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The Real Risk Factors

New York City residents in March 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

RogerG

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Not Wasting a Crisis, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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A Bear in the California Woods

A LAUSD bus driver joins school workers at SEIU Local 99, which represents about 30,000 support workers, as they march at Marlton School in February 2018. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

40 years as a one-party state has made California very vulnerable to bear markets, like the one that we’re experiencing right now.  Sometimes black swan events can come in the form of a virus and the effects move down the money digestive tract to the California taxpayer.  Watch out taxpayers, pensioners, younger government employees and the whole gamut of local governments.

There are two bears stalking the state.  One is the huge bond and pension indebtedness and the other is the public employee unions.  The second one gave birth to the first one.

A local newspaper headline announces bankruptcy in Stockton, California June 27, 2012. (REUTERS/Kevin Bartram)

Here’s the scenario.  Unsustainable defined-benefit public employee pensions – the most expensive to maintain, as opposed to the defined-contribution kind – requires a high rate of return to successfully service the payouts to retirees like my wife and I.  The coronavirus bear market has shattered the 7 percent rate of return to adequately fund CalPers, CalSTRS, and any others out there.  The pension bear was beget by the public employee union bear, the most powerful lobby in Sacramento.  Who’ll make up the loss?  If you said the taxpayer and lower-rung government employees, move to the front of the class.

The pension fund managers will go to the one-party state, which is housed in the state capital, to make ends meet.  These clowns will then try to bilk more out of the “rich”.  Already the top 1% of the state’s income earners account for 50% of the state income tax, which contributes 60-70% of the dough to the state’s coffers.  What’ll happen?  You guessed it: capital – meaning the “rich” – have already begun to flee to places like Incline Village just across the border in Nevada.  Others seek refuge further points east.  For a state that prides itself in its open heart for refugees, why is it so intense about making them?

Watch for how totalitarian taxation leads to totalitarianism.  The State Franchise Tax Board is already manning up to scowl the nation for what it considers its truant millionaires and billionaires.  We’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say about California’s attempt to fleece the new-found residents of other states.  Does a state have the power to enter another state – literally or digitally – and force that state’s residents to prove that they didn’t spend 6 months in the People’s Republic?

The next in line to the guillotine will be local governments.  To meet their pension obligations, they’ll have to layoff workers.  It’s highly unlikely that the state with one of the highest combined rates of taxation in the nation can squeeze any more out of local residents.  To pay the bill, they’ll have to raise the contributions from a shrunken workforce.

And what’ll happen to current retirees (like myself) whose retirement decisions were based on contractual obligations over a 30-year career?  I’m nervous for the bear in the woods.  Little did we know that Reagan’s 1984 commercial would have relevance beyond the Soviet threat.  Watch the 1984 ad below to get my point.

The situation is clearly laid bare in a podcast interview of state Senator John Moorlach (R., Costa Mesa) by Will Swaim of the California Policy Center.   You can listen to the discussion by clicking on Moorlach’s picture.

State Senator John Moorlach (R, Costa Mesa)

RogerG

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Panic in the Age of Trump

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!

RogerG

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Socialism Without the “Socialism”

On Super Tuesday (yesterday), the Democratic Party may have stepped from the brink of a full-throated endorsement of truth-in-labeling.  Appearances matter a lot, and most Dem voters seemed appalled at appearing to fondle a cranky septuagenarian holdover from the days of Tom Hayden and the SDS.  They seem to want their socialism in an accumulation of smaller doses and without the “socialism” title.  Comrade Sanders scraped a few wins in hard-left bastions (read California) and lost in many other locales that turned out to be more hospitable to another doddering septuagenarian of the plodding socialism-lite wing.  A Super Tuesday vote for slow motion socialism?

When that great uncle, fresh from the dementia unit in a chronic care facility, becomes a party’s alternative to the ranting great uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, you know that the Dem bench is nearly empty.  They both are nuts: one literally so, and the other a lifetime believer in falsehoods.

One wants to replicate the carnage of a long-dead Swedish socialism, thinking that the adjective “democratic” makes it all better, while extolling the virtues of totalitarian health care and literacy campaigns for the purpose of mind control.  After all, Castro, Maduro, and Lenin can’t be all that bad … he says.

The other wants to dial back from “11” – to, let’s say, “9” – every one of the half-baked ideas to ooze out of the minds of the Squad and that good ol’ SDS crank.  Instead of a real Green New Deal, the other wants a lime-green one.  Instead of a full-on Medicare for All, he proposes a more haphazard government takeover but will, over time, eventually transform all health care workers into government employees.  As for any damaging fallout, well, another group of government employees will be hired to clean up the mess, ad infinitum.  Take each childish blathering of AOC and he will adopt it … but add a little water.

So, Dems, you have a choice between honest and damaging socialism and honest and damaging socialism-lite.  And while you’re at it, vote to make pre- and post-natal abortion, along with gun confiscation, a commonplace.  Both the honest fool and the demented one insist on it.  They only differ in the amount of lead on their throttle-pressing foot.

RogerG

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Frighteningly Familiar

Today’s movie recommendation: “The Rope” by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, starring James Stewart.  Two well-to-do young men, fresh from their elite colleges, both considered smart with above average IQ’s, committed a murder because they thought themselves to be above morality.  Hitchcock probably got the idea from a famous 1924 murder case.  The script and the reality are eerily similar.

A scene from the movie with the James Stewart character between the killers.

The reality: On May 21, 1924, Richard Loeb (age 19) and Nathan Leopold (age 20) planned and executed the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks as he as walking home from school.  Loeb, the son of a millionaire Sears and Roebuck executive, and Leopold, the son of a millionaire founder of a box manufacturing company, would be legitimate Mensa Society members.  Leopold was a scholar of botany and ornithology, mastered 10 languages, and translated classics from their original Greek and Latin.  Loeb was the youngest graduate, at age 17, of the University of Michigan in 1921.  They would reunite in a couple of years for their ultimate and horrifying stick-it-to-the-man caper.

Nathan Leopold (l) and Richard Loeb at their trial. Their kinship for each other developed into a sexual relationship.
Bobby Franks, age 14, shortly before his murder.

Both were fascinated with the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, in an extremely garbled fashion.  They were attracted to Nietzsche’s notion of the rise of “supermen” after he predicted the fall of traditional institutions and norms, an idea that resonated with both National Socialists and the Bolsheviks: Lenin had his “vanguard elite” and Hitler his Aryan supermen.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It wouldn’t stop there.  An emphasis on an elite of “smart” people with the appropriate college credentials would be a keystone of late 19th-century Progressivism.  Progressives valued an unelected class of administrators and regulators – a technocratic elite – to govern society.  The conceit is still with us in our expansive administrative state, and as Democrats parade about with their constant use of the term “expert” to nullify opposing views.  Their proposals – The Green New Deal for instance – would fast-track the ongoing trend of transferring great power to their preferred class of elite college-credentialed overlords in ever-expanding agencies.

Have we been softened-up to accept this state of affairs?  As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I think so.  In the movie, a prominent teacher (James Stewart) is presented as a powerful influence on the minds of the killers, until the teacher discovers too late the wayward extent that they took his classroom musings.  The earlier pride in his clever mental gymnastics in the classroom is wiped off his face as he discovers the body later in the story.  Then he comes to realize his huge mistake.

A similar corruption of the mind was noticed by CS Lewis in his famous tract “The Abolition of Man”.  Lewis worried about the dehumanization of young minds occurring in British classrooms of the mid-20th century.  In a chapter titled “Men Without Chests”, he wrote of the degradation of rampant subjectivism and relativism in English instruction.  Out goes firm standards of good and evil, in comes the unrestrained individual.

CS Lewis

Progressivism performs a similar trick.  Essential to their understanding is a denigration of the past as corrupt while the present is an improvement on the way to a better world.  There’s not much veneration for the old and true.  No wonder church attendance is down. Our schools and culture are depressing it.

How about some serious thought of what we are doing to ourselves?  Watch the movie.

More on the Leopold and Loeb murder case here.

RogerG

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The Decline of Memory and Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders, Oct. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

In our times, 5 decades is too long.  Our historical memory seems to not last beyond one decade.  What have our families, institutions, and schools done to us?  One possible cause for the memory loss is a kind of imperialism of the present: an unexamined assumption that the past is a lesser, corrupted life and the present is all that counts.  The lack of memory exaggerates the present and puts us in a position to repeat past mistakes, not realizing them as mistakes.  Thus, to no surprise, we are seeing a rekindling of socialism and the rise of Bernie Sanders – a Super Tuesday and general election away from the White House.

The fabled 60’s counterculture gave birth to a willful forgetfulness of the past. The tenor of the times was captured in one of my favorite songs, “Let’s Live for Today” by the Grassroots.  Great song, horrible philosophy.  Here’s a good rendition:

The song came to mind as I was reading about Reagan’s strangulation of the USSR that would lead to its ultimate demise.  He instituted steps to shrink hard currency (the stable currencies like the pound sterling and US dollar) to the monstrous behemoth.  He lifted the price controls on our own crude oil production (imposed by Carter).  The price controls led to a shuttering, for instance, of the oil fields around Bakersfield, where I lived, and across the country.  Bernie promises to relive the disaster that was the malaise of the 70’s.

Man begging in Moscow in the 1980’s. Looks like a homeless encampment in one of our Democrat-run metropolises.

The price controls destroyed our own production, increased our dependency on foreign sources, and created shortages and inflated prices at the pump.  Bernie wants to leap beyond Carter and reregulate the economy while imposing huge tax hikes on it, as well as bring Soviet central planning in the form of The Green New Deal to America.  What Carter did to the US oil industry and the Soviet Union did to its people, Bernie wants to do to us.

Now, the Dems in Sacramento want to accelerate Bernie’s version of eco-terrorism – The Green New Deal – by “managing the decline of the oil industry” in the state.  This isn’t about “price controls”.  It’s about economic euthanasia.  Wow be to those in the oil-producing regions of the state.  No amount of utopian retraining will replace the loss.

Kern River oilfield outside Bakersfield, Ca.

I put the blame for the rise of Sanders and the crazy left in Sacramento squarely at the feet of pop culture’s corruption of our schools, families, and institutions — a present from the Summer of Love.  It’s a form of engineered social amnesia.  Are we about to institutionalize calamity because we have the memory of a hormone-addled teenager?

Drug-infused ecstasy during the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, 1967.

RogerG

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A Basket of Deplorables, the Democrats’ Version

The Democratic presidential hopefuls in debate in South Carolina, Feb. 25, 2020.

Hillary Clinton, September 9, 2016:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.  Right?  The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”

Hillary Clinton speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, Sept. 9, 2016, where she made the infamous “basket of deplorables” comment.

Clinton slimed an entire demographic for mere partisan political advantage.  Well, I’d like to inform Ms. Clinton that “deplorables” exist in her own party.  They were on display in South Carolina last night.  It was an extremely ironic episode in shaming Bernie for his “socialism” while the other 6 advanced different degrees of it.  Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, Free…, named and unnamed boosts in taxes, open borders, etc., are, in their own ways, heralding a socialist future.

To add to the irony, 2 billionaires were on the stage.  How could big-moneyed men be so socialistic, whether under Steyer’s environmental radicalism or Bloomberg’s nanny statism/gun grabs/Green New Deal?  They’re either grossly ignorant or simply pathetic.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his The Red Wheel series on the Russian Revolution recounts a realistic conversation in 1916 between Lenin and Alexander Parvus, a long-time socialist (indeed, “democratic socialist” as they all called themselves, and was the title of Lenin’s publication, Social Democrat) and successful businessman.  In Solzhenitsyn’s rendering, Parvus concocted the scheme of enlisting the financial help of Kaiser’s Germany to fund Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia.  German money, indeed, kept the Bolsheviks afloat in Russia as a revolutionary enterprise in 1916 and 1917.  Parvus was rich – like Bloomberg and Steyer – and was free with his money to advance the cause.

Alexander Parvus

Lenin’s old trope about using the money from the rich to buy ropes to hang them would be quite appealing to Bernie bros.  But why are Mike and Tom so eager to walk under the noose?  The contradiction is so glaring that the only practical conclusion is that they are fools.

That’s another reason to keep the whole gang from ever getting close to the White House.

Watch the debate highlights below.

RogerG