Streetwise Professor

From 911 through the early days of the invasion of Iraq, there were some on the right who argued that the Anglosphere–the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand–would save the world from a dark future. I was always skeptical, because it was evident that the Commonwealth countries in particular were already hurtling down the road to serfdom: from the earliest days of this blog, I referred to the UK as the “Ghost of Christmas Future,” because its embrace of collectivism and political correctness bode ill for the US.

Recent events have validated that skepticism–and how. I could cite many verses in many chapters, but two recent developments make the point.

The first is covid. The allegedly doughty Anglosphere has been as been as much of a collectivist collection of bedwetters and repressers as any country or group of countries in the world. The panic and consequent lockdown policies are largely attributable to the hysterical predictions of University College London’s crack–as in crackpot–epidemiological modelers. And the government’s panicked response thereto. The UK locked down once–to little effect. It is now locked down again, with progressively more draconian restrictions on normal life.

The evidentiary basis for this: zip, zilch, nada. There is no evidence that lockdowns improve public health outcomes, and there is considerable evidence that they don’t. There is evidence beyond counting that the economic and health consequences of lockdowns is severe. All pain. No gain.

Parts of Australia have also imposed draconian lockdowns, complete with police state enforcement methods and limitations on individual freedom. Ditto New Zealand. Canada has also been highly restrictive.

These efforts have been statist and collectivist in the extreme, with the smattering of protests about liberty being screeched down by the better thans who have proven themselves utterly impotent, not to mention incompetent. But we’re supposed to obey them. Because they give incantations to SCIENCE!

The other telling indicator of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Anglosphere elites is climate policy. The UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are all hard core worshippers in the Church of Climate Change (while the pews of the Church of England are empty, notably).

Australia has implemented policies intended to displace totally fossil fuels within a short time frame, substituting renewables in their place. This has had a too small to measure impact on global climate, but has blessed Australia with more expensive and less reliable electricity.

Not to be outdone, “Conservative” British PM Boris Johnson said “hold my ale,” and has just announced a grandiose “green industrial revolution.”

Note to Boris: the original industrial revolution was an endogenous, self-generated process that massively improved living standards; your proposed “industrial revolution” is a government-driven, centrally planned process that will produce penury in exchange for trivial environmental benefits (and indeed, may involve serious environmental harm, when the consequences of mining, distorted land usage, etc., are considered). To compare what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries to what you propose for the 21st is an abuse of language that staggers the imagination.

So what is Boris’ Big Plan? This:

“My ten point plan will create, support and protect hundreds of thousands of green jobs, whilst making strides towards net zero by 2050.

“Our green industrial revolution will be powered by the wind turbines of Scotland and the North East, propelled by the electric vehicles made in the Midlands and advanced by the latest technologies developed in Wales, so we can look ahead to a more prosperous, greener future.”

The push forms part of the UK’s pledge to go carbon neutral by 2050, and comes ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next year.

The plans include producing enough offshore wind to power every home, quadrupling how much Britain produces to 40GW by 2030, which would support up to 60,000 jobs.

It also aims to generate 5GW of low carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030, and develop the first town heated entirely by hydrogen by the end of the decade.

The UK Government also wants to advance nuclear as a clean energy source to help support 10,000 jobs.

Then there are wider plans for electric vehicles, public transport and well as an expansion of cycle and walk routes.

Mr Johnson will also discuss making homes more energy efficient, creating 50,000 jobs by 2030 and installing 600,000 heat pumps every year by 2028.

In other words, like California, except with crappy weather.

The key word is “plan.” It’s Boris’ 10 Year Plan. Maybe Boris can borrow from Lenin and promote it with a slogan: “Utopia is Tory government combined with green electrification of the entire country.”

It bears all of the intellectual defects of such grandiose schemes. The reliance on centralized decision making. The focus on dictating technological means for achieving an objective–and relying on technologies that are either unproven, or extremely unlikely to be scalable (wind energy in particular). Further, the monomaniacal agenda: reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of any consideration. Putting aside that CO2 is what makes things green, there is apparently no consideration of the environmental consequences (e.g., from mining) of large scale wind power and battery usage (in autos and to make intermittent wind a reasonable power source). Nor is there consideration of other trade-offs: what are the costs, in terms of foregone output and opportunities, of pursuing this single goal? What are the benefits that will be achieved?

Further, the entire agenda is profoundly anti-freedom. The private automobile was the greatest liberating force of the 20th century–which is why the left hates it with such a passion. Boris’ (not so) green electric machines will be far more costly, and far more limiting, making them more expensive and less useful to the hoi polloi. The policy obviously aims to push the proles onto public transport. Yeah. I’m sure British train service will get so much better. And even if it does, it is inherently more regimented and limiting than autonomous personal transport.

I guarantee that this effort will be a bacchanal of rent seeking, incompetence, and failure. If you doubt this, contemplate the multiple failures of the UK government’s covid responses like testing and test-and-trace. But sure, they will totally nail a complete re-engineering of the entire energy system!

If Boris et al really believe that CO2 is a deadly menace, then tax it and get the hell out of the way. Let individuals figure out the most efficient way to trade-off carbon vs. other human wants. This centrally planned approach is doomed to failure. Which means that the green industrial revolution may spark a real revolution when Britain sinks into penury. While sitting in the dark and cold.

Again, climate policy is merely an example. I could go on. But it illustrates the Anglosphere’s descent into collectivism and statism and corporatism: and alas, the US–at least about half of it–want to follow them all the way down.

The beginning of this descent can be dated to the end of WWII. Churchill’s loss in 1945 is probably a good starting point. The pace of decline has varied over time: things were so dire by the late-1970s in the UK that Thatcher came to power and slowed, and in some cases reversed the decline. But it has resumed apace, and the adoption of green energy lunacy by an ostensibly conservative government suggests that the decline is now irreversible.

In some ways, Australia’s decline is the most depressing. Once upon a time Oz was more individualist, and disdainful of the pommy bastards. There was a kinship between Australia and the American west, a frontier kinship as it were. But that seems largely a thing of the past.

This came home to me when I re-watched the Mad Max trilogy last week. Watching those paeans to rugged individualism (personified by Mel Gibson’s Max), then reading about Australia today (especially the lockdowns in Victoria and the dysfunctional energy policies), I said to myself: “What the hell happened to you?”

Well, whatever happened to them has happened to the Anglosphere as a whole. (Don’t even get me started on Canada, ex Alberta.)

And it is happening to the US too. The recent election results, and many other political developments, suggest that at most half the country resists joining the UK et al on the road to serfdom. And that half is politically marginalized–perhaps by electoral manipulations engineered by the other half.

After Trump’s suggestion that he would give his nomination acceptance speech at the White House triggered potential legal objections, his campaign mooted the possibility of giving the speech at the Gettysburg battlefield. This triggered paroxysms of insanity that are remarkable even against the background of repeated paroxysms of insanity that have been playing on a loop for almost 4 years now.

Leading the Stupid Parade was CNN’s Jerry Diamond: “This is a President who has consistently positions himself as a defender of Confederate symbols and monuments to Confederate generals.” He was soon joined by assorted leftists, notably Meathead himself, Rob Reiner, who repeated the theme that going to Gettysburg was a dog whistle to racists and Neo-Confederates.

The clownery here is just too much. Anyone making these statements has no clue about Gettysburg, the history of the battlefield, or the monuments there. No. Clue. Whatsoever.

To start with, Gettysburg was the turning point in the war against slavery. Recognizing this, in November 1863 President Lincoln gave a speech at the dedication of the National Cemetery on the battlefield. This speech just happens to be the most famous oration in American political history, and arguably in the entire English language. For those who have forgotten, or never knew (which, alarmingly, is a very real possibility):

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A paean to Slavocracy if I ever heard one! “A new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The authoritarian’s creed, right?

That is what Gettysburg means. That is what those who speak there pay homage to. That is what politicians who speak there want to be associated with.

Like FDR, in 1938, at the dedication of the Peace Memorial, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Third Day of the battle.

Speaking of the National Cemetery, it is the resting place of over 3,500 Union dead. Sure, there are seven Confederates buried there. By accident–they were mistakenly identified as Federals. Except for the remains of Confederate dead undiscovered in the years after the war–whose bones still rest in those lost graves–the bodies of the Johnnies were removed to the South, to places like Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

So honoring the dead there means honoring the Union dead.

As for monuments, according to the National Park Service, there are 1,328 monuments at Gettysburg. Over 1,100 are to Union units.

Anyone who is remotely familiar with the history of the battlefield (which certainly excludes Meathead and other meatheads who bloviate on the subject), the moving political force behind the creation of the park (and other parks at Chickamauga, Shiloh, and Antietam) were Union veterans. Gettysburg in a particular was intended to be a shrine to the Union cause. The most important single figure in this movement was the notorious Dan Sickels, wounded on July 2, 1863.

Many Union veterans were deeply hostile to any recognition of Confederates on the battlefield. This was a monument to their achievement, in the name of Union, and for some the end of slavery.

Virtually every Union regiment and battery that fought at Gettysburg is memorialized there in granite and bronze. The veterans, and sometimes the states their regiments were recruited in, paid to create these sentinels in stone.

Monuments to any Confederates, or any Confederate figures, were placed in the park much later. The 11 states that contributed soldiers to the Army of Northern Virginia have placed monuments there. Some–like Virginia’s and North Carolina’s–are large and impressive. Some–like Texas’–are more modest.

The larger memorials (notably Virginia’s) do have Lost Cause resonance. But for the most part they recognize the bloody toll that the citizens of these states paid on three days in July, 1863.

Interestingly, one of the most recent additions to the monuments at Gettysburg is a statue of James Longstreet. After the war, Longstreet became a Republican. He defended the Reconstruction government in Louisiana, and attempted to defend blacks against the depredations of white supremacists opposed to said government, and to the civil rights of blacks.

For which he was vilified in the South.

I have been to Gettysburg over two dozen times, the first time when I was 9 years old. I have walked every foot of that field from Benner’s Hill to Big Round Top, and probably seen well over one thousand of these monuments, and read the text on most of them. Based on that, I can state definitively that anyone who believes it is Stone Mountain in Pennsylvania is beyond delusional.

Yes, there are monuments there that might warm the cockles of a Lost Causer’s heart, but overwhelmingly it is a massive memorial to the Union cause and Union sacrifice. Indeed, Gettysburg was arguably the singlemost important milestone in making the Cause a Lost one.

Most importantly, it is the site of the Gettysburg Address, which is the seminal speech that framed the cause for which the Union fought, and set the course for the post-war order. A course (according to the Emancipation Proclamation issued six months before the battle and then months before the speech) that included the end of slavery.

But the left (particularly in the media) is totally obsessed with playing Six Degrees From Slavery. In their twisted, fevered brains, if Trump does anything that is at all associated with the Confederacy, he is doing it because it is associated with the Confederacy. But a sensible person, and one who knows the battlefield, the history of the battle, and the history of the battlefield-as I do, and have since I was a boy-knows that the greatest associations are with the fight for freedom and democracy, and the fight against slavery.

“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” — Proverbs 26:11 

This Proverb applies to the American news media and the US “Intelligence” Community, with a variation. The variation being the media returns to the “Intelligence” Community’s vomit, rather than its own per se.

For about four years the news media lapped up whatever lies the “I”C barfed up about “Russian collusion.” And it was all lies. 100 percent.

Honest people can be fooled. Yet, once they are fooled, they distrust who fooled them. Dishonest people lap up lies over and over again. Because they want to.

The latest iteration of this is the recent hysteria over the allegations that the Russians (namely, its military intelligence service, the GRU) paid bounties to the Taliban to kill Americans, that Trump had been briefed about it, and did nothing. These allegations were “credited” to “anonymous intelligence sources.”

The dogs at the New York Times ran to the vomit like they hadn’t eaten in months. Which may be true, since the demise of the impeachment fiasco, and the dominance of the Covid-19 story. But rather than treating another “I”C leak with skepticism, if not disdain, they wolfed it down. Because they wanted to.

In the event–I’m sure you will find this shocking–the “intelligence” was of dubious provenance, and because of that Trump had not been briefed about it. So the story was 100 percent unadulterated puke.

A word to the wise. If you claim to put any credence in any story based on “anonymous sources in the intelligence community,” you are either a fool (because you actually believe it despite the repeated evidence of their untrustworthiness) or a knave (because you know it is likely untrue but choose to treat it as gospel regardless because it is politically useful).

Arguendo, suppose the story is true. What is Trump supposed to do about it? Nuke Russia? Add more sanctions? What’s left to be sanctioned, pray tell?

Those who are flogging this story, and those like it, want a new Cold War with Russia. But apparently they expect only one side to fight it: the Russians, evidently, should be pacifists in this Cold War II. But if the Russians are pacifists, why fight a war against them?

So let’s get real. If there is a Cold War II, then one can expect both sides to utilize the tactics of Cold War I. During which, you might remember, the Soviets supplied massive military supplies to, inter alia, North Vietnam and North Korea which were used to kill Americans.

And during which the United States “Intelligence” Community supplied weapons to Afghan Islamist foes of the USSR that were used to kill thousands of Soviet soldiers.

Memories run long, and payback is a bitch.

Meaning that if you fight Cold War II with the Russians, as day follows night, Russians will try to kill Americans–while attempting not to leave fingerprints. That’s the way Cold Wars are fought.

So be very careful what you ask for: and if you ask for a New Cold War, expect the consequences. And if those consequences include the deaths of American soldiers, you need to accept that the responsibility is largely yours.

It is particularly perverse to blame Trump for the deaths of Americans in Afghanistan. He has been laboring to extract the US from that cesspool, precisely because he believes that it is pointless for American troops to die there, for . . . well, for nothing.

And the establishment–notably the “Intelligence” Community and the Pentagon–have fought him tooth and nail. Apparently forgetting the adage “never reinforce failure,” they have reinforced it for going on 20 years now. And they will not admit failure, and have fought Trump more viciously in his attempts to withdraw than they have fought the Taliban in the Hindu Kush.

In other words, Trump has been trying to save American lives, and the Pentagon and the “Intelligence” Community have been willing to expend them. To what purpose, they cannot explain.

In that respect, the “Russian bounty” story is even more twisted than the run of the mill Russian collusion story. For it represents the most malign elements of the Deep State and their vomit mongers in the media and the Democratic Party crying crocodile tears over dead Americans in Afghanistan, and blaming the man who is trying to prevent more Americans from dying there, all to perpetuate their insane war that will kill Americans as long as it lasts.

It is hard for normal people to imagine a more damning commentary on the American establishment than that. But that likely reflects the limits of my imagination. I am sure that these malign, evil creatures that dwell in the bowels of Langley and the Pentagon will conjure up even more sick actions in the future.

Shit’s getting real out there, and it’s hitting close to home. Not so much in Houston, which has been relatively quiescent. (My tennis partner/rapper friend says Houston is chill compared to other Texas cities. A comparison to Dallas suggests that’s true.). No, in Chicago, where my younger daughter witnessed the looting of a jewelry store located directly beneath her apartment in the wee hours of Sunday morning, and who today went to go grocery shopping only to find several of her usual stores either burned out or ransacked. And they weren’t in Englewood or Austin.

And of course, there are scenes of destructive orgies in other major cities, including notably at the very gates of the White House in DC.

I have a modest proposal to address the situation: shoot all white rioters on sight.

I make this proposal in the spirit of bringing America together. For after all, who can possible object? (Except for a few pigment impaired ruffians–but they won’t be in any position to object!)

Think about it. The left apparently believes that the riots are the work of their bêtes noires (heh), white supremacists. (Cf. statements of the governor of Minnesota, the mayor of Minneapolis, or the mayor of Seattle, who blamed the recent riots on “white men.”) Certainly the left will rejoice at the summary dispatching of their arch enemies.

The non-left believes that the pasty-faced (and largely sunken-chested and pipe cleaner-armed) rioters are far left Antifa radicals who deserve a good whacking.

Speaking for myself, I hold no truck with either. So let God sort ’em out.

There is also a Solomonic angle to this. It is a way of getting at the truth. Just as Solomon’s threat to split the baby was meant to reveal the truth about who the actual mother was among the contenders, we will know from who screams loudest at this proposal just who the perps are. So I would take Seattle mayor Karen–sorry, Jenny–Durkan far more seriously if she were to endorse this modest proposal.

Further, implementing this proposal is a form of redress for centuries of state violence directed against black people. Evening the score.

So bring America together!

Putting my attempt at Swift (or Juvenal) aside, I am completely serious about focusing law enforcement efforts on white rioters: to me the most striking racial aspect of what I have seen in numerous videos is just how many white punks, mainly dressed in black and wearing backpacks and masks (but not for Covid-19 reasons) are at the center of the violence. As for these being white supremacists. Please. I know Bubbas. These ain’t Bubbas. They are Antifa, right out of central casting.

These have all the trademarks of Antifa or Antifa wannabes. They should definitely be the target of law enforcement, both at the point of action and behind the scenes. Their financers. Their support groups. Their lawyers. They are the schwerpunkt of these riots, and should be attacked and taken down. Hard. By all means necessary. And not just because of this time. But to reduce the probability of a next time.

There is obviously planning and support here. Consider the Miracle of the Bricks, whereby pallets of bricks have magically appeared on streets, handy for rioters and looters to use. No business leaves bricks in the street. Even construction companies don’t leave bricks in the street–they aren’t stupid. No, the bricks were acquired and distributed to strategic locations for the express purpose of providing ammunition for thugs.

It should not be that hard to track down the sources of at least some of these caches. Street surveillance cameras. Old fashion police work identifying who bought lots of bricks recently. Drones–or are they all being deployed to catch people violating stay at home orders?

One would hope that the FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies have devoted at least as much attention to these groups as to the KKK or other knuckle-dragging (and almost completely marginalized) white supremacist groups. Perhaps they can pry themselves away from chasing Russian hobgoblins and chase the anarchist left instead.

I shouldn’t say anarchist, really. Anarchism has a semblance of intellectual coherence. These thugs are nihilists, pure and simple: read Dostoevsky’s The Devils/Demons/Possessed to get a better understanding of them. All of the actions we have seen them commit are completely nihilistic, and these individuals have been encouraging nihilistic behavior by others. Not that these others lack agency or are not responsible for their own wantonness, but the white agitators in their midst are definitely accelerants pouring onto burning embers. The nihilists are cynically manipulating the discontented and the criminal in order to advance their agenda of destruction. (There are many in the black community, including those who could be described as radical, who understand this.)

And just who are the fascists that the soi disant antifascists are fighting? In their fevered minds, the United States is fascist. Every business is fascist, right down to the last convenience store. Every government at every level is fascist. You are a fascist if you aren’t Antifa.

This isn’t like Spartacists fighting the SA on the streets of Weimar Germany. They are going after you, and every civil and commercial institution in the country.

Many on the left tolerate them–hell, encourage them–apparently on the principle of the enemy of my enemy, or out of some deluded belief that Antifa storming the White House allegedly inhabited by an orange Nazi is the modern equivalent of the Big Red One storming the Nazis at Omaha Beach.

They should take heed Churchill’s remark about crocodiles. He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.

As for the spark of these events, the horrific death of (Houston native) George Floyd (a Houston legend rapper back in the day, in fact) created the conditions that Antifa can exploit. Large crowds of understandably angry people. Police forces that are reluctant to create more racial incidents. An inability or unwillingness of many people to distinguish between legitimate protest and nihilistic political violence.

These factors are underlying conditions to the violence, perhaps necessary conditions, but not sufficient conditions for it. Absent the malign acts those of who want violence and destruction for their own political reasons, legitimate protest would not have exploded into this bacchanal of violence. The nihilists are opportunists, and are exploiting this opportunity.

So get whitey. Especially if s/he is dressed in black.

One last remark. Events like Floyd’s death, and the reaction to it, leave the impression that unlawful police violence is purely a white cop-on-black victim phenomenon. This is not true. There are many tragic stories of non-blacks being killed under questionable circumstances by police officers (white and black)–e.g., Daniel Shaver, Dillon Taylor, Dylan Noble, Isiah-Murietta Golding, to name a few.

Making this issue a black-white narrative (literally and figuratively) impedes rather than promotes addressing it. The problems are systemic in nature–training, the personalities of people attracted to police work, stress, and in particular the cumulative psychological impact of stress, the ambiguous and largely deferential legal treatment of cop shooters (or kneelers or chokers). Making it all about race prevents dealing with these real causes.

One factor that I bet dimes-to-donuts played a factor in Minneapolis is police unions. The policeman who kneeled on Floyd’s neck, Derek Chauvin, had been involved in numerous complaints, and multiple shootings. That he was still on the force with such a record is almost certainly due to the ability of his union to shield him from termination.

To reduce the frequency of such events as those that triggered this nightmare, police have to be meaningfully accountable. Yes, I know that they will be the subject of numerous false accusations; that some of the actions that have tragic outcomes (as with Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO) represent legitimate use of force; that some actions are the result of mistakes or negligence or panic rather than depravity. But a rebalancing of legal and institutional protections seems to be in order to improve accountability and take the bad actors off the streets, or to deter them from engaging in bad acts.

The Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Due to an extremely exaggerated threat to life, our liberty and ability to pursue happiness are under grave threat from lockdowns and other severe impositions on civil liberties.

I have been a lockdown skeptic from very early in their imposition in the US. As more data regarding the virus, and the economic and social impact of responses to the virus come in, I am becoming a lockdown radical: burn them down before they burn us down.

Insofar as the impact on “life” part of the life, liberty, pursuit of happiness trilogy is concerned:

• Daily evidence arrives demonstrating that the infection fatality ratio (IFR) of covid-19 is of the same order of magnitude as influenza, and not an order of magnitude higher, as initial estimates (propagated by the execrable WHO, among others equally execrable) suggested.
• This is due to the evidence that the virus is much more prevalent than suggested by the case numbers alone (numbers which are wildly misleading as I have been saying for weeks). This reflects the fact that most of those infected are asymptomatic. The most revealing data points in this regard are systematic testing of the crews of the US aircraft carrier Roosevelt and the French aircraft carrier de Gaulle. Other semi-random samples provide supporting evidence, as does a systematic study in Santa Clara County, CA–a study conducted by eminent scientists at Stanford.
• Unlike the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, which is repeatedly (and tiresomely) trotted out as a precedent for the Wuhan Flu of 2020, the current virus is not a major health threat to the young. And by “young,” I am flexible in my definition: anyone under 70. In contrast, in the Spanish Flu outbreak, people in their 20s died in their millions.
• The epidemiological models that were the basis for lockdown policies have proved wildly exaggerated.
• “Honest epidemiologists” acknowledge that lockdowns merely kick the can down the road until they are relaxed, and that due to the delay in achieving herd immunity, total fatalities are likely to be higher as a result of doing so. Viruses gonna virus. We can pay them now, or we can pay them later. It is hubristic to think that humans have much power over the relentless progress of pathogens.
• But, but, but . . . we need to flatten the curve to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed, right? Er, not even in hotspots like New York have ICU resources operated at capacity. Further, as I noted in an earlier post, capacity is a choice not a fate: in NY and the UK and elsewhere, capacity has expanded rapidly. Overwhelming of the health care system has proved to be another chimera.
• Case in point: ventilators. The Great Ventilator Shortage has rapidly transformed into the Great Ventilator Glut: even NY acknowledges it has way too many. (Some weeks ago I was thinking that I wished there was a ventilator futures contract that I could short. That bet would have paid off handsomely.) (To which I would add that the clinical benefits of intubation/ventilation are dubious for most patients, at best.)
• There is clearly evidence of excess deaths–this has been a notably deadly outbreak, though not as yet more deadly than some extreme flu outbreaks such as 2017-2018 (which we weathered without shutting down the world). However, the variation in excess death rates across countries is virtually identical, regardless of policies that they have adopted, or the timing thereof.
• Excess deaths have peaked, and are trending downwards. Again, pretty much everywhere and at the same time regardless of policies adopted.
• In the US, and in some hard-hit countries (e.g., Italy), there are substantial variations in the severity of the outbreak. New York City has less than 1/3 the population of Texas, and 1/4 the population of California, but has experienced multiples of cases and deaths over these larger jurisdictions. In Italy, south of Florence covid-19 has had a minor impact. These variations suggest that local factors (e.g., pollution, population density) have a first order impact on the effects of an outbreak. This further suggests that one-size-fits-all policies make little sense.

I could go on. For a useful summary of additional facts, I suggest this. I could suggest more such resources, if you are interested.

Insofar as the economic and social impacts are concerned, it’s hardly necessary to go into detail. The consensus now is that the economic collapse will exceed that of the Great Depression: the only question is whether the collapse will endure as long–which, since the collapse was created by policy, will be the result of policy (which does not make me optimistic). (The Great Depression in the US was “Great” not so much because of the severity of the initial decline–1920/1921 was as severe–but for its duration. Monetary and other policy errors caused the extended misery. Will we repeat them?)

Insofar as liberty is concerned, just look around. People arrested for surfing, FFS. Police departments declaring that protest is a “non-essential activity.”

Take the crackdowns on outdoor activities. What evidence whatsoever is there that such activities pose risk of spread of the virus? So as not to keep you in suspense, let me answer: none. Ditto gyms or restaurants. The biggest risk? Close and extended contact with an infected individual. So by all means keep everyone locked down at home, except for occasional forays to say, buy food. From people.

This economic collapse will cost lives. Many of them. It will cost futures. The futures of young people with their lives ahead of them.

We are constantly hectored by those who claim to be acting on the basis of SCIENCE. I note that many of those hectoring are clearly utterly incapable of discussing intelligently any scientific topic. Self-selection–those who are capable of doing actual science have far better things to do than become politicians or bureaucrats–is one major explanation of this.

But those who scream SCIENCE the loudest are little more than Wizards of Oz, trying to intimidate us little Dorothies, and warning us not to look at the little man behind the curtain. Men plural (and women) actually–the modelers with the risible models, the if-it-bleeds-it-leads journalists repeating bullshit data that they do not comprehend, and the politicians aping both.

Some countries are starting to relent. Germany, for example. Trump and some governors have laid out plans to ease the lockdowns, but these plans are timorous and built on the same faulty foundations as the lockdowns themselves.

Consider Texas, where Governor Abbot will open state parks and permit stores to reopen–but only if they offer curbside service. (Can I get a curbside haircut? How does that work, exactly? Tough luck for barbers, I guess.)

Schools will remain closed, even though (a) children are not vulnerable, (b) other countries have either not closed schools, or have reopened them, and (c) exposing children is the most effective way of building herd immunity which is key to suppressing the virus in the longer term.

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

The governor’s second executive order focuses on Texas’ medical staff affected by limitations placed on surgical procedures. The order eases restrictions on surgeries starting April 22. The goal of this order is to allow doctors to diagnose patients without an exception. The governor specifically used diagnostic tests for cancer as an example.

So cancer screening and surgeries have been stopped. That hasn’t cost any lives, surely.

Abbott’s “plan,” like Trump’s (largely irrelevant one because it’s governors and hick and hack local mayors and judges and police chiefs whose decisions really matter) is based on widespread testing. Testing has become a mantra, a totem.

As a practical matter, the availability of tests will be a binding constraint for the foreseeable future. The UK, as an example, promised tens-of-thousands of tests–and has been able to deliver only a fraction of those. Availability of tests in the US has grown only slowly. If setting us free depends on availability of tests, we shall remain in bondage for a very long time to come.

And what is the purpose of the testing? I keep reading “test, track, and isolate” like some kind of mantra. But for a disease that is potentially spread by casual contact (unlike, AIDS or venereal disease) tracking contacts is utterly futile. “Who were you in contact with Mr./Ms. Positive?” “I was on the Blue Line” or “I was on the Metro.” Yeah, that sure helps. A necessary (but not sufficient!) condition for test, track, and isolate to work to control a ubiquitous pathogen is that the testing be almost as ubiquitous. But that just runs into the constraints mentioned earlier, i.e., if testing is a necessary condition to participate in civil life, we are not going to be able to participate in civil life for a long time to come.

Some proposals regarding testing–namely, the requirement of a certificate of immunity to obtain full civil rights–are positively Orwellian, not to mention almost certainly unconstitutional. (And I surely hope that Orwellian is a strict subset of unconstitutional, though I am having my doubts.)

Based on these quavering, tentative proposals to relax constraints, Lockdown Nation ain’t ending anytime soon.

And Trump and Abbott and a few others are quite the aggressive ones. Leftist governors in particular–Gulag Gavin in California, Coonman in Virginia, Governor Ratched in Michigan, and their confreres in places like Minnesota, Washington, and Wisconsin–give every indication that they quite like the way things are going, thank you.

Why is this? Not to go all Freudian, but this is overdetermined. A big part of it is the let no crisis go to waste mentality, combined with a will to power. The virus has proved to be the perfect Trojan Horse to justify outrage after outrage against liberty, and to seize control over the daily lives of citizens in ways that they only dreamed about before.

Another part is a refusal to admit error. These policies were justified on the basis of apocalyptic–and hysterical–predictions from models that have proved to be utterly unreliable. What politician is willing to play Emily Litella, and say “Nevermind”? None, to a first approximation. So now they warn us about the “second wave.” Which will occur inevitably whenever the lockdowns are relaxed if the theory of the lockdowns (“flatten the curve”) is correct in the first place.

The question now is how much longer will Americans who are watching their livelihoods and futures disappear put up with this. Although I see glimmers of hope, they are only glimmers. The deference to authority, no matter how demonstrably incompetent, opportunistic, or corrupt, appears to be very deeply ingrained indeed. Depressing.

What we need are policies that target the most vulnerable (especially the elderly), and vary with local conditions. Instead, we have indiscriminate approaches that have created immense harm to our livelihoods and liberties, with little demonstrable public health benefit in return. It’s time to rise up and speak out against the petty tyrants who wreak havoc and and add insult to injury by insisting that they are doing it for our own good.

The latest leftist/statist/progressive/establishment/”elite” freakout is over Trump’s alleged incompetence at addressing the Coronavirus. This is an illustration of their utter cluelessness, because the responsibility for any failure in addressing a potential pandemic utterly discredits the entire progressive vision.

In that vision, a wise, nay, omniscient, technocratic elite foresees problems, devises elegant solutions, and saves the world. In that vision, elected officials–legislators, but especially the chief executive–are at best irrelevant distractions, but more likely meddling interferers who undermine the brilliant designs of the administrative apparatus.

So if the government fails, it is on the permanent government, not on the hapless sod at the top who vainly pulls the levers of the state machinery, to no avail (because the mandarins are far too sophisticated to respond to the commands of such a boorish boob–they know better!).

We already have a perfect illustration of the disconnect between the vanity of the administrative state and its actual competence. The geniuses from the government who are here to help put infected individuals from a cruise ship on an aircraft . . . that also carried (previously!) non-infected individuals. The response of the State Department is priceless. It should be framed for posterity:

“At the end of the day, the State Department had a decision to make, informed by our inter-agency partners, and we went ahead and made that decision,” Walters said. “And the decision, I think, was the right one in bringing those people home.”

Again with the fucking “inter-agency”! Our overlords to whom we owe utter obeisance.!

But there’s more from M. Walters:

“What I’d say is that the chief of mission, right, through the U.S. embassy, is ultimately the head of all executive branch activities. [Er, mere peasant that I am, I thought from reading the Constitution that the President of the United States is “ultimately the head of all executive branch activities.” Silly me!] So when we are very careful about taking responsibility for the decision, the State Department is – that is the embassy. The State Department was running the aviation mission, and the decision to put the people into that isolation area initially to provide some time for discussion and for onward, afterwards, is a State Department decision.”

Yes, we are in the best of hands. The best of hands! How dare you question them, peasant!

Regardless of what you think about Trump’s competence, it cannot be less than the bureaucracy’s. Yet the better thans insist on demanding we defer to the bureaucracy. Because they know better.

And then, they are shocked–shocked!–when people with a modicum of common sense and who rely on empirical reality choose Trump over them.

Maybe you could be this stupid. And arrogant. If you tried really, really hard.

A Merry Christmas to all. ‘Tis the season for giving, and I appreciate the time you all have given over the years to read my musings (and rantings!). SWP will be going into its 15th year in a few weeks–hard to believe. Thanks to all for visiting, and for continuing to visit. I hope I give you reason to continue doing so.

Until then, have a joyous Christmas.

Cheers,

Craig AKA SWP

Anyone who says that “the science is settled” is a fool or a charlatan. Case in point: Darwinism and its more rigorous heir Neo-Darwinism. These have been “settled science” (in the case of the former) since no later than the Scopes Trial in 1925. But as this fascinating review article by the estimable David Gelertner demonstrates, these theories cannot do what they purport to do: explain “macro-evolution,” or to quote the title of Darwin’s famous work, explain the “origins of the species.”

The eminent statistician George Box once quipped, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism have proved incredibly useful. They have provided the models that have resulted in the incredible strides in understanding, and manipulating, genetics and the genome. That is, they have proved enormously useful at a micro level–that is, within a species

But that’s not what Darwin set out to do, nor what neo-Darwinists claim to be able to do–explain how life forms evolved from one celled organisms to incredibly complex ones like humans. And Gelertner (or more exactly the author of the book Gelertner reviews, Stephen Meyer) explains why. It’s a matter of probability. Ironically, the discoveries in genetics derived from working in the Darwinian model/paradigm undermine its macro claims.

Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian framework is driven by mutation: “pure chance and lots of time” as Gelertner phrases it. But the odds against a useful mutation are so immense, that there is never enough time. Genes make proteins, and proteins are chains of 150+ amino acids:

The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20¹⁵⁰. In other words, many. 20¹⁵⁰ roughly equals 10¹⁹⁵, and there are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe.

What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? Douglas Axe did a series of experiments to estimate how many 150-long chains are capable of stable folds—of reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful. (Axe is a distinguished biologist with five-star breeding: he was a graduate student at Caltech, then joined the Centre for Protein Engineering at Cambridge. The biologists whose work Meyer discusses are mainly first-rate Establishment scientists.) He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10⁷⁴ will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10⁷⁴ is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 10⁷⁷.

In other words: immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is—so far—a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million—you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.

There is also the problem of creating whole new life forms:

To help create a brand new form of organism, a mutation must affect a gene that does its job early and controls the expression of other genes that come into play later on as the organism grows. But mutations to these early-acting “strategic” genes, which create the big body-plan changes required by macro-evolution, seem to be invariably fatal. They kill off the organism long before it can reproduce. This is common sense. Severely deformed creatures don’t ever seem fated to lead the way to glorious new forms of life. Instead, they die young.

Evidently there are a total of no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal. The German geneticists Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for the “Heidelberg screen,” an exhaustive investigation of every observable or inducible mutation of Drosophila melanogaster (the same patient, long-suffering fruit fly I meddled with relentlessly in an undergraduate genetics lab in the 1970s). “[W]e think we’ve hit all the genes required to specify the body plan of Drosophila,” said Wieschaus in answering a question after a talk. Not one, he continued, is “promising as raw materials for macroevolution”—because mutations in them all killed off the fly long before it could mate. If an exhaustive search rules out every last plausible gene as a candidate for large-scale Drosophila evolution, where does that leave Darwin? Wieschaus continues: “What are—or what would be—the right mutations for major evolutionary change? And we don’t know the answer to that.”

. . . .

Darwin would easily have understood that minor mutations are common but can’t create significant evolutionary change; major mutations are rare and fatal.

So where does that leave us? With very unsettled science. And this in the area in which scientists are justly proud of the enormous progress they have made working within the established paradigm. Progress that has changed lives in almost unfathomably ways, and which will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

But that is what Kuhn called “normal science”: incremental progress within an established paradigm. This is fertile ground for a Kuhnian paradigm shift. An accepted paradigm cannot explain vital facts–macroevolution, in this instance. Indeed, here it cannot explain the very phenomenon it purports to be able to explain and was in fact developed to explain. That failure will trigger the hunt for a new paradigm. And likely sometime someone will develop it.

Keep this in mind whenever you hear that the science is settled, especially in fields–like climate science–where the underlying problem (the behavior of a dynamic, non-linear system) is as complicated or perhaps more complicated than biological evolution, and where the normal science in the existing paradigm has been far less successful than Darwinism/Neo-Darwinism.

The American Psychological Association has determined that masculinity is indeed toxic:

Thirteen years in the making, [the APA’s new Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men] draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.

. . . .

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors. For example, a 2011 study led by Kristen Springer, PhD, of Rutgers University, found that men with the strongest beliefs about masculinity were only half as likely as men with more moderate masculine beliefs to get preventive health care (Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 52, No. 2). And in 2007, researchers led by James Mahalik, PhD, of Boston College, found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to consider as normal risky health behaviors such as heavy drinking, using tobacco and avoiding vegetables, and to engage in these risky behaviors themselves (Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 64, No. 11).

When evaluating documents like this, I find it useful to refer to Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions. He argues that a particular dichotomy, between what he calls the constrained and unconstrained visions, can explain a large amount of the variation in opinions on seemingly disparate and unrelated subjects. Sowell does not oversell the idea, but to paraphrase George Box’s statement about theories, all dichotomies are wrong, but some are useful. Sowell’s is definitely useful.

The APA’s new Guidelines are firmly in the unconstrained vision. They consider most human behavior to be the product of social constructs, which are somewhat arbitrary and malleable. They can be deconstructed, and then reconstructed, by a gnostic elite–in this case, psychology researchers and therapists. The enlightened reconstruction results in better social outcomes.

In contrast, the constrained vision views most human traits as stubborn facts that are resistant to change, and believes that attempts to change them are likely disastrous. These traits are at root the result of millions of years of biological evolution, augmented in the more recent past by social and cultural developments that accommodate the evolved species to social life, including social life in modern “extended orders” (to use Hayek’s term, in contrast to more limited, tribal groupings). In the case of masculinity, biological imperatives relating to reproduction predispose men (and the males of many other species) physically and mentally towards competition and sometimes strife. Cultural and social conventions and norms constrain these impulses, and channel them into more social and socially productive directions.

Including, I might add, competition for status and prestige that results in extraordinary accomplishment. Men are high variance, with a greater frequency of outcomes at extremes than women, in almost any variable that you want to measure.

These phenomena are complex, and interact in deep and poorly understood ways. The constrained vision always keeps Chesterton’s Fence in mind. Men socialized into “stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression” are “unhealthy”? Well, why did socialization take such a perverse turn? And why did it take such a perverse turn virtually universally, across cultures and across time? Could it be that perhaps these traits perform some deeper function, related to biologically selected male traits, and that undoing these cultural norms may lead to horrible outcomes?

In other words: how do you reconstruct testosterone? And, since you can’t, how can you be sure that the allegedly toxic traits that you presume that you can manipulate via therapy are not the very things that keep the testosterone in check? How do you know that you are not playing Sorcerer’s Apprentice when you meddle with these things?

The hubris in the unconstrained vision is particularly stunning in this case, as the APA itself criticizes heavily the previous “androcentric bias” of the psychology profession. So in other words, previous psychologists were deeply flawed. But you can totally rely on the current generation. Because research.

Well, the previous (now apparently discredited) psychologists based their claims on research too. But even more telling: the reproducibility crisis in psychological research is more acute than in any other subject (with over 50 percent of psychological studies being non-replicable). (If you Google “reproducibility crisis” top Google suggested fill-in is “reproducibility crisis psychology.”)

What’s more, many of the unreplicable studies involve relatively simple experiments, rather than those that purport to identify causal relationships in complicated social and behavioral phenomena.

In other words, perhaps the worst way to convince me of the correctness of a claim about psychology is to cite modern research.

Some blind spots are evident in some of the research cited in the link. It spends some time discussing the interactions between masculinity and race:

These dynamics play out in the prison system as well. As of 2014, black men made up 37 percent of the male state and federal prison population and were more than 10 times as likely to be incarcerated in state or federal prison as white men. Hispanic men were also overrepresented, making up 22 percent of the prison population despite making up only about 8 percent of the general U.S. population (U.S. Department of Justice, 2015).

Well, if you want to examine a society dominated by females and notably lacking in traditional male figures, just look at the minority inner city communities that supply the prison population discussed in this quote. These dots are, of course, not connected by the APA.

Relatedly, variations in things emphasized by the APA, such as murder and suicide, across countries, races, ethnicities, and time are huge, which suggests that many other factors are at work, and that a reductionist focus on the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is woefully inadequate.

The presumptuousness of this endeavor is breathtaking, and is therefore a particularly pronounced example of the unconstrained vision in action. As someone firmly rooted in the constrained vision, I say: don’t mess with what you don’t understand, and don’t pretend to understand when recent experience–which you recognize–demonstrates the fallibility of your discipline. Psychologists should be humble: they have a lot to be humble about.

Thanks to those who proved their humanity by responding to my post from last night.  Yes, there is obviously a problem with the Site Sphinx, who asks you to prove you are human, but provides no way to do so.

I’ve provided the screen shots of the impossible-to-interact-with “You must prove you are human” riddle to my hosting service.  Hopefully this will be rectified quickly.  I’ll post when it is.

Update: Boy, that was fast.  Apparently my hosting service corrected the problem shortly prior to my posting.  Thanks for those who left comments.  Cheers.