Question 24

Question 24

The Greeks thought civic virtue could--and must--be taught. What if they were right?

How can governments be viewed with any optimism after the governments around the world, with their various philosophies and leadership criteria, ruined their economies in an inept effort to manage a virus? How can anybody look at these [people with any confidence?

And this: Police in Australia are checking that people’s coffee cups are full to make sure they have a reason to not wear their masks outside.

Funny idea in 'insideSources': Uber enables rapid evaluation of driver and passenger quality, expedites payments, and provides passengers and drivers with precise records of the times and route. Riders and drivers receive information on one another before they meet—imparting a degree of safety that taxis cannot replicate. And Uber makes all of these processes highly intuitive to both driver and rider.
Uberization of healthcare means the development of digital technologies that similarly ease the process of connecting patients and providers, expedite their care, offer clinical advice along the way, simplify record-keeping and payments, enable patients and providers to monitor progress and results, and accumulate indicators of quality and safety—all in intuitive, convenient ways.

Another interesting idea: The vax mandates were supposed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by high patient demand.
Instead, they will lead to hospitals being overwhelmed due to low labor supply. (Jay Bhattacharya)

People are so hard to predict and order.

WokeWorld report:
Passengers on a train near Philadelphia watched as a woman passenger was raped on Wednesday night but did nothing to help or even call 911, police say.

Is that social distancing? Or is it isolated, indifferent, self-absorbed people looking out at the world?

(see "Kitty Genovese" who was the nightmare victim in 1960s of a long, drawn-out murder in a public place. It became a psychology syndrome in textbooks, although its impact was lessened by the gradual revelation that the NYT exaggerated the event and much was made up.)

The 14 percent of Americans who are firmly opposed to getting the vaccine are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white adults, they are much more likely to be insured, and they are more likely to identify as Republican. Remember the pockets of yuppies who refused to vaccinate their kids?
Those firmly opposed to the vaccine are also much more likely to believe misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. (This is a cause and effect question of less significance.) A Kaiser Family Foundation survey from April found that 81 percent of the “definitely not” group was more likely to believe or was unsure about at least one vaccine myth, including the false ideas that vaccines contain fetal cells, cause infertility or change our DNA. This may explain why they still overwhelmingly think the vaccine is a bigger risk to their health than COVID-19. (The advantage of natural immunity was not raised.)

Not understanding anything about science seems to help.

Two studies, both completed by the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), an economic policy think tank housed at the University of Pennsylvania, project a decrease in private wealth, wages, and America's gross domestic product (GDP) over the next three decades relative to a projection in which the bill is not passed.

Covid is a highly selective respiratory disease variant that honed in tightly on the immunity-impaired aged and co-morbid. Accordingly, the one-size-fits all Lockdown policy was at least mistaken. Now there are shortages; we seem surprised and are looking for causes. Is this really just stupid?

Interesting notion on school choice: As early as 1955, economists such as Friedman began touting vouchers as a strategy to expedite integration. Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes and began attacking school choice as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.

Can kindness trump Law? if so, whose kindness and which laws?

From Brownstone: The undisputed fact is that the CDC changed rules for causation on death certificates in March 2020, so now we have no idea whatsoever whether the 713,000 deaths reported to date were deaths because OF Covid or just incidentally were departures from this mortal world WITH Covid. The extensive well-documented cases of DOA from heart attacks, gunshot wounds, strangulation or motorcycle accidents, which had tested positive before the fatal event or by postmortem, are proof enough.

Uniformity casts a wide net. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot's John Carlson Lecture on climate at MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences was canceled when Abbot turned out to have expressed a dissenting opinion—on a different topic. Abbot argued in a Newsweek piece that universities’ obsession with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, “threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.” 

So they canceled his talk on climate.

In reaction to the supply chain problem, some guy named Leary writes we should “withdraw from dependence on the global system and reconnect ourselves to local, tangible, human networks of production and consumption.” He has in mind shopping at farmer’s markets and growing your own food. “We can reject the miracle, as fully as we’re able,” he writes.

The operative word here is 'miracle.' And the informal world organization to mine and grow products to be refined and elaborated and then delivered to a total stranger a zillion miles away deserves awe and praise; it certainly isn't going to draw individual imitation.