for nor temperamentally inclined toward postsecondary book learning. Yet the dominant narrative in our culture today is that the only way to be successful and self-respecting is to have a college degree. This narrative reflects the experience of the nation’s elite degree holders, who are largely clueless about work that does not involve sitting at a desk and using a computer. That narrative pushes students away from practical training in a trade, while a relentless campaign from campus pitchmen pulls them into four-year colleges. Vice-chancellors of enrollment, vice presidents for enrollment management, and executive directors of university marketing try to find potential recruits and persuade them to send in that first tuition payment, or at the very least a non-refundable deposit. The enrollment bureaucracy’s mantra is “optimizing yield”—getting as many warm bodies into your dorms and classrooms, if only briefly, for every thousand recruiting dollars you spend. A vast industry of enrollment consultants assists the in-house yield optimizers, promising to “reduce melt” (i.e., reduce no-shows), provide “multi-channel marketing,” and measure “product knowledge.” Their problem is right out of Econ 101: the nationwide supply of slots in each year’s freshman class outstrips demand—except in that thin upper crust of name-brand, status-conferring institutions. Thousands of obscure colleges fight for each applicant with techniques that resemble time-share marketing: offering priority in housing and in choosing a simpatico sleep-until-noon schedule of classes, say, to students who apply for early admission."

Everything can be made a business, from government to non-profits to religion. There is no reason that education should be exempt. But there are a lot of cultural reasons why it should be muted. Education used to be an institution, a pillar in the social edifice. It didn't always have to be perfect but is it too much to ask that it be reasonably high-minded and that its students be more customers than victims?

Emmaus

                                         Emmaus

Today's gospel is the brilliant Road to Emmaus gospel where two of Christ's apostles are discussing Christ's death on their way to the town of Emmaus. They are joined by Christ, whom they do not recognize. He joins the conversation, explains the life and death of Christ, particularly in the context of prophecy.

The travelers reach a point in the road where it seems the new man who joined them is going to go his own way. The men encourage him to continue with them to Emmaus. They eventually recognize him at the breaking of the bread at dinner.

This story is especially interesting in its connection to the Eucharist but what is fascinating is the journey of men, met by Christ whom they do not recognize and the moment where they, the travelers, must initiate the true development and enhancement of their understanding.

Without their positive efforts, Christ will move on alone.

A Chart and Projections

                           A Chart and Projections

The experts who are running our lives have some new projections from their models. The recovery may be less "bounce back, very strong, most powerful," and more Obama "shovel ready." This self-inflicted wound will be a story for the ages.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today released “Current Projections of Output, Employment, and Interest Rates and a Preliminary Look at Federal Deficits for 2020 and 2021.” The CBO projects the US unemployment rate will peak at 16 percent in the third quarter of 2020, and still average above 10 percent in 2021. The prospect of double-digit unemployment rates over the next year or longer will disappoint those hoping for a rapid recovery.

Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (real GDP) is expected to decline by about 12 percent during the second quarter, equivalent to a decline at an annual rate of 40 percent for that quarter.

The unemployment rate is expected to average close to 14 percent during the second quarter.
The federal budget deficit is projected to be $3.7 trillion.
Federal debt held by the public is projected to be 101 percent of GDP by the end of the fiscal year.

Some Non-Viral Thoughts

                   Some Non-Viral Thoughts

Perhaps there should be some agreed-upon statute of limitations where the destroying nation is no longer responsible for the damage it has done. So the Americans can walk away from Libya. Yalta leaves Eastern Europe to the furious Russians for their support of the West's dream of the U.N. and we remember the nice dream. At some point all should be, if not forgiven, less front-burner. Forgotten. Assigned to history.

I have been puzzling over the Middle East and the world's--especially the Europeans'--contribution to the current problems. Blame often falls on the Europeans' arbitrarily creating borders in dividing up the region after WW1 under Sykes-Picot. I think this is a straw man argument that deflects from a more important and larger responsibility these nations and their so-called leaders have: The winner of conflicts has responsibility to the peace.

An old article argued that European fomenting factionalism was a serious contributor to the wars of peace. "In Syria, the French cultivated the previously disenfranchised Alawite minority as an ally against the Sunni majority. This involved recruiting and promoting Alawite soldiers in the territory’s colonial army, thereby fostering their sense of identity as Alawites and bringing them into conflict with local residents of other ethnicities. The French pursued the same policy with Maronite Christians in Lebanon, just as the Belgians did with Tutsis in Rwanda and the British did with Muslims in India, Turks in Cyprus and innumerable other groups elsewhere.

"The militarization of these ethnic and religious identities, rather than the failure of perfectly placed state borders to alleviate tension between them, explains much of violence in the Middle East today. Blaming imperialism is usually sound politics and good comedy. But in this case, focusing on bad borders risks taking perpetual identity-based violence as a given, resulting in policies that ultimately exacerbate the conflicts they aim to solve."

So, in Romanoff and Juliet, the British favor partition of a country and speak to it in the U.N.. The following week they change their mind and oppose it, and give the exact same speech in the U.N..

Wars have terrible consequences for the losers and, particularly in modern times, significant responsibilities for the winners. The winners must create circumstances that allow for the continuation of life without the threat of recurrence of warlike animosity inherited from the previous conflict (e.g. The Treaty of Versailles) or the accidental sowing of seeds that engender new conflicts from the old. Historically winners have solved these problems by simply killing the enemy and sowing their fields with salt. The Romans absorbed their enemies. 

Now, in the current nuclear age, this is even more important. Animosity is becoming increasingly more dangerous with the rise of the power of the individual. With nuclear poisons and bacteriologic weapons, even individuals with limited resources can pose a world threat that seems certainly as disturbing a risk to life as the more theoretical climate change.

But if you have the confidence to volunteer for leadership of a nation and the arrogance to send young men to their deaths, you better step up to manage the wasteland your acts have created. And you should be judged by the failures. Unless, of course, the nations are entirely self absorbed with no sense of human responsibility or have no real ability to exercise their positive vision.

Or both.

Happy Earth Day

                                                   Happy Earth Day

May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now" about the predictions from the time of the first Earth Day in 1970. These are some:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980 when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” (Note: Global production of crude oil last year at 82.275M barrels per day (bpd) was just slightly below the record output in 2018 of 82.9M bpd, and about 50% higher than the global output of 55.7M bpd around the time of the first Earth Day).

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
(reprinted by Perry)

The New Economic Model

                              The New Economic Model

Under Lockdown Socialism:

–you can stay in your residence, but paying rent or paying your mortgage is optional.

–you can obtain groceries and shop online, but having a job is optional.

–other people work at farms, factories, and distribution services to make sure that you have food on the table, but you can sit at home waiting for a vaccine.

–people still work in nursing homes that have lost so many patients that they no longer have enough revenue to make payroll.

–professors and teachers are paid even though schools are shut down.

–police protect your property even though they are at risk for catching the virus and criminals are being set free.

–state and local governments will continue paying employees even though sales tax revenue has collapsed.

–if you own a small business, you don’t need revenue, because the government will keep sending checks.

–if you own shares in an airline, a bank, or other fragile corporations, don’t worry, the Treasury will work something out.

This might not be sustainable. (Kling)

There are limits as to what can be imposed. When a culture is offering vast and diffuse opportunity, those at the top will be hard pressed to solve needs of the large subsets, let alone the small ones. This notion of success by decree does work for aristocracies, though. The essence of these failures is lack of faith. The problem with Capitalism is that it is not a system, it is the result of an attitude of independence and liberty. The impulse to manage it is a manifestation of leadership's disbelief, not in capitalism, but its engine of liberty. 
NPR knows what we need, Bravo knows what we want. And if Bravo is wrong, they will melt away. But NPR will always be there, ignored and immortal, at least until the electricity is turned off.

The Instinct of a Leader

                          The Instinct of a Leader

Trump is being criticized for working "from his gut," ignoring his advisors and experts over the Virus. There is a lot of contradictory advice--and a lot of ignorance about the Virus--so what exact correct path he has ignored here is unclear.

Here is a hair-raising episode from the country's history, as recalled by Amity Shales:

"FDR informed his "brain trust" that he was considering raising the price of gold by 21 cents. His advisers asked why 21 cents was the appropriate figure. "It's a lucky number," stated Roosevelt, "because it's three times seven."

Henry Morgenthau, a member of the "brain trust," later wrote: "If anybody knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened."

We are not being governed by a lot of Socratic clones here. Lincoln is an outlier.

Council of Europe

                              Council of Europe

The West, exclusively, is inundated with self-proclaimed noble organizations and pressure groups with self-proclaimed high ideals, for you. They are unelected, virtually limited to the most benign and liberal countries in the world, and generally unknown. They have no plans for Africa, China or Russia. They do, however, have plans for you.

Who are these guys?

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), which describes itself as "independent," is the human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe -- not to be confused with the European Union. The Council of Europe is composed of 47 member states, including all of the 27 European Union member states. Its decision and policy-making body is the Committee of Ministers, made up of the foreign ministers of each of the member states. Its most famous body is the European Court of Human Rights. The Council of Europe, unlike the EU, cannot make binding rules on its member states. Last year it celebrated its 70th anniversary. The Council of Europe calls itself the "continent's leading human rights organization... All 830 million people living in this common legal space have an ultimate right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights".

According to its 1997 Annual Report:

"The mandate of ECRI, as determined by the Heads of State and Government, is: to review member States' legislation, policies and other measures to combat racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance, and their effectiveness; to propose further action at local, national and European level; to formulate general policy recommendations to member States...

"ECRI is composed of members designated by their governments (one for each member State of the Council of Europe) on the basis of their in-depth knowledge in the field of combating intolerance. They should have high moral authority and recognised expertise in dealing with racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance. ECRI's members are nominated in their personal capacity and act as independent members."

And who funds them?

Sunday/Thomas

                                  Thomas

Today's gospel is the "Doubting Thomas" gospel. It is an insight that unfortunately has become a cliché.

Thomas is not portrayed as a fickle guy in the gospels; he is actually a brave, committed man. When Christ wants to return to a town where they tried to kill Him previously, Thomas, after losing the argument against going, announces he will go with Christ so they can die together. So his caution over the talk of Christ's resurrection stems from only one thing: His desire for the truth.

"Thomas" means "twin." Doubting Thomas is a twin. The other side of doubt is belief. So his other twin is "belief," the product of doubt. Doubt is a process. But that is not true for all.

Solipsism: the position in Metaphysics and Epistemology that the mind is the only thing that can be known to exist and that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. It is a skeptical hypothesis, and leads to the belief that the whole of reality and the external world and other people are merely representations of the individual self, having no independent existence of their own, and might in fact not even exist. It is not, however, the same as Skepticism (the epistemological position that one should refrain from even making truth claims).
There are people who make their livings talking like this.

Several modern currents of thought are rushing us toward the rapids. One is doubt itself, as a philosophy, a tenet of modern life. For many, doubt is the endpoint.
Descartes asked, "What can I know?" He described us as isolated individuals whose knowledge was individually subjective. But this comes at a price. I can doubt the existence of the external world, and I can doubt the existence of what appears to be my body. But when I try to also doubt the existence of my inner self, my thinking, then I find that I am still there--as a doubting mind. Doubting is the thing that in the end I cannot doubt. Doubting, however, is thinking, and the existence of thinking implies the existence of a thinker. Hence Descartes' famous conclusion: "I think, therefore I am." So the self sees us as isolated individuals prioritizing our subjectivity above all else. And the agent of thought is doubt. And, unlike Thomas, those doubts are never answered.

This has implications for more than the individual. "Community" implies shared beliefs, things held in common. So doubt, as an endpoint, is as destructive, as isolating, as paralyzing as any heresy. It is the keep of the immobile and the somnolent. Like the pacifist, doubt requires the efforts, and the sacrifices, of others to exist.

When Christ appeared the second time, He was probably really happy to see Thomas.

Graphs and a Map

                                                   Graphs and a Map

Geography:


A telling graph:


The end of a graph:

People of the Wheel

                    People of the Wheel*

A strange reference popped up in an interview where politicians were praising one another, a reference to how well they did during "the Ebola threat" during the Obama administration. (This was in contradistinction to the government's current anti-viral performance.) It is probably not a good idea to bring Ebola up.

Ebola is a virus with several subset that, in humans, is savagely fatal, or up until recently has been. In some respects it has been managed well and the oft-maligned WHO can point to it with some pride; they have, in between great dinners, managed the outbreaks--if with some admittedly homicidal preventive techniques by the "host" countries.

But the history of Ebola research raises real concerns.

Ever since the Russian Biopreparate bio-weapons program, where researchers  developed weaponized microorganisms and new, lab-created illnesses, to kill people at random, the Americans have had labs devoted to counter these anti-human experiments. On several occasions, Ebola has been encountered outside of such labs by accident. The teaching case is Ebola Reston.

Reston's appearance in 1989 was the first-ever Ebola virus that emerged outside of Africa and was also the first known natural infection of Ebola virus in nonhuman primates. When it was first discovered among laboratory monkeys in the United States, the source was immediately traced back to the Philippines to a monkey breeding/export facility. The second outbreak was in 1992–93. The third episode in 1996 was the last known outbreak before Reston ebolavirus reemerged in pigs in 2008.

Nonhuman primates (NHPs)are used for preclinical research, disease modeling, drug development, experimental infections, and biological production and testing. M fascicularis is the only indigenous simian species in the Philippines; collection sites and quantities are government regulated. Regulated.

The original outbreak was first detected among imported NHPs in a quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia, USA. This outbreak was initially suspected to be simian hemorrhagic fever (SHF), another viral disease caused by an arterivirus, and indeed SHF virus was isolated from the animals. However, Ebola virus was also noted by electron microscopy and indirect fluorescent antibody assays in the cultures.

Remember, these are regulated breeding facilities and labs. And, of course, such an infection had never been seen before.

At the time, the virus was identified and its behavior was unknown. Unknown. There was an exposure to human handlers who knew they were exposed--and they went home. To their families.

It turned out that a small proportion the personnel in the lab had developed antibodies to the virus but, it appeared, this particular subset of the virus did not infect humans. (Despite the common natures of the subtypes, the Reston virus does not convey immunity to either Marburg or Zaire.)

Now, this news item from Fort Dietrich, Md.: In June, 2019, an inspection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found leaks and mechanical problems with the lab’s new chemical system to decontaminate wastewater. The institute was also working with Ebola and the agents known to cause the plague and Venezuelan equine encephalitis when high-level research was voluntarily halted. 

In 2009, research at the lab was suspended after the discovery that more than 9,200 vials, about one-eighth of its stock, wasn’t listed in the institute’s database.

Now, how good is the containment policy in Wuhan?

What are these people doing? And why do we have faith in any of them?

*In the original movie adaptation of the novel I Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth (1964), bacteriologic warfare destroys humanity except for a few humans and a group of crazed remnants bent on killing anyone loosely connected to science whom they call The People of the Wheel.

So, It's Worse Than You Think

                     So, It's Worse Than You Think

Models. What a nightmare. Here is an article from Israel--and commented on by Townhall--that Don sent showing some problems, real problems, that reasonable and able people have when asked for an answer to a complex question: Predict the future when an organism we do not know reacts with the human immunologic system that has never seen it before. And decisions on the estimated behavior have to be made by politicians, totally ignorant of the science and perhaps of abilities limited only to refined mendacity, who will be judged and vilified by press members who finished behind them in high school.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. The numbers told a shocking story: irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.

The Wuhan Virus follows its own pattern, he told Mako, an Israeli news agency. It is a fixed pattern that is not dependent on freedom or quarantine. “There is a decline in the number of infections even [in countries] without closures, and it is similar to the countries with closures,” he wrote in his paper. 

“Is the coronavirus expansion exponential? The answer by the numbers is simple: no. Expansion begins exponentially but fades quickly after about eight weeks,” Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel concluded. The reason why coronavirus follows a fixed pattern is yet unknown. "I have no explanation,” he told Mako, “There are is kinds of speculation: maybe it's climate-related, maybe the virus has its own life cycle.” 

But what about Italy and their staggering 12% mortality rate? “The health system in Italy has its own problems. It has nothing to do with coronavirus. In 2017 it also collapsed because of the flu,” Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel told the news agency. Indeed, Italy’s exceptionally high coronavirus mortality rate is eerily reminiscent of their unusually high flu mortality rates. Supportive of this theory, Germany, has low flu infection and mortality rates and similarly low coronavirus rates.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel concludes in his analysis summary paper that the data from the past 50 days indicates that the closure policies of the quarantine countries can be replaced by more moderate social distancing policies. The numbers simply do not support quarantine or economic closure. 

On the reasonableness of Israel’s unprecedented quarantine and closure, he commented to the news agency, “I think it's mass hysteria. I have no other way to describe it. 4,500 people die each year from the flu in Israel because of complications, so close the country because of that? No. I don't see a reason to do it because of a lower-risk epidemic.” 

While the American policies remain less restrictive than those of Israel, it is important to understand the origins of our own “mass hysteria” response. President Trump urged a strong coronavirus response after consulting with Dr. Fauci and his team, who relied on a British model predicting 2.2 million deaths in the United States and 500,000 deaths in the U.K. But that model was developed by Professor Neil Ferguson, who had a history of wildly overestimating death rates through his prediction models. Professor Ferguson was not known for his reliability, and his 2001 disease model was criticized as “not fit for purpose” after it predicted that up to 150,000 people could die in the U.K. from mad cow disease (177 deaths to date). Ferguson’s U.K. coronavirus deaths prediction is now down to 20,000 people, 4% of the original prediction.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel has mathematically shown us that coronavirus closures were a mistake. It's a tough reality. Americans lost their jobs and businesses went under because the United States, along with most first world nations, acted on the chilling predictions of a severely flawed model, a reading of Professor Ferguson’s tarot cards. Hindsight is 20/20, so we have to be realistic with our criticism. President Trump did not want 2.2 million Americans to die and did what he thought was necessary to save our lives, relying on a model his advisors told him was trustworthy. It's done. It happened. But it doesn't mean that he should continue the course. 

It’s been one month since our country declared a national coronavirus emergency and life as we knew it had ceased.  

Separateness of the Mask

                         

                       Separateness of the Mask

As I understand it, hijab is "modest dress" and a niqāb, or ruband, is the veil that can be a part of it. The constraints of The Virus has made me think of this in a new way.

In talking to people with a mask on, some nuance is lost. Conversation seems to devolve to the direct, like a train robber. It is reminiscent of the behavior of the lovers in The Magic Mountain who used a foreign language between them because it made subtly--and insincerity--difficult. In less intense social interactions, it seems enhancement suffers.

Actually it is hard to believe that expression could be so important to interchange; while facial expression is probably older than language, it is certainly more limited. And there must be studies about it, although what is not learned might create inaccuracies. 
Maybe the obvious barrier introduces a psychological--and non-language--complication of distance and isolation.
Whatever it is, it is different. I wonder if, like Mann's lovers, it is clarifying--or coarsening and stunting.

Lincoln

                                    Lincoln


We Americans stupidly recognize this day as the day before taxes are due. So we emphasize money and materialism over greatness of mind and soul, greatness that was both a product of and an influence upon the nation. Taxes are trivial compared to what happened on this day in 1865. President Lincoln was shot by Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 and died the next morning. Secretary of State Seward was brutally assaulted as was his son. There is good evidence that General Grant was stalked to his train the same night by the conspirators. This occurred 5 days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox and doomed the South to a reconciliation with the North shepherded by the usual political wolves. More importantly it deprived the nation and politics of the high standard of mind and spirit Lincoln embodied.

Tolstoy on Lincoln:
“.... how largely the name of Lincoln is worshiped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.

“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.

“His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

I don’t want people to die, but....

                     I don’t want people to die, but....

"I don’t want people to die. But liberals are not helping by pressuring young people to give up jobs, savings and hope of a brighter future as if it’s a sacrifice they should make without complaint or any expectation of repayment, just because it’s the right thing to do.

The conversation should solely be framed as this, “We are asking young people to give up a lot, and to save mostly older people. So how are we going to pay them back? What sacrifice will be demanded to make them whole?”

I appreciate how people want to seem moral and righteous. But I want to underline the “contract” part of “social contract.” It is not justice to make young people give up their futures. We need to repay them, with interest.

People’s fears about losing jobs, losing houses, and watching retirement savings disappear are not minor. And if we fail to take them seriously, they will start to listen to Trump and others who say we have to re-open the economy."

"Just because it is the right thing to do?" "Want to seem moral and righteous?"

This was written by one Amanda Marcotte who has a job. She works as a political writer for the left-leaning website, Salon. I suppose all this implies that the idealistic, self-sacrificing optimism of the young, embodied by Sanders, has moved on to easier, lower ground. She seems to think that political triage is a new idea but it is the basis of old people on ice floes, death camps, euthanasia and eugenics. It is actually not a partisan question, it is a question of whatever the future is substituting for religion. It is a problem only when the political influence extends over controlling life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Which is too far.

Intensity is not a substitute for insight, nor is force for thought. Control over things should be carefully considered. Let's start here: Let's not read the works of people who write books titled, Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself. And, when they write articles, let's not take them seriously.

Sunday/Easter

                                   Easter

Easter is the essential Christian event. Every aspect of the Christian church hinges on Christ's resurrection.

The gospel is filled with little particulars (the woman hesitant to enter the tomb, Peter being outrun to the tomb, the meticulous arrangement of the burial cloths, the assumption that the body was stolen--after the assumption by the Pharisees that the apostles would steal it)--all giving misdirection and specificity to what becomes the philosophical earthquake of all time. And, of course, another biblical irony: The first to arrive, the women, could not be legal witnesses.

Yet how does this all hinge? Hearsay? The interpretation of a sacred book? Amulets and magic rites? No. Amazingly it hinges on us.

By the time Christ rises, we know all the players. We even have some insights about them. They are not revolutionaries, not mystics and, while seemingly sincere, they are not special. They are relatively normal working folks with responsibilities and, probably, annoyed families. As seen by their behavior during the Passion, they are not fully aware of what is happening. Nor are they particularly brave. Yet, after this crisis where their leader is tortured and killed, they somehow emerge as philosophers and martyrs. They all, to a man, experience a mind-changing, life-changing event. Scattered and leaderless they raise a religious movement that challenges everything in its time and, eventually, forces mighty Rome to adapt.

Christ performed the great, unarguable miracle. It was the behavior of men, people, who confirmed and developed it. No leap of faith was necessary. They were convinced and changed. Then they convinced and changed the world.

 

Graphs

                                     Wide-ranging Graphs

American CO2 production:
 


The dreaded inequality:



Some pent-up car demand:


And a curve that for some reason does not alarm people:

Good Friday

                             Good Friday

How the norms slide and slip, how the bell-shaped curve moves. Two poems about Good Friday that were outliers, now the norm.

Christina Rossetti's Good Friday

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.


And the atheist Housmann' Easter Sunday, taking the position of the thief:


If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Goebbels and The Left

                      Goebbels and The Left

There has been a sudden outpouring of scholarship from left-leaning "scholars" on the history of post-World War II free market and libertarian thought. Much of it lacks academic rigor and has something of a conspiratorial tone as if no reasonable person could believe such ideas, and therefore they must be the product of corporate influence, a cover for racism and white supremacy, and so on. This kind of propagandist rewriting of history works; Goebbels was a genius at it.

Scholarship in drag, like the 1619 Project.

Attacking origins of thought through speculation is a standard. A great one is the attack on Christianity through its original documents. The Jesus Project, disguised as a Christian research project, was really made up of very aggressive, dare I say "evangelical," atheists who tried to cobble together a narrative that challenged the traditional Christian scripture with gnostic writings written three hundred years later. Some fun fiction is out there built around the Council of Nicea and the choice of preferred writings that emerged. (Khoury's Templar series is a good one.)

Berstein has an article on the topic in Reason. He analyzes Robert Van Horn who writes "from 1946 throughout the 1950s, corporations made possible and crucially supported the rise of Chicago law and economics through funding and advice…" He implies that corporate involvement influenced the normative positions of Chicago School economics, in particular skepticism of antitrust laws. there is nothing in Van Horn's post documenting that corporations funded the relevant scholars at Chicago. The only funding discussed in the article is from the Volker Fund. As Wikipedia explains: "The William Volker Fund was a charitable foundation established in 1932 by Kansas City, Missouri, businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker. Volker founded the fund with the purposes of aiding the needy, reforming Kansas City's health care and educational systems, and combating the influence of machine politics in municipal governance. Following Volker's death in 1947, Volker's nephew, Harold W. Luhnow continued the fund's previous mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics."

"In sum, "corporate funding" amounted to a handful of three-year fellowships for independent scholarly research, and a two-week seminar. To extrapolate from that corporate funding was "crucial" to the rise of law and economics (the start of which the author himself dates to several years earlier), much less that it affected the substantive views of those involved, is quite a stretch."

But this is, and will be, the way of our new world. We will be overwhelmed by the audacity and the volume of fraud. Ideologues, tabla rasa politicians, and wide-eyed fools will adopt the style of sincere mystics and itinerate patent medicine hucksters. The new politician and his Press supporters will parse 2+2 and often will be overlooked because nobody will believe, like Goebbels, that anyone could lie so easily, so massively or be so egocentrically cruel.

All our Drugs Come from China

                              All our Drugs Come from China

"80 percent of America's pharmaceutical drug supply comes from China." This has been presented recently as part of a rather astonishing anxiety over America's dependence upon foreign manufacturers. We do this on purpose; it's cheaper. But the numbers are, in the words of the Secretary of Defense in "Independence Day," not entirely accurate.

What is underlying this problem is how the inaccuracy occurs. Are these people this dumb? Or are they insincere?

This is from Reason:

'Tracing this “80 percent of American drugs come from China” claim back to its source reveals a game of “whisper down the lane,” in which a rather innocuous piece of data about the global manufacturing base for pharmaceutical drugs has been inaccurately summarized and stripped of important context.

In December, when the U.S. and China signed the “phase one” trade deal—and when the coronavirus outbreak was still very much in the background—Politico published a story (with some reporting from the South China Morning Post) framed around the idea that “U.S. policymakers” were worried that China could “weaponize” its drug exports to gain leverage in a trade dispute.

The piece was designed to scare. “The U.S. relies on imported medicines from China in a big way,” authors Doug Palmer and Finbarr Bermingham wrote right at the top. “Antibiotics, over-the-counter pain meds and the stuff that stops itching and swelling—a lot of it is imported from China.”

How much is a lot? “In all, 80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China,” they wrote, linking back to a press release from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa). (Remember, this piece was in Politico.)

But that’s not what the press release says.

Grassley’s statement was publicizing a letter Grassley sent on August 9 to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA, asking them to conduct more inspections of foreign drug manufacturing facilities to make sure they meet American standards.

“Unbeknownst to many consumers … 80 percent of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients are produced abroad, the majority in China and India,” Grassley wrote.

There’s the first bit of context collapse: the authors of the Politico piece merged Grassley’s “80 percent … are produced abroad” into “80 percent…are made in China.”

All of this also raises another question: Where is Grassley getting that information? His letter sources that claim to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report which itself cited FDA data on pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world. And that report makes it clear that the U.S. has a diverse supply chain for drugs that goes well beyond India and China.

“Nearly 40 percent of finished drugs and approximately 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) are manufactured in registered establishments in more than 150 countries,” is how the GAO summed up America’s pharmaceutical supply chain.

In two jumps, we’ve gone from “80 percent of American drugs are manufactured in more than 150 countries around the world” to “80 percent of drugs come from two countries” to “80 percent of drugs come from China.”'

There are simply too many sources of information, misinformation, and disinformation out in the world for the individual to monitor. So the individual expects the trusted sites, who analyze information for a living, to do it. But they may be unable--or unwilling--to do so.

The Imperial College London

                    The Imperial College London


A paper written by a team of 33 researchers at Imperial College London, a research-oriented science institution in South Kensington, was summarized recently by Tucker. This is from it.

Dr. Fauci’s latest admission: “I’ve looked at all the models. I’ve spent a lot of time on the models. They don’t tell you anything. You can’t really rely upon models.”

The economic suffering we are enduring right now was based on these models, amplified in their extremes by a click-hungry media apparatus that thrives in a crisis as in no other time.

There was precious little consultation with serious medical professionals (the pleas of 800 were ignored). Also ignored were a range of experienced epidemiologists with real track records as well as economists. There were no legislative votes, and no real public debate. The Constitution was ripped to shreds. Large numbers of people who, by virtue of the musical-chairs game of elections, happen to be holding office assumed dictatorial power and declare themselves wise enough to rend the social fabric between essential and non-essential and thus instantly wreck the dreams and lives of tens of millions of people.

Despite all the expertise out there, and tremendous efforts to beg caution, and despite all our pretensions at being a scientifically minded people, at all levels of society, there was genuine panic and the adoption of what seems like the medieval “miasma” theory of disease. It’s just in the air, everywhere, blowing around. Stay indoors! Get away. Cling to loved ones and hope for the best! Better yet, sit by yourself, alone in a room, until this ends!

That was six weeks ago. You still can’t get a test, unless you are very sick and hurl yourself at the hospital front door. That is the fault of government agencies, in a scandal that has been widely covered and will be told throughout the ages. That will surely be remedied in time, along with a much-needed antibody test for post-infection immunity.

All that said, we are finally getting at least some information to make sense of this disease. In particular: demographics. We are at least finding out for whom it is fatal and therefore can better focus mediation strategies on those in danger – which is essentially the core job of medical professionals since, well, since the ancient world. To the extent we can replace fear-based mythology, predictions, and state power with knowledge rooted in empirical realities, that is to say, actual facts, we get closer to comprehending the possibility of calm and focus on what matters.

What have we learned? I draw your attention to a complicated paper written by a team of 33 researchers at the now-famous Imperial College London. This difference between this paper and the others is that this one is rooted not in what statistical models predict based on malleable assumption but on the actual factual record. The paper: “Estimates of the severity of coronavirus disease 2019: a model-based analysis.”

For its conclusions, I’m relying on a summary in Statnews: What explains Covid-19’s lethality for the elderly?

Researchers on Monday announced the most comprehensive estimates to date of elderly people’s elevated risk of serious illness and death from the new coronavirus: Covid-19 kills an estimated 13.4% of [infected] patients 80 and older, compared to 1.25% of those in their 50s and 0.3% of those in their 40s. The sharpest divide came at age 70. Although 4% of patients in their 60s died, more than twice that, or 8.6%, of those in their 70s did…

An accompanying editorial finally says what people are starting to realize: “the fatality rate is low for younger people.” It’s high for older, unhealthy people, but low for healthy younger people. That’s hugely important information for focusing the response.

Worldometers presents the reality more clearly (but keep in mind that the precise case fatality ratio is unknown given the lack of random testing and potential misclassification; what matters here are the demographic disparities).

And from confirmed COVID patients with preexisting conditions:

Here is the breakdown and a comparison to SARS and seasonal flu (keeping in mind that this data is preliminary but the demographics are likely to hold true), demonstrating that even with preliminary data COVID-19 is more discriminatory by age/health than seasonal flu.

The authors of the Imperial College study point out that while this appears to be about age, we are really talking about the health of immune systems of which age is a statistical proxy. There is also a gendered risk too, with authors noting “tentative, sex-based differences in the COVID-19 epidemic, with elderly men generally faring worse than elderly women.”

How do these surprising demographics affect the fatality ratio, the number on which everyone obsesses because it is this that gives us an indication of whether this is “worse” or “not as bad as” the seasonal flu? It suggests that an aggregate number masks a huge disparity between groups.

In the outbreak’s early weeks that was thought to be as high as 3% to 8%. Instead, the fatality rate among people with confirmed disease is 1.38%, they concluded. That supports an estimate by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health earlier this month of a 1.4% fatality rate in confirmed cases. The British group said the fatality rate among all of those infected with the new coronavirus — including those who don’t have symptoms — is 0.66%.

That’s a huge difference from what people believed at the very outset, confirming that the cautions of John Ioannidis were right to introduce doubt about sweeping impositions of social, economic, and political change based on early perceptions, which have always been far more scary than the reality. It was 15 years ago that headlines blared the coming mass death from Bird Flu, with predictive epidemiologists demanding that schools and businesses close to protect us from the worst fate. That didn’t happen, although Bird Flu was deadly (all such viruses are), but the pandemic was not anywhere close to as bad as was predicted.

In sum, what researchers know now that they only suspected a few months ago is that coronavirus is mainly a threat to older people with health issues, and men in particular. That’s hugely important information and a far cry from the confused miasma theory (everyone is going to die!) that drove the panicked response.

To be sure, this does NOT mean younger people are in the clear – it’s a severe disease, and there are always exceptional cases that defy the demographic patterns, as with any disease. But the statistical evidence shows this is rare, whereas more severe complications for the sick and elderly are far more common.

Pandemics and The Environment

                   Pandemics and The Environment


This is from a Williamson article on how the pandemic and the reaction in The West is exactly what would be created by The Green New Deal. While obvious enough, it is still true.

The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing.

What is underway right now in response to the epidemic is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.

Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possible severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday was always difficult when I was a child. The story was horrifying. And it was long. Relentless and long. Novel long. And novel deep. The suggestions and conflicts of this gospel are so important it is, objectively, hard to imagine that students are regularly deprived of it. What is Truth? Barabbas. Ecce homo. 
And these questions are universal, always reframed by every new age which gives us all a chance to rethink them from our newest, temporary vantage. Now, in the time of The Virus, it is hard not to think of Pilate, the region's most powerful man, vacillating before the crowd, too weak to do what is right, even before his own law.

This is the "Tchaikovsky Legend", from a poem by Stoddard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=X-Zwjn-2n_A&feature=emb_logo

When Jesus Christ was yet a child
He had a garden small and wild,
Wherein He cherished roses fair,
And wove them into garlands there.

Now once, as summer time drew nigh,
There came a troop of children by,
And seeing roses on the tree,
With shouts they plucked them merrily.

Do you bind roses in your hair?
They cried, in scorn, to Jesus there,
The Boy said humbly: "Take, I pray,
All but the naked thorns away."

Then of the thorns they made a crown,
And with rough fingers pressed it down,
Till on His forehead fair and young,
Red drops of blood like roses sprung.

High-Level Estimates

                    High-Level Estimates

Here is a collection of the experts and their estimates of changes in the GDP from The Virus, second quarter. From their models. 

I understand that we are now in the Age of the Experts but does anybody know anything?

Price Gouging

                                 Price Gouging

From a press release from Nurse.org, a website for nurses publishing educational and employment information as well as discussion forums:

"This week, New York needs to hire at least 200 ICU and ED nurses for one of the largest health systems in the nation. This week’s projections show a huge influx of patients, including ICU, and hospitals are in dire need.

Here are some incentives that we’ve found from New York State and staffing agencies.

*Crisis Pay – Travel nursing agencies are offering crisis pay that is over double the average pay for travel nurses. We are seeing pay rates of over $10,000 per week plus quarantine pay.

*Free hotel rooms – several hotels, including the Four Seasons.

*Free car rentals – Hertz is offering free car rentals for healthcare workers

*Free airfare – Delta and Jetblue are offering free flights to medical workers who are helping tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

*Discounts and offers – Businesses are also offering incentives, not only to travel nurses but to all nurses. From free crocs shoes and free Starbucks coffee to discounts on scrubs, we’ve collected all the specials and you can see the offers here."

Sooo...will there be charges for price gouging brought here?

Is a Shutdown an Overreaction?

From a blog by a guy named Mulligan. It got some angry response. The 90K is a bit hard for me to believe, based on the South Korean numbers:

                     Is a Shutdown an Overreaction?

60,000 - 80,000 Americans died from the 2017-18 flu, without exceeding the capacity of ICU beds. This flu was experienced around the world. Not a single country found it worth shutting down their economies in that situation.

In 2020 the forecast is that about 90,000 Americans will die from COVID-19, including some deaths due to insufficient ICU capacity. Shutting down "nonessential" businesses is now the norm.

This forecast comes from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation IMHE at the University of Washington. Unlike me, IMHE are not amateurs with contagious disease time series. With "about 500 statisticians, computer scientists, and epidemiologists on staff, IHME is a data-crunching powerhouse. Every year it releases the Global Burden of Disease study...."

At what point is a reasonable person allowed to ask why the economic policies of 2017-18 and 2020 are so disproportionate?
Some people will say that the 90,000 would have been much higher without shutting down the economy. At what point can a reasonable person follow up with "Why were ALL of the 2020 costs, which were in the $ trillions, taken on the economic (and civil liberty) side of the ledger, and essentially NONE on the mortality side?"

China Baloney

                                China Baloney

At times of anxiety, we poor humans are inundated with a lot of posturing and baloney. The anxiety over calling The Virus "The China Virus" is a great example of both. The incredible efforts of the Chinese to propagandize the crisis aside, there is some real stupidity here. Below is an article by McGurn from the WSJ:


"Amid the coronavirus wreckage, there seems to be a bright spot. The pushback against referring to Covid-19 as the “China virus” indicates a welcome new sensitivity for the racial discrimination directed at Chinese-Americans. Or does it?

Ever since people began referring to “the China virus”—or to be precise, ever since the White House press corps realized it was Donald Trump’s preferred term—the American people have been given repeated warnings that this is not only insensitive but dangerous.

It’s hard not to notice the chasm between this new hypersensitivity and the indifference toward another, very real discrimination affecting this same community. That is the racial discrimination keeping Chinese-Americans out of America’s most elite educational institutions. Some of the same people who fret so loudly about how we refer to Covid-19 are utterly indifferent to this other racial discrimination affecting Chinese-Americans.

Start with the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio. After Mr. Trump tweeted out a reference to “the China virus” earlier this month, Mr. de Blasio clapped back. Asian-Americans, the mayor thundered, “don’t need you fueling more bigotry.”

If someone fuels bigotry by calling a virus a name accurately derived from its geographic origins, what about a mayor who works overtime to reduce the number of Asian-Americans in his city’s most competitive public high schools, not because they haven’t earned their entry but because they aren’t the right race.

Ditto for Harvard. Remember, the chief argument against “the China virus” is that using it stigmatizes both China and people of Chinese descent. But what about the stigmas that come from the subjective “personal ratings” Harvard applies in its admissions process? The Justice Department says these ratings produce “consistently poorer scores for Asian-Americans,” a racial penalty that brings down an Asian-American applicant’s overall score.

Asian-Americans as a whole score higher “on many objective measures than any other racial/ethnic group including test scores (see chart below), academic achievement, and extracurricular activities.” But if we are to believe Harvard, Asian-Americans are less likable, less kind and less courageous than those of other races. If that’s not stigmatization, what is?

….. “xenophobia wears many faces.” And in a nation of 330 million, America has its share of goons. What’s Harvard’s excuse?"