Well, well, well...

 

So, the EU has just reached an agreement with UK on how they will deal with each other post-BRexit.  According to Deutsche Welle:

"The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was the result of nine long months of negotiations and set up a relationship of zero tariffs and zero quotas on goods traded between the EU and UK." 

If this sounds like the EU is going to treat UK as if they were still part of the team, then you and I read this the same way.

And why wouldn't they?  Trade is how wealth is acquired.  If you have a pie and I have five dollars and we trade those, you now have five dollars that you value above having a pie, and I have a pie that I value above those five dollars.  We both gained in that transaction.  Wait... what?

Yes, unless governments get in the way to impose taxes and tariffs, trade — that is 'free trade' — always results in profits to the traders.  Taxes and tariffs steal some or all of that profit (or more) and funnel it to the government so it can be wasted on things you normally wouldn't spend your own money for.  People who cheered Trump's tariff policy will by now be scratching their heads: "What in tarnation is he talking about?"

The EU seems to have decided that trading with UK (and making profit from trading with UK) is a better idea than cutting off trade with a country that has Chunnel access to the Continent, and is even better than taxing their own citizens to impel them to reject UK produce (that, until a few months ago, was all perfectly fine).  One wonders what sort of drug they're on that induces such common sense?  Perhaps we can get prescriptions for our own U.S. politicians?  Would they take the medicine?  Forget it, Jake, it's D.C.

 

50 Laboratories

 

Back on February 7, 2017, I wrote about problem-solving using massively-parallel trial-and-error and suggested that this method almost always results in the optimal outcome, and gets very close to it when it misses the bulls-eye.

We just went through a period where this method was applied, and it has (apparently) worked as expected.  Fifty states each dealt with Covid-19 using a handful of models such that we now have several different solutions, each demonstrating different levels of success.

New York, New Jersey, and California, along with several others, went the 'hard lockdown' route, while others, notably Florida and Texas, eschewed mask mandates and forced isolation.  The results are in: lockdowns don't work if the desired result is the health of the populace; mask mandates seem to have no observable effect on infection rates; forced isolation is (as was predicted early-on) a recipe for economic catastrophe and very little in the way of 'preventing infection'.  The CDC is now admitting that the chance of acquiring Covid-19 from hard surfaces is approximately zero.  If only someone would have been aware of how useless most of these draconian non-solutions were earlier in the process!

Well, it turns out that someone was aware of how useless mask mandates, hard lockdowns, and economy-crippling isolation measures were.  By and large, what the mainstream media sneeringly refer to as 'right-wing media' was on this case within weeks of the initial outbreaks, and they warned whoever would listen that (a) Covid-19 was far less dangerous than 'the experts' were saying it was, and (b) that there was no reason to torpedo the economy in order to keep people healthy.  In fact, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and NJ Governor Phil Murphy both sent infected seniors back into the nursing homes from which they had come, the better to infect any seniors who had thus far escaped the virus.  The instant this happened, 'right-wing media' was on the issue 'like white on rice' warning (as if no one could figure this out for themselves) that placing infected persons in close proximity to uninfected persons was an excellent way to infect the uninfected.  Those warnings were dismissed as conspiracy theories, but we now know that they were something else.

The left is keen on 'common-sense gun laws', but they're not quite as keen on common-sense health policies, and now I think we can speculate as to 'why'.  Common-sense gun laws (which are thoroughly divorced from common-sense) give them more power.  Common-sense health policies take power away.  The common denominator is that whatever gives the left power is good, and whatever takes power away is bad.

Let that sink in for a moment.

 

A Small Difference of Opinion

 

I have come to understand — somewhat reluctantly — that Mike Vanderboegh was more right than he could imagine when he opined that Americans are now two distinct people occupying the same territory.  The implications of this are ominous.  They almost guarantee that the United States will eventually — maybe soon — disunite, probably via a civil war, perhaps via a shooting civil war.

It has been obvious for some time, certainly since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that Democrats as a class are unprincipled and mendacious, with minds closed to any idea that does not fit the narrative set by the demagogues by whom they are pleased to be ruled, and violently opposed to all who question their accepted dogma.  In this sense, they are largely indistinguishable from Muslims who are perfectly accepting of the notion that the only good unbeliever is a headless unbeliever.  The rise of "cancel culture" (that oddly seems to affect only conservatives) provides adequate proof.

The things they believe can only be believed by turning a blind eye to uncomfortable facts, while simultaneously declining to fact-check their own sources.  For instance, we have the glaring example of Adam Schiff who, almost weekly for the entirety of the Trump presidency, proclaimed that he had "seen clear and convincing evidence" that Trump and his team colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.  Of course, Robert Mueller at the head of two dozen highly-paid and Democratically-aligned A-list attorneys couldn't find anything prosecutable despite spending two years and 30 million dollars.  When asked directly whether he, Mueller, had inquired into the Clinton campaign's documented connection to the Steele dossier, Mueller demurred because "that was not within my purview".  That is, in lawyer-speak, an admission that Mueller was charged with finding wrongdoing by Trump and his team to the exclusion of everyone else.  As a consequence, the $30 million resulted in a few minor 1001's and very little else.  The persecution of General Michael Flynn never rose to the level that any Democrat would have been bothered by the complete absence of due process because, you see, Flynn was a Republican and thus unworthy of fair treatment.

Since Second Amendment issues are always high on my priority list, most discussions zero in on that pretty quickly.  "I'm not trying to take your guns!" she loudly proclaims.  Well, no, you aren't, but the people you voted for are.  That's where anything resembling "a discussion" usually ends.  No Democrat wants to have to fight that battle under any conditions that might lead them to have to change their mind.  The facts are not on their side, so they argue emotion.  As soon as one party forces the debate back onto a factual base, they execute a strategic withdrawal.

Big Tech and Big Media have together conspired to make a Trump re-election unlikely if not out-and-out impossible.  The treatment of Hunter Biden is illustrative.  Hunter sent his laptop in for repair and then apparently forgot about it.  When the laptop repairman exercised a workman's lien and began peering deep into the innards of the device, he discovered evidence of potentially criminal activity on Hunter's part.  He made a safety back-up copy of the laptop's contents before turning it over to the FBI which (presumably) is still looking into it.  When The New York Post ran a front-page article based on that "safety copy", FaceBook and Twitter shut down NYPost access to their platforms.  No Democrat raised an eyebrow.  The existence of evidence that Hunter Biden may have engaged in criminal activity remained (and remains) unknown to the bulk of the American people.  Had Hunter been linked to anything Republican, he would now be in federal prison awaiting trial.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic provides a wealth of confirming data for the overarching premise.  Mario Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, issued an order early in the course of the pandemic that forced NY nursing homes to re-admit Covid-positive patients back among their untested populations.  That this resulted in the deaths of a number of elderly patients that might otherwise have survived the experience is undisputed.  Trump (a Republican) dispatched a Navy hospital ship to NY harbor to help the (Democratic) mayor isolate Covid patients.  When the ship was finally recalled to regular duty some weeks later, they had handled exactly ZERO patients.  It just wouldn't do for any Democrat to place themselves into a position from which they would have to give credit to a Republican for doing something good, even if citizens have to die to prevent it.  Despite this, the governor won an Emmy for his daily press briefings!

Despite widespread lockdowns that crushed their economies, NY, NJ, CT, and CA have experienced high case rates, high hospitalization rates, and high death rates from the virus.  States that rejected hard lockdowns, FL and TX prime among them, have recorded lower rates for hospitalizations and deaths.  Even so, those "free states" are routinely panned in Big Media as being hotbeds of infection.  Only among so-called right-wing media is there speculation that lockdowns might not have been as effective as we were promised.  NY, with very high death rates, even insisted that travelers from "hotbed states" like FL quarantine for two weeks on arrival.  Recently, CBS' "60 Minutes" so blatantly misquoted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis regarding his response to Covid-19 that the (Democratic) mayor of Palm Beach County felt obligated to go public in defense of his (Republican) governor.

In short, Democrats believe many things that are provably false and disbelieve many things that are provably true, and insist that everyone who doesn't believe as they do is a traitor, a terrorist, an insurrectionist, a conspiracy-theorist, or some combination of those.  Given their propensity to destroy the economy and their compatriots' wealth in the process, the only real traitors seem to be the ones with a "D" next to their names.