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.