Dollars and lives

What "essential" means:

It really hasn't occurred to most of you that businesses fail from not engaging in business. This just tells me the socialist indoctrination centers (schools) have utterly failed to explain how business works.

And let me stick in a note here that no matter what you think of the type of business, they have employees who suffer first. Go ahead and get your hate-on about whomever, but the wage earners will be out of jobs.

Quite soon we're going to need a combination of treatment options, targeted quarantine, and enhanced safety measures that let most workers and customers get back out at least partially into public, not just to buy food, but to support all kinds of economic movement.

That's a relief

What was that about supply and demand again?

This stuff is so intellectually challenging, that must be why we always get it wrong.

The reason we don’t have enough hand sanitizer is because something so simple is so regulated.

The FDA regulates hand sanitizer like a drug. Its ingredients are simple enough that it’s inexpensive most of the time.

But the regulations created a barrier to meaningful competition. And when demand spun out of control, there wasn’t enough supply. Prices soared and people who needed it were left without.

Got to have those barriers to competition, or else some consumer somewhere might have to assume some risk, and some manufacturer might have to be exposed to dog-eat-dog competition. Price spikes are the price we pay for making civilization infinitely safe, and supply crashes are the price we pay for avoiding the dreaded price gouging.

Texas: Religious Services Essential

You guys have a good governor. Now take care doing it so this doesn't become a stick to beat religious people.

Music from Cimmeria

Bye, bye, ER

The sole ER in my little county (we have no hospital) just shut its doors, ostensibly because of concern that doctors had too little PPE gear. In fact, the medical staff desperately wanted to stay open and had made great strides finding PPE donations. So far we have zero reported cases in this county. The ER has been operating in the red for the last year or so and has been taken over by its lender. The red ink results from the fact that the ER is freestanding and therefore ineligible for Medicare, in addition to which Blue Cross hates freestanding ERs and wouldn’t give them a PPO agreement on terms that would cover costs. The lender simply announced, without no warning, that it would shut its doors this morning and “furlough” staff for 45 days, helpfully adding that now they could pursue unemployment and other emergency benefits. I believe the peak for Texas is projected for May 15, i.e., about 45 days out.

The wokest Senator

Senator Tom Cotton was a voice crying in the wilderness:

On January 22, one day before the Chinese government began a quarantine of Wuhan to contain the spread of the virus, the Arkansas senator sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar encouraging the Trump administration to consider banning travel between China and the United States and warning that the Communist regime could be covering up how dangerous the disease really was. That same day, he amplified his warnings on Twitter and in an appearance on the radio program of Fox + Friends host Brian Kilmeade.

* * *

When the first classified briefing on the virus was held in the Senate on January 24, only 14 senators reportedly showed up. Cotton’s public and private warnings became more urgent that last week of January. In a January 28 letter to the secretaries of state, health and human services, and homeland security, he noted that “no amount of screening [at airports] will identify a contagious-but-asymptomatic person afflicted with the coronavirus” and called for an immediate evacuation of Americans in China and a ban on all commercial flights between China and the United States. Cotton first spoke to President Trump about the virus the next day. The Arkansas Gazette reported that he missed nearly three hours of the impeachment trial while he was discussing the matter with Trump-administration officials. The outbreak was “the biggest and the most important story in the world,” he said in a Senate hearing that week.

* * *

. . . On January 31, the president announced a ban on entry to foreign travelers who had been in China in the previous two weeks, while allowing Americans and permanent residents to continue to travel back and forth between the two countries. The measure was not as stringent as Cotton’s call for a ban on all commercial flights, but Cotton points out that the president “did not have many advisers encouraging him to shut down travel.” Advisers who were supportive tended to be national-security aides, he adds, while “most of his economic and public-health advisers were ambivalent at best about the travel ban.” 

“I commend the president greatly for ultimately making the right decision contrary to what the so-called experts were telling him,” he says.

Meanwhile, what were most of the other Senators distracted by? Well, you know.

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.”