Leadership failed, and by leadership I mean Comey

It was lies all the way down.

The FBI’s former chief of intelligence Kevin Brock, who served under prior Director Robert Mueller, said the new IG findings add to a body of evidence that Comey’s tenure at FBI was infected with a record of noncompliance.“

* * *

Not a single application from the past five years reviewed by the inspector general was up to snuff," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, lamented. "That’s alarming and unacceptable."

* * *

For longtime FBI leaders like Brock, Comey’s tenure inflicted a culture shift that may take years for the country’s premier law enforcement agency to shed. 

"This is not the way it has always been in the FBI. Very specific policies and procedures were written in the early 2000s to ensure the proper use of confidential sources, to assess their reliability and credibility, to protect against abuses and mistakes,” Brock said. “Somewhere along the line, actual practice drifted away from these protective policies. And management and legal counsel didn’t step in. Leadership failed.”

Mr. Cuomo has an epiphany

Now, whom do we know who's made a point like this one?

“Where do we get the masks? China. Where do we get the gowns? China. Where do we get the gloves? China. Where do we get the ventilators? China,” Cuomo told reporters at a press conference in Albany.

“I don’t know how we got into this position.”

In another portion of the briefing, he sounded a similar alarm.

“Why don’t we have medical supplies made in this country? Why are we shopping in China for basic medical supplies?

Perhaps he doesn't often think seriously about where the policies he supports lead us.  I can imagine saying, "I see now that the priorities I gave different goals have led us to this emergency, so I'm painfully rethinking my positions."  Nothing could induce me to say something as ridiculous as "I don't know how we got into this position" of relying on cheap imported Chinese goods.  Any semi-sentient person knows exactly how we got here.

Naturally the clamor is for more government intervention to force American companies to supply critical goods.  And yet in this emergency American companies are doing so voluntarily, when regulations don't stymie them.  In the long term, we consumers will have to demand it by being willing to pay more for secure local supplies instead of cheap, tenuous ones.

An Objection

They don't really have the resources to enforce all these mandates, which have proliferated far beyond their capacity to deploy anyone to force the issue. At some point they are going to hit a psychological wall at which the ordinary person is going to stop obeying. What then? Shoot to kill? Gun stores are essential businesses.

"Men's Grooming"

Apparently people think beards and long hair will be fashionable by summer. You can't get to the barber, see.

I haven't trimmed my beard since 2011, but I shave my head myself and have since it became obvious that male pattern baldness was in my genetic destiny. (That's OK; anyone can change their pronouns, but only a real man can display male pattern baldness.) I expect no changes in my 'grooming routine,' whatever that is.

Adjusting Fire as Necessary

UPDATE: For the immersion sects:

Staff of life

We were running out of bread, and I didn't feel like going inside the store, and curbside delivery slots are a week or more out, so I made some easy bread.  This isn't artisanal bread with my neighbor's tasty natural yeast, and I didn't fire up the outdoor oven, either.  It's just the easiest possible indoor-oven bread with commercial yeast, flour, water, and salt.  No kneading, just 5 minutes on a dough hook in a mixer to start, then about two minutes of work separated by 3 waiting periods.  Start to finish, maybe 6-7 hours.  It bakes at 450 degrees for 30 minutes or so, in a dutch oven with a lid, but you take the lid off to finish it.  When the internal temperature gets close to 200 degrees, it's done.

Ad Auctoritati

I started not going out back on the 7th of March. In the time since then I have left my property on now five occasions, two of which were motorcycle rides in the mountains, one of which was a motorcycle ride to town to check the post office and gas up, and two of which were trips to the county dump. I could have skipped the motorcycle rides, but they were through open country air and I enjoyed them.

Today's trip to the dump (and the post office) was the first one of these made under the lockdown order. I told my wife that I hadn't minded at all engaging in all this isolation when it was my decision to do it, but now that someone is trying to tell me that I have to do it I find myself rebelling against it internally. I'm still doing it freely -- it was my decision to start with -- but suddenly I'm aware of a prick of irritation that wasn't there before. I suppose that is just my nature.

Speaking of arguments against authority, read Eli Lake today on how the FBI has proven it cannot be trusted to surveil Americans. I've met Eli a couple of times over the years. He seems like a solid investigator of these sorts of issues, and -- unlike me -- not inclined to oppose authority just by instinct. His questions are always informed, good ones.

I happen to agree with him here, but of course I do.

Taking one's eye off the ball

From Ixtu Diaz:

In the midst of this festival of frivolity, harsh reality landed in Europe. In just ten days, we discovered that neither the tampon issue, nor the participation of transsexuals in the Olympic Games, nor the climate emergency were real problems, nor emergencies, nor anything of the sort. They were just fictitious problems, the pastimes of a generation that hadn’t known tragedy.

More and more my reaction to a lot of people's drama is "I don't have time for your BS."  I have only so much time, attention, and resources to try to solve problems.  Some pseudo-problems have dropped the bottom of my list, to deserve attention when the rest of the world has become perfect.

Michigan caves

Governor Whitmer saw the elephant, especially after the FDA also saw the elephant and authorized the use of chloroquine to treat COVID-19:

"When used under the conditions described in this authorization, the known and potential benefits of chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate when used to treat COVID-19 outweigh the known and potential risks of such products," FDA Chief Scientist Denise M. Hinton wrote in the approval letter.

Sweden Goes Its Own Way

This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it will provide a laboratory for testing whether or not this approach is wise. If Sweden comes out ahead here, we may have to consider that our response ultimately did impose unnecessary costs on our nation in order to advance a misguided approach to the pandemic.

The other reason it's interesting to me is that Sweden is one of the premier countries held up as an exemplar by Bernie Sanders et al. Yet this approach is treated as a moral monstrosity when it is proposed by anyone here, or in the UK for that matter. How will they resolve the conflict that will create?

Hard Times All Around

Mexican cartels are really struggling.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has sent the price of heroin, methamphetamines and fentanyl soaring, as the likes of the Sinaloa cartel – and its main rival, the Jalisco “New Generation” – struggle to obtain the necessary chemicals to make the synthetic drugs, which typically come from China and are now in minimal supply.

“The cartels have suffered from COVID-19 due to the inability to get the regular shipments of synthetic opioids and precursor chemicals for the massive production of meth from China,” Derek Maltz, a former special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Operations Division in New York, told Fox News.

...

Obdola underscored fentanyl, which originates from China, has become the most coveted cartel commodity in recent weeks.

“In China, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), around 5,000 illegal drug laboratories have been processing synthetic drugs and chemicals to process them. Most of these drugs have Europe and North America as the main markets,” he continued.

Even the cartels can't trust China, it seems.

Pulling up the drawbridge

My county has now closed the boat ramps, not because it's seriously a public health risk for people to go out in boats to fish, but because leaving them open felt too much like an invitation for careless yahoos to come visit.  New short-term rentals and hotel/motel bookings are also halted for the next couple of weeks.  Right now this tourist town has no patience for tourists.  Everyone remembers the Spring Break and Mardi Gras idiots.  No one wants even casual contact with anyone he doesn't know and trust to have been behaving responsibly.

There's huge anxiety over a Corpus Christi TV news station's report of 2 "Aransas" cases.  Wherever the guy got his information, the chances are they didn't know the difference between two nearby towns with "Aransas" in their name and "Aransas County."  Much Facebook bandwidth is now devoted to nailing down with perfect precision where the two culprits, if they exist at all, are located at this precise moment.

I'm telling people it doesn't make the tiniest difference.  We can't know exactly how many cases are out there.  We already know there are some (probably so far not many) cases fairly nearby.  That's it, that's all you need to know, and as much as you possibly can know right now.  You don't need to know who they are or exactly where they live, and we're not going to put the tiniest effort into finding that out for you or broadcasting it.  You need to behave as though the disease were present, because if it isn't yet, it will be, and you'll never know exactly where it is no matter how infallible you think the TV news anchor or some "expert" is.

Nothing about this news changes how you need to behave:  stay home as much as you can, and wash everything you touch, for your own sake and for the sake of your duty to neighbors.  As far as your own emergency medical needs go, you don't have any yet, so here's the plan:  LATER, if you're short of breath, call an ER and arrange to follow their protocols for going in.  LATER, if you have a fever, be even more careful about contaminating anyone else, including your household.  If you have both, do both.  If you have a fever but aren't short of breath, keep isolating yourself as much as possible, and be ready on short notice to contact the ER if, and only if, you get short of breath.  If you never get short of breath, then you're pretty much golden, so don't borrow trouble.  Just don't spread it.

Cooties

Did the press really just melt down because a guy who converted his factory to mask-making read from the Bible?  Talk about purity obsessions.

As Ben Shapiro said, “If you’re angry at the guy shifting over his factory to produce 50,000 facemasks a day for medical professionals, you’re doing being human wrong.”

A Worthy Question

Do these closure orders constitute eminent domain, being a destruction of private wealth for a public good, and thus merit compensation?  I’d prefer the answer to be “yes,” though as a taxpayer I’d be on the hook for it. Limits on government power even in an emergency are needed. Otherwise government can always manufacture emergencies whenever it wants more power.

A statistical argument for chloroquine

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Roy Spencer noted an inverse correlation between malaria and COVID-19 in hundreds of countries:

If I sort all 234 countries by incidence of malaria, and compute the average incidence of malaria and the average incidence of COVID-19, the results are simply amazing: those countries with malaria have virtually no COVID-19 cases, and those countries with many COVID-19 cases have little to no malaria.

Here are the averages for the three country groupings:

Top 40 Malaria countries:

212.24 malaria per thousand = 0.2 COVID-19 cases per million

Next 40 Malaria countries:

7.30 malaria per thousand = 10.1 COVID-19 cases per million

Remaining 154 (non-)Malaria countries:

0.00 malaria per thousand = 68.7 COVID-19 cases per million

One possibility is the impact of widespread use of chloroquine as a long-term preventative for malaria. There are other possibilities, of course, including heat and humidity, but there also is an indication that patient populations being treated with chloroquine are not coming down with COVID-19. At least, I read that during the last week, but it's getting harder and harder to find a search engine that will generate any "chloroquine" results that aren't deeply skeptical and full of spiteful references to the Bad Man, fish-tank cleaner, and the suffering of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients, even while chloroquine manufacturers are dialing up cheap chloroquine production to 11 and donating doses by the tens of millions.

“We Cannot Direct The Wind, But We Can Adjust The Sails”

Dolly Parton reads bedtime stories. Do you know about Dolly Parton? She’s really something.

Outlaw Cinema For the People

For the next two months, REBELLER is going to be free to read. The legendary Joe Bob Briggs writes there often now.

Paid to be wrong

But wrong in a good cause!

Lockdown Time Now

North Carolina's just started one minute ago, and is scheduled to last until the end of next month.

Relax, We've Got That Climate Problem Licked

A new invention makes vodka from carbon dioxide.

Begging bureaucrats for beds

I'm pleased to see that Texas doesn't have a "certificate of need" program.  Let's make the bureaucrats seek a public referendum to get a certificate of need for a CON program.

A lot of things need to change.  November is coming.

What’s It Like To Be A Bee?

An investigation within limits.

Unfair tactics.

Red tape, red garbage

How many examples do we need of why everything the government touches becomes shoddy, overpriced, and in short supply?

Trends in most places show some promise

Supply lines

One of the things that made me the most nervous a couple of weeks ago was the difficulty of ordering food online. We routinely order a number of things that our grocery store doesn't stock, so when the grocery stock aisles got iffy and I wanted to avoid crowds anyway, my first recourse was to Amazon. It was disquieting how many things suddenly were out, from beans to rice to canned anything to almost any kind of cleaning supplies. I checked again today, though, and found supplies almost in an ordinary condition.

I've been using the local grocery's curbside service. It's clunky; you get a delivery date that's a week out instead of same-day. Once you choose your items, there's a very limited ability to add anything else you may think of. Substitutions and outages are still common. Still, there's minimal personal contact, which is safer not only for us but for the workers. Considering the conditions they're operating under, they're doing a great job and trying hard to be both conscientious and flexible. Our lurking neighbors (hello, lurking neighbors!) are being even more careful than we are, minimizing risk to themselves and to the 99-year-old materfamilias onsite.

Most of the county is being at least fairly careful. There is a growing resentment of outsiders who arrive from who-knows-where having practiced who-knows-what hygiene. My own feeling is that it's more important how we all act in public than whether we've been here for a short or long time. It's all about the hands and the face, and overcoming that careless tendency to think it's no big deal to be in public with a fever or a cough.

The local restaurants are trying to hold on by offering take-out and delivery. Controversy is brewing over whether it's best to support the ones offering discounts, or the ones imposing surcharges. Again, my own feeling is that it's more important to keep the restaurant enterprises together, so they can preserve jobs, than to supply the community with cheaper entertainment. If we just want cheap food, we're all able to cook at home. Food supplies became inconvenient for a while, but never to the point of hunger; mostly we just had to be flexible about substitutions. Because Mr. Tex and I cook most of our food at home anyway, we didn't feel the disruption nearly as much as many did.

A Small Cost of Social Distancing

Yesterday I went for a motorcycle ride in the country. I came across a cow loose in the road, as occurs from time to time. I had a very strong impulse to stop, as I normally would, and help return the cow to her pasture. I generally feel a duty to do that sort of thing, and I wanted to do it. On any normal day I would have done it, but on this day I realized I had conflicting duties.

On this day, there was already a crowd of people standing around -- uselessly as far as I could tell -- and I could tell that it would be impossible to avoid interacting with them. They had clearly called for help, and were numerous enough that people would notice them and slow down (thus avoiding collision with the cow). Everything's easier to catch here than back in Georgia, where flatter land and wider rivers made it easy for livestock to get free and go a long ways. They probably managed the fairly easy task of herding one cow down into her pasture.

I rode on and left them to deal with it, with sad regret. It's likely enough we soon will have worse things to regret than the lost chance to help catch a loose cow, but I hated to go on without helping. I was one person there who really knew how to deal with the problem having dealt with that particular problem some several times before. I could have been a help, but this time I was no help at all.

Alas Joe Diffie

The sad irony is that we cannot fulfill his longstanding last request.

Crisis envy

If we can shut down the world to stop a virus, how come the public won't accept plans to cripple the global economy in service of climate alarmism? I'm just spitballing here, but it's possible a lot of people genuinely believe in the danger of a contagious, sometimes fatal disease, and aren't just virtue-signaling about a trendy hypothetical threat. Even in the case of the virus, there are those inconvenient people who insist on continually checking our assumptions against facts on the ground, kvetching about shoddy models, and thinking about cost-benefit trade-offs.

Why? Because We Love You

Headline: "Why has the media ignored sexual assault allegations against Biden?"

It is hugely frustrating to see conservatives, who couldn’t give a damn about the multiple sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump, weaponize the accusations against Biden. However, it’s also frustrating to see so many liberals turning a blind eye. The accusations against the former vice-president are serious; why aren’t they being taken seriously?

Obviously because it's the only moral decision, since derailing his candidacy at this stage would ensure a Trump re-election, and that latter is literally the worst possible outcome. For humanity and the world, not just the country. It goes beyond patriotism, it's a religious duty with metaphysical force.

I think conservatives are less hypocritical here, because their real objection seems to be the same one she's raising: why the double standard? Why is a guy like Kavanaugh subjected to a life-altering examination in the public eye even given that he faced accusers who fielded no actual evidence, but Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are ushered past security with a wink and a nod? Well, we know why: religious duty with metaphysical force.

One obvious reason is that Reade’s accusations are very hard to prove.

Yes, but Kavanaugh was accused of running a high-school rape ring that somehow preyed on college-aged women who gladly attended these high-school parties, while being a blackout drunk who somehow excelled in law school and rose to the high bench, and the star witness against him had no corroboration that the event she described had ever happened. Several of his accusers recanted, and the lawyer flogging the story is now in prison for defrauding his client. Mere difficulty of proof can't be the reason. Speaking of which:

You know who has talked publicly about the importance of taking women seriously? Biden. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Biden stood up for Dr Christine Blasey Ford, noting: “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.”

Does this presumption not apply when the guy being accused is a Democrat running for president? It would seem that way.

It certainly would.

She does at least get to the point of questioning the duty:

[It is] hugely unlikely that Reade’s accusations will do any damage whatsoever to Biden’s ambitions. Allegations of sexual assault certainly haven’t posed any hindrance to Trump. The allegations against Kavanaugh didn’t stop him from becoming a supreme court justice. The allegations against Louis CK didn’t kill his career in comedy. And the multiple women who have accused Biden of touching them inappropriately in the past haven’t exactly derailed his career.

In point of fact, there are endless photos of Biden touching women inappropriately. She's right, this hasn't done him any damage apparently.

The conservative position as I understand it is that not all of these accusations are equally believable, and we ought to insist on some level of proof before deploying the very harsh sanctions we (at least sometimes, haphazardly) levy against the guilty. Harvey Weinstein is in Rikers right now, stripped of fame and wealth and freedom, and he'll likely die there. Jeffery Epstein would have died in prison even if he hadn't been killed. The punishments do really fall, sometimes, and they are sometimes life-ending punishments. Conservatives argue that such punishments should not be deployed without proof, and certainly (as in the case of Kavanaugh) not without corroborating evidence. I don't get the sense that they don't believe the punishments shouldn't be deployed at all.

The liberal position seems to be that accusations should presumptively or even always be believed, and career-ending consequences deployed, if the accused is the wrong kind of person. If they're the right kind of person, even hard evidence -- endless pictures, blue dresses -- should not be allowed to interfere with their exercise of freedom and power.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding or misstating the positions; perhaps liberals simply can't believe (in spite of the obvious evidence) that a nice guy like Joltin' Joe Biden or Bill Clinton could engage in anything bad. Rascally, perhaps, but bad? Obviously they're not bad people, so they can't be guilty; and the evidence of our eyes must therefore be deceptive. (AVI's favorite, Slate Star Codex, calls that top-down processing.)

It does appear, though, the double standard is real. The accusations against Kavanaugh were unlikely, and some of them were implausible on their face. All the same, screaming hordes of liberal women came to try to force Congress to destroy him -- not just to refuse to promote him, but to impeach him, investigate and try him, find a way to send him to prison for the harm he allegedly caused the nice-seeming lady with the memories she recovered in therapy decades after the event almost certianly never happened. The accusations against Clinton and Biden are supported by physical evidence, which you can verify for yourself. No similar outcry is occurring. In fact, you can't even get the press to admit the story exists.

What's the hurry?

I've been hoping every day for some word on how the 70,000 doses of chloroquine and azithromycin were working out in New York, because I'd read that they were delivered on Tuesday, March 24, and Gov. Cuomo said he was eager to get trials started. I was even getting worried that the lack of good news might mean the drugs weren't having any effect after all. Turns out they haven't started using them yet. They're still working out how the trials will be structured, and hope to get started next week.

The Inheritors

Here's a piece by two generations of the inheritors of Bob Wills' tradition.



Merle needs no introduction. Dwight probably doesn't either, but just in case, he's the guy singing when the Terminator walks into the biker/cowboy bar (called 'the Corral') in Terminator 2. The song is "Guitars, Cadillacs," which is probably his biggest hit.



The bike he steals is a Harley Davidson Fatboy. That was the first bike I ever knew I wanted, and it was surely this movie that made it so.

What A Man Can Do, And What A Man Can't Do

I want to point out that this is a sophisticated philosophical point, dressed up in pirate costumes.



It's more or less the essence of Stoicism. What can you do, this week, to deal with this crisis? You could plant a victory garden. You can exercise to keep your immune system strong. You could get out and enjoy whatever part of the glorious spring weather is open to you. You can call your friends and loved ones, and keep their spirits up, because they need it too.

What can't you do? Well, there's quite a lot. Learn to recognize it, and let go of it. You can't fix it. Focus on the things you can do, and accept the things you can't.

Sometimes All Choices Are Wrong

Some folks are going hard against Dr. Brix, no introductions necessary, for suggesting that it's just possible that things won't be as bad as they seem. She could be wrong about that. Nobody really knows how bad it's going to be.

People are going to make mistakes during this time, even responsible people. Her mistakes are different than the ones you'd make, but if you were in her position you'd be making mistakes too -- mistakes that would cost lives, just as hers will. It's going to be important to understand.

This is true even for that most maligned of all people, Donald Trump. He's making mistakes every day, but they're not the same mistakes that the overarching governing class would make. That's useful, even if it's disruptive. He shut off travel from China; they all called him racist and said to be sure to attend the Chinese New Year parade in your local city. He was right about that; they made different mistakes. It's helpful to have the corrective on both sides, perhaps. Our disagreements may be our strength.

As far as she is concerned, she's thinking about the psychological strain and the economic one. Everybody's seeing an endless flood of doomsday stories, while they lose their jobs and the economy tanks. It's not out of order to point out that the data coming in suggests that it might not [see comments] be as bad as you've been hearing (day and night, if you follow these reports obsessively). People are seeing their lives ruined, things they've invested their hearts in destroyed. She's erring on the side of giving them hope. Maybe that's wrong; but maybe everything's wrong, in the sense that there's no free ride. Every choice imposes a cost in blood.

The strongest pillar of Christianity was always the fact that people knew they needed to be forgiven for the things they'd done, even if they did their best to do right. In harder hours than we've known but late, that was understood personally by nearly everyone alive. If God can't forgive us, who can? Can we forgive ourselves? Can we forgive each other?

We're going to need to do.

"I Do Love a Steel Guitar"

Well then Grim, I know a guy- this guy does one of my favorite versions of Wichita Lineman, and so I looked and found a good Texas Swing piece he does and with a fiddle too (of course!).  Enjoy Greg Booth, with son Danny on Guitar and Bass and daughter-in-law Amanda on the fiddle , doing Boot Heel Drag (Bob Wills steel guitar man Herb Remington did it in 1950):

Rebooting the economy

It doesn't always go well.

Sunlight

An unexpected effect of suddenly converting the nation's universities to online academies is that classes are being recorded and can be shared. There's a sudden panic over the suggestion by conservatives that students might want to share any egregious examples of progressive balderdash, because, you know, the public might not understand. This was good: "The vast majority of academics are centrist liberals."

Yes, we'll have no virus

Russia has almost no coronavirus to speak of, but a strangely high incidence of pneumonia. Doctors are warning that it's time to get ready for the Italian scenario, but in the meantime as long as they don't call it coronavirus, it's all good. Call it a "banana." We're going to get another horrible demonstration in how societies with different levels of trust and transparency deal with crises. I hope we draw the right lesson.

Interesting idea

Trump supposedly has told governors that he wants a massive sampling of the population to determine which counties have a low incidence, which might let us prioritize some counties for allowing more economic output and relegate others to tighter lockdowns. I can imagine something like this working, if we somehow avoided the stampede from more infected counties to less, which is a big "if." It would be nice to see goods produced by and shipped from "safe zones," even if the safe zones had to shift from location to location over time. But it's not like we have, or even want, county border guards.

Western Swing V

And for those interested, Gringo dropped an article on the history of the steel guitar.

Always With the Negative Waves

So there was a slight sword practice mishap tonight. Nothing serious, although I expect I’ll feel it tomorrow.

I told a female friend the story and she was like, "There's a scary pandemic that will probably sicken you if you go to the hospital, and you're fighting with swords on wet ground?"

And I'm like, "Yeah, after riding motorcycles all day."

Statistics

It'd be nice if we had better evidence, writes a statistician.

Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?

The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have....

One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.

In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new coronavirus infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will translate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The vast majority of this hecatomb would be people with limited life expectancies. That’s in contrast to 1918, when many young people died.

One can only hope that, much like in 1918, life will continue. Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.

A Pretty Day in the Spring

Western Swing IV

Still more of the feel-good genre, with thanks to brother Gringo.



(This one I usually hear Willie Nelson do, but obviously he was following Wills' lead.)





(I do love a steel guitar.)

Did I mention bad regulation?

Nevada's governor has decided it's best if his state doesn't try chloroquine. No need to let doctors have any discretion. Three guesses which party.

Adapt and overcome

I heard the President say the other day that, although he's activated the Defense Production Act, he hasn't had to use it. So far no manufacturer has said "no." Ford steps up to help manufacture ventilators, using car parts.

Deregulation and safety

Bad regulations can kill people just as thoroughly as Wild-West unregulation.

The Last Most Hated President, and Merle Haggard

On the 17th of March, of whatever year that was. 1973 if the description is accurate.

Because It's An Emergency

You know, when you put it this way, it does seem like an odd approach....

Western Swing III

Tom's contribution. Gringo has a bunch more, which we'll get to tomorrow.

Pelosi caves

As Powerline observes:

One can only imagine how bad the Democrats’ polling must have been to cause such a hasty retreat. The Democrats had no one behind them except their most extremist supporters, like the New York Times.

He's not doing nothing

Good summary.

Western Swing II

Here's a series of videos from a Western Swing concert.

The Tide Pod President

The President said chloroquine was a promising enough treatment that, considering how widely used it had been for 70 years, was worth trying in hospitals by doctors.  Its limited side effects have been studied for a long time, so we're not going to kill anyone with it, whereas it might help some people who otherwise look extremely likely to die.

Therefore if a couple in Arizona saw him on TV, noticed that their aquarium cleaner had a similar active ingredient, and ate from 10-20x the maximum recommended experimental dose (news articles have been talking about max 500mg, whereas they each swallowed a teaspoon, which is nearly 5 grams or 4000 mg), clearly President Trump killed them with false hope.

The product was clearly labeled not for human consumption.  They chose a dose out of the clear blue sky.  They weren't even sick.  But the press is:  very sick.  This is a culture that will remove useful--even life-saving--products from the public sphere if unsupervised children of any age might hurt themselves by wildly misusing it.

Western Swing I

Some recommendations from Gringo. I'll put up Tom's in another post later.





Keep the recommendations coming and we'll do a series.

Destroying the Ring

That's going to be the big challenge.

Oxford: No Need to Panic

A new study from Oxford puts the hospitalization rate at about one in a thousand.

Repression

The French are doing it again.

France went into lockdown on March 17. The administrative state immediately generated an array of bureaucratic forms: a certificate to leave your house to walk the dog or go shopping; a certificate justifying your attendance at work rather than working from home. These certificates are to be carried on your person at all times and produced on demand by the authorities. As of this morning ‘confinement’ is being notched up again. Village and municipal food markets are to shut; leaving your house for shopping or exercise is limited to one hour and can take place no more than one kilometer from your home. The time of departure from your house is to be indicated on a certificate. Any infringement is to be punished by a minimum fine of €135 ($145), which rises to €1,500 ($1,615) for repeat offenders.

Our own experience is mostly that the right response to this business is to eliminate layers of government rather than adding them. Bureaucracy isn't helping, and it isn't helpful.

Effective presentation

I'm too disgusted to comment further.

Leverage

I'm trying to figure out whether Majority Whip Clyburn (D.-S.C.) really told participants in a conference call: "This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” It's widely reported on right-ish sites, but attributed only to an anonymous participant in the call. The fact-checking sites and CNN have never heard of it at all, not mentioning it in any way, even to dispute it. This makes my antenna creep up: wouldn't Snopes normally have issued either a flat denial, or at least a weak attempt to "put it in context"? Why doesn't Clyburn deny it? Are the press afraid even to ask him about it? There continue to be sporadic reports that the senators are "close to a deal." Pelosi is pounding the airwaves with the idea that Republicans are poisoning the stimulus package with pills. The rest of the country is howling about holding up relief checks for collective bargaining concessions, airline carbon emission limits, wind and solar subsidies, and corporate board gender quotas. The Pelosi poison-pill argument, when it's explained at all, has to do with insufficient "oversight" of bailouts to employers. That's an argument that could get some traction, unless "oversight" means things like corporate board gender quotas. President Trump strongly signaled that he'd like to see restrictions on using helicopter money to do stock buy-backs. Okay. I'm in about the position I was in when we were rushing through the 2008 "stimulus." I hoped at the time it would help and not hurt too much. To this day I don't really know. If Pelosi kills this one, I guess we'll see what it's like not to print money for a change, but there's going to have to be some serious relief for people holed up at home needing groceries and lacking paychecks or savings. Maybe not for a few weeks, but certainly if this goes on for months.

When You Can, Buy Ammo

A friend who has until now not been a gun owner bought a shotgun. It's a 2/3" chambered Mossberg. There's no ammunition for it, not nationwide.

Lay the stuff in when you can, again. It gets short fast.

The World Loves a Working Man

It is somewhat humbling, or ought to be, to realize that the world would be just fine if you stayed home for a month... or forever.

For Gringo

Et al.



We should do some Western Swing for a while. Hit the comments with recommendations.

Old Men

National Puppy Day

Normally I would not countenance foolishness like ‘national days’ (months, etc) of any kind, but just now I’m inclined to an exception in a good cause.

Good Morning, Ladies All

'Tis a fine morning in the springtime, all else aside. Don't forget it.

"I'm on your side, but you're not"

The inimitable Milton Friedman on sexual justice in labor pay.

Niche angst

A/k/a, per a commenter, the "exhausting theatre of pretending to be tortured by minor, everyday events." An exquisitely woke rumination from the Guardian: this is apparently what happens to people who don't want to do work they find distasteful and don't want to hire anyone else to do it, either. As another commenter said, "I'm beginning to think that our feminists don't really understand how labor markets work." But then again, who does?

Thinking outside the box

Crises bring out the MacGyver in us.

Manhattan Project, part II

We may not be able to "flatten the curve" fast enough, but we still have time to get serious about expanding the number of beds.

Kill all the lawyers

Okay, we can be nicer about it, let's just eliminate some of their ability to wreak havoc and gum up the works.  Part of Congress's emergency legislation eliminates tort liability for N95 masks provided to healthcare workers, thus freeing up manufacturers like 3M to start flooding the market with them.

There are some approaches to an emergency that don't have out-of-pocket costs.  Later we can argue over whether the fear of tort liability might have prevented a manufacturer from cutting corners.  Right now I just want to see the masks, and without the inevitable explanation that it will require months to grind through to the regulatory approval process.  It's time to mow some of these guys down, and that goes equally for the people looking to hit the jackpot if they wore a mask and it wasn't 100% effective in protecting them from every conceivable risk in life.

We're going to need the same approach to vaccines and other treatments.

Astra and dis-astra

"When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

It's not clear yet whether Comet ATLAS will put on a great show, so in the meantime here are some terrific Hubble shots of an interstellar comet, Borisov.

Socialized medicine: free, universal, and rationed

I continue to hope our unusual President will slash enough red tape to balloon supplies of things like ventilators in time to do some good.  In the meantime, we're getting a crash course in rationing by "triage officers" and in budget trade-offs.

I keep reading that the U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than many EU countries, even Italy.  The more important metric, however, may be ICU beds, where we're not doing so badly:  3 times as many as Italy, 5 times as many as the UK.  Nevertheless, New York is in for a rough ride, though I'm encouraged to see that they're whole-heartedly trying chloroquine and other promising antivirals, supplies of which so far appear to be holding up.

Evidence-based decision-making

This fellow seems to have his head screwed on straight.  He advocates concentrating on isolating on those at the highest risk of COVID complications, while letting everyone else go back to school and work.  He gets there by looking carefully at what measures have been tried in different countries, and what effect they had on both general spread and, more important, contributing to a crushing load on hospitals.  There's also some welcome attention to scary theories about air-borne transmission and likelihood of infection from casual contact, which bears on how effective careful hand-washing and surface-sanitizing can be even if we end the lockdown before we destroy the economy.  He also argues that the biggest danger to the economy is fear, not of the virus, but of what the government may do next.

Derangement

My neighborhood Facebook feed is not much nuttier than usual.  People are jumpy about groceries, but not too much.  There's some of the argument we're seeing nationwide over whether we're over- or under-reacting.  Less D-vs.-R quarreling than usual, I'd say.

It's a different story at the sole Project Gutenberg forum devoted to politics, which are ruthlessly repressed elsewhere on the site.  It turns out that PG devotees are about 95% hair-on-fire socialists with a terminal case of TDS.  For a few weeks I've been conducting an experiment to see whether civil discourse is possible, which wasn't going well even before the virus panic started.  In the last few days I've been posting the occasional semi-good-news story about potentially encouraging approaches to treatment regimens or re-tooling production to focus on medical shortages.  The response is a nearly unanimous blast of close-minded hostility.

An interesting aspect is the level of proof demanded, depending on the story.  The initial reaction to reports that chloroquine studies were surprisingly hopeful was to attack the "right wing" sources.  A moderately sane member was kind enough to find palatable French-media sources confirming the essential story, but the dominant message then became that Fake News was a horrifying scourge to be avoided at all costs, and we won't know a single thing about treatments until every bureaucrat on the planet has had time to commission lengthy studies.  To say otherwise is to be a science-denier who jumps to ignorant conclusions, like you-know-who.

When news hit about the senators who dumped their stocks before the DOW collapsed, however, a different standard of truth came out.  Suddenly suspicion was as good as proof.  Even odder, when I posted a link to a Reuter's report about Novartis donating 130MM doses of chloroquine, the responses ranged from an assumption (definitely no proof needed) that Trump had bought stock in the company, which was cynically trying to buy good PR by giving the drug away, to a worried concern about all those poor people who already depended on chloroquine to treat their rheumatoid arthritis, and were immunocompromised so were at greater risk of contracting the virus.

I could point out that all those poor RA patients may find that they've inadvertently been taking an effective virus prophylactic, but why bother?  It's clear to me now that this PG crowd are among the people I've recently come to understand as being more wedded to their problems than to their solutions.  It's what Eric Fromme used to call the "yes, but" conversation.  I decided a couple of years ago that you can only help so many people, and the first ones that need to be triaged to a quiet, dark corner of the ER are the ones who don't really want an improvement, only a subjective validation of their own rage and disappointment.

The Crannogs

H/t Instapundit for this article on Scotland's ancient crannogs.

Artificial islands commonly known as crannogs dot hundreds of Scottish and Irish lakes and waterways. Until now, researchers thought most were built when people in the Iron Age (800-43 B.C.) created stone causeways and dwellings in the middle of bodies of water. But a new paper published today in the journal Antiquity suggests that at least some of Scotland’s nearly 600 crannogs are much, much older—nearly three thousand years older—putting them firmly in the Neolithic era. What’s more, the artifacts that help push back the date of the crannogs into the far deeper past may also point to a kind of behavior not previously suspected in this prehistoric period....

But why were Neolithic people tossing their “good china” off of artificial islets? Without direct accounts from the time period, archaeologists can only speculate as to why the crannogs were built, how they were used, and why they became places for pottery disposal. Garrow and his colleagues surmise they were used for feasting, another unknown set of religious or social rituals, or both.

The Gambler

Rest in peace, Kenny Rogers.





He was one of the fixtures of my youth, which coincided with the height of his career in the place where he was most popular.

UPDATE: I did not realize that he had a career in psychedelic rock, but this famous song was apparently an early hit of his. Some of you 'old rockers' may like it.

The Media Has Gone Mad

It turns out that medicines can kill you if you overdose, which I think everyone in the world knew. Tylenol can destroy your liver, but it's for sale over the counter in every drug store, gas station, and grocery store in America.

Gender justice

Manhattan Project-style

A few days ago, the President "invoked" the Defense Production Act, leaving some question in the press whether he has actually "used" it yet.  The New York Post is reporting, however, that President Trump took a call from Senator Schumer formally requesting DPA action to spur the manufacture of ventilators and personal protective equipment, and was heard to agree and to instruct a subordinate to make it so.

More good news:  Novartis plans to donate up to 130 million doses of chloroquine worldwide by the end of May.  A little slow, but a scale that's starting to approximate what we'll need.

PS, I'd hope we could "embrace the power of and" concerning this constant rhetorical battle over whether we should be optimistic about the reports of useful treatments, or focus on obtaining solid data from double-blind tests.  I'd like proof as much as the next guy, but we can do more than one thing at a time.  It would be unbearably stupid to put off large-scale use of chloroquine while we conduct leisurely double-blind studies and write them up for the journals.  We can already be reasonably sure we're not doing violence to the balance of benefit and harm by giving hospitalized SARS sufferers chloroquine, because the risk of suffocation is already known to be extremely high, while the risk of the drug is already known to be extremely low.  Neither is 100%, but that's not the point.

Good stat source

"Watts Up With That" now posts this daily worldwide virus summary.  Two things to note:  the scales are logarithmic, so a hopeful sign is a curve under 45%, but of course any convex curve beats a concave one.  Also, this is deaths per million of population, not the case fatality rate.  I prefer the former, because we still have no real grasp of the total number of cases, but we can get a pretty good handle (except in countries we suspect of straight-up lying to us) about both the total deaths and the total population.  That rate will of course confound two variables:  the cases per population (spread), and the death rate for cases (severity/efficacy of medical system/health of population), but that's the breaks.

From the same source, here is a far more informative than usual recap of the prospects for treatment with chloroquine and remdesivir.  I believe there are interesting things happening with convalescent serum, too, though those are hard to scale.  Most of these treatments have problems with either evolved resistance, cost, or scalability that mean they will be most helpful in buying time while we work on an effective vaccine.  Still, my biggest concern at the moment is finding an approach that relieves our fear of crashing the medical system enough to let most of us go back to work supporting the prosperity that enables us to have a first-class medical system in the first place.  If we have to give up on the medical system, we might as well let the virus rip, accept the losses, and remember what it was like to live a century ago, because you can't stop producing essential goods for fear of every contagion out there.

Old Norse Handwashing

Dr. Crawford offers a couple of stanzas from the Havamal that will take about twenty seconds to recite, if you care to learn a bit of the language.

Onion

Turnabout's fair play.

The dog that hasn't barked

This is puzzling.  An L.A. writers makes the reasonable case that the city's homeless population is a coronavirus explosion waiting to happen.  The question is, why hasn't it exploded already?  Is it really taking that long for the disease to spread to L.A.?

If it weren't for Italy's experience, I'd be more skeptical than I am that this thing is spreading as fast as we feared.  Washington looked like a special case.  New York is disquieting, though.

Knock It Off, Lady

Headline: "The Coronovirus is a Disaster for Feminism."

Thesis: Yes, men die at much higher rates from this disease, but the real tragedy is that more women will have to care for their own children instead of pursuing paid employment or great works.

When people try to be cheerful about social distancing and working from home, noting that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did some of their best work while England was ravaged by the plague, there is an obvious response: Neither of them had child-care responsibilities.

My sister's husband -- a great guy, this guy, who appears to have majored in college in 'being cool' and then built a life around it -- is the one watching their child all day every day.  They won't even let my mother do it, though she's just down the street, out of a desire to keep her quarantined.

That may not be universal, but it's certainly on the menu. If you've actually got a great work in you, and not that many people do, you can work it out. If you don't, you know, you'll probably appreciate the time you spent with your kids more than the time you spent at work. When you finally get to a place where you can reflect on what really mattered about your life, you'll be glad of that time.

"Survival Necessities"

An email from Cold Steel.

I suppose I might need a 1917 Naval cutlass.  If things get bad enough, piracy is always an option.

A Glorious Romp

Andy McCarthy on the Mueller debacle.

Goodbye, Senator

One of my new Senators -- new to me since I moved here, I mean, he's been in office entirely too long -- is Richard Burr.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., dumped stock holdings worth millions ahead of the market plunge that began in February after they received briefings on the coronavirus, according to published reports Thursday.

Burr, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sold the stocks on Feb. 13, ProPublica reported, citing disclosure filings.

Loeffler began dumping shares Jan. 24, after a private briefing for senators from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institutes of Health, the Daily Beast reported.

Shares of the companies whose stocks she sold are down an average of 33%, since then, according to the report. Loeffler's sales totaled between $1,275,000 and $3,100,000, according to the report.

On Feb. 7, Burr wrote in an op-ed co-authored with Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., that “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress, and the Trump Administration.”

Earlier Thursday, NPR reported that Burr offered a far more dire forecast in comments in late February to a private luncheon organized by the Tar Heel Circle.

He warned that travel restrictions, school closures and military involvement could all come to pass, as indeed they have.

If you're worried about the state of the Senate should he resign, you need not be.  Under NC law, if there is a vacancy in the Senate unexpectedly the governor does appoint his replacement, but...

(a) The replacement must be of the same party, and,
(b) Must be chosen from a list of three people selected by that party's leadership.

So there's really nothing to lose in pushing him out. It's all upside.

By the way, the other Senator who chose personal profit over warning the public about the dangers was the one that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp appointed instead of Doug Collins. Kemp's a skunk too, as we were just discussing, and here's evidence that skunks run in packs. Fortunately there is an actual election in Georgia, and the Republican primary is right around the corner. If you're a Republican voter and citizen of Georgia, you should definitely pick Collins to run in the general in November. [Correction: the Senate Special Election will not have a primary, but will feature all candidates from all parties on 3 November. --Grim]

Also, get rid of Kemp when you can. That's my advice.

UPDATE: In researching the Senate Special Election, I discovered that one of the candidates is a man I know personally, Richard Dien Winfield. Don't vote for him. He's a nice guy, but the kind of political philosopher who thinks that the Wise should rule over all of you, and assign guaranteed employement jobs that befit your talents as assessed by them, etc. He should continue teaching Hegel, which he is as good at as anyone in the world, and not move to D.C.

UPDATE: Ah. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the Senator appointed by Kemp, is married to -- wait for it -- the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. That explains why it seemed plausible to Kemp to appoint a non-native Georgian to a Senate seat. Everybody explained that in terms of 'trying to appeal to the white suburban female demographic' or 'trying to appeal to the large transplant population in Atlanta,' but it still seemed amazing that a recent transplant with no longstanding ties to the state who had never held any other political office would be appointed to the Senate. Now it makes perfect sense.

Even more like this

Not only does the old malaria drug chloroquine work surprisingly well against novel coronavirus, but it's generic, cheap, and widely available.  The FDA still isn't willing to go out on a limb saying it's a treatment whose benefits clearly outweigh its risks, but President Trump is leaning hard on them not to get in the way.  Sure, we need some traditional, slow double-blind studies.  In the meantime, doctors are free to prescribe existing approved drugs for off-label uses in their own discretion.  This one's results in Asia were so promising that people in influential positions, including NY Gov. Cuomo, are clamoring for it, and manufacturers already have taken the hint.

We should be able to see a pattern where identifiable populations are taking prophylactic malaria treatments.

Equinox

Surprisingly, the spring equinox is earlier this year than it's been in a long time.  Today does in fact feel like the first day of spring, too:  whereas it's been hinting at spring for a while, today is genuinely warm.

We are burning gathered brush and deadwood today to create a kind of natural charcoal fertilizer for a garden patch.  In the next few days we will turn over the earth, and begin planting as the weather indicates.

A Place Called Papa Joe's

If you didn't happen to know Billy Joe Shaver, well, you probably should. He is one of the great songwriters of the Outlaw Country era. He almost single-handedly wrote Waylon Jenning's best album, "Honky Tonk Heroes." Now this fellow once got into a little trouble in a place called Papa Joe's. This place:

You should probably think twice about messing with anybody when you're in a place like that, but not everybody does. Billy Joe was an old man by then -- heading to his third divorce with the same woman -- and a younger man decided he could bull the old guy. Well, sometimes that works.

Not every time.

Dale Watson wrote a song about it.



Whitey Morgan's version has easier to understand lyrics, although I don't like the instrumentation as well:



Here's Billy Joe explaining what happened, except that nobody but him thinks the other guy had a gun -- all the evidence presented in court had the other guy with a knife. A knife is of course quite as dangerous as a gun in the right hands; at the right range, more dangerous.



Then, once he won the court case, Billy Joe wrote a song about it too.  Willie Nelson pitched in.



If you're really seated in the tradition you'll know that Willie's "don't cross him/ don't boss him" language comes from his own best album, 1975's "Red Headed Stranger" about a preacher who killed his wife and her lover in the year of 1901. It's quite a compliment, in its way. In another way, perhaps less so.

Per Hypothesis

Scientists claim they have proven Darwin's theory of natural selection. They are still wrestling with a problem that bothered Darwin himself.

A species is a group of animals that can interbreed freely amongst themselves.

Some species contain subspecies – populations within a species that differ from each other with different physical traits and their own breeding ranges.

Northern giraffes have three subspecies that usually live in different locations to each other, while red foxes have the most subspecies – 45 known varieties – spread all over the world.

Humans have no subspecies.

Darwin got as far as declaring that the different races were not different species; but he definitely engaged the idea that there were such things as races, and that they must have some sort of biological origin. Just because he was eliminating distinctions between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom, it only makes sense within his theory to apply the same rules.

If we really applied the same rules, we would cash out our non-scientific notions of 'different races' in terms of subspecies. Then you would have one human species that can interbreed freely amongst itself; but different subspecies whose different traits arose in different ranges (and often just because of Darwinian natural selection, which favored darker skin or eyes in this environment and lighter skin or eyes in that one).

But of course that cannot be done now for the reverse reason that it could not be done then. Now we have a social imperative to pretend that there are no differences at all instead of the social imperative to pretend that the differences were essential and insurmountable. This is called "progress," but in terms of intellectually accepting the consequences of Darwinian theory it leaves us in exactly the same place.

This is what I like to see

More like this, as Instapundit says:  factories shift production to emergency items in short supply.

Anatomy of a Love Song

This is Homer & Jethro, if you don't know them. They were a big influence on Billy Joe Shaver, whom you ought to know.

Xi Hu, Hangzhou

I have climbed the pagoda in this photograph, many years ago when we lived in China. The photo is from Xi Hu, literally "West Lake," near the town of Hangzhou, once capital of the Southern Song Dynasty.

Another Book Recommendation

Mike got me thinking about stretching out and exploring even more chili recipes, so I dug out an old cookbook somebody bought me as a gift some years ago.  It's a very good one.  I have only minor quibbles with it, and I think I might have gotten my "Deviled Beef" chili from it originally (although the version in the book is quite different from mine as it has evolved, and as I wrote it up here a few days ago).

The book is The Chili Cookbook by Robb Walsh.  It contains the oldest surviving chili recipe (a lobster chili encountered by Spanish explorers on the coast of what would come to be known as Latin America). It contains Native American recipes, New Mexican recipes, Texan recipes, and then a whole lot of regional American variations.

I made one last night that I'm just trying today, now that the flavors have melded overnight.  It's a classic Texas "Bowl of Red" style recipe, with no peppers in it stronger than ancho, and otherwise just paprika.  It was still spicy enough to cause the wife to load it down with sour cream though, because it uses a whole two ounces of ancho in the pot.  Of course you can always add more of whatever you want, as I always say when talking about recipes. 

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

In honor of the day, and since many of us are looking for new reading material, how about an introduction to an Irish hero of Robert E. Howard’s?  For those of you who prefer Vikings, he sails with a crew of Danish pirates. For those who prefer Arthurian stories, the timeframe is supposed to be during the reign of Arthur.

It’s not Howard’s greatest work all the same; it’s more like the drive-in movie Sword & Sorcery films than like the great ones. It will definitely bother you insofar as you are a stickler for historical accuracy. But they’re fun tales if you have read all the Conan stories and want something Irish for the day.

UPDATE:  The Dropkick Murphys are doing a free online concert tonight in place of their annual St. Patrick's Day show.  If you're interested, it starts at 1900 Romeo, i.e., 7 PM Boston time.

The End of the Russian Part of the Russian Saga

Prosecutors abandon trying to prove that the Mueller-indicted Russians were guilty of the alleged crimes. The Russians were eager to contest the charges and demanded their day in court rapidly. The US government delayed and delayed, and now has decided to drop the prosecution.

The US has already abandoned the claim in open court that the Russian government had anything to do with the indicted Russians.

Universal Basic Income

In the end, it wasn't Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders, but Mitt Romney who seems most likely to bring UBI to America.

That's the Spirit

An Ohio town dissolved its government over a one-percent tax.