Losing Faith In The System

 

In just two weeks, the Congress — the new Congress, will certify the 2020 election.  Various and sundry Trump supporters are hoping for a miracle — that an overwhelmingly Democratic House will void the election of a Democrat to the Presidency, or that Trump will somehow wrangle the same thing.  The Left is reacting much the way Trump supporters acted when Hillary lost.  Between all the bitching and carping by the losers and the smug satisfaction of the winners, we're all losing sight of a very important development.

The faith that most Americans had that elections were fundamentally a good thing has been fatally wounded.

Half of the American voting public no longer believes that an election can deliver on the will of the people.  They feel that they have lost their voice.  They feel that they have been effectively silenced.  Worse than that, they feel that this silencing is permanent.  They have become a permanent underclass.

On the Left, all is calm, all is bright on this Christmas Eve.  They have forgotten — if they ever knew — the famous remark by John F. Kennedy:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

The words of Oleg Volk upon reading a galley proof of Tipping Point still echo in my mind:

"Frank, I hope you haven't written a documentary."

Me, too, but I'm losing faith that we're going to come out of this intact.

 

Y2K For Nurses

 

Norene just read me a snippet of an article in a newspaper about COVID-19 causing a huge surge in demand for RNs who can drop everything and act as shock troops for hospitals experiencing a lack of trained staff.  Wages of $100/hour (and up) are attracting nurses from all over for 13-week contracts almost everywhere.

To a mainframe programmer, this looks like Y2K all over again.  $100/hour annualized for a 2000 hour work year comes to $200,000/year.  Overtime at time-and-a-half can easily double that, and $100/hour is the low end of the scale.  Hot diggity!

A bunch of nurses who have been working for — in many cases — short wages see an offer for an irresistibly high hourly rate, and they figure "In three months, I can pay off my mortgage.  If it all falls apart after that, pffft!".  With no mortgage and probably a nice cash cushion beyond that, a nurse can dish pancakes at IHOP until the dust settles, and good nurses are almost never out of work for very long — if they want to work.

For hospital administrators, it must look like a scene from a horror movie:  all my experienced nurses are gone and now I have to shell out triple to replace them with headcount I have to train to use our systems.  Maybe I should have put them in 'golden handcuffs' when I had the chance.  Yeah, you should have...

Ah, well, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

 

Traffic Circles

 

As long as I'm on a safety jag, I might as well stump for my favorite traffic-easing device: traffic circles (TCs), AKA roundabouts.  Once upon a time, TCs were to be found everywhere.  They were economical because they didn't require the installation of traffic lights with the attendant wiring and opportunities to malfunction and maintenance issues, although they did take up more room.  The beauty of a TC is that the only thing that might slow a driver down is the presence of other traffic, and that's exactly the condition in which you ought to slow down.  With no traffic light to halt you because it's not yet time for it to turn green, you always have the ability — as long as traffic allows — to cruise right on through (including right turns, left turns, and U-turns).  That is, the only red light condition is "there's too much traffic".

In rural France, a driver almost never sees a traffic light, and even STOP signs are fairly unusual (and, yes, they say "STOP', not "ARRETEZ").  Nearly every intersection at grade is a TC, and after you've negotiated two or three, it seems the most natural thing in the world:  slow as you approach, find an opening in traffic, enter the rotation, and exit when you get to the road you want.  If you miss your exit, go around again.  When viewed from above, traffic seems never to stop through a well-functioning TC.

Studies show that TCs are orders-of-magnitude safer than light-controlled intersections:  38% fewer accidents and 90% fewer fatal accidents, not to mention a 28% smaller carbon footprint.  If safety were the overriding goal for traffic engineers, TCs would be ubiquitous.  So why aren't they?

With so many fewer accidents, vehicle stops, and savings on gasoline, there must be some reason they're not more common.  That reason is very probably 'ticket revenue'.  With no red lights to run, there are fewer tickets issued to offending drivers.  Yes, TCs may be economical, but the county doesn't see it that way.  No tickets means no fines.

Then, too, American drivers, having been weaned off the whole TC idea no longer view TCs as something beneficial.  "OMG, it's chaos!"  To be fair, there are some TCs that are truly horror stories.  Paris' "L'Etoille", the TC that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe, is one such.  Even Parisians shudder at the thought of getting caught in that maelstrom.  The scene in "European Vacation", although set in London, was likely inspired by "L'Etoille".

But...  if the thought of easier passage through intersections, fewer red lights to slow you down, 30% fewer fill-ups at Shell, and a greatly-reduced likelihood of getting a ticket from a red light camera appeals to you, maybe you should think about campaigning for more TCs.

 

Lights and Wipers

 

We were driving home from West Palm Beach yesterday after two wonderfully relaxing weeks at a condo owned by my cousin.  Just after we got on the Florida Turnpike, the skies opened up and the rain was coming down in buckets, so much so that I wondered whether I should pull over and wait it out.  Of course I had my wipers wiping furiously and my headlights beaming because, in Florida as in many other states, when your wipers are operating, you must have your headlights on.

You would be surprised — or maybe you wouldn't — by how many other cars on the road didn't have their headlights on even given the horribly reduced visibility.  It occurred to me that it would be a fairly simple engineering change (and in software it would be even simpler) to force the headlights on whenever the windshield wipers turn on.

Given the simplicity of such a change and the lives that might be saved by doing so, I'm stunned that the feature isn't a standard specification for every new car.

 

The Really-Awful Very Bad Election

 

For weeks, possibly months, Democrats have been predicting a Blue Wave that will hustle Donald Trump out of the White House where he never should have been in the first place.  Republicans, in contrast, have been pooh-poohing the notion under the assumption that GOP voters are reticent about openly supporting Trump for fear of blowback.  One of these was almost certainly true.

Imagine our surprise, then, to see neither a Blue Wave nor a Red Wave, but rather an ordinary neck-and-neck contest between an egotistical braggart and a senile farm-team second-rate politician!

In the run-up to the election, Trump has been packing stadiums with his followers while Biden is lucky to have 200 people — including staff — show up for any of his appearances.  Social media numbers, even given FaceBook's and Twitter's obvious suppression of conservative opinion, has been heavily skewed toward Trump.  One might be forgiven for suspecting that the Dems were about to get their asses handed to them on platters.

Election night proceeded more or less as expected save only for the mysterious appearance late in the process of hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots heavily favoring the Democrat slate.  One report — thus far unverified — claims 138,339 ballots in a single batch were all — ALL — for Biden, 100% of them, zero (0) for Trump.  Statistically, this is as likely as hitting the lottery twice in a row.

The closeness of the election and the slight lead enjoyed by the Democrats, not to mention the several stories of irregularities, combine to make more plausible accusations of vote fraud.

While I have never been an active supporter of Donald Trump, I recognize that he has managed to do things while in office (despite active obstruction by Democratic politicians and elements of his own Department of Justice) that deserve applause:  reducing regulation (which probably had significant impact on both the stock market and the minority unemployment numbers), brokering historic peace deals between Israel and several Middle-Eastern nations, and renegotiating NAFTA; along with several things that warrant raspberries and spitballs:  tariffs prime among them.

What I find hard to justify is the overwhelming waves of hatred — pure hatred — that his opponents fling his way.  The hatred is so unremitting that it results in what some call TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome:  the haters are unable to even give credit where it's due.  The only thing that matters is putting Trump down.  If that means giving up all the good things Trump has managed to do, that's the price we must pay, and if it means we must overlook the fact that our Presidential candidate is visibly failing, mentally, and is almost certainly NOT up to the rigors of the Office of the President, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.  Besides, there's always the 25th amendment by which Joe Biden can be put out to pasture and replaced by President Kamala Harris who, as a contender for the nomination, was so unpopular among Democrats that she had to drop out of the race early.

You can't make this stuff up.  Democrats have decided that things like 'truth' and 'justice' and 'fair play' are just getting in the way of what must be done.

When "Tipping Point" was being written, Oleg Volk read an early galley and remarked:  "Frank, I sure hope you haven't written a documentary," and I agreed.  That was then; this is now.

The larger the government, the more corrupt it will be.  This seems to be a law of nature.  There are no countervailing examples.  To reduce the corruption, there is but one path:  reduce the size of government.  If that needs to happen via secession, then so be it.  A nice little civil war seems right about now to be a step up from where we are.

 

Vitriol is not a cure for anything

 

Each succeeding election cycle, as I recall them, has been less collegial and more adversarial than the one before.  In days gone by, men as different as Nixon and Kennedy could meet for a debate, treat each other honorably, and shake hands when it was over.  Such days are now but a fading memory.

It happened gradually, if what I recall is actually true.  Little by little, the respect paid by one side to the other had eroded, almost imperceptibly at first, increasing in small increments.  Until 2016.

The election of 2016 was 'special'.  The electorate was given a choice between Donald Trump, a boorish, egotistical huckster with a flexible definition of 'truth' and Hillary Clinton, former attorney, former First lady, former Secretary of State who — one would be forgiven for assuming — had to know the law regarding topics like 'conflict of interest' and 'national security' and who — one might be forgiven for assuming, given her many years in government — took her obligations seriously, and Gary Johnson, a retread Republican who couldn't be taken seriously by the GOP establishment.  Only Johnson ran a gentlemanly campaign.  As between the other two, the 'major party candidates', the only surprise by election day was that neither had punched the other.

Of course, the chance that boorish Trump might triumph over a seasoned professional politician was too ridiculous to seriously contemplate, so few seriously contemplated it.

The American voter, however, largely considered Clinton to be a probable threat to national security and gave the bulk of electoral districts (and electoral votes) to Trump.

How dare they!  How effing dare they!!  The Democrats collectively lost their minds.  That Trump might have won the Presidency on his own merits was a sheer impossibility.  There had to be another reason.  The excuse their leadership settled upon was 'Russian collusion', and the rank and file got foursquare behind the idea that the dastardly Russkies had meddled in our election.

For 4 years and despite a series of unprecedented successes by Trump, successes that earlier Presidents had diligently worked toward without ever reaching (or, in most cases, approaching) those goals: a booming economy, historically-low minority unemployment, peace in the Middle East, and a radical skinnying of welfare rolls; Democrats and quasi-Democrats have repeatedly tried to undermine Trump's policies.  The Mueller investigation found nothing it could prosecute beyond a few low-level operatives who were snagged on charges unrelated to the 2016 campaign.  The subsequent Horowitz investigation determined that the Department of Justice had been subverted to the cause of neutralizing Trump.  The mainstream media covers only stories that are damaging to the Republicans; stories that cast aspersions on Democrats are pooh-poohed as 'Russian disinformation' and buried along with UFO sightings.

One might be forgiven for thinking that things couldn't get any worse, but things have gotten much worse.  Unable to depose their bête noir, the Left now seethes with anger.  Cities burn, Antifa and BLM activists riot in the streets, bystanders are beaten and killed for no reason but that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Anarchy reigns, and it's time for another election cycle, this one more vitriolic than the last.

Despite the Democrats proffering a man who, in 47 years in the Senate and White House, has virtually nothing on his resume and who is a proven plagiarist to boot, coupled with a Vice-Presidential candidate who was so unpopular — among Democrats — that she had to drop out of the race for the nomination early — despite all that, Democrat voters have lined up behind the only chance they have to depose the man who killed all their dreams in 2016.  It's vitriol that's fueling this election, and nothing else.

Vitriol is not a cure for anything, and if Joe Biden loses to President Trump in 2020, the level of vitriol is only going to increase and the situation in this country will get worse.  How long before we seriously consider that 'secession' might be a good thing, all things considered?

 

Rioter, rioter, go away

 

News from the trenches of the New York Times:

Voters are beginning to become alarmed by the wide-scale rioting in several cities and have begun to notice that the cities with the worst problems are run by Democrats.  Poll numbers are thus swinging to the Republicans and away from Democrats.  Even Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon have started to notice, and they, too, have become alarmed and are suggesting that it's time for the riots to stop lest they damage Joe Biden's chances of unseating Donald Trump.

This presents an intriguing problem for Biden who has already promised to get the domestic situation under control if elected in November.  The problem is this: if Biden (or the Democrats generally) issue a call for the rioters to behave themselves, one of two things will happen.  Either the riots will stop, or the riots will continue.

If the riots continue, it makes Biden's promise to calm the troubled waters seem hollow.  If the riots stop, it labels the rioters as Democratic partisans and the Democratic party as the likely source of the unrest that has caused billons (with a 'B') of dollars worth of damage to probable Democratic strongholds.  One path confirms Trump's charge that the Democrats are America-haters, while the other marks them as ineffective braggarts.

I wouldn't want to be in either one of those shoes.

 

Out Of Our Shackles

 

If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other,...  the bands of political associations will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies;  and far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint. -- John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams was not alone in voicing such secessionist sentiments, either.  Alexis deTocqueville also thought it a good idea along with Sec'y of State Timothy Pickering (F-MA) and President James Buchanan (F-PA).

Some will protest that the issue of 'secession' was settled long ago.  That's not true.  What was settled in 1865 was the question of whether an agricultural economy without an industrial economy in partnership can hold its own against such a partnership.  The answer was that it could not.  The Confederacy decided to 'go it alone' and the Union objected to being left without a ready source of cotton, rice, and okra.  The Union got its way, thanks to their industrialized economy.  Might makes right.

Big government supporters then and now were and are very much against the idea of government growing smaller as by the departure of states, but lately the worm appears to be turning.  Upset over the election of a President they wouldn't have chosen (and, in fact, didn't), California has been making secessionist noises recently.  It's a fact that California's economy absolutely dwarfs the economy of the Confederacy, so they certainly could survive (at least in the short run) without being a part of the current union, and it is very unlikely that this President would react as negatively to their departure as did Abraham Lincoln.  In fact, it's probably true that a large portion of the electorate left behind would actually cheer the new nation onward.

Should we object to a CalExit?  I think it is becoming more apparent with each passing day that, as Mike Vanderboegh once observed, the United States is now one country occupied by two distinct people.  That wouldn't be a problem if both of those two distinct peoples were tolerant of each other, but that's not the case.  In fact, it's blindingly obvious that one faction considers the other to be sub-human and unworthy of any consideration.  This group, the intolerant, accost members of the other group at restaurants and disturb their peaceful enjoyment of a meal they haven't prepared themselves.  They do not simply boycott the 'others', they actively thwart the others' enjoyment of rights they themselves insist upon.  Rights for me but not for thee.  When those 'others' are invited by their supporters to speak on college campuses, for instance, they often find themselves blockaded and unable to even enter the venue.  When they do actually gain entrance and try to speak, they are often hooted and heckled by the 'intolerants' in the audience who — it must be said — are not present to hear the speaker but rather to prevent the speaker from being heard — by anyone.  Surprisingly, the intolerants are not receiving the same treatment from those 'others' who, by and large, tolerate the intolerants.

In case it isn't obvious, the intolerants are without notable exception so-called 'progressive leftists', and their targets are, also without notable exception, so-called conservatives.  The left isn't prepared to extend even the basics of common courtesy to a group they see as 'the enemy'.  In other words, we are at war.  We just haven't started shooting each other yet.  If and when the shooting starts, progressive leftists are going to be unpleasantly surprised to discover that conservatives are better armed and are all too willing to shoot back.

One would have to be an absolute moron to think that a peaceful secession would not be better than that.  Maybe it's time for us to seriously consider secession as a solution to the unrest we see every night on the 6:00 o'clock news.

 

What shall we do about our police?

Riots in several major cities across the nation are making plain to one and all that the national tolerance for the occasional physical excesses of our police forces has come to a sudden halt.  In New York City and several other places, police vehicles have been pelted with Molotov Cocktails and many wind up turned turtle and burned beyond recovery.  Multiple police officers have been shot and killed.  Crowds of bystanders no longer stand by idly while police arrest suspects.  In Minneapolis MN and in Buffalo NY, police have been fired and charged with felonies for assaulting citizens.

Antifa and BLM have been accused of stirring protesters and turning them into rioters.  Sections of several downtowns, usually in minority neighborhoods, have been decimated by arson.  The Left generally praises and/or excuses the excesses of the rioters in contrast to the opprobrium slathered on the police and municipal leaders.  The Right tsk-tsks over the generally over-the-top police reaction but reserves their strongest condemnations for the looters and rioters.  Neither is providing much in the way of 'solutions'.

Well, is there a solution?  Without a doubt, anything that would serve to mitigate police violence would have to do so by imposing real accountability on police departments.  That means 'negative reinforcement', and that means making police misconduct painful.  Currently, when a citizen sues the police department and wins, the settlement is paid from city funds.  That is, it's paid-for by the taxpayers of the city.  The police feel no pain from that punishment.  All the pain is directed at the taxpayers.  That doesn't work.  We've seen that it doesn't work.  If it worked, police brutality would no longer be an issue.  We need a different answer.

The path suggested by several commentators is to pay such judgements from police pension funds.  This has the benefit that all cops are penalized for the misbehavior of the so-called 'bad apples'.  Essentially, it outsources enforcement of departmental ethics policies to everyone in uniform.  Would that work?  Maybe.  There may be a better answer.

It has been suggested that all government employees (at every level) with arrest power should be mandated to carry personal liability insurance.  Police unions wield tremendous political power and it's possible that the 'pension option' could be thwarted in the next contract.  It's much harder for the unions to lean on Prudential or Allstate, and those insurance companies will have a vested interest in rating police officers on their 'risk'.  A 'risky' officer will find the insurance premium rising in lockstep with the insurer's perceived liability.  The best the unions will be able to do in response is to negotiate an 'insurance allowance', but such contracts apply to every member equally.  Sure, an officer might get $300/year to cover the cost of insurance, but Officer Friendly may find that the policy only costs $265, putting $35 back into the family budget, whereas Officer McSteroid has to come up with another $400 to cover the $700 premium, and if his behavior doesn't improve, before too long he'll need a second job just to maintain the required level of insurance.

Nowadays, when an officer is (finally!) fired for misconduct, it often just means a transfer to a different city or county or state and a change of uniform.  Tabula rasa, baby!  Not so if Officer McSteroid still has to maintain a current policy.  State Farm knows his name and his reputation and shares that information with Allstate and Prudential.  There's no escape from the database.

Too bad we can't do that for Congressmen.

Corona recap

States are beginning, slowly, to re-open from the Moo Goo Gai Panic and we're seeing some lightly-reported lessons.

• We've suspected that CV19 is wildly contagious, but we're now discovering that it's only wildly contagious in certain circumstances, viz. close contact with a symptomatic infected person over an extended time frame;  some (like the New England Journal of Medicine) are suggesting upwards of 10 minutes is required for transmission.


• asymptomatic infected persons appear to not be carriers of CV19.


• casual contact, even with an individual exhibiting symptoms, presents nearly no danger of infection.


• N95 masks, touted as the gold standard for PPE, trap particles with a minimum size of 0.3 microns (E-6);  the diameter of the CV19 virus is 80 nanometers (E-9), about 1/4 the minimum size an N95 mask will collect.
  


• mask use, therefore, provides close to zero protection for ordinary people going about their ordinary business.  They only protect against droplet infection when someone coughs into your face or sprays blood on you — which is why medical professionals use them on the job.  For you shopping for groceries?  Fundamentally useless, but perhaps comforting.


• To die from CV19, you first have to catch it, then be part of a susceptible population, someone whose immune system won't successfully fight it off, and then have some co-morbidity (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, immunosuppressed, etc.).  If your immune system is working and you're in reasonable health otherwise, yes, you're going to catch it eventually, but you won't die from it.

None of this is meant to deter you from wearing a mask, even a cloth mask that is nowhere near as useful as an N95 mask, if you feel that it makes people around you more comfortable.  Just understand that it isn't really providing any measurable benefit.

Second, states that started reopening early, around May 4, are not showing indications of increasing hospitalization.  There's some confusion here because the news media bleats about "increase in cases" and lets you draw the (incorrect) conclusion that CV19 is resurgent.  The (reported) increase is typically an increase in individuals reported as infected after being tested, not 'individuals complaining about symptoms and/or being admitted for treatment'.  Most people who become infected with CV19 show no symptoms (asymptomatic), and perhaps don't even know they have it until they get tested and...  surprise!  Eventually everyone will be positive for CV19, but with a death rate in the neighborhood of 0.03%, look for the real death-from-CV19 number to come out around 100,000 — which is approximately what happens in flu season.  All those deaths where a mugging victim was discovered on post-mortem to have CV19 don't count.

It appears FDR was right: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Bailouts and IRAs

In less than a month, the government has added $5T to our national debt.  They did it by printing money.  It's backed by nothing.  There can only be one result from that: inflation.  "Big deal!" I just heard someone say.  Yes, indeed, a very big deal, especially if you've already retired.

Washington is spending enough money that its effect will be felt almost immediately.  There are already reports of retail price increases for food.  What this means is that over the next few months and years, virtually everything you want to purchase is going to cost substantially more than it does right now.

If you're a workin' stiff, you can campaign for a wage increase on the grounds that your employer is charging more for whatever your employer sells/provides, but if you're retired:

• you're on Social Security and you're probably not going to get an increase in that,
• you have an IRA with a certain balance, and that balance isn't going to be adjusted upward,
• the stock market is presently in the basement.

That $3,500 cruise you had planned for next Summer?  It'll be $4,000.  For every $7 you were planning to spend, you now have to plan on spending $8.  To put it another way, if you had $400G put aside for your retirement, somebody in Washington just stole $50G.  The balance in the account doesn't change; only its purchasing power does.

Now, if you happen to be one of those fortunate people who are the beneficiaries of the bulk of that $5T bailout, you can grab your pot of gold and put it where it will generate some more wealth for you.  If you're Joe Sixpack, you're shit out of luck.  Better luck next time.

And the reason for all that extra spending?  It's to combat the ill-effects of COVID-19.  The Kennedy Center needs money to help them get past the enforced shutdown, and Planned Parenthood seems to be... well, to be honest, I don't know what they're doing to battle COVID-19, but it's important enough for them to rate $35B.  In fact, almost none of that spending will actually help the man in the street... excuse me, the man forced to quarantine at home.

The real problem here is that all those people who just got the shaft from the financial wizards in Congress will go to the polls in November and re-elect the very same people who just stole 13% of everything the voters had saved, because "Hey, I got a check for $1,200!"  They saw that; they didn't see their retirement savings shrink by 1/7th.

Sean Hannity is a f*****g moron

Back on December 9th, 2011, I suggested that Sean Hannity was an idiot.  I was wrong.  I admit it.  Sean Hannity is a fucking moron.  There's just no polite way to say that.

I rarely watch 'Hannity' even though I regularly follow Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham whose programs bracket Hannity.  Tonight I let myself be lured in because of the recent revelations of FBI malfeasance regarding General Michael Flynn and the Hannity teaser that he would have additional information on that topic.  And what does Hannity lead off with?  "I wear this FBI pin to honor the 99% of honorable FBI agents who protect yada yada yada..."

Is it possible that anyone can be that stupid?  If 99% of FBI agents were as honorable as Hannity, in his blind belief in 'American exceptionalism', supposes, there would be whistleblowers galore offering documentary evidence of institutional corruption throughout the United States Department of Justice.

But there aren't.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Hannity is a fucking moron, and he gave us the evidence voluntarily.

Overreacting to COVID-19

You always have to have a plan, but it doesn't always have to be the same plan.

When we first heard about Coronavirus, COVID-19, the reports were sketchy and the number of cases was small.  "Small" in statistics equates to "unreliable", so we should have heavily discounted the initial speculations of a 6% fatality rate.  "6%' is a scary number.  It's 1-out-of-16.  In this country, 6% is 20 million dead Americans.  People panicked.  The country went into quarantine in an attempt to slow the spread of the disease.

As the number of cases grew, the conclusions drawn grew more reliable.  Soon we revised the fatality rate down to 3%.  That's still 10 million dead Americans, but it was based on testing increasing numbers of people who were exhibiting symptoms.  People without symptoms were assumed (!!) to be uninfected.  They weren't being tested because test kits were scarce.

Something else was becoming obvious: almost everyone who died from COVID-19 had other underlying issues, what are called "co-morbidities".  Yes, they died from COVID-19, but they might not have died if they weren't obese, diabetic, had heart disease, or something else that turned them into a fragile patient.

As test kits became available, people without symptoms began to be tested and we discovered something startling.  Huge numbers of people were showing positive test results, and they were asymptomatic.  They had already contracted COVID-19 and shrugged it off.

The federal government, in an effort to get good data, offered states a little bonus to compensate them for the extra work they had to do collecting COVID-19 statistics.  Effectively, the feds were paying the states for reporting COVID-19 cases.  Guess what happens?  Mr. Jones dies after being mugged, and on 'post' he's discovered to be positive for COVID-19.  Presto-chango!  He's a COVID-19 death.  Suddenly, there's a huge bump in the fatality rate.  The reported fatality rate can't be relied upon because it may be artificially inflated.  It's almost certainly lower than reported.  What does this tell us?

• COVID-19 is ferociously contagious.  You almost can't escape it.  If you don't catch it in April, you'll pick it up in May.
• COVID-19 is not very deadly.  The latest estimates of the fatality rate are down in the 0.03% range, 3-in-10,000.  That's still 100,000 dead Americans, but that's a long way away from 20 million.
• Your greatest chance of catching it occurs indoors.  Fresh air and sunlight are hazardous to the virus and suppress its transmission, and thus are healthy for potential hosts (us).

Some countries, notably Sweden, have taken the attitude that COVID-19 is going to have to run its course, and their numbers (cases-per-capita, deaths-per-capita) are not noticeably different than ours.  Given this, what of our reaction to the pandemic?

• Unless you or a loved one is in an at-risk population, staying indoors too much is a bad idea.  It spreads the virus.  Efforts to keep people out of places like parks and beaches is exactly the wrong thing to do.
• Even if you are in an at-risk population, sunlight and fresh air are probably good for you.
• 'Social distancing' probably doesn't work.  Almost certainly, it isn't doing what we hope it's doing.
• Shutting down the economy and disemploying so many people was stupid and irresponsible.
• The experts think everything is working well, and we should keep doing this until we're all destitute.

You always have to have a plan, but it doesn't always have to be the same plan.

Where's The Money Coming From? -- Part 2

 

At the end of the First World War, two important things happened: the Spanish Flu, and the Treaty of Versailles.  The first killed 50 million world-wide including 675,000 in the U.S. alone.  The second imposed ruinous economic conditions on Germany such that the Weimar Republic resorted to printing money so fast that inflation made all of it worthless.  You may recall stories of harried Germans trying to buy bread with a wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks.  It's a crap-shoot at this point whether our own Chinese Coronavirus will kill anything like 50 million world-wide, but there is absolutely no doubt that printing 2 trillion (with a 'T') dollars with nothing to back it up is going to cause inflation of the U.S. currency.  How much inflation?  I have no idea, and neither does anyone else.  It is, however, a fact you can take to the bank that prices are going to rise because 2 trillion more dollars are now chasing the same amount of productivity.  Less productivity, actually, because many otherwise-productive businesses have been shuttered by executive fiat.

Amazingly, everyone seems 'OK' with that because the 2 trillion is going to be distributed more-or-less evenly across the population.  Did you catch that?  Everyone is going to get approximately the same benefit from the Mint printing all those dollars.  No one is going to be treated any better or worse than anyone else.(**)

The geniuses in Washington just did a 'stock split' on the cash in your wallet, in your savings account, in your IRA, and everywhere else you had stored your accumulated wealth.  In a stock split, you get more shares of stock, but each of those shares is less valuable than they were yesterday.  Everybody thinks "Oh, boy!  I'm getting $1200 bucks!"  Unfortunately, what you had yesterday plus the $1200 bucks now has, together, the same value as what you had yesterday.  Or less.

You've just been played.

Again.

 

 

(**):  This is not exactly true because as part of that massive 'stimulus' package, a lot of non-productive recipients are also going to get a pile of cash: various arts organizations including The Kennedy Center ($25million), and the all-time record-setting least-productive part of the economy, the U.S.Congress ($39million).

Yes, indeed, you've been played.

 

Where's The Money Coming From? -- Part 1

 

On last night's (Friday Mar 27th) show, Tucker Carlson asked a very important question regarding the $2.2 Trillion Corona Virus bailout package.  He may not have realized how important the question was when he asked it.  He asked "Where's the money coming from?" and then offered that it might be money borrowed from China.  It may be worth a moment or two to ask (again) the question people shy away from asking — perhaps from some inbred instinct that they're not going to like the answer: Where does the government get its money in the first place?

All the money the government spends comes from three sources:

• taxing
• borrowing
• printing

All of these things hurt the economy and the people for whom the economy exists.  In fact, government spending, because it is funded by these methods, hurts the economy and the people for whom the economy exists.  I addressed this issue about 10 years ago right here on this blog where I suggested we were on the verge of a financial catastrophe the likes of which we had never before seen.  And we're intent on doing it again.  Why are taxing, borrowing, and printing money bad for the economy?

Taxing:  When two people make a free exchange of goods, whatever form those goods may take, profit ensues.  Each participant in the exchange wants something the other has and values it more highly than what they already have.  I have $5, you have a cake.  You think the cake is worth less than $5 and I think the cake is worth more than $5.  When you make the sale, you now have $5 — which is better than just a cake — and I have a cake worth more than that five-spot I just gave you.  We both profited.

Then the government steps in.  It snags a few percent off the top as sales tax, and some of that profit has just evaporated because the actual price I paid has been artificially inflated.  You don't get off scot-free, either.  All the material you put into making that cake you had to buy from people who charged you sales tax for the flour, the eggs, the sugar, and everything else that went into it, plus you're going to pay income tax on the $5 you got from me.

The act of taxing is like tapping the brakes on your car: it slows the process down, perhaps imperceptibly, but the slowing happens even if you can't detect it.  Multiply this drag by millions, billions, or trillions, because it happens each time a taxable transaction occurs.  The actual slowing is the removal of profit.  What profit each of us made has been transferred — some of it, all of it, or more than that — to the government so that it can be spent on things that have nothing to do with that cake.

Borrowing:  Whenever you borrow something, the intent of the lender is that whatever was borrowed will come back eventually, and often with interest.  There are certainly cases where borrowing, even at interest, is a good thing.  That's why there are mortgages on homes.  When borrowing happens in order to increase one's productivity, the increase in productivity is expected to be greater than the interest and thus enable the loan to be paid off over time.  The greater the increase in productivity, the easier it is to pay off the loan, but it still involves transferring profit to the lender.  The borrower trades future profit for current advantage.

That, alas, is not how government borrowing usually works.  Government borrowing is a way of 'kicking the can down the road'.  The loan will be paid off in the future when the politicians who borrowed it have retired, and 'paying the loan back' is somebody else's problem.  The 'somebody else', in case you haven't figured that out, is you.  The government doesn't want to tax you in the current cycle for current budget needs, so it taxes you in the future at higher rates.  As I said: somebody else's problem, but the effect is the same: a drag is imposed on the economy.

Printing money:  Most people think money is wealth.  How wealthy am I?  Let me see what's in my wallet.  But that's not wealth.  The true measure of wealth is "what can I do with this money?"  If a haircut or an oil change costs $300, how far will your $100,000 retirement fund take you?  That's what 'printing money' does.  It shaves a little bit off every dollar in circulation and transfers it to whoever owns the printing press.  In lots of cases, the effect is so slight that it's virtually unnoticeable, but over time the effect is cumulative.  In the past hundred years or so, approximately 95 cents has been shaved off the dollar.  That's why 1920 prices seem so bizarre to us.  Cars being sold for $600; gasoline at 7 cents per gallon; houses for $4,000!

In days of yore when 'money' was based on something solid like gold, evil rulers would 'tax' by shaving a tiny sliver of gold from the edge of a coin.  In modern times, governments just inflate the currency.

So, Tucker Carlson asked the right question: "Where's the money coming from?".  The answer is that the government is going to inflate the currency, make each of your dollars worth a tiny bit less, make each of the things you buy a tiny bit more expensive.  Whether they do it by taxing you (unlikely, since they're writing $1200 checks to every taxpayer) or by borrowing, or by simply printing enough extra dollars, the effect is the same: starting tomorrow, life is going to get more expensive.

 

Ranks of Gun-owners Explodes

 

I'm hearing stories of people rushing to their local gun stores and panic-buying guns.  News reports suggest these are "pro-gun fanatics" doing the buying in anticipation of the need for self-defense armament in the face of the current corona virus pandemic.  That seems extremely unlikely.  All the known "pro-gun fanatics" already have guns and ammunition sufficient for their self-defense without the necessity of expanding their collections or stocking up.

No, I believe these are primarily first-time gun owners who are worried that the breakdown of civil society is going to impact them and their families harshly.  If they haven't already, they're suddenly realizing that in extremis, they are their families' best or only defense and their first thought is "I had better get myself a gun".  When they get to the gun store, they get a nasty shock.  A series of nasty shocks, actually.

One, there are long lines.  There are reports of lines wending out the door and down the block of people waiting their turn to get in so they can look at the merchandise and make their selection.  The lines are long because those who are busy making their selection are taking their time about it — because they don't know anything about guns and need lots of help from the harried staff — because they're first-time buyers.  Any reputable gun store will only sell you a gun if they're confident you're competent to operate it safely, therefore they take the time to show you the features of whatever you're buying.

Two, the selection is narrow because — hey, a store can only stock a certain amount of stuff, right?  In places like California, the selection is even narrower because only certain firearms are even legal to sell in that state.  Yes, California has an official list of firearms that may be sold or possessed within that state.  A Glock 17 in standard black may be legal whereas the same gun with a powder-coated finish may not.

Two(a), in some states (NY, NJ, CA again, IL, HI, maybe others) you need a 'permit to purchase' before anyone will even let you look at or touch a firearm in their store.  To get that PtP, you will need to visit your local police department or sheriff's office who will do a pre-BGC BGC.  They're busy with other things like crimes and your petty concerns are not high on their priority list.  When they do get around to you, they can take as long as they want before issuing the PtP.  NY and NJ are notorious for taking six months or more before you can even walk into a gun store to examine your impending purchase.

'Impending purchase'?  Yes, three, throughout the United States there is a mandatory minimum waiting period during which the Famous But Incompetent FBI will complete a background check to ensure you're legally entitled to purchase a firearm.  Almost everywhere, it's three (3) days, but in some places (California, again), it's ten (10) days.  Oh, you wanted that gun right now?  Yeah, sorry, but you can come by on Tuesday and pick it up, except...

Four, FBI, which does those background checks, is having a problem with staffing because of the Moo Goo Gai Panic, and just announced that it might take as much as twenty-eight (28) days to complete yours.  Aha, but the law says any BGC not completed in three (3) days is to be treated as a 'pass'!  Gotcha!  Well... no.  These days, when the FBI can't complete the check on time, they issue a 'conditional disapproval' — and they're issuing lots of CDs these days.  Sorry.  Game over.  Thank you for playing.  What '2nd amendment'?

Five, when those panicky first-time buyers get frustrated, they flip open their laptops and hit the web because it's easier just to buy your gun over the internet.  Suddenly, they discover that you actually can't buy a gun over the internet without having it shipped to a local Federal Firearms Licensee, the same people who can't handle the flood of new customers wanting to buy their wares.  Naturally, they will take time out of their busy day to help you fill out the Form 4473 for somebody else's merchandise, but you'll still have to have a BGC which could take as long as 3 or 10 or 28 days before you actually take possession of your new hardware.  That's after it gets shipped across country.

I don't know for certain, but I would bet a lot of money that many of those first-time buyers experiencing the roadblocks outlined above were, until a few days ago, hard-line supporters of 'reasonable restrictions on who can get a gun', and they are, also for the first time, beginning to understand why all those "pro-gun fanatics" were so upset over each new reasonable restriction.  They're faced with a situation that does not treat lack of preparedness kindly and is especially cruel to those who weren't even aware that they weren't prepared.

Welcome to the party, pals.

 

Inmates In Charge Of The Asylum

 

Notes from the front lines of the war against CoViD-19: This is (I think) Day-12 of our ordeal.  Bars and restaurants and other places where people typically congregate (including places of worship) are closed by diktat, Clearwater Beach is closed in the middle of Spring Break, school is out until at least April 1, everyone is on a de facto lock-down because — really, where can we go?  There have been about 160 deaths from exposure to CoViD-19.

'Seasonal flu' kills people at rates 100 times that, but (we're told) CoViD-19 hasn't 'peaked'.

Small businesses that rely on a more-or-less constant flow of paying customers are hurting so bad that many of them may not survive until they're allowed to re-open, but — not to worry! — the SBA has loans and grants to tide them over, and a bi-partisan budget expansion — paid for by you, of course, — will surely pass on its first appearance.  The employees of those businesses are furloughed because (a) the business is closed, and (b) they're not allowed to travel (or strongly discouraged).  Many of those employees are low-wage workers heavily dependent on tip income.  Ah, well, at least there's unemployment, and by now the mandatory two-week waiting period is just about over, and they'll be allowed to apply so they'll get their first check after (maybe) another week.  Or two.

Larger businesses have the advantages of scale and the ability to hunker down and mothball their capacity, so this mandatory shut-down is a huge boon to them as far as 'competition' is concerned.  Smaller businesses?  Bummer, Dude.

This artificial impact on businesses from coast to coast is a cratering event for the various stock markets and the economy in general.

Time for a reality check:  the earliest data we have on CoViD-19 comes to us from a cruise ship, the Diamond Princess.  That environment is 2,000-3,000 people in relatively close proximity for a week or more, passing germs back and forth at every meal.  Many of those passengers are older and are much more at-risk than is the general population.  That looks very like a 'worst-case scenario'.  And what conclusions can we draw from the Diamond Princess?

Worst case:  The Diamond Princess tells us that the contagion rate (who's going to catch it?) will probably top out around 20%.  For the U.S. population as a whole, that's 600,000 people, and 80% who won't catch it regardless.  20% of those infected (120,000) will show symptoms severe enough to require intervention, real quarantine and/or hospitalization, some of them in an ICU.  10% of that (12,000) will die.

We lose more than that to seasonal flu, and we lost way more than that to the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic during the Obama administration, and nobody got anywhere near this excited back then.  In short, this is not Captain Trips, and we are not all going to die, and we are almost certainly over-reacting.  The worsening economy is a net negative for Donald Trump whose re-election campaign will almost certainly focus on economic performance issues.

The biggest loser is the Constitution.  Isn't it amazing that what is almost certainly an ordinary virus is all it takes for the American people to look the other way when the government virtually repeals the First Amendment?  Peaceably assemble for dinner or a beer?  Nope, all those places are closed and we don't want you traveling, and we especially don't want you gathering in groups!  Freedom of worship?  Maybe after the crisis passes (heh heh heh).

Never let a crisis go to waste.

 

Stranger Things

 

And...  Bloomberg's gone!

Money can't buy you love, and it appears now it can't buy you the Democratic nomination for President, either.  Just weeks into a campaign funded by over a half-billion Bloomberg bucks, MikeyB craters on Super Tuesday and Biden is back in the hunt.  Just like that (snaps fingers).

In fact, Biden did so well yesterday that — if he can keep up the 'Joementum' — he could make it oh-so-easy for the convention to sidetrack Bernie Sanders...  again.  Over the next few weeks, each Tuesday is going to have several state primaries.  Biden has to do much better in those than he did last night if he is to successfully fend off Sanders, but it's doable.

What's not doable is to avoid a convention in which there is considerable horse-trading.  Warren doesn't have many delegates, but she's holding a bunch.  Same for Buttigieg and Klobuchar, although those are probably already pledged to Biden.

I continue to believe that neither Biden nor Sanders, the only two viable candidates left, can face off against Trump in the Fall campaign unless the economy tanks before then.  The Republican primaries last night confirm that.  Trump ran virtually unopposed and so GOP voters did not even have to cast a ballot, but they did, and in what was for all practical purposes a one man race, Trump collected more primary votes than the top three (3) Democratic contenders.  If he can repeat that performance in November, it will be a blowout

Oh, this is going to be sooooo interesting...

 

Bloomberg vs Trump

 

In the words of Red Buttons: "Strange things are happening...".  We're 240-some-odd days from the election, 8 months or so, and we can begin to see the vague outlines of how it's going to shape up.

Joe Biden, who just a few months back was the Dem front-runner, has slipped to 4th place as his campaign collapses reminiscent of a slow-motion train wreck.  The DNC has changed the debate rules to allow Mike Bloomberg to buy his way onto the stage.  Even so, Bernie Sanders has surged to first place and the DNC is going to be faced with a plateful of unappetizing choices at the convention.  If Bernie is, by then, still the leader, the DNC is going to have to torpedo him because there is no way he can compete against Donald Trump in a bustling economy.  Only Mike Bloomberg stands a chance now.  It's a small chance, but that's all the Dems have at this point.

What's interesting is that Bloomberg is an inveterate gun-grabber, so the pro-gun electorate finds him abhorrent.  Trump has been, over the past few months, methodically alienating that same community.  If the contest in November is 'Bloomberg vs Trump', 120-plus million gun owners will have no place to go...

...except to a third-party.  Or just stay home.  What if the LP or the Constitution Party puts up a plausible candidate for the first time in 30 years?  The threshold for getting a podium at the Presidential Debates is only 5% of the electorate.  In 2016, almost 129 million votes were cast.  Were some third-party to gather 7 million votes, the FEC would be forced to include them in the 2024 debates or, like the DNC in 2016, to rig the rules to keep the debates a two-party affair.  Either choice would be 'good news': one would finally allow a fresh voice to be heard nationally, while the other would demonstrate once and for all how utterly corrupt the entire system is.

Strange things, indeed.

 

The End Of The Affair

 

This is the situation as it stands now:

• the House has voted to impeach Trump and sent the articles to the Senate
• the Senate, after considerable debate, has voted against calling additional witnesses beyond those called by the House
• a formal Senate vote to remove or acquit will be held early next week
• everyone assumes the Senate will acquit Trump of wrongdoing.

The Democrats have been working to remove Trump from office since the instant he won the last Presidential election, and possibly before then, that much is glaringly obvious.  Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller spent $32 million on a team of Democrat-allied lawyers in a 2+ year effort to find high crimes or misdemeanors and found nothing even peripherally related to 'Russian collusion'.  The most serious result of that investigation was the indictment of General Michael Flynn on charges that — just this week — have resulted in a finding by a judge that the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence from Flynn's defense team.  That is: the FBI knew Flynn was innocent and went after him anyway.  In any ordinary criminal case, this would be enough to get any charges thrown out, and that is exactly what Flynn's team is asking for.  If they win, Flynn walks free, and what we got from the Mueller Probe, all that time, all that money, is 'nothing'.

Various employees of the FBI, CIA, and NSA and other TLAs have resigned or been fired for their related actions over the past 3 years.  At least one, Andrew McCabe, is in danger of going to federal prison.  Judges from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have put on their shocked faces and declared that, much to their surprise and chagrin, affidavits presented to them by the FBI (signed by Director James Comey) to obtain warrants to spy on American citizens have now been discovered to be faulty, a nice way of saying "the FBI lied to us and we weren't skeptical enough to ask any piercing questions".  This is 'rot', and it's all the way through most of the federal bureaucracy.

At some point, a reasonable person will look inward and ask:  "After all this time and all this money and all these blemishes on formerly-revered institutions, could it be possible that there really is no 'there' there?"  This is an important question and can't be safely brushed aside.  If it turns out to be true that Trump is guilty of nothing beyond being a jerk (of which he is certainly guilty), that same reasonable person is face-to-face with a bureaucratic machine that can and will deliberately destroy anyone that gets in its way.  Is that what we want from our federal government?

Brushing the question aside is an admission that the chasm between Republicans and Democrats is unbridgeable, and that means that we are — not 'will be'; are — currently in a civil war; that Democrats and Republicans can no longer share the same country.  Although I think 'brushing it aside' is a very bad idea, I fear there are far too many people who will do exactly that.  They hate Trump so much that even the looming specter of civil war is not enough to bring them to their senses.

There is one thing that may save us from the dangers of Trump Derangement Syndrome: the example of Czechoslovakia.  In 1992, Czechoslovakia's parliament agreed that on January 1st, 1993 the country would split into two countries: Slovakia and Czechia, a 'Velvet Divorce'.  No shooting, no dead partisans, just 'haul down the old flag and run up two new ones'.  It went off without a hitch.  Splitsville, amicably.

In a way, it might be a good thing, all things considered, for the United States to become 'the Disunited States', for the left and right to 'dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them'.  Several quite nice things would happen very quickly if we were able to disunite the way Czechoslovakia did in 1993.  For one, Red America and Blue America would stop paying for each other's pet projects.  Blue America would stop funding seemingly-endless foreign military interventions; Red America would stop supporting a host of progressive giveaways.  Because both factions would get to write new Constitutions, other hot-button issues could be handled expeditiously:  the 2nd amendment, the hottest of hot-button issues, might exist in one and not in the other.

We should think about maybe having a 'Velvet Divorce' of our own.  What do you think?  Good idea or bad idea?