Letting a good crisis go to waste

A year ago the secprogs were praying, after their manner, for a recession that would get Trump voted out of office in 2020. It does happen in such a circumstance; look at Carter and George H.W. Bush and Herbert Hoover.

But they can't seem to stick to one script, and in the era of social media, it's a lot harder to talk out of both sides of your mouth without the same audience hearing opposing stories from the same person. When there was a little less information and a lot more control, a lot of people will hear one bad story, and a lot of other people will hear another bad story, and most of the rest will hear both but only in small enough parts that it will seem less like a contradiction and more like a complex mass of bad news. The few who grok both prongs of the conspiracy for what they really are, were few enough not have much electoral impact.

Not anymore. Now most of us have the whole story at our fingertips. There's still more information and disinformation than we as a society are savvy enough to see all the way through yet, but the genie is out of the bottle.

So now when false rape accusations get made against high profile political appointees, we still have people picking sides based on inadequate evidence, but everybody can see how embarrassing the process of sausage making is. Faith in the old institutions is eroded, but not just in the targets that those who stooped to low tactics hoped to disparage.

And when a potential crisis arises in Hubei, the Dems poo-poo Trump for overreacting and don't let him do anything but cut off trade with China, and say "go to the Chinese New Year parade or you're racist."  When that turns out to be inadequate, they poo-poo him for not having done enough, and cite as evidence a bunch of watery out of context quotes that were intended to give people some hope and instill peace, and stay mum about having discouraged social distancing at a critical time because it may have been too early to know but racist signaling in retrospect is really not a fair counterpoint to a public health concern. When the damage that was done continues to blossom, they poo-poo him for his optimistic naïveté and start doing their Chicken Little impressions.

So now we're basically in a recession. If this all ended tomorrow, maybe it wouldn't qualify as a real recession; it's not so much that people are fiscally battening down the hatches to weather out a storm of low confidence, but everybody just putting their business on hold.  The demand is pent up, not gone, and the big companies that operate a lot on LTAs are stuck between trying to get out of them and just trying to manage them in the new situation.  But after a while people run out of the capacity to keep waiting, and businesses do board up, and workers do try to find alternative sources of income, and after a while longer the chances of the band getting back together start pointing at zero.

But even now this isn't really a recession. The stock market's behavior is just a symptom. What this is, is a crisis. And a crisis is like a war: the leaders who demonstrate the willingness and intent, in word and deed, to help America survive and thrive, are the ones who will keep or gain the reins of power until normality returns.

But the Dems have been telling us for over a decade now that, either by name or by effect, America needs to end, and we either ought to be subsumed in either some kind of global identity or anonymized under a swarm of immigrants and intersected identities that still think the brass ring known as the American dream is still here to be grasped.

Whatever the world as a whole is going through, these considerations are a luxury that Americans are decreasingly willing to indulge in. We finally have a real taste of toilet paper shortages and bread lines, and "well, at least the billionaires can't hoard any more than the rest of us" no longer sounds so comforting.

In the end, who is more likely to keep the power?  The known quantity, or the challenger who has no relevant experience (remember when that was a meaningful criticism)?  In the end, who is more likely to win the election?  The guy who stumbles along the way but at least tries to remind us that this isn't the end of the world and is actually trying to do something, or the guy who still thinks pronouns and replacing convicts in prison with socially distant paddle boarders are more pressing concerns than toilet paper and access to food?

Governor Whitmer, if you were trying to recoup your executive failure by appealing to Trump to shut down Michigan for you...

...this was not the way to do it.

See here for my original, recent post on the Michigan governor's "audition for VP" theory.

But she ran primarily on a "fix the roads" platform, which to be fair was a high priority before the pandemic.  That's kind of like Ralph Nader running on an airbags platform, except she won.  Now what, though?  This is harder than a state infrastructure crusade, isn't it?

Maybe the powers that be are thinking "ja wohl, she might be our kind of people after all," and hope that in seven or fifty-five months people will only remember the name and face when they go into the booth.

So they for three years periodically accused Trump, by dint of doing anything they didn't like, of being a dictator, as if exercising his duties in well precedented ways they didn't approve in his particular case, constituted by itself or in any degree tyranny.

But then the Wuhan virus hits and after poo-poohing him for overreacting, they "suddenly" panic and demand martial law, they demand shelter in place rules, they demand money be printed (or at least taxed) to support people who can't go to work and then divert some of it to the Kennedy Center, which lays off performers anyway.

My favorite example: the governor of Michigan begs after a fashion Trump to do the things I enumerated above, and then does them herself when she gets tired of waiting.  She should have done it herself immediately; if she has the power now, she had it when this all started too, and it was her duty to tend to Michigan more than it is his.

Like a friggin' cop who shows up and then calls 911.  Call for backup if you want, but you still have a job to do while you're waiting.

Apparently her strident posturing is to win the electoral affections of Biden, but I think it worked the other way. I'll explain in a minute.

Trump has the authority to impose martial law. He does not have the authority to violate the peaceable assembly clause. Whether groups of ten in this circumstance don't meant the peaceable criterion is debatable, but either way it's not the president's purview to regulate such things.
A governor, on the other hand, can make the state national guard enforce her will to some degree, including forcing large groups of people to disperse. It's been done before.

Ms. Governor of Michigan, the Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Bus Depot is on line one. They'd like to interest you in some ironic optics about exercising executive power.

So it's weird how the Left seems so ready to invest more and more power in authorities and then when they have an opportunity to exercise some power, they run crying to daddy.  Even if daddy is a Republican.  Do they think they can bait and frame him with something more unpopular than their esoteric political aesthetics?  Do they still fail to understand they don't have the clout to overcome all the Constitutional checks and balances and electoral memory that would prevent them first from inventing tyrannical laws and then preventing the other side from ever getting the chance to use them?

Best I can figure is it's sort of a litmus test. Nagin failed; he did provide an opportunity to score some cheap points against Bush (but in those days that was like open mic night), but he did not show that he could step up and set an example. The governor of Michigan failed in the same way; she screamed her rhetoric but seems angry only because orangemanbad didn't do as soon as she wanted what she should have done, by her own power at any time, until she was I guess forced against her will to stand in the breach.  Lucky for her Trump's not running for governor of Michigan.

Pols who can take the reins in a crisis have a chance of a national career. Some people who never have the opportunity of such a crisis get there anyway. But pols who don't, finish their careers like varsity athletes who peaked in high school, periodically calling to the public mind what was so important about them but never accomplishing anything greater ever again. And I wonder if the DNC looks at it exactly that way.

Which is not to criticize. It's not uncommon to see people make a professional error of some magnitude and then find themselves, whether they ever realize it or not, off the career track. But it's interesting and it makes me wonder to what extent such figures are merely tolerated for what little they can contribute after all, and not "encouraged" to move on and let newer blood prove itself.

This is a little more politically hot than I usually like to get into, but...

...have you seen #filmyourownhospital?

I suppose there will always be a few hospitals that aren't as busy as the ones that we keep seeing footage of on the nightly news, but after a while it will be fair to ask "is the real crisis ever really going to happen?"

It may still be premature on my part, true, but I'm starting to smell a parallel between a couple things.

The first is three years of "the proof of Trump's collusion with Russia is imminent."

The second is "the coronavirus surge is no longer racist paranoia but imminent."

The scientist in me is interested in seeing what kind of data we'll get from this epidemiological experiment.  But the historian in me wonders how many patriotic sheriffs are out there who will refuse to support the encroachment on civil liberties that is happening because of all this.

I'm not talking about real threats to public health.  I'm talking about one guy paddle boarding by himself getting accosted by two boats and arrested.  I'm talking about 19 year old Pennsylvania girls getting $200 tickets for driving after "curfew" despite being socially distant from everyone except the cop that pulled her over in the first place.  

I'm also talking about the strange policies that sound like they're supposed to reduce human contact but in effect only make it worse.  Does a store get 100 customers during the ten hours it's open each day?  That's about ten customers an hour.  Cut that down to five hours and the hundred customers now have half the time to go shopping, and if it's an essential business like a grocery store, people on average aren't going to stop coming.  In the short run it may, since people will binge shop and then stay home, but when people come back to find empty shelves, they'll come back more often hoping for a restock, and thus we have more shopping trips than we would have seen otherwise.  So we have 100 customers coming in five hours instead of ten, and thus instead of ten customers per hour, we have twenty.  Twice as many.  Was this just stupid, or was it irrelevant to the real goal of the exercise?

The historian in me also wonders if the patriots who are staying at home for now and issuing warnings about post-Weimar Germany on social media will notice when the last chance to stand up, to draw the line in the sand, comes and passes.

I recently heard...

...that, due to the economic slowdown from corona, about 1/3 of all investment wealth (I think in the US) has been lost.

 This predominantly affects the wealthy, since they not just invest more in terms of absolute number of dollars, but tend to invest a larger proportion of their income or otherwise-liquid assets in businesses, the stock market, etc.

 Is this considered an acceptable mode of wealth redistribution?

I don't always buy the political stuff Neil deGrasse Tyson puts out... (edited)

...but when I do it seems like it's going to be one of those "the Left eats its own" cases.

I saw recently a tweet of his from late last summer trying to put into perspective the different high profile causes of death in America.  He showed how things like the flu and cancer cause tens of thousands of deaths a year but the total number of school shootings deaths is still in the hundreds.

Of course, we can't let facts get in the way of condemning guns, so someone tweeted back how we're doing so much to reduce the number of deaths to influenza and cancer but we're doing f-all about guns, and that's why people are disproportionately upset.

The hell "we" aren't.  

Hell, I'll say it again without sarcasm quotes:  the hell we aren't.

Cosmetic AR-15 bans, bump stock bans, permits to buy ammunition, magazine capacity restrictions, "gun-free zone" laws and signs where laws might not apply, increase in the presence of "resource officers" at schools around the country.

It's not that we aren't doing anything.  It's that most of the things they try aren't working.  NDT's point is that getting mad but insisting we try the same ineffective things even harder is not going to help.  We've been fighting the flu and cancer for  as long as people have been getting sick, and yes, we have made progress, but the one is a disease that looks like it will never really go away, and the other is a disease that really we barely even understand.

Really, it's a bad analogy.  Let me draw some parallels.

You’re not working to reduce medical errors by taking away scalpels.
You’re not working to stop the flu by taking away tissues.
You’re not working to stop suicides by taking away guns. Well, you are, but....
You’re not working to stop car accidents by taking away cars or roads.
But you think taking away guns will stop homicides, and are tone deaf to the UK's creeping knife restrictions.

Why don't we get more angry at people who take a dump or sneeze and don't wash their hands?  Why don't we put more social pressure on people who still smoke in public or put undertested chemicals in food or household or other personal products?  

We've done some of that and it's helped, but there's no controversy there, even though people are still getting sick and coming in to work.

There's barely any controversy about when armed security refuses to confront a shooter, even though that's the one thing they're trained and paid to do.

Historically though we haven't held the school shooters responsible, and I'm not talking about the fact that some of them were legally juveniles.

Thank God the discussion is finally starting to turn towards what makes people go postal.

Yeah..."Postal."  Remember when that's what the problem was?

And like with corporate health and safety policies, regular people wake up from the latest environmental fad and realize it was a one dimensional issue after all.

What do I mean by that?

Look back to my brief harangue about how (in particular) New York banned plastic grocery bags, demanding we buy reusable ones or revert to paper bags--but we have to pay for those, and the first time I got one, the bag ruptured twice just in the process of picking it up.

Some of you are old enough to remember when plastic got popular, on the grounds that it was easier to recycle than brown bag paper.  Maybe the technology has changed and paper really is lower impact these days.

But in their push to ride the crest of this green trend, everyone failed or declined to consider other factors that should have gone into the calculus.

Maybe there aren't enough people like me who like using the bags as bathroom trash can liners to make a difference.  I'm skeptical of that, but to be fair all my data are anecdotal.

Back when the Chinese restaurants were open, orders were often placed in plastic bags even if they were first in a paper bag, because plastic is waterproof so if my mo shu leaked I wouldn't get stains on the passenger seat in my car.  Most people don't order enough at one time to fill up a cardboard box like is sometimes used, and those are bulky enough you'd need to have a catastrophic spill to soak all the way through before getting home, but the restaurant probably wouldn't have enough boxes to go around, anyway.

Anyway, fast forward to the pandemic and everybody suddenly realized that reusable bags can accrue germs when the sit on the floor of the car, or on the ground, or soak up spills.  That's not good for the home team.  Or for the immunocompromised team.  So now plastic bags are back on the menu.

I'm just going to leave it at that.  Next time, can we at least try to anticipate some unintended consequences first?

So now Biden was accused of...things far worse than hair sniffing.

Back in the 90s, this was, and she told people at the time, so this isn't some Russian-fomented bimbo eruption.

If you like your evidence from one side of the spectrum, there's a sufficient article  here.  Another one that is in the Lifestyle section instead of Politics or...I don't even know if they have something like a police blotter section...can be found here if you want another example of the different levels at which journalistic bias can be engineered.  If you want to read something from the other side of the spectrum, look here.

The flip-flopping in social media by people who were outraged by the mass of accusations they felt added up to evidence against Brett Kavenaugh, the insistence that it doesn’t matter because Trump has more accusations (I'm not even sure that's true) just telegraphs you're not on any moral high ground, you're just doing the marketing work for your favorite team.  (h/t to Shoe0nHead for the metaphor).

If you can't even demonstrate that your side is actually better, if your best attempts to do so only make it worse, why should we be swayed by the skin suit you peeled off a moral human being and put on to parade around in front of us?  Didn't it occur to you we'd be even more off-put?

Same thing with the virus "hoax.”  Anybody who says Trump meant "the virus is a hoax" instead of "this is another political opportunity like the hoaxes that brought vaporous impeachment charges," especially since he was already trying to do something about it, wants it to mean that, don’t even want to acknowledge the perfectly neutral fact that he was in the crosshairs for years, it failed, and they’re trying to do it again with this—without even having to argue about whether it’s real.