The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Is the ‘Hero of the Fascist Lockdown Lobby’

Posted on | April 21, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

So dubbed by Ace of Spades:

John Ekdahl has been on a helluva tear on Twitter.
He wonders why it is that the New York-based media is scolding Floridians for visiting the beaches in small numbers, but yet all of New York City’s parks remain open.
He wonders why people are being told they can’t drive but New York City’s subway system remains open, each car a contained petri dish. (And note — they only gave out the order to wear a mask on the subway a few days ago!)
And I’ll point this one out: The same people saying that protests are non-essential are the same people who said it would violate the Constitution to quarantine people from the New York City area to the New York City area.
Andrew Cuomo, hero of the fascist lockdown lobby, threatened to provoke a Constitutional crisis if Trump sought to limit New Yorkers’ holy right to export the plague to other states.
Why is it the Ruling Class is busy demanding lockdowns for others while accepting no restrictions at all for themselves?

Ace’s point about New York City’s subway system is more important than anyone at CNN or MSNBC is willing to admit:

In a research paper called, “The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City,” [MIT Professor Jeffrey] Harris reports that the subways were packed with five million riders a day. Harris overlaid the hot spots of the virus in NYC with the subway stations and found a correlation. “Maps of subway station turnstile entries, superimposed upon zip code-level maps of reported coronavirus incidence, are strongly consistent with subway-facilitated disease propagation.”

Of course, we didn’t need an MIT professor to tell us this, only common sense. New York City is one of the few places in America where most residents — and there are 8 million of them — don’t own a car. Nearly everybody in the city rides the subway, and commuters ride trains from the suburbs into the city, and if ever there was a petri dish that provided the perfect environment to spread a deadly epidemic, New York was it. And yet at no point during this crisis did Gov. Cuomo or Mayor Bill deBlasio do anything about their subway problem. It was only on March 20, more than a week after President Trump had declared a state of emergency, that Cuomo announced the closing of “non-essential businesses,” which produced a dramatic reduction in subway ridership.

Despite these failures, however, Cuomo gives a daily press briefing in which no reporter ever asks him a hostile question, and he lectures as if he were an expert in epidemiology. Cuomo pretends to know, for example, that it will be unsafe to reopen businesses anywhere until basically everybody can be tested for the coronavirus. But as Ann Althouse points out, most Americans live in places with no subways, and therefore are at much less risk of the kind of mass contagion that struck New York, which has 44% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths.




 

Category: New York

‘For the Wrath of God Is Revealed From Heaven Against All Ungodliness …’

Posted on | April 20, 2020 | 1 Comment

Thus begins one of the most powerful passages of Scripture, and I was pleased today to learn from Denise McAllister that this has become the inspiration for a new website, Romans One. It is an ambitious and high-minded project, as the editors explain their intended mission:

Why choose this part of the Bible as the foundation of our message? Because we are living in those times. America was once a nation in which the Christian worldview graced every part of society from academics and journalism to science and politics, but now it looks more like godless Rome in the first century when the apostle Paul wrote a “cultural commentary” of his own. No doubt the Roman Christians were as frustrated and perplexed about how to engage the culture as Christians are today. They needed help, and Paul gave it to them.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul explains that the only answer to the immorality and willful ignorance plaguing humanity is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is as true today as it was then, especially when America, like Rome, has embraced an ethos of sex, lies, and idolatry—the trio of depravity that is intertwined like serpents to form a death grip on culture.
What are Christians to do when faced with overwhelming hostility to their faith and such profound rejection of the truth about God, human nature, and society as a whole? Some Christians today feel so besieged that they are withdrawing from the public square. Others are wringing their hands in frustration, feeling powerless to make a difference. Still others are simply ignorant of what’s going on. Worse, some Christians so reflect the image of the culture that they have become part of the problem, appearing no different from the world around them and unable to be salt and light among the lost. . . .

You can (and should) read the rest.

Lot of that “wrath of God” stuff going around lately . . .




 

Category: Culture, Religion

Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo: The Media’s Favorite Scientific Geniuses

Posted on | April 20, 2020 | Comments Off on Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo: The Media’s Favorite Scientific Geniuses

 

Watching MSNBC today (so you don’t have to) and it’s amazing how laser-focused they are on the blame-Trump narrative of COVID-19. The MSNBC viewer is given the impression, for example, that Joe Biden was presciently warning about this Chinese disease in January, when what is being quoted is not what Biden himself said, but campaign statements issued on the candidate’s behalf. Likewise, Joe Scarborough passes over as inconsequential the fact that Nancy Pelosi, who now presumes to lecture the president about “science,” was in January and February leading an impeachment effort in Congress that might have distracted the president from keeping up with the latest developments in the pandemic.

And what about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo? The media, which relentlessly attacks Trump at the White House coronavirus briefings, has nothing but praise for Cuomo, despite the fact that Cuomo has presided over the worst outbreak in the country. The most insulting part of the media’s coverage of COVID-19, however, is that they claim for themselves the authority of scientific experts — and expect to be taken seriously:

A virus is not magic, epidemiology is not voodoo, and the credentialed experts are not a priesthood. Yet the reporters, anchors, and commentators on cable TV news — most of whom have no more claim to expertise in such matters than you or I — exhibit a cult-like faith in the ability of the Pandemic Priesthood to predict the future. Previous failures by these experts to predict the course of the COVID-19 outbreak are ignored, as the television preachers of “science” encourage their viewers to regard the priesthood with religious reverence. Most amazing of all is how the media has conferred expert status on certain politicians, as if New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were qualified to deliver scientific lectures on preventing the spread of contagious disease.
All of this, of course, has little or nothing to do with actual science, and very much to do with political bias. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Donald Trump, Health Care, Joe Biden, Media Bias, Nancy Pelosi, Science

Crazy People Are Dangerous: If You’re Watching ‘Tiger King,’ You Know It

Posted on | April 18, 2020 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: If You’re Watching ‘Tiger King,’ You Know It

 

What remarkable luck — five years ago, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin began working on a documentary about Americans who own private menageries of exotic animals and, almost accidentally, found their protagonist in an eccentric Oklahoma zoo owner, Joe Schreibvogel, a/k/a “Joe Exotic.” In 2019, he was sentenced to federal prison, giving their documentary its dramatic conclusion, and their film was released on Netflix just about the time the coronavirus lockdown created a captive audience. During its first 10 days of release, more than 30 million people watched Tiger King, which instantly attained the status of cult classic.

The other day, my son Jefferson and I binge-watched the first three or four episodes (I lost count), and it’s easy to see what has made this the most successful documentary in history. Prior to the release of Tiger King, little attention was paid to the strange subculture of exotic animal collectors. Bizarre fact: The number of tigers privately owned in America exceeds the number of tigers that live in the wild. We might take patriotic pride in this fact — an endangered species is flourishing here, thanks to American capitalism — but the filmmakers are not sympathetic to the private ownership of exotic cats. (Producer Eric V. Goode is a wealthy conservationist.) And the type of people who pursue the hobby (or business) of breeding tigers and other exotic species in captivity . . .

Well, “eccentric” is perhaps the most polite adjective that comes to mind.

These people are not just crazy, they’re trashy. You have never in your life seen so much trash outside of a landfill. The filmmakers do an excellent job of conveying this with subtlety. For example, after our introduction to Joe Exotic and his downscale zoo in Oklahoma, we then meet Kevin Antle, a/k/a “Doc Antle,” a/k/a “Mahamayavi Bhagavan Antle,” owner of T.I.G.E.R.S. (The Institute for Greatly Endangered and Rare Species) near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Doc Antle with Jay Leno on ‘The Tonight Show’ in 2003.

In contrast to Joe Exotic’s redneck persona, Antle seems far more reputable. Antle is a multimillionaire who has worked as an animal trainer for such big-time Hollywood productions as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the 1998 remake of Dr. Doolittle. Antle’s attraction in Myrtle Beach is very professional-looking and charges more than $600 for admission, giving visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get up close and personal with these animals. However . . .

Antle appears to be running a sex cult, with multiple “wives” chosen from among his female employees. We meet a former employee who joined Antle’s operation as an 18-year-old and left after more than a decade, describing her experience at T.I.G.E.R.S. as something akin to slavery.

Another exotic animal owner we meet — who “seems chill,” in my son’s words — is a former Miami cocaine kingpin who served time in federal prison for the murder of an FBI undercover agent. And so it goes with everyone we encounter in Tiger King. There are no heroes here, no one you would think of as members of the respectable bourgeoisie. In general, they could be categorized as “grifters,” who in one way or another have cashed in on the public fascination with rare exotic animals. The producers are holding up a mirror to American society, inspiring us to ask why so many people are willing to pay money to have their picture taken with a tiger. How did the “tiger selfie” become a status symbol?

One is reminded of the old saying about legislation and sausage, and how you don’t want to know what goes into making it. The business of breeding wild animals in captivity, which makes it possible for people to pay for that “tiger selfie,” attracts a certain type of person, because the work required behind the scenes is not something that the respectable bourgeois would be interested in doing, or even knowing about. For example, an adult tiger requires a diet of a certain number of pounds of meat daily. This is quite expensive, and early in the series we are told that Joe Exotic has more than 200 tigers in his Oklahoma zoo.

That number boggled my son’s mind: “Two hundred? What the . . .?”

My son had thought that somebody would own maybe 10 tigers, which would still be a lot of tigers, but 200? “That’s an insane number of tigers.” How did Joe Exotic go from zero tigers to more than 200 in less than decades? Ah, but how is not the question, rather why.

It’s about the cubs, you see. Federal safety regulations do not allow for the general public to interact with exotic big cats as adults because an adult tiger (spoiler alert) might bite your arm off. What these private zookeepers can do, however, is let someone handle a tiger cub, up to a few months in age. Thus, exhibitors like Joe Exotic must have their cats continually breeding, producing new litters of cubs on a regular basis, to give them the product that pays their bills.

Perhaps you see the problem with this. If the big money is to be made with baby tigers, what happens when they grow up? Well, animal-rights activists, whom I despise quite generally, have nonetheless made a reasonable point in voicing their suspicions that some of these private menagerie owners are killing their “excess” adult animals. After all, what is the bottom-line incentive of continuing to feed hundreds of pounds of meat every month to adult tigers and lions, if these animals make no meaningful contribution to the profit of your operation?

And then, of course, there is Joe Exotic’s nemesis, Carole Baskin.

What an evil witch she is, masquerading as philanthropic animal-rights activist when she is not really any better than the for-profit zookeepers whom she attacks in the name of “animal rights.” Joe Exotic made many mistakes in his life, but none was more foolish than ramping up his personal feud with Baskin’s “Big Cat Rescue” into an obsession.

This reminded me, actually, of Bill Schmalfeldt, who in 2012 decided to make himself part of the Brett Kimberlin saga, and didn’t stop until . . .

Well, you can read the files about Bill at Hogewash.

Joe Exotic had a habit of making boastful threats. He was going to “destroy” Carole Baskin, et cetera, and as my son observed, you feel sorry for Joe because he has so obviously gotten in over his head, antagonizing Baskin in ways that are certain to boomerang back against him.

Did I mention that Carole Baskin murdered her second husband?

“Allegedly,” I hasten to add.

Missing millionaire Don Lewis (left) and his widow, Carole Baskin (right).

Don Lewis was a successful businessman, a 42-year-old married father of four in 1981 when he first met 20-year-old Carole Jones Murdock. Lewis was a rather notorious womanizer, and commenced an affair with Carole, a high-school dropout who was also married at the time. Carole divorced her first husband and, in 1991, became Mrs. Don Lewis. Six years later, however, Don was ready to divorce Carole, whom he claimed had threatened to kill him. Then one day, Don mysteriously disappeared.

Five years later, Carole had Don declared legally dead, and thus inherited his substantial fortune, rumored to be several million dollars, and including the Florida property which she subsequently turned into Big Cat Rescue. You see, among his other enterprises, Don had been a collector of exotic wild animals, including dozens of big cats, and Carole’s enemies — chief among them, Joe Exotic — suspect that after killing her husband, Carole feed Don’s remains to the tigers. Such is the suspicion expressed by several people in Tiger King, but as a professional journalist certainly I would never make such an accusation myself, because that might be construed as libel. You can Google it yourself, however.

 

As I say, there are no heroes in Tiger King, and whether or not Don Lewis was murdered, he was no innocent saint. Adultery is a sin, after all, and perhaps the “Red Pill” guys like Rollo Tomassi would find some lesson in whatever happened to Don Lewis, who was definitely an Alpha male.

As every student of Aristotle knows, hubris is essential to tragedy. In his arrogance, the protagonist fails to recognize the destructive fate which approaches, and there is a lot of hubris evident in the fate that befalls Joe Exotic. He staffs his Oklahoma zoo with the lowest sort of human trash, perhaps not merely as a way of saving money — his people work for substandard wages — but also because ex-convicts and drug addicts can be bossed around more easily. One cannot help but notice that Joe Exotic is not alone among big-cat aficionados in having a domineering, control-oriented personality. All of them, Carole Baskin included, take pleasure in the superiority of their status within their private fiefdoms, a status that requires a number of inferior minions to do their bidding. There is a sadistic quality to this type of personality; such people cannot see others as equals, and so they will always seek out or create situations in which they are the unquestioned Boss, surrounded by lackeys and sycophants.

The spirit of voluntary cooperation — teamwork in pursuit of a common goal — is alien to the domineering personality. There is nothing wrong with ambition, and every team must have its leaders, but anyone who aspires to such a role generally will encounter an institutional structure that requires them to “pay their dues” and work their way up the ranks before obtaining a position of independent leadership. Nick Saban didn’t just decide one day to start a football team and appoint himself as head coach. No, he first worked as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, Kent State, in 1973, and spent the next 16 years as an assistant coach (at Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, etc.) before finally getting his first head coaching job in 1989 at Toledo State, when he was almost 40. It was more than a decade later that Saban became head coach at LSU, where he led the Tigers to the National Championship before being hired at the University of Alabama in 2007, when he was age 56.

Nick Saban did not suffer from a lack of ambition, and he is a demanding taskmaster, but you see that he had to pay his dues, working within the system, to make it to the top of his field. This is a very different thing than the way someone like Joe Schreibvogel makes himself the boss of a private zoo, and collects a bunch of underlings to do his bidding. Even the more respectable operators, like Doc Antle, are part of a fringe subculture that lacks the kind of institutional framework that limits the authority of the boss. You may see Nick Saban shouting on the sidelines and think he’s some kind of tyrant, but he is accountable to the university, and governed by the authority of the NCAA, so that he must work within the limits of this framework. While there have been documented abuses within the world of college athletics, the process by which someone becomes a head football coach is such that the wheat are separated from the chaff. You can’t buy your way into an NCAA head coaching job, the way that a Miami drug kingpin bought himself a menagerie of exotic pets.

Viewers of Tiger King are sympathetic to Joe Exotic because they see him as an underdog who fought (and lost) a war against a powerful enemy. The animal-rights movement, as personified by Carole Baskin, has enough money and prestige to make life miserable for private zoo owners.

The regulatory power of the federal government is part of this equation. In addition to allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kill Carole Baskin — oops, spoiler alert! — Joe Exotic was sent to prison for violating two federal laws, the Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act. It is quite probable that these laws that Joe Exotic was convicted of violating have also been violated by many other proprietors of private menageries, but Joe more or less drew a target on his own back. He just pushed things too far, and made himself conspicuous. It’s like the difference between a local drug dealer who avoids arrest by keeping his enterprise small, selling only to a trusted circle of clients, and the big-time smuggler who drives flashy sports cars and, predictably, finds himself forced to defend his empire by murdering rivals or suspected snitches.

“A man’s got to know his limitations,” to quote Inspector Harry Callahan, and it’s obvious that Joe Exotic didn’t recognize any limits.

Joe Exotic was crazy, and Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Celebrities, Crime

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 04.17.20

Posted on | April 18, 2020 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

First, a little administrivia. This was the last day of the tax season for me, and unfortunately it may also be the last linkagery post until May 1 or whenever Gauleiter Sisolak condescends to reopen the casinos, libraries, and other such places where I can plug in my laptop and crank out the blog posts. Financially, I should be okay for a few months, what with unemployment having been bumped up by an extra $600/week, and who knows, Social Security may finally get off their dead butts and finish the “expedited claim review” they started in December 2018. I’ll try to find someplace to get Rule 5 Sunday done, at least, but no guarantees.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Red Pilled Jew: Thought Trails & Shudders From “Essential Workers”
357 Magnum: Why People Don’t Run When There’s A Fire
EBL: Brian Dennehy, RIP, also, Are You Sheeple Or A Free People?
Twitchy: Brit Hume Shares Fact-Filled Thread On Study Showing COVID Fatality Rate Just Bottomed Out To Flu-Like Levels
Louder With Crowder: Washington Post Gets BTFO’d By Dan Crenshaw Over Coronavirus Coverage
According To Hoyt: On Losing Respectibility
Vox Popoli: Shutting Down Congress, also, Jury Fraud & Fake Justice

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Racist Olympics Edition
American Conservative: Why We Should Love The Post Office
American Greatness: Facebook Coronavirus “Fact Checker” Worked With Wuhan Virus Lab, also, Political Elite Plays Its Last Card
American Thinker: This Isn’t The Pandemic You’re Looking For
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Fiscal Disaster Friday
Babalu Blog: An Anniversary Of Heroism & Shame
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 17
Cafe Hayek: You Don’t Gotta Have Faith
CDR Salamander: Something’s Funky In Big China
Don Surber: Hollywood Plans Big 150th Birthday For Lenin
First Street Journal: “Essential” Products
The Geller Report: Pelosi Quietly Deletes Video Encouraging People To Visit Chinatown; Trump Reuploads It, also, Beaches In Florida Start To Reopen Tonight
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Compared To What?
Hollywood In Toto: Why The Quarry Just Misses The Mark, also, Dismiss Exorcist III At Your Own Peril
Legal Insurrection: Paycheck Protection Program Out Of Money As Pelosi Plumps For Additional Pork, also, Fauxcahontas Open To Being Biden’s VP
Michelle Malkin: CNN/SPLC’s New Public Enemy – “Social Distancing Deniers”
The PanAm Post: Spain’s Socialist Government Makes Economic & Health Crises Worse
Power Line: An Open Letter To Governor Walz, also, Freedom Is Starting To Break Out
Shark Tank: Figlesthaler & Eagle Lead GOP Candidates In FL-19
Shot In The Dark: Moot Points
The Political Hat: Obey – Use The Pronouns, Transgender Lesbians, & Mandatory Homosexuality, also, Firing Line Friday
This Ain’t Hell: Two Charged In Death of Former Marine, also, Valor Friday
Victory Girls: Media Claims “Opening Up America” Guidelines Won’t Work
Volokh Conspiracy: Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Pelosi Asked To Explain To Small Business Owners Why Dems Are Blocking Emergency Funding, also, Joe Biden Forgets What Year 9/11 Happened
Megan McArdle: Rural Areas Think They’re The Coronavirus Exception. They’re Not.
Mark Steyn: The Sages & The Non-Essentials

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Category: Linkagery

Good News: More Evidence COVID-19 Is Less Lethal Than Most People Believe

Posted on | April 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

For some time now, it has been apparent that a large percentage of people infected with COVID-19 are either asymptomatic or have such mild symptoms that they have never been tested for the virus. From an epidemiological perspective, this is a double-edged sword. If you’re infected but asymptomatic, you can spread the disease without knowing it. This probably explains, for example, why New York City went from having just one known case in early March to having hundreds of cases within a couple of weeks. It’s possible that many who spread the virus never knew they were infected because they never had symptoms.

However, there is a bright side to this double-edged sword: If a substantial percentage of Americans have already been infected by COVID-19 without becoming sick (and never getting tested) then the fatality rate would be much lower than is suggested by the simple arithmetic based on reported cases and reported deaths from the disease. Nationally, the U.S. has 683,786 reported cases, and 34,575 reported deaths, which would mean 5% death rate. The rate is much lower in some states; Florida reports 24,119 cases and 686 deaths, which is a 2.8% death rate. If there are many asymptomatic people who have never been tested, however, the death rate is actually much lower. And . . .

EXAMPLE #1:

Sweeping testing of the entire crew of the coronavirus-stricken U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: The majority of the positive cases so far are among sailors who are asymptomatic, officials say.
Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19, the potentially lethal respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, the Navy says. The service did not speculate about how many might later develop symptoms or remain asymptomatic.
“With regard to COVID-19, we’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.
The figure is higher than the 25% to 50% range offered on April 5 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force.

EXAMPLE #2:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now “actively looking into” results from universal COVID-19 testing at Pine Street Inn homeless shelter.
The broad-scale testing took place at the shelter in Boston’s South End a week and a half ago because of a small cluster of cases there.
Of the 397 people tested, 146 people tested positive. Not a single one had any symptoms.
“It was like a double knockout punch. The number of positives was shocking, but the fact that 100 percent of the positives had no symptoms was equally shocking,” said Dr. Jim O’Connell, president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which provides medical care at the city’s shelters.
O’Connell said that the findings have changed the future of COVID-19 screenings at Boston’s homeless shelters.
“All the screening we were doing before this was based on whether you had a fever above 100.4 and whether you had symptoms,” said O’Connell. “How much of the COVID virus is being passed by people who don’t even know they have it?”

EXAMPLE #3:

The first large-scale community test of 3,300 people in Santa Clara County found that 2.5 to 4.2% of those tested were positive for antibodies — a number suggesting a far higher past infection rate than the official count.
Based on the initial data, researchers estimate that the range of people who may have had the virus to be between 48,000 and 81,000 in the county of 2 million — as opposed to the approximately 1,000 in the county’s official tally at the time the samples were taken.
“Our findings suggest that there is somewhere between 50- and 80-fold more infections in our county than what’s known by the number of cases than are reported by our department of public health,” Dr. Eran Bendavid, the associate professor of medicine at Stanford University who led the study, said in an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer.

You see that the emphasis in media reporting on these results is on the negative aspect — a large number of asymptomatic cases means that spread of the infection is wider than we knew, and more difficult to detect — so that they completely ignore the upside. In the Boston homeless shelter story, for example, this is a population that, to say the least, has less-than-optimal access to health care, and yet you have 146 case in which none of the infected people even had symptoms? Similarly, in Santa Clara County, the random testing suggests there have already been tens of thousands of asymptomatic coronavirus cases in the community — people who were infected, but never got sick. And the Navy’s testing on the aircraft carrier, where most of the sailors are young people in prime physical condition, the large number of asymptomatic cases indicates that very few such people will experience anything more than mild symptoms from this coronavirus. This is good news.

We should be encouraged, and ignore the media’s negative spin.




 

Category: Health Care

Just a Quick Note

Posted on | April 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

My Wednesday post about the death of Mackenzie Lueck has been deleted, because two of my kids objected to the tone of my commentary. This bothers me, as the entire point I wished to make is that what led to Mackenzie’s death was the kind of “non-judgmental” attitude that prohibits us from describing prostitution in plain English, resorting to euphemisms like “sugar baby” that make this evil seem harmless.

Prostitution is always wrong, and anyone who wishes to argue otherwise ought to expect strong opposition and criticism. In the article I linked Wednesday, one of the dead girl’s university “friends” said she believes that 60 percent of girls in her circle of sorority sisters have engaged in some kind of “sugar baby” type of activity. She argued in defense of this activity, as if no one could rightfully condemn it, and as a parent, I was profoundly horrified by her attitude. Perhaps in expressing my horror, I was too flippantly sarcastic, or used blunt language that offended people, and so I have taken down that post. However, in doing so, I wish to make clear that I have not changed my mind on the subject. Selah.




 

Category: Blogging

A ‘Granular’ Re-Opening Plan

Posted on | April 17, 2020 | Comments Off on A ‘Granular’ Re-Opening Plan

 

During the past couple of weeks of daily briefings, Dr. Deborah Birx has popularized the word “granular” to describe how the COVID-19 task force is tracking the spread of the disease. While the news media remain focused on the Big Numbers — the cumulative total of cases and the death toll — those whose job it is to try and control this contagion must pay attention to a series of small-scale pictures: What is causing the increase in cases in one particular county? Are local health officials able to do complete contact tracing on new patients? Does the task force need to move more resources into this region?

During the discussion of when and how to “re-open the economy” (a misleading phrase, because large segments of economic activity have not been restricted by “stay-at-home” orders), the anti-Trump media seemed to be under the impression that a one-size-fits-all approach would be imposed by the White House, which never made sense. There are many parts of the country where rates of COVID-19 infection are still very low, and there is no reason why these communities cannot be permitted to ease restrictions, while at the same time keeping the viral “hot spots” under lockdown orders. For example, in Florida, no one is suggesting that the Miami area should just “go back to business” anytime soon, but it doesn’t make sense to maintain indefinitely the same restrictions in Lakeland and Kissimmee.

If the level of infection, on a per-capita basis, is comparatively low in a community, and if the number of new cases is small enough that each individual case can be contained via quarantine and contact tracing, then a return to something like “normal” life is possible. Of course, there must be measures to protect the elderly and other high-risk individuals, but let me quote something from an Associated Press article:

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

That’s from an article about Brazil, whose president fired the health minister this week, but it is a fair summary of what we know: Most people who become infected with COVID-19 are never hospitalized; some are asymptomatic, or nearly so, while a relatively small percentage of those infected develop serious problems which may be fatal. Thursday’s report from Florida, for example, shows 23,340 known coronavirus cases since March 1, of which 3,458 (14.8%) have ever been hospitalized, and 668 (2.9%) have died. Keep in mind, of course, that some unknown percentage of Floridians have actually been infected already, but experienced few or no symptoms, and recovered without ever being tested or treated by any medical professional. So the actual death rate is probably lower than what has been reported, and Florida’s 668 deaths in a population of more than 21 million are but a fraction of the per-capita death rate in New York, New Jersey or Michigan. Letting states and local communities manage their outbreaks, under guidance based on “granular” metrics, is what the Trump plan is about:

President Donald Trump gave governors a road map Thursday for recovering from the economic pain of the coronavirus pandemic, laying out “a phased and deliberate approach” to restoring normal activity in places that have strong testing and are seeing a decrease in COVID-19 cases.
“We’re starting our life again,” Trump said during his daily press briefing. “We’re starting rejuvenation of our economy again.”
He added, “This is a gradual process.”
The new guidelines are aimed at easing restrictions in areas with low transmission of the coronavirus, while holding the line in harder-hit locations. They make clear that the return to normalcy will be a far longer process than Trump initially envisioned, with federal officials warning that some social distancing measures may need to remain in place through the end of the year to prevent a new outbreak. And they largely reinforce plans already in the works by governors, who have primary responsibility for public health in their states.
“You’re going to call your own shots,” Trump told the governors Thursday afternoon in a conference call, according to an audio recording obtained by The Associated Press. “We’re going to be standing alongside of you.”

My guess is that we’ll see a resumption of spring training games in Florida in a matter of weeks. Just keep watching the numbers.




 

Category: Donald Trump, Health Care
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