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