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A Cross Between Albert Einstein and Arnold Schwarzenegger…
… the body of Albert Einstein and the mind of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Early in the Wuhan virus outbreak, we had a choice between two distinct paths: we could broadly shut down the country, creating an obvious economic disaster in hopes of limiting the spread of the virus; or we could isolate what we believed to be the most at-risk population, the elderly and sick, and allow the economy to continue functioning.
New York City chose a hybrid approach: shut down the economy and put Wuhan-positive seniors into nursing homes where they could infect the other residents. For whatever reason, the powers that be doomed both the economy and the elderly.
In the meantime, some of us who live a few hundred miles from New York City, in counties where ICU beds are empty and ventilators are unused, would like to get our hair cut. Last I heard, that might be deemed permissible next month.
Published in General
I’m not sure that the progressives who shut down the economy had a clue about the economic damage they would cause. And now they think they can plan their way out of it.
Good luck with that. Time to start claiming to be a Native American and grow it long.
They always think they can plan their way out of it.
I would say I resemble that remark, but my body is closer to that of a beach ball than Einstein’s.
I’m good with “attempt to allow the economy to continue functioning.”
I think that most politicians are not stupid. I think that they are catering to the voters. Most Americans seem to be quite committed to the Nanny State. A great many Americans seem to be persuaded by “granny killer” rhetoric. This goes not just for voters on the Left, but for most of the middle, and some who claim to be conservatives.
It’s not everybody, but it’s enough to tilt the elections.
The corrupt, Leftist media could not peddle their nonsense if much of the public were not so gullible.
So I think that the fundamental problem is the people. We get the leaders that we deserve, and we get the media that we deserve. Those who dissent are like a voice in the wilderness, and are roundly vilified.
It’s hard to know where to place blame, because there are so many institutions involved. Primary and secondary education is corrupt, the colleges and universities are corrupt, the judiciary has been corrupt and often malicious for a good 70-80 years, the Democratic Party is corrupt, many of the churches (mostly the “mainline” ones) are anti-Scripture, and the media is almost entirely on the side of the corrupt institutions. The professions are corrupt, including my own (the law). Don’t even get me started on the doctors and psychologists and pychiatrists.
The corruption in the FBI and DOJ, revealed again this week even worse than ever before, is astonishing.
It is truly remarkable that so many people can be so completely wrong, and yet not only confident in their error but overflowing with self-righteousness.
Hank, thanks for the chance to unload this rant.
Good and hard.
I don’t entirely trust polls to be accurate, and I certainly don’t trust public opinion to be informed. Most people get their “news” from garbage media — television news, major newspapers. Having said that, I figure the way we shift public opinion is to keep talking, trying to persuade people. The argument that it’s the people’s fear and not the government’s rules that is keeping people home doesn’t mean we shouldn’t repeal the rules. Whatever the people think, if the government doesn’t remove the restrictions people can’t get back to work.
The ironic thing is that the people choose to social distance before the lockdowns and are choosing to social distance after the restart. The government run nursing homes should have been more proactive and the people should have been left free to live their lives cautiously.
They seemed to think that you can shut down half the economy, or two-thirds, and the rest will keep going ok. As if there weren’t millions of parts whose interconnectedness is crucial and often invisible when things are working.
It’s why central planning can’t work.
I’m not sure, either, but I thought the economic damage was a feature, not a bug. It’s hard to read their minds and they never speak the truth, so it’s hard to know for sure.
Dems will blame a Trump for the broken economy, ignoring that he listened to the “experts.” Had he not shut down the economy, they would have accused him of ignoring the science and would have blamed all the deaths on him. It was a no win situation thanks to partisan politics now carried to the extreme. They accused him of doing too much, then not enough. Soon they will pivot back to accusing him of doing too much.
No wonder Democrats are talking about nominating Cuomo given that Biden is not up to the campaign, much less the job. Who knew that he would be unable to match the performance of the listless Clinton 2016 campaign. Who better represents Team Blue’s response to the crisis?
Wish you were completely wrong
Democrat leadership embraced the shut down once it sunk in what it would accomplish for them. It will destroy smaller firms, strengthen the central government and the largest and most remote and digitized firms. Don’t be confused just because most Democrats and lots of Republicans are naive about their leadership. They know what they are doing and why.
Whether you isolate the well or the sick depends on the prevelence of the disease in the population-which we didn’t (and really still don’t) know-as well as on your testing capacity-which was & still is inadequate. So the call isn’t as easy as most think.
I recently read the book, Apache Voices, in which it was mentioned that in times of epidemic, the Apache people would break up into small bands and separate from each other. I suppose that was a way of isolating the well. Or maybe both.
Well, sure. But there are other choices as well.
For example, we could have isolated the high-risk population and let everyone else go back to work. We could have used private-sector controls rather than legal mandates. And we still can, and should.
Which choice you make has a lot to do with how you value people living free of government coercion. Your comment emphasizes the unknowns — how little we really know about the state of the disease in the population. That can either prompt one to endorse restrictive government action out of a sense of caution, or can cause one to reject that action because one believes that only a clear and unambiguous justification would make such action defensible.
None of this makes sending untested but possibly Wuhan-positive elderly people back into their nursing homes a good idea, of course.
I suspect that politicians thought they had to be seen as doing everything possible to save lives. Many of them are still stuck in that mode, and the news media is going along. Polls are still providing them support, although that’s beginning to change.
States that have started opening up are doing well, so maybe that will shift opinion.
Or something. I’m still trying to figure out the bizarrely misguided New York City nursing home rules.
I expect it will. I expect that soon many of them will suddenly decide that it’s okay to re-open, and act like they are leading, rather than following, the citizens. And that’s okay with me, as long as they do it soon.
So you wouldn’t have put infected elderly patients in nursing homes? Where would you have put them?
Given that the other nursing home residents seem to be pretty much the most vulnerable population on the planet, I think essentially anywhere else would have been preferable. So, for example, the city could have:
Whatever choice they made, there is still no rational explanation I can think of for explicitly prohibiting testing of returning elderly prior to their re-admission into the nursing homes. Why deny nursing home staff information about which returning residents are and are not Wuhan-virus positive?
I’m trying to figure out New York City, period. I’ve never been there, but last night I did a virtual bicycle ride that had been newly uploaded to Rouvy. It’s titled, “Edgewater to NYC Midtown via west side bike path.” Now I have a completely different mental picture of the city. I suppose I could have gotten some of that from Google Streetview, but it’s more interesting when seeing traffic and people moving about.
Lots of people were wearing masks — even some bicyclers, though masked bicyclers weren’t so common. Some drivers wore masks. The bicycle/pedestrian lane on the George Washington Bridge was fairly crowded on the way over, and not so much on the return trip. The route both ways went past NY-Presbyterian hospital. We’ll see if I picked up a virtual coronavirus.
It was a 23 mile round trip. Several red lights were run. As far as I could tell, no pedestrians were flattened in the making of the video. The stats show that I was not riding as hard as I usually do, but I have trouble riding full speed when there are pedestrians and bicycles to squeeze past in narrow places.
Do it again so June 27th, World Naked Bike Ride day. You won’t have to dress for it.
Not even a mask?