The snobbery of the self-anointed

The Vision of the Anointed - Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell -- from a long review.

The idea that humanity can be analyzed into two major competing groups has stimulated many types of social theory. Marxist theory has occupied itself with the conflict between capitalists and proletarians. Certain kinds of modern-liberal theory have attempted to elucidate relationships between a managerial class and the populace that it tries to manage. Classical-liberal and conservative theories have focused on the conflict between people who produce wealth (whether these be considered capitalists or workers) and people who govern but do not produce.

In The Vision of the Anointed, the distinguished economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell makes an important contribution to classical-liberal and conservative thought by scrutinizing the ways in which a self-consciously elite, or “anointed,” group uses ideas to maintain its power in American political life. Sowell regards American political discourse as dominated by people who are sure that they know what is good for society and who think that the good must be attained by expanded government action. This modern-liberal elite exerts its influence through institutions that live by words: the universities and public schools, the media, the liberal clergy, the bar and bench. Its dominance results from its command of the information that words convey and the attitudes that words inspire.

People who live by words should live also by arguments, butas Sowell richly documentsthe modern-liberal elite is not so good at arguing as it is at finding substitutes for argument. Sowell analyzes the major substitutes. Suppose that you doubt the necessity or usefulness of some great new government program. You may first be presented with a quantity of decontextualized “facts” and abused statistics, all indicating the existence of a “crisis” that only government can resolve. If you are not converted by this show of evidence, an attempt will probably be made to shift the viewpoint: outsiders may doubt that there is a crisis of, say, homelessness, but “spokesmen for the homeless” purportedly have no doubts.

There may also be an attempt simply to declare victory by relabeling current political proposals as inherent rights: it will be announced, in vague yet dogmatic terms, that everyone has a right to decent housing and that government is therefore compelled to provide it. If necessary, substantiation for this new right can be discovered in a Constitution that means whatever the latest school of jurists decides that it means.

If even these methods fail to win you over, attention will be redirected from the political issue to your own failure of imagination or morality. It will be insinuated that people like you are simplistic or perversely opposed to change, lacking in compassion and allied with the “forces of greed.” (As Sowell observes, it is always the payers rather than the spenders of taxes who are considered vulnerable to the charge of greed.)

The New American Nobility is a Scamocracy

First, read FEE's article here.

Seattle Just Passed a New Tax on Jobs in the Middle of an Economic Crisis—But Exempted Government Workers

Understand that the Political Class always protects its own - and its votes. Everyone in the city will pay higher taxes except government employees. Of course.

Anyone who thinks that the United States does not have a class of the nobility is simply not paying attention.

Not my original idea. Glenn Reynolds wrote in USA Today,

America has a nobility problem, and it means our leaders don't pay for their failures

Politicians and bureaucrats are America's ruling class and they should start paying a price for failure. Accountability isn't just for little guys.

And finally, the incomparable Angelo Codevilla explains that what we have is Scamocracy in America. 

How a fraudulent ruling class plundered our most precious inheritance.

No, the federal swamp is not being drained.

Quick links

Three Ideas to End the Rot on College Campuses
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/29/three_ideas_to_end_the_rot_on_college_campuses_143564.html
The author, Charles Lipson, is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. 

What ‘woke’ whites get wrong about blacks’ priorities
https://nypost.com/2020/06/28/what-woke-whites-get-wrong-about-blacks-priorities/
Which is just about everything. Most of all that woke white people really do think they can decide what is best for black people, without asking them.

I had to hear what whites were saying. I listened to the protesters, talked with my white friends and read articles and social media posts. What I found was white people overwhelmingly depicting black people as desperate and defeated, with no way to pull themselves out of their misery.

“I understand your point,” a white friend said when I objected to this simplistic narrative. “But don’t you think blacks are being oppressed?”

That’s when I realized that white wokeness is the new factor in our national life. It has been embedded into the consciousness of whites that all blacks are the same and that they all face impossible barriers to improvement — from standardized tests to the black men being arrested on the nightly news. A growing number of whites believe that black life is unrelentingly grim. 

One of the most respected environmentalist activists and scholars in the whole world was published on Forbes.com, but got deleted because environmental absolutists went nuts.

What was his crime? Pointing out the corruption of the Green groups and environmental activists around the world. It is now on Quillette: "On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare."
https://quillette.com/2020/06/30/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare/

Read it all. I have saved it for reference as a PDF.

Biden's record-setting tax increases will take your money — and your job
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/504536-bidens-record-setting-tax-increases-will-take-your-money-and-your-job

The Dems' operate always on the principle that all our money really must be handed over to them. And what do they do with it? Purchase votes and launder it through contracts and foreign aid to the pockets of their family members (coff, Hunter Biden, coff) and crony companies and non-profits.

Some Republicans do this, too, of course, but it is a fundamental operating principle for Democrats.

America has a ruling class problem

The American elites are one vast social networking scheme that subsidizes each others' projects, arranges regulatory variances for one another's fiddles, places family members at elite universities and the top-tier banks, law and consulting firms, and reinforces each others' opinions. There is a bit more ideological variance tolerated than in the Chinese Communist Party, but only a bit. -- David Goldman

America has a nobility problem, and it means our leaders don't pay for their failures

Our Constitution forbids the creation of “titles of nobility.”  The Framers thought it was important enough that the prohibition appears twice, once forbidding the federal government from doing it, and elsewhere extending the ban to the states. ... 

Charles C.W. Cooke, a Brit who just recently became an American citizen, noted the practice of calling former government officials by their former titles and called it "grotesque.” It’s something he discussed in a recent book. 

"By custom, we allow our politicians to retain their titles for life. Throughout the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was referred to as 'Governor Romney,' though he had not been in public office for six years," Cooke wrote. "One can only ask, 'Why?' America being a nation of laws and not men, political power is not held in perpetuity, and there is supposed to be no permanent political class.   

"Americans do not have rulers, they have employees — men and women who can be hired and fired at will and who remain subordinate both to the highest law in the land and to the popular will that it reifies. It is wholly proper for individuals to adopt titles when they have been hired by the people. But it is utterly preposterous for those individuals to retain those titles when their commission has come to an end." 

In principle, Cooke is absolutely right. But in practice, America absolutely does have a ruling class, and a permanent political class, and they seem to be increasingly one and the same. (As Angelo Codevilla writes:  “Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust.”) And like any ruling class, they claim, and possess, privileges and immunities not available to ordinary citizens.

Read the whole thing. Also:

The next time we hear a lecture about caring from a woke Yale professor, or a sermon on systematic racism from a CEO, or more Hollywood confessional video drivel, we should pause and politely ask, 'But where do your children go to school? And why do you live where you live? And dine with whom you dine?' Then remember class, not race, is what divides America—the truth that the upscale white progressive dares not utter.

The problem isn't the bad apples. It's the orchard.

Why the policing problem isn’t about “a few bad apples”
“The system was designed this way”: A former prosecutor on the fundamental problem with law enforcement.

Protest Also Against Police Unions and Qualified Immunity

A letter to the American public: Why you must decide what you want from cops
If you recruit well, conduct thorough background checks and train constantly, you can have a human with a kind heart and good ethics – but you can't have perfection

Links will be added as the day goes on.

It’s Past Time to Examine How Police Unions Protect Bad Cops

A short reading list

Left-Libertarian Alliance Introduces House Bill to End Qualified Immunity for Police Officers

Police Union Privileges Revisited

New Undercover Video Blows Lid Off Antifa Domestic Terrorists

THE TRUTH BEHIND RACIAL DISPARITIES IN FATAL POLICE SHOOTINGS

The Myth of Systemic Police Racism
Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.

Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

Civil rights veteran Bob Woodson rejects claims of 'systemic racism,' says black struggles issue of class

“The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism”

The 1619 Riots

I Must Object - A rebuttal to Brown University’s letter on racism in the United States

Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia

Shop owners reveal financial and emotional struggles of being looted -- because of course the best way to bring down racism is to loot and burn the businesses owned by racial and ethnic minorities.

And speaking of stupid people:

How deadly is the Wuhan virus really?

Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? -- Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude. 

Authors Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya "are professors of medicine at Stanford. Neeraj Sood contributed to this article."

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.

The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.

Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland and the U.S. provide relevant evidence. On or around Jan. 31, countries sent planes to evacuate citizens from Wuhan, China. When those planes landed, the passengers were tested for Covid-19 and quarantined. After 14 days, the percentage who tested positive was 0.9%. If this was the prevalence in the greater Wuhan area on Jan. 31, then, with a population of about 20 million, greater Wuhan had 178,000 infections, about 30-fold more than the number of reported cases. The fatality rate, then, would be at least 10-fold lower than estimates based on reported cases.

Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time. That’s more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italy’s case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%.

In Iceland, deCode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing. In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%. Iceland’s first case was reported on Feb. 28, weeks behind the U.S. It’s plausible that the proportion of the U.S. population that has been infected is double, triple or even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland. That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate.

The best (albeit very weak) evidence in the U.S. comes from the National Basketball Association. Between March 11 and 19, a substantial number of NBA players and teams received testing. By March 19, 10 out of 450 rostered players were positive. Since not everyone was tested, that represents a lower bound on the prevalence of 2.2%. The NBA isn’t a representative population, and contact among players might have facilitated transmission. But if we extend that lower-bound assumption to cities with NBA teams (population 45 million), we get at least 990,000 infections in the U.S. The number of cases reported on March 19 in the U.S. was 13,677, more than 72-fold lower. These numbers imply a fatality rate from Covid-19 orders of magnitude smaller than it appears.

How can we reconcile these estimates with the epidemiological models? First, the test used to identify cases doesn’t catch people who were infected and recovered. Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill. Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections. Epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors.

The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.

This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.

If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions.

A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.

Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study -- New epidemiological model suggests the vast majority of people suffer little or no illness.

The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

“We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,” she said.

The modelling by Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group indicates that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest. Like many emerging infections, it spread invisibly for more than a month before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February.

The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.

However, she was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.
The Oxford study is based on a what is known as a “susceptibility-infected-recovered model” of Covid-19, built up from case and death reports from the UK and Italy. The researchers made what they regard as the most plausible assumptions about the behaviour of the virus.

The modelling brings back into focus “herd immunity”, the idea that the virus will stop spreading when enough people have become resistant to it because they have already been infected. The government abandoned its unofficial herd immunity strategy — allowing controlled spread of infection — after its scientific advisers said this would swamp the National Health Service with critically ill patients.

But the Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.

Although some experts have shed doubt on the strength and length of the human immune response to the virus, Prof Gupta said the emerging evidence made her confident that humanity would build up herd immunity against Covid-19.

To provide the necessary evidence, the Oxford group is working with colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent to start antibody testing on the general population as soon as possible, using specialised “neutralisation assays which provide reliable readout of protective immunity,” Prof Gupta said. They hope to start testing later this week and obtain preliminary results within a few days.

Stanford University School of Medicine seems to be casting a skeptical eye toward such claims. Example 1 - John Ioannidis, a professor there.

His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

Example 2: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (again) of Stanford Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya brings bad news:

1) Only a small percentage of Americans, less than one percent in his study, maybe two or three percent nationwide, have had COVID-19. Herd immunity requires something like 70 percent or 80 percent to have antibodies. So the disease has a very long way to go before it has run its course.

2) There is no vaccine for COVID-19 on the horizon, and there may never be one.

3) The shutdowns that have paralyzed the developed world have, to some degree, slowed the spread of the disease, at tremendous cost. But that only delays the inevitable. There will never be a time when it is “safe” to stop the lockdowns. The disease isn’t going away.

4) Dr. Bhattacharya is also eloquent in describing the disastrous human toll, in lives and misery, that the shutdowns have inflicted around the globe.

On the other hand, Dr. Bhattacharya has good news, too. The fatality rate from COVID-19 is low–worldwide, somewhere between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent, probably closer to the low end of that range. The typical seasonal flu is said to have a fatality rate of around 0.1 percent. So COVID-19 is probably somewhat worse than the average flu virus.

Here is the video in which he makes those points.

"I try to get more cynical every day . . .

" ... but I can't keep up." So observed Gerard Vanderleun a few years ago on the state of American politics. But it is not just politics any more. Consider this FB post, which I have personally verified (I deleted the person's name).

Now, why is that the rule? Having been a federal bureaucrat, I will say (in my view, authoritatively) that there is one and only one reason: money.

Understand that this listing decision was not originated by physicians, but by administrators. And the overwhelming desire of every bureaucratic administrator everywhere is this: get more money. Increase his/her department's budget.  Because that is the way that bureaucrats get promoted - not for managing programs or people, but by managing ever-larger budgets.

And the medical bureaucrats know very well that the amount of money they get from  the federal spigots turned on for the C19 epidemic will relate very directly to the number of C19 cases they report, especially the fatalities.

If you think this sounds cynical, I assure you: It is far from cynical enough.

Update: And the beat goes on:

The Big Apple’s new death toll is 10,367. That figures combines the 6,589 victims who tested positive for the virus plus another 3,778  who were never tested, but whose death certificates list the cause of death as “COVID-19 or an equivalent,” according to city Health Department data from March 11 through April 13.

Italics mine, to illuminate what is being done here. What exactly is an "equivalent" cause of death to C19? Why, something that killed them, duh. You know, like lung cancer.

I said on my FB page, "First, let’s kill the children."

 Serious question: How many people are we willing to kill to stop people from dying of Covid-19?  

More specifically: How many children are we willing to kill to do it? Read this and weep:

"Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday. ...

But the U.N. report warned that “economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in an hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year.”

The full UN report is here.

Our sanguinary calculus is real: If we do not do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will die. And if we do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will still die - and the UN says that "hundreds of thousands" of them will be children. But as Roger Kimball explains,

We have often been presented with a false dichotomy between saving the economy and saving lives. This is a false dichotomy because, as Geach points out, “the state of our economy is not just a monetary risk, it is a health risk.” For one thing, “when people lose their jobs, they typically lose their health insurance.” He notes that there were more than 10,000 “economic suicides” as a result of the 2008 recession. There is also a spike in cancer deaths, drug abuse, domestic violence, and other pathologies.

This is not a guess, it is fact:

Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

There are protests around the country against long continuing the restrictions from this day on. The longer we are told to stay "safe at home" instead of going back to work, or finding a new job for the 22 million-plus Americans who have lost theirs in the last month, the more people will kill themselves or a family member, the more spouses and children will suffer abuse and injury, the more alcoholics will be made, the more people will suffer fatal non-Covid illnesses, the more drug addicts will be made - the list continues.

"At some point," [Princeton bioethicist] Peter Singer says, "we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life. No government puts every dollar it spends into saving lives. And we can't really keep everything locked down until there won't be any more deaths.

We need to think about this in the context of the well-being of the community as a whole….We are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need—better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren't in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs. The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

I think that we're losing sight of the extent to which that's already happening. And we need to really consider that tradeoff.

 The "false debate," in other words, is not the discussion that considers the enormous human cost of suppressing economic activity. It's the discussion that pretends there is no such tradeoff. (The 'False Debate' About Reopening the Economy Is the One That Ignores the Enormous Human Cost of Sweeping COVID-19 Control Measures)

And it will not take long for the American people justifiably to decide that the real point of these restrictions is not the health of Americans at all, but something politically sinister. And no podium appearances by Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx is going to persuade them otherwise.

The coming crash and what it portends

If we continue on the present course, we will enter a depression that might make the 1930s a distant competitor. The number of jobless Americans could reach tens of millions.

WSJ: Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown:

Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms. ...

The deadweight loss in production will be profound and take years to rebuild. In a normal recession the U.S. loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or so. In this case we may lose that much, or twice as much, in a month.

Our friend Ed Hyman, the Wall Street economist, on Thursday adjusted his estimate for the second quarter to an annual rate loss in GDP of minus-20%. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s assertion on Fox Business Thursday that the economy will power through all this is happy talk if this continues for much longer.

This is the first time ever that the US Government has deliberately shut the economy down, and the idea that it can just be turned back on like flipping a switch is delusional.

Consider: We will never be able to determine how many lives were saved from the virus. But we will easily know how many people died because of the economic crash to come - just count increased suicides and even some homicides, to say nothing of untold numbers of people thrown into permanent poverty.

The lockdowns and stay-at-home orders are saving lives now. But if they continue much longer, they will cost lives later and cause economic, literal suffering for years and years to come.

Also, The Atlantic, "Suicide and the Economy."

On April 12, 1937, the express train to New York roared across the New Jersey countryside. The train, a Pennsy Railroad electric locomotive the color of bull’s blood, usually passed through the station at Elizabeth at about 50 miles per hour. On this particular morning, it came to an unanticipated stop. As the express rounded the curve, my great-grandfather jumped down from the platform, where witnesses reported he had been pacing for 10 minutes, and lay down across the tracks.

When the engineer was finally able to halt the train 100 feet past the platform, Roy Humphrey had disappeared beneath its wheels. His last act: raising his head to look at the oncoming train.

Roy was one of at least 40,000 Americans who took their own lives that year and the next, the two-year span that suicide rate spiked to its highest recorded level ever: more than 150 per 1 million annually. 

Update: "US unemployment could surge to 30% next quarter and GDP might plunge 50%, Fed's Bullard warns"

Also relevant: "The luxury of apocalypticism -- The elites want us to panic about Covid-19 – we must absolutely refuse to do so."

The point is, there is such a thing as doing too little and also such a thing as doing too much. Doing too little against Covid-19 would be perverse and nihilistic. Society ought to devote a huge amount of resources, even if they must be commandeered from the private sector, to the protection of human life. But doing too much, or acting under the pressure to act rather than under the aim of coherently fighting disease and protecting people’s livelihoods, is potentially destructive, too. People need jobs, security, meaning, connection. They need a sense of worth, a sense of social solidarity, a sense of belonging. To threaten those things as part of a performative ‘war’ against what ought to be treated as a health challenge rather than as an End Times event would be self-defeating and utterly antithetical to the broader aim of protecting our societies from this novel new threat. To decimate the stuff of human life in the name of saving human life is a questionable moral approach.

Link this, sucker!

What is NATO good for? Well, pretty much nothing, at least right now. As I wrote in 2008,  "What has NATO ever done for us?" The answer is also pretty much nothing (since the fall of the USSR) and I do not take back a word of it.

America is moving rapidly to tribalism, pushed hard on purpose by the Marxist, America-hating revolutionary vanguard. And the very concept of "citizen" is vanishing. Because "Pre- & post-citizens" was written by VDH, you automatically should read it. My own relevant essays are here.

With Soleimani blown to smithereens, what to make of Iran's threats to retaliate? Oh, they will do something, but if they were capable of doing worse, they would have already done it. And with Soleimani dead, they have a huge blank in their murderous-imagination planning because, "Top commander's assassination leaves Iran with very few options to retaliate."

Then read Hussain Abdul-Hussain's thread on why "reporting in the main news outlets NYT and Wash Post is so misinformed (either on purpose or because of incompetence)... ."

Oh, when Trump blew up Soleimani, the Left was unanimous that it was an act of war that was going to start World War 3! Oh, how we long for the good old days when Obama launched 2,800 strikes on Iraq, Syria without congressional approval. And how fondly we remember "Obama's Breathtaking Expansion of a President's Power To Make War." Good times, eh? Good times!

Speaking of war, why was this an act of war:

Remains of the car Qassem Soleimani was riding it. 

... but this was not?

Smoke rises from the reception room of the U.S. embassy that was burned by Pro-Iranian militiamen and their supporters, in Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2020 (Link)

But the chickens come home to roost, even if to a new coop: "Obama official thinks Trump's strategy worked."

The "wicked problem" of Social Security in one chart

This has been well known for many years and so is no news flash. But is an excellent illustration of a political "wicked problem," as distinguished from a simple problem or a complex one. But briefly, a wicked problem is that which all parties agree exists but do not agree on how to describe it, nor on what a solution can be, nor even on how to implement a resolution or know when it has been accomplished.

This chart is why everyone knows the problem exists. But because of its "wickedness," everyone has also united in kicking the can down the road.

Ratio of Covered Workers to Beneficiaries

Ratio of Social Security Covered Workers to Beneficiaries Calendar Years 1940-2013
Year	Covered Workers(in thousands)	Beneficiaries(in thousands)	Ratio
1940	35,390	222	159.4
1945	46,390	1,106	41.9
1950	48,280	2,930	16.5
1955	65,200	7,563	8.6
1960	72,530	14,262	5.1
1965	80,680	20,157	4.0
1970	93,090	25,186	3.7
1975	100,200	31,123	3.2
1980	113,656	35,118	3.2
1985	120,565	36,650	3.3
1986	123,400	37,322	3.3
1987	126,287	37,951	3.3
1988	130,142	38,420	3.4
1989	132,478	38,859	3.4
1990	133,672	39,470	3.4
1991	132,969	40,172	3.3
1992	133,890	41,029	3.3
1993	136,117	41,840	3.3
1994	138,197	42,516	3.3
1995	141,446	43,107	3.3
1996	143,909	43,498	3.3
1997	146,736	43,792	3.3
1998	149,692	44,075	3.4
1999	152,453	44,366	3.4
2000	155,295	45,166	3.4
2001	155,546	45,668	3.4
2002	154,894	46,176	3.3
2003	154,954	46,752	3.3
2004	156,900	47,367	3.3
2005	159,081	48,133	3.3
2006	161,852	48,863	3.3
2007	163,057	49,603	3.3
2008	162,485	50,420	3.2
2009	156,021	51,860	3
2010	156,725	53,398	2.9
2011	158,988	54,816	2.9
2012	161,672	56,176	2.9
2013	163,221	57,471	2.8

We are willingly being spied on

Read 'em and weep:

"How Your Phone Betrays Democracy"

A trove of location data with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans obtained by Times Opinion helps to illustrate the risks that such comprehensive monitoring poses to the right of Americans to assemble and participate in a healthy democracy.
 

Within minutes, with no special training and a little bit of Google searching, Times Opinion was able to single out and identify individuals at public demonstrations large and small from coast to coast.

By tracking specific devices, we followed demonstrators from the 2017 Women’s March back to their homes. We were able to identify individuals at the 2017 Inauguration Day Black Bloc protests. It was easy to follow them to their workplaces. In some instances — for example, a February clash between antifascists and far-right supporters of Milo Yiannopolous in Berkeley, Calif. — it took little effort to identify the homes of protesters and then their family members.

Of course, there are people who do this full time - and they sell our identities and location data to anyone who will pay.

Now even the FBI is warning about your smart TV's security

“Beyond the risk that your TV manufacturer and app developers may be listening and watching you, that television can also be a gateway for hackers to come into your home. A bad cyber actor may not be able to access your locked-down computer directly, but it is possible that your unsecured TV can give him or her an easy way in the backdoor through your router,” wrote the FBI.

The FBI warned that hackers can take control of your unsecured smart TV and in worst cases, take control of the camera and microphone to watch and listen in. ...

 The FBI recommends placing black tape over an unused smart TV camera, keeping your smart TV up-to-date with the latest patches and fixes, and to read the privacy policy to better understand what your smart TV is capable of.

At least use a different router for all connected devices than the one to your computers and tablets and phones.

Pentagon warns US military not to use home DNA testing kits

Companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry allow people to get a breakdown of their genetic makeup and geographic heritage, from providing a saliva sample. Ancestry boasts some 15 million users, while 23andMe says it has 10 million.

But a department of defence memo, obtained by Yahoo News, warned that the kits could put members of the military at risk.

“Exposing sensitive genetic information to outside parties poses personal and operational risks to Service members,” wrote Joseph D. Kernan, the undersecretary of defence for intelligence, and James N. Stewart, the assistant secretary of defence for manpower. ...
 
“There is increased concern in the scientific community that outside parties are exploiting the use of genetic data for questionable purposes, including mass surveillance and the ability to track individuals without their authorization or awareness.”

The memo reflects a wider concern about biometrics like DNA, fingerprints and facial recognition.

The DNA-testing companies are extremely inaccurate in their testing anyway. I remember reading of a journal that sent samples from several individuals to three different home-DNA testing companies and got back very different reports on each person. Then there was the example of the Dahm identical triplets whose samples also varied significantly. As Science News reports, "Results can vary widely depending on which company you use."

And when you sign the forms to send the sample back in, almost all of them include paragraphs by which you assign permanently and completely all rights to your DNA use for medical or commercial purposes to the company. That's right, when you send off your saliva sample, you are literally transferring ownership of your own DNA to the company.

Monogamy and chastity: keys to national prosperity, and more

Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought

Unwin found that when strict prenuptial chastity was abandoned, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking disappeared within three generations.

But we lost that battle when the Pill was invented. And it will not be turned back, ever. And so here we are: "New York public school rejects student Christian club, OKs LGBT Pride Club"

An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg

You are not a moral leader. But I will tell you what you are.

By DePaul University philosophy Prof. Jason D. Hill

You have stated that you want us to panic, and to act as if our homes are on fire. You insist that rich countries must reduce to zero emissions immediately. In your speeches you attack economic growth and have stated that our current climate crisis is caused by “buying and building things.” You call for climate justice and equity, without addressing the worst polluter on the planet China; the country that is economically annexing much of Africa and Latin America. You dare not lecture Iran about its uranium projects -- because that’s not part of the UN’s agenda, is it?

-----------------

And now Virginia is on its way back to solid red:

'The law is the law': Virginia Democrats float prosecution, National Guard deployment if police don't enforce gun control

This will be a major factor in giving Virginia to Trump next November.
-----------------------------

As I have posted before, for the Left violence always underlies their means. Now apparently even Newsweek is catching on.

ANTIFA'S DEADLY YEAR SHOWS THE EXTREMISM ON THE FAR LEFT | OPINION

The must-read of the day

Memorize this, then read the rest:

In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

The reason that "the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion" is because politics is their religion. They are millenarians, a world view defined as, "the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed" (Wikipedia).

In history, milleniarianism has often been purely religious, found among ancient Jews and ancient and modern Christians. But millenarianism does not have to be either religious or apocalyptic. There are secular-political milleniarists who believe that human society may be brought to flourishing by properly enlightened human institutions. For example, in 1964, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Leonid Brezhnev. He promised that year that the USSR would achieve "true communism" by 1980. In Marxism-Leninism, true communism was a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

Well, we know how Homo sovieticus turned out.

Political milleniarians believe that society is in deep need of profound change. This change must be compelled from the top because the people are either powerless to bring it about themselves or are too complacent or uninformed to effect it. The present order is corrupt and must be vanquished. Christoph Schönborn in First Things put it this way:

Indeed, the hallmark of this criticism is that society in all its spheres (economics, culture, defense) is continually being told that it should have a “bad conscience”: not because of particular abuses and wrong attitudes, but fundamentally and universally. It is not the abusive practices of banks that are criticized, but their very existence; not this or that measure taken in the defense of a country, but the very existence of this defense. Behind this criticism, which likes to call itself “prophetic,” there lies in reality a kind of “political millenarianism” which, in the name of some future paradisal society, rejects and demonizes the existing society en bloc, demanding that it be overthrown by revolution.

Not necessarily violent revolution, a political one will do just as well, about which more shortly.

Political millenarianism is not purely secular, though. Its adherents have an unbounded (and be honest, historically unjustified) faith in government and its ability to order the lives of the people better than they can order their own lives. Political or religious millenarians are always firmly authoritarian and use the power of government to cement the control of institutions and agencies over the daily lives of the people. Millenarianism always opposes personal freedom. Whether religious or secular, millenarianists have that much in common.

They leave no room in future societies for divergent belief systems. Millennialists have a dualistic view of the present, or an “us against them” view of society. The pluralism of the modern world is rejected in favour of an envisioned perfect monistic future where there are no more political conflicts. These belief systems culminate instead in the end of history, and it is from this monistic approach to the world where the potential for totalitarianism and authoritarianism becomes manifest. “For millennial groups the political compromise necessary for societies to function is anathema, because other groups in society are either in league with evil or under its spell. There is no room for non-believer.”

In more moderate practice, however, the desire for an ideal time is positive. It affirms what common sense and a glance at this morning's headlines reveal: there is something seriously wrong with the present order. Hence, it can impel adherents to avoid complacency in the face of evil, to work for the improvement of the human condition so better to prepare persons to face the coming judgment. Indeed, most Christians have held through two millennia to the idea that the Kingdom of God, preached by Jesus, is just as much a present spiritual state of community as a coming physical reality. The Kingdom is within us now, although we can never achieve it fully on our own efforts. Nonetheless, we must do the best we can.

In Christian history this understanding has led on the one hand to the monastic movements that sprang up in the early Middle Ages. Monasteries were strict communities of faith, set apart from the world (although not so separatist that their leaders eschewed commerce with the world). On the other hand it led to the 20th century's liberationist theologies, which paradoxically came to eschew eschatology altogether and focused solely on the reform and even overthrow of present political orders. (It can be argued, though, that liberationism was as much a product of The Communist Manifesto as the Bible.)

But eschatology becomes evil when its adherents see only their own purity and others' sin. When they see the present state of affairs - always of others' affairs - as wholly corrupt, godless and faithless, then it is a short step to religious radicalism, what we have come to call religious fascism. Examples given: the mullahcracies of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan, internally cruel to the point of murder, oppressive and ruthlessly class-ridden, a sort of real-world Animal Farm, only infinitely bloodier.

If the eschatologists are both radicalized and evangelistic rather than monastic, then the result is holy war, jihad. Holy war focuses on destroying sinners, not converting them.

That is the state of al Qaeda and a great deal of the Muslim faithful today. Al Qaeda is actively jihadist, while many millions of other Muslims are sympathetically so. They seek to attain the ideal time - the true Islamic society. Never mind that millions of other Muslims have a different understanding of what Islamic society should be. The radicalized eschatologist simply can write them off as apostate and make war against them as readily as against infidels.

Non-religious westerners are just as liable to eschatological fervor as religious people anywhere. Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (and heavily romanticized) working classes could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

But, as Soviet army officer Victor Suvorov came to realize, in a True Communist society, who would stoop to volunteer to shovel manure? As he wrote in Inside the Soviet Army, 

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, 'Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?'

Of course not. Despite this basic, and indeed obvious flaw, the Soviet promise of its Ideal Time enraptured enormous numbers of Western elites who should have known better.

The old USSR has gone the way of the dodo and hardly any die-hard true believers remain in its former states. But they remain in droves in the West, convinced that Western economic-political systems remain irredeemably corrupt. Having shunned Christian faith for some decades, Western Marxist and socialist ideologues also discarded a key thing that has prevented Christian eschatologists from experimenting with Taliban-style social orders: the New Testament formally denies the possibility of the self-perfectibility of the human person. (Christian oppressions and brutalities done for other reasons were bad enough, but only rarely, and on small scales, did Christians ever attempt to enforce an Idealized community by force or coercion.)

So the philosophical and ideological origin of the modern Left: Rejecting the idea of a divinely shaped world yet to come, but believing, all evidence to the contrary, that human beings are fundamentally perfectible, most Western ideological eschatologists found a natural fit with Marxism-Leninism: the present order must pass away, and we can build something better on our own. The violent destruction of the present order, if necessary, had a natural fit with Marxism from the beginning.

The Left, rejecting as a basic tenet of its faith the major features of Western societies, came to romanticize heavily non-Western, non-capitalist cultures, especially those of the Third World. The village society became idealized, always assumed to be populated by selfless, caring people whose spirits (never souls, which might need saving!) were uninfected by the crass materialism of capitalism. This was their Eden, the Ideal Time from humankind had sprung; Marxism-Leninism provided the framework for transforming Western societies into a New Jerusalem. Over time, and not a very long time, the Left idealized anyone who opposed the West, no matter how cruel, oppressive or personally repulsive he might be: Castro, Che, Mao, Saddam and others. 

That such figures murdered by the thousands or millions dismayed some of the Left, to be sure. But again, Marxist theory provided a way to rationalize the deaths: building the Ideal Community might well require bloodshed, and besides, such violence and oppressive structures were understood to be mere temporary expedients en route to the Ideal Time, when the inherent goodness of human beings would finally flower and coercion would no longer be necessary.

It must be pointed out that the Left, especially the Hard Left, was always mostly from the privileged classes of Western societies. In their dreams of an Ideal Time, they always remained in power. They saw as natural allies anyone who wished to overthrow the Western order, even if (especially if?) by hard violence. They were apparently oblivious to the fact that the others never saw them as allies, not even Stalin, who had moved firmly in eastern Europe to kill or imprison the homegrown communists there before they could get the foolish idea that they would have some say in the newly established workers' paradise.

The romantic thrall much of the Left has today with Islamism is little different than its swoon over Stalin, and no more moral. The Left never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of Stalin's rule and so never really understood that he considered them "useful idiots" to be eliminated if the Soviets ever occupied their countries. Likewise today, the Left, convinced of its own moral purity, fails to understand that al Qaeda and ISIS view them with contempt equal to Stalin's, and considers them nothing more than infidels to be dealt with when the time comes.

Fortunately, though, there are some of the Left (or at least of liberals) who recognize the peril (link, link, for example) and we may pray others will awaken, too.

Also, I recommend reading "The Ideological War Within the West," by John Fonte, which helps illumine these concepts. Fonte "suggests there has arisen a conflict within the democratic world between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism, between democrats and what he calls post-democrats." Well worth the time.

See also, "Six fatal shortcomings of the modern Left," by Paul Berman, an old-style Leftist, Dissent Magazine, Winter 2004.

Update:

Andrew Sullivan: A Glimpse at the Intersectional Left’s Political Endgame

Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

5 Reasons Socialism Is Not Christian -- read the whole thing, but here is the list:

1. Socialism is Based on a Materialistic Worldview 2. Socialism Punishes Virtue 3. Socialism Endorses Stealing [Actually, socialism is stealing] 4. Socialism Encourages Envy and Class Warfare 5. Socialism Seeks to Destroy Marriage & Family [This has been a longstanding goal of the entire Left for decades]