Notes On The Collapse

COVID: Two False Narratives

It’s not farfetched, if you stop to consider it. CNN’s viewers expect them to… how to put this diplomatically?… to err on the side of safety (and if at all possible, the Democratic Party). And Fox’s audience is used to them opposing CNN as much as is possible. So it’s not at all unreasonable to expect that both narratives are, as AOC famously put it, factually incorrect but morally right.

In this particular example, the narratives are driven by different ways to measure the danger of COVID. Fox uses the population mortality rate (PMR) because it’s low; CNN uses the case mortality rate (CMR) because it’s high enough to be alarming. And both numbers by themselves are completely meaningless. Here’s why.

Let’s say you’re trying to figure out the answer to a simple question: How safe is it for me to fly to Florida over Thanksgiving?

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We Need More Parties

The president flew out today, on his way to Europe to talk up his new spending plan. Which, at present, is half what his first spending plan was and does nothing to reduce our spending deficit, not to mention our debt.

Which is fine. Keynes explained it to us: Why it is that, in tough times, we need to borrow and spend so that the good times return sooner. He used many pages of complicated mathematical formulae to back up his premise, and the number of people who can even understand them much less comprehensibly explain them is tiny, so let’s just take his word on it, shall we? The government is right to borrow and spend. We may disagree on how it spends what it gets—

Ah, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We do disagree. We pretty much all disagree, and volubly, at great length.

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Whose Fault Is The Debt Limit?

At 2 p.m. today, the NBER will release the monthly Treasury update of debt relative to credit. (Here’s a spoiler: It won’t be anything we didn’t see a month ago. We’re up to our ears in debt.) Meanwhile, Congress is rushing back into emergency session for a quick fix to stave off default as our spending continues to increasingly exceed our income. At a time when every politician is casting blame about the rapidly ballooning national debt and the continual political struggle surrounding raising the debt limit, it’s worth our while to examine the larger picture: Whose fault, really, is the precarious condition of our national finances?

It’s tempting for partisans to each blame the other party; it’s easily done, too, as government waste has become proverbial and inefficiency is automatically assumed without the bother of proving it. It’s equally simple for a certain class of people to throw up their hands and blame all politicians, as though they themselves would do better if they were in charge. But even a little brief reflection will show that, while these are satisfying accusations, they can’t possibly have much merit.

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Hallowe’en As Oppression

I read the other day that our modern view of Hallowe’en was created using white suburbia as a model, and that it should be dismantled because the act of Trick Or Treating propagates racial oppression. The gentleman who wrote that had earlier mentioned that I was unqualified to opine on matters of race, as I’m one of the oppressors and couldn’t possibly understand the way he could.

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No Way Out

“There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is — other people!”

– Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit” / “Huis Clos”

The latest in the interminable blame-game handoffs that are what passes for normalcy in Washington D.C. is upon us — again. And, as always, it’s everyone’s fault and no-one’s.

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Healthcare: Tear It All Down

I’ve never understood why it is that otherwise intelligent people instantly assume that a simple, massive change is the only solution.

(Brace yourselves. This rant has been building for a while.)

It’s a truism that every single complex problem has a simple, easy-to-understand, common-sense wrong answer. What’s wrong with complex solutions for complicated problems?

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Texas Abortion Law: This Is A Good Thing

Even its proponents will often be compelled to admit: This is a strange type of law.

There’s precedent for granting bounties to private citizens, and it’s very probably lawful to use the civil courts instead of criminal for enforcement in this or a similar fashion. Even if it’s not, centering a counter-argument on this point is an error anyway. Those who invented the bill in the first place are attempting to choose the ground for the next fight over what is effectively a “heartbeat law” on abortion.

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Vaccines and the Declaration of Independence

Permit me, gentle readers, to recommend a book: “Starship Troopers”. If you’re looking for a gift for that stubborn conservative in your life, it should do fine.

But, recognizing that you probably won’t have time today, and you may not actually have a copy on your shelf at present, I’ll paraphrase a bit and apply that to the vaccine debate. After, you can go buy the book at the link provided above. (Independent booksellers will benefit, not Bezos.)

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