National Tartan Day

It's National Tartan Day, which is an opportunity for Americans to celebrate Scottish heritage -- both our personal heritage, and the tremendous contributions that Scotland has made to our national heritage. Many states have registered district tartans that residents can wear, including both the state in which I was born and the state in which I currently reside.

The Carolina District Tartan

Georgia District Tartan

Disgrace

Couldn't agree more.

New rules in, but some old rules out

Minor silver lining.As Glenn Reynolds says, let's get to work making it permanent.

Not an OPEC fan

I can live with this:

Trump said Saturday at a White House press briefing he’s opposed OPEC his whole life, and characterized it as a cartel, or monopoly. “I don’t care about OPEC,” he said. He threatened to use tariffs if needed to protect the domestic oil industry, even as he predicted that Saudi Arabia and Russia would come to an agreement.

Test fail

The botched rollout of bottlenecked coronavirus testing is fertile ground for left-vs.-right bashing: it simultaneously shows that the Trump administration callously or stupidly failed to get the CDC to do something right, and that the CDC is the deadly, bottlenecking, calcified, politicized Deep State the Trump administration is saddled with. I remain unconvinced that testing is the most important thing right now, much as I would love to have the luxury of 100% knowledge of who in this country harbors either live virus or effective antibodies.

Powerline notes that the numbers from Japan and Seoul suggest that testing isn't brilliantly correlated with death rates per capita, which is a lot more interesting data than case-positive rates. Early on, fabulous testing might allow a few sparks to be stamped out before they spread; at this point, we're probably past that strategy.  It's possible that masks, or other factors such as social-distancing, ICU beds or ventilators per capita, or treatments will prove more important:

Perhaps these experts should look harder at the actual data and not just their models. The data certainly suggest more testing may not be our savior. Alternatively, the Trump administration should consider asking governors to mandate, not suggest, that their citizens wear face masks in public. South Korea’s and Japan’s experience suggests that combining this policy with one that more surgically isolated the elderly and most vulnerable while allowing most of the country to go back to work would provide more effective protection from the virus and at a far, far lower cost.

The case fatality rate for governments

From Ed Morrissey:

... Europe has rediscovered why borders matter and why government works best on the principle of subsidiarity. The borders lesson got taught the hard way, as I wrote two-plus weeks ago, after Europe and the US precipitated a massive refugee crisis by decapitating the Qaddafi regime in Libya. The flood of refugees from there and Syria created cultural dislocation throughout the Schengen Zone, provoking the Brexit push in the UK and setting the stage for their current disunity.

It should come as no shock that Germans expect the German government to prioritize Germans in an existential crisis rather than a super-national quasi-governing body. Nor should it shock anyone that the same is true for the French, the Italians, and so on. That doesn’t mean that they can’t work cooperatively to approach common interests and problems, but that in a crisis, they’re responsible to their own citizens first and foremost....

And:

"... All these European rules need to be reviewed. In recent years, Europe actually made us close hospitals and schools. Then, in our hour of need, the citizens of Italy realized we are on our own."

Reasserting Constitutional Limits on Government

The Third Amendment to the Constitution is perhaps the one least violated by the government. Yet if the government ever wished to violate it, by quartering soldiers in private homes, it would almost certainly be during an emergency like an insurrection. Governments have an interest in suppressing insurrections, and in many cases it may even be legitimate that they do so. In other cases, governments that have violated natural rights deserve to be overthrown. But whether they are deserving or not, if a future American government desires to place soldiers inside your home to keep an eye on you, it will probably be because of an insurrection. An insurrection is an emergency, but it does not justify setting aside the Third Amendment -- it is precisely for such an emergency situation that the Third was written.

The present emergency has led to a lot of different levels of government violating the Constitution (and state constitutions) in various ways. Always this is said to be a temporary matter with which we should not be overly concerned, because there is a legitimate interest at stake and the powers are only emergency powers. That is not the way the Constitution is supposed to work.

This Reason article focuses on the Second Amendment, which is always in peril as the common right to bear arms is threatening to the powerful in every generation. But consider also the First:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment addresses Congress, but it is supposedly fully incorporated against the states. Lately we have seen bans on worship services being held. That is a violation of "free exercise," and also "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." In fact all of these bans on gatherings of 10 or more people are unconstitutional abuses against the free assembly clause. It may well be wise public policy to suggest that people do not assemble at this time. There may well be an emergency; but that itself cannot be adequate, because governments can always generate emergencies when they wish to do so.

The counterargument is that people should die if we allowed assemblies and 'merely' recommended against them. People may well. But many Americans have died to preserve these liberties, and not just while acting bravely under arms: in the Civil War, for example, disease probably killed more people than weapons. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free," said the Battle Hymn of the era. Making men free was the important thing; dying was a small matter, even a bad death of disease in an encampment.

I have no wish that anyone should die, though everyone shall. But we must not lose focus on first principles. The only legitimate purpose for any government to exist is to preserve and enforce the natural rights. Any government that becomes destructive to those ends may be altered or abolished. This one has been pressing well past its limits. However wise the policy in terms of suppressing disease, if it destroys our natural rights it puts the cart before the horse. The function of government is not to preserve lives but liberty.

I am willing to endure a tactical pause while it seems to enjoy the democratic support of my countrymen. Soon, though, we shall need to reassert limits on the beast we call Leviathan.

The Great Gold Robbery of 1933

It was conducted by the FDR administration against the American people.

Lifeboat rules

If this doesn't inspire residents to rise up and replace their HOA board with something more humanoid, nothing will.

That must have hurt

The New York Times article drips with doubt, but can't quite avoiding the conclusion that doctors find chloroquine helps.  Michigan's governor caved a while back.  Not even Nevada's governor wants to be seen now as obstructing treatment.  Fact-checkers are racing to prove that no one seriously obstructed it in the first place. Within a week, we'll hear criticism that President Trump has blood on his hands for not making chloroquine treatments both free and mandatory in all 50 states two months ago.

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.