Okay — that's the argument I'm not seeing. Why not?!
I do see "Goodbye, Green New Deal" by Kevin D. Williamson at The National Review (dated March 27, 2020):
The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing....ADDED: If the argument I suggest is not being made by the erstwhile advocates of the Green New Deal, it seems to mean that they were never sincere about their demands. The Greta Thunberg HOW DARE YOU? argument was fake. Green New Dealers: Step up and prove me wrong.
What we are seeing right now is what it looks like when Washington tries to steer the economy.... The Left wants very much to convince Americans that climate change presents an emergency of the same kind requiring the same “moral equivalent of war” worldwide mobilization.... A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.
I don't expect an answer, so I will offer what I think is the best explanation of how there could be both silence and sincerity. The Green New Dealers feel empathy for those who are now suffering from the disease and from the economic shut down. They don't want to exacerbate the pain. And it's not merely empathy. They're afraid of the political damage if they point to the pain and call it a great opportunity. They don't want to look like ghouls.
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259 comments:
1 – 200 of 259 Newer› Newest»It isn't as interesting to talk about shutting the airlines down and ushering in the green new deal when we see 6 million people a week filing for new unemployment and the green new deal would make that permanent.
what ever happened to those reusable cloth grocery bags? weren't THEY going to save the planet?
There was a comment from a Tory leader at the tail end of the Thatcher/Major era to the effect We know we live in a democracy and eventually the opposition will be in power. We are simply trying to hang on until they are sane.
Eventually the Democrats will be back in power. Unfortunately I see no indication they will be sane.
environmentalism is a GREAT thing to believe in; while on your jet, going to ski in the Alps.
Sitting in your house, watching your 401K evaporate.... Not so much
The connection between economic inactivity and environmental conservation of the GND sort is drawn too starkly right now. Were someone to make this argument, and I expect that GND proponents will, it will sear into our national memory the reality that GND = economic pain for Americans. We play around with GND type stuff when we are feeling most affluent, not insecure. Right now there are many millions of Americans in real pain, so the smarter proponents of GND type programs are keeping their mouth shut lest the obvious conclusions be drawn by too many: GND proponents hate people, hate economic activity and rejoice when economic misfortune befalls millions and when millions of lives are overturned and made insecure.
"The ravages of the disease are horrible and tragic, and no sane person welcomed the onslaught"
No sane person, sure, and no true Scotsman.
I know this is not where the post was going, but: Lots of politicians welcomed the chance to tank the economy and assert their power, and did so eagerly. Lots of other people argued that we needed the horrible ravages to fight the disease, cuz "real calculations"--we had to do something, everything to stop the even more horrible deaths of 11M, scratch that, 2M, scratch that, 1M, scratch that, 200K, or if we save one life it's worth it, or if we don't, health care will be overwhelmed. The pro-panic faction sought the onslaught.
Babylon. Bee this morning:
“Bernie Sanders Drops Out As Campaign Goals Of Locking Everyone Up, Destroying Economy Already Achieved.”
When do I get my freedom and civil liberties back?
You like the shutdown? I can get you another shutdown. I can get you a shutdown lasts forever, by four o'clock. With nail polish on it. That's the argument, basically.
Seen in Instapundit today:
"So how is everybody enjoying the free 30 Day trial of Socialism?"
Which is funny, but even though we're waiting in line for toilet paper, we can still get food delivered to us. Given the New Green Deal, we'd have no food. No deliveries. The heads of the state would. But the masses would not.
It's been tried before. Look up Ukraine mass starvation by Soviets.
Babylon. Bee this morning:
“Bernie Sanders Drops Out As Campaign Goals Of Locking Everyone Up, Destroying Economy Already Achieved.”
When do I get my freedom and civil liberties back?
Ha, I don't always find the nation's new paper of record funny, but that Sanders snark is perfect.
Are you enjoying your 30-day FREE TRIAL of totalitarianism?
Seen on the internet
"How do you like your 60 day free trial of Socialism?"
That's some deep thinking if you have the stomach to go there.
Why isn't the Green Leap Forward getting any traction? Theory. Theory, is like COVID models of deaths. Abstract, until time allows reality to catch up to predictions,(especially ones about the future) and we find out listening to the experts is a fools errand.
We aren't hearing about it because the celebrities who pushed for it have seen what their lives would be like, and now they don't want it.
Really, why isn’t everybody ready to string the fucking authorities up?
This panic was wildly overblown so they could run around like little Hitlers ordering shutdowns and telling people to hide in their homes.
People who advocate the Green New Deal cannot see the current situation as even remotely similar. Or, they simply don't want to publicize that the current situation is what they advocate.
Why aren't we seeing the argument that when we phase out the economic shutdown, we need to open it up into the Green New Deal?
Because the country may be stupid but it is not yet sufficiently suicidal to go that far? The economy is going to be in the ICU for a bit BUT can/will recover. Why be in a hurry to sign a DNR and pull the plug?
Why don't we see the argument being made that all these elderly people dying off is good for the country as whole and could save us from bankruptcy? Let's see the value of this and engrain it into normal life as we move forward.
That's an argument I'm not seeing. Why not?
Once this economic nightmare is lifted it will be interesting to see what other economic disaster the Democrats will be campaigning on.
"The ravages of the disease are horrible and tragic, and no sane person welcomed the onslaught"
This is being proven everyday as extremely overblown.
This is not tragic and horrible. It's life. Simple life. Nothing more, nothing less. Mankind has dealt with life, and this is turning out to be better than any other times, and no worse than normal*.
*definition unavailable
COVID-America is more USSR than the Soviets were because we presently have 50 little tyrannies forming a Republic, each of us under some sort of state emergency order. We are a federation of temporary tyrants, at their command. For a virus sent by ChiComs to be the only effective invention by the CCP to hit our shores is pretty weird because it made us more like them, the exact opposite result than what Clinton promise when he blessed China with Most Favored Nation status. Yep the exact opposite.
The GND and whole CAGW scam are finished. If the models can’t accurately predict what Covid19 would do over 90 days then how can the models predict the climate for the whole planet in 2100?
This result is a silver lining. Add the fact that people realize that China is run by a bunch of murderers.
Because people aren't buying what the left is selling. They're insane.
The one big change that I believe will happen - don't expect to see everyone return to the office. Work from home will be WAY more common than before.
Work from home will be WAY more common than before.
My guess is that at least 1/3 of the desk jockeys who were commuting into the city every morning were doing so only so their supervisors could keep an eye on them, and play office politics with them.
I've always wondered why the greenies never made an issue out of this.
Yahoo used to have work from home. Remember when Marissa Mayer became Yahoo CEO and canceled work from home? And everyone went crazy that she, a mother herself, would try to damage other working mothers this way.
Then Yahoo released reports about how many of those work from home people had not even been logging on to their systems.
So...we'll see if work from home continues.
Because the majority of Americans either don't believe in AGW or don't think it is nearly as bad a problem as the alarmist claim it is. Also, much of the claims are based on computer models, like the ones that were used to predict orders of magnitude more deaths from the pandemic than it looks like we are going to see. In addition, who exactly determined that we (as a society) were engaged in "over activity?" What is the exact amount of activity we should be allowed to engage in? Is anyone going to be allowed to travel for tourism purposes? How many? Who? Will we be allowed to own and operate cars? Are you aware that the "Green New Deal" would have pretty much the same effect on our society as The Great Leap Forward had on China?
A liberal utopia
in which 100 trillion is spent
for govt to control every aspect of our lives
sounds good for Bribem to argue
Because Cuomo dumped hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in a failed solar venture while NYC auctioned off a bunch of respirators?
I'm really getting tired of people who sacrifice nothing telling others they need to sacrifice a lot for some lofty goal. You first, poseur.
This argument will be made, and it will help saner people to link the GND directly to economic misery and authoritarian measures and leadership, just as soon as someone gives AOC back her microphone.
Now that people have seen what’s in it, they’ll never vote for it.
we had to do something, everything to stop the even more horrible deaths of 11M, scratch that, 2M, scratch that, 1M, scratch that, 200K, or if we save one life it's worth it, or if we don't, health care will be overwhelmed. The pro-panic faction sought the onslaught. [Sebastian]
You are so cavalier about others' lives. It's good that you are immortal.
"flattening the curve"
means
"lengthening the curve"
the only cure is antibodies in 80% of the population
take as long as you like to get there
second wave!
"Why not?!"
I don't think anybody--even most Leftists--really ever wanted what the GND "promises". (Committed Leftists were only interested in the power over the economy and the suppression of our liberties that it would entail.) Supporting the GND was a sort of ideological litmus test, like a religious belief that everyone pretends to honor publicly, but which is privately recognized as absurd.
As Our Hostess suggests, the genuine economic and personal pain people are experiencing today--disastrous in many cases--makes it all too clear that the former public veneration of the GND was at best, aspirational. Indeed, no one wants another 30 days of this, much less a lifetime. It is quite possible that the Left will quietly abandon its former emphasis on the GND and come up with some other imaginary boogieman to frighten and manipulate the public with.
We could be witnessing another step on the path to becoming healthy skeptics again. That we have horrible leaders incapable of thinking clearly and we rely on experts who then rely on models is dangerous enough. That they employ flawed models is to be expected in such a scenario. That the hide the inputs and assumptions on which said models are built is unacceptable. Many of us had turned away from standard political types and rejected the arrogance of Climate Modelers who have been wrong for 20 years and never acknowledge their models’ failures. Instead they switch from Science! to ad hominem attacks on skeptics or anyone who dares question their models, which leads to us questioning their intent, to which the standard reply is “YOU HATERS JUST DON’T CARE!”
So living in a time of bad modeling and having our livelihoods taken away based on flawed models has kind of waked a lot of people up who had been content to live and let live and ignore politics. Politics has reached out and forced ALL OF US to pay attention to these stupid experts.
Bribem needs to move center
Even the Dims did not go Socialist
No sale.
You could also say that the 13 weeks beginning in late January and ending in late April matches the 13 weeks of Marine Corps basic recruit training.It has changed the point of view of most American voter forever to a reality based politics. That didn't take long.
Because this is a situation people are not enjoying. The (political) argument for the Green New Deal is that it will be enjoyable. There will be less traffic but you won't have any trouble getting where you want to go. There won't be unemployment. Instead, there will be lots of good new green jobs. Etc.
If the message you get from this disaster is that we need more green boondoggles, then I know you didn't lose much, or even really get scared.
What we should do is look at creative ways to prepare for pandemics with effective measures that attack the virus rather than us just hiding and waiting for it like teenagers is a horror film or an active shooter attack. A Manhattan Project type effort to develop a way to quickly produce immunity and treatments for an unknown contagion in a matter of days. And also a way to quarantine a few thousand people in various places safely, securely, and humanely to keep them out of hospitals.
The economy has already been crushed by the pandemic shutdown. Why put the foot of the government on its throat and keep it down?
Some will adjust their behavior - not living on the edge of their budget - but not many. Hopefully enough will value their liberty and fight for it.
And many in the media seem to welcome the onslaught, at least as an opportunity.
You know, restaurants and cooking at home seem pretty inefficient and prone to bad nutritional choices. Food should only be distributed to government facilities where it will be prepared in complicity to government regulations and distributed in correct portion sizes to be consumed on-site. Just think of the benefits! No more obesity problem and the environmental benefits from producing fewer household appliances and gadgets make it imperative that we, as a society, make this change. Its for the children.
Next, why do we let people live in individual homes surrounded by land that is not being used for food production?
Maybe they are too busy pushing payouts to illegals
One silver lining to this Coronavirus cloud is that so-called scientific modeling has been exposed. Neil Ferguson’s model that really kicked off Britain’s and the US’s social distancing panic was a flat-out lie. His “model” spewed out 2.2 million US deaths, 500,000 Brits. As soon as this swayed Boris Johnson, he lowered his British death projections to 20,000. IOW, the high end results of the model were simply a political tool. Period. When asked to see the code that produced those outrageous high numbers we discover he wrote it himself, 13 years ago, and, no, he isn’t going to release it.
Climate change is based on models. I personally argued with climatologist Dr. Jeff Dukes from Purdue about his projections that Indiana was about to experience a 6-7 degree rise in temperature over the next 30 years. This, he told us hayseeds in a soils group meeting, was following a 1,3 temp rise over the last 125 years. “So you’re telling us we’re about to raise the rate of change 20 times!” I asked. Dr. Dukes had not expected any of us dumb farmers to do the math, I’m sure.
“That’s what the best models are showing,” he replied. (Later I went back and forth with Dukes for 20 minutes on the whole climate hoax. He was polite, unpersuasive, and flat out wrong on several points. Twas a glorious day.)
Scientific models are political tools, nothing else.
Blogger Kai Akker said...
we had to do something, everything to stop the even more horrible deaths of 11M, scratch that, 2M, scratch that, 1M, scratch that, 200K, or if we save one life it's worth it, or if we don't, health care will be overwhelmed. The pro-panic faction sought the onslaught. [Sebastian]
You are so cavalier about others' lives. It's good that you are immortal.
4/9/20, 8:17 AM
Exactly Kai Akker! If he is not hysterical, then he is cavalier.
Work from home will be WAY more common than before.
I have to laugh. I left a job at a major tech company a couple of years ago because they no longer wanted people working remotely and I had no desire to move to California. At the time, their priority was in supposedly making the work environment millennial friendly. That meant every team member was to be crammed into one large room with no assigned desks or work spaces. Just a few bean bag chairs. They spent huge $ converting their labs because they viewed this as the only way to attract young talent. In retrospect, maybe not the best approach.
Its also inefficient to let people choose their career path. What if they choose one that is not optimal for society?! Children should be administered aptitude tests as early as feasible and then educated for and assigned to the jobs they are best suited for. If, for some reason, they are not happy with the jobs they are assigned they can be given medication. If that does not resolve the issue then treatment in a clean, well-run government psychiatric facility would then be an option.
If that does not resolve the issue then treatment in a clean, well-run government psychiatric facility would then be an option.
That is, if their talents are of sufficient value to society.
I never really understood what “Green New Deal” actually stood for, and perhaps it’s meant to be ambiguous. But I think recall hearing that it has something to do with creating public work projects, like in the OG New Deal, and maybe putting people to work in this way might be dangerous at a time like this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“the only cure is antibodies in 80% of the population”
“take as long as you like to get there”
But the thing is, is that you don’t need to get sick to get them. You can get them fro serum from people who have recovered, or from vaccines. All we really need there is a bit of time, and the bureaucrats at the FDA etc to get out of the way.
From a comment I made yesterday:
What will be interesting is the next time we have a Democrat president, and OFFICIAL ACRONYMS say we only have 12 years left before we all die of global climate change. Or global climate change that ALSO causes new horrible viruses; I'm sure there are science-y science groups already willing to sign off on such a thing.
I mean, that's scary like a pandemic. Even worse, maybe.
This Democrat-president government -- let's say it's Biden's replacement, Hillary --would then be able to impose the same kind of economic shut-downs to prevent such devastation, right? Look how much pollution we're stopping already.
Maybe Ken B can explain how government can shut down the economy in one circumstance and not the other.
As I wrote in the earlier post:
A government that can shut everything down so easily: you have set the framework for your children and grandchildren to experience this over and over, for less and less reason.
I am Laslo.
4/8/20, 1:15 PM
"The Green New Dealers feel empathy for those who are now suffering from the disease and from the economic shut down. “
LOL. They are trying to shut down the airline bailouts as we speak.
The modern left HATE freedom and liberty. The modern left are collectivist brownshirts. They have no empathy. Collective pain and punishment isn't a bug to them, it's a feature.
The Green New Dealers feel empathy for those who are now suffering from the disease and from the economic shut down.
Environmentalists do not feel empathy for anyone who is not in lockstep with their thinking. They never have. In fact, there is a long and inglorious history of environmental extremists destroying people, their lives, and their lifelong work. It's in their DNA to run over anything that is in their way. (Greta Thunberg is cute to some on the left for her scolding. When she gets older, that scolding will become violent action against individual rights- mark my words.)
And as far as feeling empathy for the suffering from economic shutdown. You're kidding, right? They long for economic shutdown.
The reason they shy away now is because they would look as selfish as possible otherwise. PR-wise, it's not a good move for them to speak yet. But...it's coming. It's just around the corner. The NYT will soon feature articles on how we should be learning from this shut down and how we've helped the environment. Not sure summer will be any cooler, but then, that was never the desired result anyway. Control of the economy and life was.
Scientific models are political tools, nothing else.
I wonder if the fact that the models always produce the output the modeler wants is deliberate or if its a matter of unconscious bias causing the modeler to create a model that confirms his prejudices. The West Anglia email scandal would tend to confirm the former.
The environmentalists are waiting for the fear curve to flatten.
I am Laslo.
The American people, on the whole, aren't stupid. The covid19 models were wildly wrong. The CAGW models are even worse. The CAGW scam is over. Finished. Kaput.
But the thing is, is that you don’t need to get sick to get them. You can get them fro serum from people who have recovered, or from vaccines.
Serum antibodies from recovered people have a role in treating infected patients, but they won’t make uninfected people immune. They don’t stay permanently in circulation and they don’t stimulate your own immune system to replicate antibodies. Only a vaccine can do that.
To be fair: Ken B made a distinction between state and federal government.
My hunch is when a Democrat is President the distinction doesn't matter: the states will be made to fall in line.
I am Laslo.
The covid19 models scared the hell out of people, but the death toll will probably be no more than the average flu season. When this is over people will say: We shut down the economy for this based upon wrong models?
Ergo, we won't radically change our economy based on models that the Earth will forego .01 increase in temp (maybe!) in 2100.
The CAGW scam is over. I remind Bill McKibben of that daily on Twitter.
The Federal Reserve just announced $2.3 Trillion in new lending programs.
Warren Buffett has always made money for his partners.
This is the New Green Deal, that is why none of the proponents are talking about it today.
bagoh,
" waiting for it like teenagers is a horror film "
That would explain why more minorities are dying
Green deal projects aren’t shovel ready. We can’t simultaneously inject trillions of dollars to keep everyone afloat and invest money in long term projects that don’t immediately create economic gain.
That’s the logical response if anyone really is putting forth the argument. Of course there are also all of the more intangible arguments: nobody wants the kind of lifestyle and society the green dealers have promoted.
The Amazing Randi used to have a definition of pseudo-science on his website. I can't find it anymore. Probably because he has gone all in on the CAGW scam and predictions of climate change pretty much conformed to the definition.
They don't want to look like ghouls
Whereas Nancy Pelosi wore it with prude trying to stuff the GND into emergency legislation, after holding up the relief funds for a week, a week in which experts were still predicting hundreds of thousands of dead Americans. True ghoul that lady!
The GND is so 2019.
Environmentalists are pinning their hopes on ChiCom Flu wiping out most of the human population as a sacrifice to Gaia, especially if it kills all the science deniers.
gilbar said...what ever happened to those reusable cloth grocery bags? weren't THEY going to save the planet?
Yeah, that one pissed me off yesterday. I wonder if Althouse has ever set foot in her beloved Whole Foods with reusable bags only to be told "you can't use those here anymore." That was my experience at Trader Joe's yesterday.
CStanley- how is your mother? Has she passed through the dangerous time with no symptoms?
Maybe if it appeared like there was the slightest chance that any of the dire predictions of the global warming alarmists might come true, people would consider it. But all those predictions have so completely fallen flat on their face. And now we see what the impact to our lives would be if we did what the alarmists want us to do.
I agree that this is definitely a silver lining.
One cannot overstate the economic illiteracy of the lefties. For many, they just want the power that comes with this kind of control without understanding the economic consequences. For many others, the argument would be that “smart” management of the economy by their “experts” would avoid these consequences ...and as we all know, OrangeMan is no expert.
- Krumhorn
"The ravages of the disease are horrible and tragic, and no sane person welcomed the onslaught"
Typical idiotic pablum.
California study of herd immunity for Covid-19
Money grafs:
The hypothesis that COVID-19 first started spreading in California in the fall of 2019 is one explanation for the state's lower than expected case numbers.
As of Tuesday, the state had 374 reported COVID-19 fatalities in a state of 40 million people, compared to New York which has seen 14 times as many fatalities and has a population half that of California. Social distancing could be playing a role but New York's stay-at-home order went into effect on March 22, three days after California implemented its order.
"Something is going on that we haven't quite found out yet," said Victor Davis Hanson a senior fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institute.
My company is doing work with carbon capture. About 2 months ago, I was talking to our person leading this effort. We got into the conversation of single use plastics, and this person, being in the UK, thought it was great that such waste was being banned. I disagreed. I noted that single use plastics advanced medical care in the 20th Century. The ability to hermitically seal equipment, lab samples, and waste reduced the spread of infectious diseases in hospitals. While this person was happy to being doing their part for the environment; I was proud of what was done in the past to improve healthcare. You can decide which approach will actually save more lives.
It would be cool if we finally finally finally came out of this not letting the press lead us by the nose!
I agree. I think that the GND is dead for the present. We are seeing I real tie how bad models really are. We also see how politicians are so good at screwing things up. As noted above, Gov Cuomo’s being suggested to ultimately replace Chia Joe Biden, squandered the money that should have gone to respirators, to solar and wind projects. And, indeed, he also oversaw the destruction of the economy of upstate NY through his GND-like economic blindness. No fracking of course, because that would mean more fossil fuels available, while eliminating new pipelines from states that do allow fracking, while also requiring new hookups. CA, is if anything, worse. Moreover, the GND is based on the idea that the idea that if we all live in dense cities like NYC, and take mass transit, instead of drive our own (much safer) cars, we won’t need to use as many horrible fossil fuels, thus saving the planet. And that opens them up to the charge that if everyone were forced into their dense urban cities, we would all be infected now. And the charge that the only way to really quarantine in cases like that, is to weld the doors shut of the high rise apartment buildings and let the virus burn itself out, as was apparently done in Wuhan.
I think that a lot of people are waking up and rediscovering that during large epidemics, big cities can be death traps. Best safety is spreading out, which we can do better than many countries, because we have a very large country that mostly is sparsely populated. Only real reasons to live that densely are because jobs require it, or to save the planet. We have seen that a lot of jobs don’t really require it any more, and fighting global warming as we are probably slowly slipping back into an ice age is ludicrous.
This shutdown IS the Green New Deal. 90% reduction in air travel. No automobiles on the streets, no commuting to workplaces or games or social events. Why campaign for something that you have already achieved?
Just get people to accept that this is the new normal. ("If it even saves one life" applies to polar bears as much as humans.) As those 20th Century visionaries Hitler, Stalin and Mao demonstrated, humans adapt pretty quickly to the New Boss, the more totalitarian the quicker the adaptation. Putting a large and ever growing percentage of the population dependent on a government check for their very existence will speed the acceptance along.
The Faucian bargain based on flawed models has wrecked the Green New Deal.People see through it.
Several comments above make the argument I call The Covidiot Creed. Here it is in concentrated form:
“Predictions were high. Now deaths are low. The lockdown was never needed.”
It exists in a slight variant
“Predictions were high. Now predictions are low. The lockdown was never needed.”
Here is one of the examples above from M Jordan
“ Neil Ferguson’s model that really kicked off Britain’s and the US’s social distancing panic was a flat-out lie. His “model” spewed out 2.2 million US deaths, 500,000 Brits. As soon as this swayed Boris Johnson, he lowered his British death projections to 20,000. ”
Here is another, subtler example, from ST
“This panic was wildly overblown so they could run around like little Hitlers ordering shutdowns and telling people to hide in their homes.”
We can argue whether almost 2000 deaths a day are overblown of course, but it is certainly a lower figure than the original projections, and so ST concludes the measures take were just budding Hilterism, unconnected to that reduction.
Of course the Covidiot Creed is entirely wrong. Here is what actually happened
Predictions were high death counts *unless we increase social distancing.*
We increased social distancing, in many cases with lockdowns.
The worst case did not happen, and new predictions *based on keeping the social distancing* were lower.
Social distancing saved lives.
There are other problems with the Covidiot Creed. Deaths are not low, they are just not as high as they might have been. Projections are not really low since they only go a few months, they are just not as high as they were. And the lower ones all assume the measures will continue.
But this absurd and dangerous Covidiot Creed is all over this blog.
It's funny you mention that Ken B.
I was just thinking that old saying that all models are wrong and some are useful.
By publishing the more conservative numbers indicating as many as two million potentially dead from covid-19 it got people to feverishly comply with social distancing and has been at the curve down to the low range of the estimate.
That result from a model seems pretty useful to me
One key leftie agenda item is almost certainly going to come to pass. With many new $Trillions being financed by the Federal Reserve, it’s hard to imagine how we will avoid a 90+% top marginal tax rate such as existed during WWII and the decade afterwards. The Pocahontas wealth tax will also be on the table.
Won’t that be fun...
- Krumhorn
Hey Ken-many of the doomsday models presupposed social distancing.
By publishing the more conservative numbers indicating as many as two million potentially dead from covid-19 it got people to feverishly comply with social distancing and has been at the curve down to the low range of the estimate.
From the Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.
The GND is decades in the making, and will never die so long as marxists/commies walk the Earth.
Some may think it's new because it's the first time the commies have tried to enact it legislatively. The GND flows from Project 21, and Project 21 flows from the Frankfurt School.
So what happened to that Biggus Dickus bravado about charging into the face of death in the name of freedom, Howard?
The Green New Dealers feel empathy for those who are now suffering from the disease and from the economic shut down. They don't want to exacerbate the pain.
More likely, their considerable investments are tanking just like everyone else's. And their flights restricted. And their spas are closed.
The left is pushing for the economy to be shutdown as long as possible. Preferably for the rest of the year. Not only would the resulting depression damage Trump but it would also sow chaos and reduce economic activity to such a low a baseline that a reopening under GND constraints would appear to be an improvement. I can already see Joe's corpse telling us how lucky we are that under his reign, the economy is improving and climate change is being defeated. Never mind the newly minted millions of funemployed.
Ken B:
We don't really know why the predictions were totally wrong, do we?
That's the beauty of it. Predict a high number of deaths, make everyone stay home and then claim that the quarantine was the proximate cause that saved lives.
The real reason for the high death and infection predictions was to scare the hell out of people and force them to stay home. That worked.
When the Gov. of CA issued his shut down order, his letter stated that 56% of Californians would get infected. But Dr. Birx said that was over THREE cycles.
I don't believe the models. The models say 442 dead in Nebraska by August. We don't even have 20. And nearly all of them were old people with pre-existing conditions.
You can virtual signal all you want and accuse me of being part of the "absurd and dangerous Covidiot Creed" but you're just a hardcore liberal that hates Trump. Admit it.
Ken B, I'd say the models assume that either social distancing will continue or one of the following will happen: 1. Testing will show that effective herd immunity levels have been reached. 2. A vaccine is widely deployed. 3. Effective treatment is available.
@ST: Yes, I think the "Grand Inquisitor" is a must reread for anyone contemplating what's going on here.
remember back when the lockdowns started?
they told us that there WOULD BE over 2 Million deaths from covid
they told us that WE HAD TO FLATTEN THE CURVE; because, otherwise hospitals would be Overwhelmed with covid deaths, and would NOT be able to handle OTHER medical problems... resulting in EVEN MORE DEATHS!
because of Hospital Overwhelming, we HAD to lockdown the country; for a few weeks
and it Turned out, that our hospitals had Plenty of Room, so the lockdown was extended to MONTHS
then, as death predictions were forced down by reality (200,000... 80,000...60,000...)
NOW... They are saying (we straight faces) that the lockdowns should continue for "12 to 18 months", or "until the covid danger has passed"
As i say, Try to remember back in early march... It wasn't lockdown for months... It wasn't lockdown until the danger has passed.... It was lockdown TO FLATTEN THE CURVE ("we can NOT decrease the number of people that get this!!!), to avoid overwhelming the hospitals
Rather like Vietnam; isn't it time we declared victory, and went home (or, in THIS case, leave home and go back to work)
Seriously remember WHY we started this?
I'm making some real money in the stock market today. Thanks Fed and Treasury for saving the country!
At Peace Plaza East, we yearn to limit Human Impact. We have enough people. The remaining community members gather to protest in the Human Pagoda.
Our Leader made an unexpected appearance Monday. We burst into Earthsong and I felt thrills running up my leg.
Namaste.
"Predictions were high death counts *unless we increase social distancing.*
As Pants pointed out, many of the predictions included existing distancing; IMHE models projections assumed "full social distancing" through May, yet their numbers keep decreasing.
You are either ignoring this because it doesn't suit your point, or you are willfully and dishonestly misrepresenting the issue.
Either way, you are a charlatan.
I am Laslo.
Why not?
Maybe because most reasonable people don't indulge themselves in all this left/progressive BS. They don't read about it, they don't think about it, they certainly don't want to talk about it.
They don't want to waste their time with it.
They have better things to do.
They are not going to take the bait to get into stupid arguments about stupid things.
"This shutdown IS the Green New Deal. 90% reduction in air travel. No automobiles on the streets, no commuting to workplaces or games or social events. Why campaign for something that you have already achieved?"
So maybe the plan is necessarily silent, but exactly as I've laid it out in the beginning of this post. They don't want to stir up opposition, but what they will try to do is hold the line on restoring the economy, particularly with respect to saving the airlines and the oil industry.
There will be arguments about where to put the trillions that will be dumped into the economy. On one side are people who think an especially large amount should go to the airlines.
But why not let airlines go under? Something will remain and the price of airline tickets can go WAY up, and we will have achieved a major element of the Green New Deal. It can be done by arguing in Green New Deal terms or simply by arguing about where money should be spent and portraying the airlines as the rich when those who deserve the most are the working class.
Work from home will be WAY more common than before.
Work from India/Philippines will be WAY more common than before
Fixed it for you.
“ Scientific models are political tools, nothing else.”
I disagree to the extent that they are kept out of politics. They can be very useful. For example, my kid builds models all the time for their job (and before that, their research for their dissertation). Part of it is that Navier-Stokes equations cannot be solved mathematically for even moderately complex problems. Instead, you just experiment enough to build a good model of how the physics work in certain very limited situations (and don’t try it with the world’s climate). The models are good enough that engineers can use them to build processes that work. And that can empirically be shown to be effective.
Climate Change and Global Warming was ALWAYS a hoax. It turned into a religion. An evil secular religion designed to wield world power on all individuals. We all know that. Greta is nothing more than a propaganda tool.
And now we are getting a taste of what One World Gov’t would look like, and it’s fucking insane. The corruption at the W.H.O. Communist China infiltrating and controlling the US media to promote their propaganda. Digital identification…..ID2020.
The virus came from a lab. We know that too.
I’m so glad our education system and Universities have indoctrinated a generation or two into sacrificing their liberties along with everyone else’s, while burying them in massive debt.
All in the name of virtue of course, and 31 genders. My poor kids.
#annaltruism.
Jamie
Thanks for the sensible comment.
All the models are “until we get a vaccine or a cure”. To get to herd immunity you need so many infected you are back to huge death tolls, or to already have really high level of people who have it and don’t notice. This last idea is discussed in a link I posted yesterday and the evidence is against it. We won’t know for sure until we get widespread serum testing. That may not be far off.
Yeah let the airlines tank. It's not like the planes will be destroyed or the aircraft or destroyed nor are the gates nor are all the spare parts in the tools. All of the people that used to run everything they're still alive and available. when you say save the airline's it's bailing out the stockholders and the board of directors and the leadership elite.
@ST: Yes, I think the "Grand Inquisitor" is a must reread for anyone contemplating what's going on here.
X2 [or X3]
arguing about where money should be spent and portraying the airlines as the rich when those who deserve the most are the working class.
Professor, airlines employ working class people. And working class people actually use airlines to travel.
we presently have 50 little tyrannies forming a Republic, each of us under some sort of state emergency order.
I wonder how many have seen the effect of one such tyranny in CO?
This guy was playing catch with his daughter in an empty park.
Would you like 1,200 calories of bug-paste a day? Guaranteed.
Fellas, How about selective breeding access for the top earners/workers?
Ladies, Equal and Just community access and pure democratic decision-making?
Right here, right now.
Peace Plaza East is welcoming new Community members daily. Off Rte 9.
"You are so cavalier about others' lives. It's good that you are immortal."
You should realize that both sides of the argument could swing this baton.
Althouse at 9:30 --
This is why many felt that the reaction to Covid was over-promoted -- that it set in place a marker of what the government will now do in a crisis. Once you break the legs the body can fit in a smaller hole.
As I have said earlier:
A government that can shut everything down so easily: you have set the framework for your children and grandchildren to experience this over and over, for less and less reason.
I am Laslo.
@Shouting Thomas: Give the people “miracle, mystery and authority” and they will follow. Works like a charm. Also of note is that Dostoevsky was harkening back to temptations during the original quarantine.
All of the people that used to run everything they're still alive and available. when you say save the airline's it's bailing out the stockholders and the board of directors and the leadership elite.
Howard makes less sense than usual. Are you over 75 Howard ?
Yeah I dunno Althouse. Nearly everyone likes to travel. They like to do it affordably. Find me one man on the street who thinks a $5000 ticket to go to Aunt Mabel’s funeral or to Disney World is something to aspire to. Not to mention, aviation jobs pay well. No one outside mentally unbalanced earth worshippers, even those who claim to be in favor of environmental protection, genuinely wants aviation to go away.
We're learning that air travel is mostly inessential.
All the tourism -- forget that. A rich-person pastime. A luxury weighing next to nothing in crisis times.
All the business travel -- it's bullshit to fly all over the world to do things that can be done by video conference, which we're learning to do and should have to become experts at.
How about all those academic conferences? A ridiculous indulgence. Do it on line.
Traveling to see family? Well, that's important, but you'll just have to pay more and limit it to special occasions like weddings and funerals. And maybe going forward, quit moving out of your home town. Let's not have everyone piling into NYC and other hotbeds of disease. Stay with the people you already know, and then you won't need a big carbon footprint whenever you want to see them. And all the new kids that come into the world will find video calls natural and rewarding. Or maybe the best answer is: Don't HAVE kids. Let the population decline. Your contribution is to do as little as possible.
In the late 1970s scientist from Exxon the world's largest oil company confirmed that carbon dioxide global warming was real was happening, posed liability risk to the firm and the company should adjust its behavior to minimize the release of carbon dioxide from certain oil fields.
Why talk of going back to our old ways? The highways and airlines are drastically reduced right now, and we don't want to stay this far shut down, but why are we thinking of getting all the way back to the extreme overactivity that was contributing to climate change?
You don't have to go back to your old ways, you know. But that's not what you mean, is it? You want to stop other people from going back to their old ways because you know better than they do how they should live. And as such, you should be able to force them to do as you wish.
Nice.
We're learning that air travel is mostly inessential.
As I said above, restaurants and home cooking are inessential. The government should be preparing food and distributing it from central feeding points. Think of the environmental savings in that!
Your comment at 9:35 is an interesting spitball or satire; can’t tell which; hope it’s not a genuine endorsement because I don’t want people to pick on you more for your extreme ivory tower cloisteredness.
In the late 1970s scientist from Exxon the world's largest oil company confirmed that carbon dioxide global warming was real was happening, posed liability risk to the firm and the company should adjust its behavior to minimize the release of carbon dioxide from certain oil fields.
So your point is that scientists from the world's largest oil company can be wrong?
Althouse wrote: But why not let airlines go under? Something will remain and the price of airline tickets can go WAY up, and we will have achieved a major element of the Green New Deal. It can be done by arguing in Green New Deal terms or simply by arguing about where money should be spent and portraying the airlines as the rich when those who deserve the most are the working class.
Thankfully, your personal little war on air travel will remain just that: a personal little war. Just like your war on shorts. Personally, I wish someone would declare war on shorting markets. George Soros would take it in the shorts and stop fucking with the world.
Most individuals are inessential...in fact we all are.
I Have Misplaced My Pants said...Your comment at 9:35 is an interesting spitball or satire; can’t tell which; hope it’s not a genuine endorsement because I don’t want people to pick on you more for your extreme ivory tower cloisteredness.
So true. Althouse lives in cloisterfuck.
And anyway, I think a, what, 3000 square foot house? for two retirees is rather, how you say, inessential.
Ken B,
As a commenter, I’m concerned you may have contracted the ‘Chuck’ virus from an old thread.
R1.3.
Symptoms-Single-minded commenting. Smug righteousness. Moderator appeals. The douchey spread of information
Co-morbidities-TDS
Stay safe
"Most individuals are inessential...in fact we all are."
Is cannon fodder truly inessential?
I am Laslo.
The economic shutdown is the greatest global warming experiment in the history of mankind. It will show the immediate and long term impact traditional toxic air pollution on global air temperatures.
Hopefully that experiment will result in a deprioritization of decarbonization as the first step required to fight climate change.
Althouse,
Peace Pavilion West has a lecture series. Please consider.
Namaste
Is cannon fodder truly inessential?
Cannons should go plant-based.
A government that can shut everything down so easily: you have set the framework for your children and grandchildren to experience this over and over, for less and less reason.
This is important. One of the lessons of the govt response was that had we taken action more quickly and aggressively to seal our borders, we would not likely have needed to take such authoritarian actions at the state and local level forcing people into their homes and businesses to close. That exercise of SOVERIGNTY by the federal govt would have reduced the need for the exercise of AUTHORITY by our more local officials, whether well considered leaders or tyrant-wannabes. Borders should be stark and enforceable, and our economy and society should be robust to the need to close them quickly and effectively (and, hopefully, relatively briefly).
This all flows logically from an embrace of localism, which also includes some aspects of the reductio ad absurdum Althouse makes of localism in the above comments. Let there be an industrial renaissance in the US, let our supply chains become a strategic focus and strengthening them--localizing them--become an aspect of trade and other regulation. Let us swing away from the over optimized overly interdependent global world we have created. But on a national level, end mobility within the US? That's authoritarian and un-American. If more people want to stay in their hometowns, great. But developing policy to decrease mobility is not an act of sovereignty like closing our national borders, it is an act of authority--that won't cut ice. Localism is about more than crisis response, it is a strategy. But it is not about forcing or even nudging people to be shut-ins.
As for the models: I understand the intellectual attraction of them. It's rally irresistible to imagine you can build a simulation of dangerous realities or the future without enduring the risks of actual experimentation, and the tools are so much fun. You can sit at a desk with a large cappuccino and play with it for hours, and then present this complex work product that only you really understand, and not really that well.
Unfortunately, they aren't working as accurate predictive tools for large complex systems, which is where we really need them most. What we have been seeing with these models is a model that starts off way out of sync with reality, and reality keep forcing adjustments to try and make the model match what is happening. That's a bit backwards. They keep adjusting and adjusting the model to try and predict what we already know, imagining that will then tell us what's in the future, but it only ends up telling what was in the past and already known.
It's not that models have no place or use, they definitely do, but not for these big complex questions, and not as a defining tool for policy. We need to accept the reality of that. I doubt we will, becuase the promise of models is so enticing to the human mind, even for laymen, but especially for scientists.
"Find me one man on the street who thinks a $5000 ticket to go to Aunt Mabel’s funeral or to Disney World is something to aspire to."
Virtual funerals.
And find your local attractions. We're past catering to people who want to go thousands of miles to a particular name-brand theme park. What's a good theme park in your area?
Figure it out. New skills are needed. Getting on airplanes is a passé indulgence.
The lefties don’t really have to make an argument for their program. We are being pummeled with social conditioning by an endless stream of comforting PSAs intoning “we’re all in this together” and “together, we’ll get through this”. They would use “it takes a village” if that weren’t so 80s.
By the time we emerge into the streets, all that will be heard is the baaaa-ing of us sheeple waiting eagerly to be shorn of our freedoms and economic opportunities by the likes of Howard.
- Krumhorn
Where I live it's been getting warmer since this pandemic started, not cooler.
"But why not let airlines go under? Something will remain and the price of airline tickets can go WAY up, and we will have achieved a major element of the Green New Deal."
Wow, you actually believe airline tickets will cost way more than before in this scenario? This is ass-backwards- they will cost less.
I think retired people are inessential. I mean think about it. For the children.
The Democrats tried to implement parts of the Green New Deal in the third stimulus bill, along with a laundry list of other wishes. Remember their insistence on reducing the CO2 output of airlines?
Virtual funerals.
And find your local attractions. We're past catering to people who want to go thousands of miles to a particular name-brand theme park. What's a good theme park in your area?
Figure it out. New skills are needed. Getting on airplanes is a passé indulgence.
Well, maybe you’re right that that’s what the GNDers will try to sell, and won’t it be hilarious.
Indulge my curiosity as a person not smart enough to take your law classes or know when you’re riddling. Are you serious or funning?
Ken B is now in the business of rewriting history, in addition to his title as Grand Slayer of Straw Men. ALL the models showed a RANGE. The LOWER range estimates were always predicated on extreme social distancing. When they said "500K to 1.1 M dead Americans" they said the LOW number was predicated on FOLLOWING GUIDELINES.
And they were wrong.
Many of us here said that based on EARLY REAL WORLD RESULTS it appeared that the real effects would be closer to a normal FLU SEASON of 20K to 80K deaths, again with and without distancing implicit in the RANGE other wise what IS the variable that extends or shortens the range?
And WE were RIGHT and Ken B was wrong.
NOW the models are revised to 60-80K and Ken and the liars he covers for are saying, SEE IT WORKED but we are WAY LOWER than the low range of every fucking model, just like us cautionary people said to you panicking people. And I stand by my earlier prediction the final numbers will be closer to H1N1 and my exact prediction from the beginning has been 20,000 which has the benefit of being MUCH CLOSER to the ballpark consensus NOW than the EARLY FLAWED MODELS.
Rather than continue to lie and obfuscate and name call, Ken B, why don't you address the question of why? WHY were the models so spectacularly WRONG, as we many suspected?
In re airlines.
Is there any reason to expect their market to be much smaller in the future? I think so. Do I have to explain why? So even if we need lockdowns immediately there will be a big shakedown in the industry. Which is a good argument against a bailout. The bailouts are to keep companies which will employee people in the future from liquidation. Not so applicable to airlines.
Anyone for cruise line bailouts? Same argument, a fortiori.
"We're learning that air travel is mostly inessential."
You're not forced to fly, you know. Have you considered the possibility that other people might have a different definition of "inessential" when it comes to air travel?
The Green New Dealers feel empathy for those who are now suffering from the disease [AnnA]
Thank you for the smile!
Ann's right. Only the rich should be flying and enjoying travel. The rest of you Inessentials will need to stay home. You may, however, watch the rich enjoying themselves on your TV's and your social media.
Letting Inessentials travel and fly is like letting cows go to the opera.
"Traveling to see family? Well, that's important, but you'll just have to pay more and limit it to special occasions like weddings and funerals."
Why visit family at all while they're alive? Wait for the funeral.
Carpe Diem
Chickelit observes: So true. Althouse lives in cloisterfuck.
LOLOL!
We only need people young enough to work hard on society's needs. If you sit at home and type, well, we probably don't need much more of that. Reading novels, planting flowers, and little garden? C'mon man. How's that helping anyone? You need to be out digging a ditch, building a road, filling a landfill, figuring out new technologies, serving as firemen, police, nurses or doctors - something we really need.
Howard:
That scientist worked for the big and evil Exxon so he had to be wrong.
CAGW is a scam.
Exxon went along with it in order to crush the smaller oil companies. It has a stellar balance sheet. Pioneer and the rest don't.
"All the business travel -- it's bullshit to fly all over the world to do things that can be done by video conference, which we're learning to do and should have to become experts at."
Spoken by someone who's never designed or built anything other than an argument.
Cloisters of the Platte in Nebraska is closed. Virtual retreats.
“ How about all those academic conferences? A ridiculous indulgence. Do it on line.”
I have been saying that for a long time. My jet set family members disagree though.
Althouse muses about a “good leap into something”. May I suggest forward. And not to sell it short - make it Great. A Great Leap Forward.
Leaping forward greatly means letting the airlines die because the Pants Shitters said everyone must stay home. Some people don’t like air travel anyway.
Our hostess is making their argument...which was the point of the post. That’s what good attorneys do. Plus a little satire. That’s what good bloggers do.
- Krumhorn
Kai, Oso: "we had to do something, everything to stop the even more horrible deaths of 11M, scratch that, 2M, scratch that, 1M, scratch that, 200K, or if we save one life it's worth it, or if we don't, health care will be overwhelmed. The pro-panic faction sought the onslaught. [Sebastian]
You are so cavalier about others' lives. It's good that you are immortal.
4/9/20, 8:17 AM
Exactly Kai Akker! If he is not hysterical, then he is cavalier."
Odd: the hysteria all seems to be on the panic side: millions will die! we have do everything, anything! we'll run out of ventilators! even young people can get it!
And cavalier about what?
I note the continual downward adjustments of the "models," without and then with distancing assumptions. This happened, including on this blog, including by the people running it.
I note the "if we only save one life" rationale used explicitly by Cuomo and implicitly by many others advocating the most draconian measures. I am not sure if Cuomo himself still believes it, but this happened, and is still happening. It is an insane approach to public health and public policy.
The pro-panic faction did seek the onslaught, and is still seeking it in many states: public officials around the country deliberately do things that produce disastrous results, when better alternatives are available and the assumptions used are very questionable (e.g., see Power Line on the Minnesota case).
Of course, my position from the outset has not been do-nothing: I want stricter, actual quarantines for the risk groups (and anyone infected, insofar as we know), and sensible social distancing and improved hygiene for everyone else.
"Thankfully, your personal little war on air travel will remain just that: a personal little war...."
It's not about me. Do I need to get out my sledgehammer? This post (and my comments here) are sketching out the argument I think Green New Deal people could be making but are not and speculating about why they are silent. What's really going on?
If man-made climate change is really a serious problem, then air travel should be minimized and certainly taxpayer money shouldn't flow into the airlines to keep them going. Let them drastically contract. It will be for the good. Pleasure travel and unnecessary in-person business should not be subsidized where there is damage to the environment. People have learned in this last month how to do without, and we'll get even better at it. The restarting of the economy should be done strategically, based on ideas of what is good, for those of us left alive and for the new people to come.
Is cannon fodder truly inessential?
I am Laslo.
Brilliant.
The professor is describing what is essentially the social structure from the movie "The Hunger Games." Who decides what is essential travel and what is not? Who enforces the travel restrictions? Is travel restricted to a 100 mile radius from your residence? Or will you be assigned a district and only be allowed to travel within it? What will be the penalties for engaging in non-essential travel? Perhaps we should introduce a "social credit system" like China's and penalize anyone we think is indulging in non-essential travel.
@Maybee....Yes, my Mom is still doing well, thanks for asking! She passed day 14 on Tuesday so we believe she’s out of the woods,
We did a celebration for her by having all of her kids and grandkids (plus one set of great grandkids) create a sign and took selfies holding the sign. My brother who is a printer made large posters out of them and displayed them on her fence, then called her out and filmed her reaction so we could all see her. It was very sweet!
You should realize that both sides of the argument could swing this baton. [bagoh20]
I don't think so. But who can say right now? No one knows where or how many casualties there will be, in the end, nor from what causes. Nor how many there would have been under the "benign" neglect alternative.
Banning air traffic to and from China has its appeal.
You know, people, this is not the first or worst pandemic mankind has been through. I think we can rest assured that most things will return to normal after this relatively small one is past. If China was simply a free and open nation instead of a lying, conniving, totalitarian asshole of a government, then this never would have happened. Simple as that. So the idea that we should pursue a more totalitarian government policy here is asinine.
The Green New Dealers feel empathy for those who are now suffering
"No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die."
The restarting of the economy should be done strategically, based on ideas of what is good, for those of us left alive and for the new people to come.
Based on your ideas of what is good. Also, "those of us left alive." You make it sound like we're experiencing "The Stand" and 99.9% of humanity are dead and you are either living in Boulder, CO with the prophet from God or Las Vegas working for the Devil.
So the Covid Crisis allows Althouse the opportunity to cheerlead for reducing air travel.
And she does not wonder why many of us are suspicious of how the panic seems to conveniently provide cover for anti-liberty things people wanted to do all along?
You are not losing freedom: think of it as a staycation from the Pursuit of Happiness.
I am Laslo.
"Althouse muses about a “good leap into something”. May I suggest forward. And not to sell it short - make it Great. A Great Leap Forward."
It's the Trump era, so: Huuuge Leap Forward. This will be the most beautiful, a truly great leap forward. I know that some people say "great leap forward," that sounds bad. Bad. You look at what happened. But we can leap a truly great leap, a leap into the green. It's called "green." The green leap forward. I think there are many people now talking about that big beautiful leap. The green leap. It's a very strong leap, perhaps the strongest, biggest leap that anyone has ever leapt. Leapt. I like that word. Is that a word? I'll say "leapt." They say Trump does not like the Green New Deal. Trump does not believe in climate change. But you listen to these experts. I had a great and very long conversations with experts. These are great experts. I have the very best experts and they are doing a marvelous job, I can tell you that...
Of course, my position from the outset has not been do-nothing: I want stricter, actual quarantines for the risk groups (and anyone infected, insofar as we know), and sensible social distancing and improved hygiene for everyone else. [Sebastian]
Of course. A perfect set-up. Full of qualifications and ideals. An AOC kind of perfection. Possible in your mind only.
You know, people, this is not the first or worst pandemic mankind has been through.
This! They were speculating on the social changes arising from this on Fox and Friends this morning. Its ridiculous. Maybe, maybe people will start wearing masks in public when they feel under the weather, maybe.
"We're learning that air travel is mostly inessential."
We are learning that Althouse knows what is inessential.
We are also learning that Althouse thinks that what she knows is inessential is inessential.
Althouse questions prog gospel occasionally, of course, but she still harbors the deep prog instinct, a subspecies of Sowell's Vision of the Anointed.
We "learn" x, therefore --. By contrast, in an actual free society, with an actual free market, where millions of people actually put their money and their efforts down as they see fit, we "learn" collectively, in the aggregate, learning above all the limits of expert knowledge and the unintended consequences of efforts to impose anyone's vision.
Whether we are capable of learning lessons from the current experiment in state control remains to be seen. Althouse's sentiment is a negative indicator.
" Nor how many there would have been under the "benign" neglect alternative."
Nor how many will die from the suicide, poverty, and lost capital of our response. The one thing that made our safer, healthier, more peaceful, and longer lives possible is economic prosperity. Everything else is built on it and sustained by it. Every bit of it lost is a bit of those things lost as well, and we just lost a pile of it. Maybe it was the right thing to do or not, we may never know, but we shouldn't ignore the costs. That just makes us dumber and more dangerous to ourselves.
What's a good theme park in your area?
There's actually a major theme park opening in my tiny, upstate NY town this summer! (Er, was, anyway...the opening's been put off to next spring.)
Thank you for clarifying. And no, they know better than to try. That’s why they are not making that argument. Because it’s completely insane and 96% of Americans would see it as such.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsMp2pZK-Cw
Ron, I live in Las Vegas. We do work for the devil. It's not really that bad. Some of us even get a 401K.
Now that the Kung Flu hoax is over, anyone care to wager $5 on what the final death toll as well as what the reported final death toll will be?
I'm going with 10m +/-1,000 actual and 20m +/- 1,000 reported.
That's US only. And let's say the cutoff is June 30.
John Henry
As others have pointed out, the problem with 'inessential' is that someone needs to decide what's essential and what's not. I don't know if that's socialism or fascism, but I know it's not freedom.
Is toilet paper essential?
The toilet paper shortage is a great leap forward.
No self-respecting socialist country has toilet paper on its store shelves.
America has made a breakthrough.
And, bagoh20, the economic prosperity is run by cheap, plentiful energy.
Environmentalism seeks to limit human activity to some kind of Collectivist, pseudo-religious ideal.
The work environmentalist ideas do in binding people together (I'm black, you're white, we can work in Yosemite or the university/diversity dept hand in hand is the thing many educated people think they know, about which the radicals have certainty).It's a costly set of ideas, of course damaging and harming all kinds of people, the poorest first
Howard,
"In the late 1970s scientist from Exxon the world's largest oil company confirmed that carbon dioxide global warming was real was happening,"
Which is interesting because the earth cooled slightly but significantly from 1940 or so until the early 1970s.
Now, the earth certainly did warm from 1890ish until about 1940. It warmed about as steeply as it did from the late 70s until 2009. But if I accept everything the more alarmist scientists contend about AGW, the rise in CO2 from 1890 to 1940 wasn't nearly enough to account for that period of warming.
So these scientists from Exxon, after a 50-year warming trend that cannot be attributed to CO2, and a thirty-year cooling trend that really cannot: maybe seven years after that, they confirmed that CO2-induced global warming was real and happening?
This looks an awful lot like Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy to me. I mean, you're saying these guys were way ahead of James Hansen.
I like to travel and I like wearing shorts. But I can do neither, in my present circumstances, because both are too expensive.
I mean, have you seen how much shorts cost lately?
Kai: "Full of qualifications and ideals. An AOC kind of perfection. Possible in your mind only."
Kai! AOC! Now that's rude!
So, are you saying that we can and should have a general shutdown, but we cannot organize a selective quarantine for people actually at risk? That we can apply enormous expertise, at enormous expense, to prepare to care for sick people in hospitals, but we cannot apply equal expertise, with equal effort, to help them stay safe in the first place? You may be right: my "ideal" requires a change in direction, an end to the CYA do-anything lockdowns, and in particular a form of discrimination the avoidance of which helps to drive current policy.
Yes, my "ideal" is to quarantine the risk groups without tanking the economy. I think we can do it. At some point, of course, some such approach will become inevitable: the shutdowns can't continue forever, but, absent a vaccine or universal antibody testing, the risk groups will still be at risk for a long time.
Althouse,
Think of a cheap car, or a city bus, or a Greyhound, or an airplane. For many people, much of the time, it's a matter of a job or not, money or not, an education or not, life or death.
Let the bad hippie ideas go. Liberate your creative energies.
Who said that the epidemic is a plot by Big Toilet Paper?
I still laugh when I think of that one.
"They don't want to look like ghouls."
Are you new here? They don't care how you think they look. Their virtue is pure.
I'm pretty sure nobody really wants to live in a society where only essentials are valued and allowed. It's our ability to rise above that which makes life more than that of a sea cucumber. My dog doesn't even want to live in a world like that. Actually, we wouldn't let her live in that world, and that goes for a lot of the rest of you.
"I had a great and very long conversations with experts. These are great experts. I have the very best experts and they are doing a marvelous job, I can tell you that..."
Unless you are also an expert, how do you know they are doing a marvelous job? And if you are already an expert, why do you need other experts to tell you what you know?
If people are supposed to believe you and not their lying eyes, those questions would need to be answered.
"We're learning that air travel is mostly inessential."
What is really, really, really inessential is air travel on private jets. I want a law outlawing that travel. How can you hate the planet so much as to ride on one of those death-spraying earth-killers?
I had my biannual doctor visit today. Did it on Zoom.
Which worked on the first try after install!!!
Also, it appears that my forehead is much larger than I thought.
On the downside, the evil Chinese Communist Party now knows quite a bit about my colon.
bagoh20 said...
"" Nor how many there would have been under the "benign" neglect alternative." Nor how many will die from the suicide, poverty, and lost capital of our response."
Nor how many will die of social-distancing anger murder, as we discussed yesterday.
KenB goes with the trusty unfalsifiable claim: if the models are correct, I win, if the models are not correct, it's because they had the intended effect of changing behavior, and I win. But as someone above mentions, most of the models had "best case" scenarios that are still proving way too high, so no.
I'd rather die relatively quick and clean from the Kung Flu than live as a serf. Unless, of course, I could live strong and healthy enough and with the means to blow the New World Order to smithereens or slit the throats of our commisssars.
I never heard of the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy. I've noticed the dynamic, but didn't know it had a name. It's very important for us all to understand.
Bagoh2o: sure point taken. However you must see that our addiction to cheap China trinkets is a disease of overconsumption of planned obsolescence consumer goods. I think during this pause it is important to reflect on what is truly important in life. Scuba diving hang gliding rock climbing those are essentials. Buying the latest iPhone just because not so sure
If your models are always overstating the problem by a lot, and you constantly have to lower the level of danger, then what should you learn from that?
More downward adjustments, from projections that included, supposedly, assumptions of extended distancing:
"One of President Donald Trump’s top medical advisers slashed projections for U.S. coronavirus deaths on Thursday, saying that only about 60,000 people may die -- almost half as many as the White House estimated a week ago.
The falling projection, the result of aggressive social distancing behaviors Americans adopted to curb the spread of the virus, may accelerate Trump’s effort to develop a plan to urge Americans to leave their homes and return to work next month.
“The real data are telling us it is highly likely we are having a definite positive effect by the mitigation things that we’re doing, this physical separation,” Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC in an interview.
“I believe we are going to see a downturn in that, and it looks more like the 60,000, than the 100,000 to 200,000” projected fatalities, he said. “But having said that, we better be careful that we don’t say: ‘OK, we’re doing so well we could pull back.’”
Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House’s coronavirus task force, projected March 31 that as many as 240,000 Americans could die as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, even with another 30 days of stringent public health restrictions."
So, WH projection cut by three-quarters in just over a week. I am not pleased by the manipulation of "models," but I am pleased by the trend. Considering that Wuhan deaths are overcounted, and many "victims" were seriously ill to begin with, 60K would be a good result: on the order of a bad flu season. The fact that, by contrast with flu, no children appear to die from Wuhan would make such a result even better.
I'm disappointed.
How can there be a 'Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy" that doesn't involve Charles Whitman or Lee Harvey Oswald?
Like I said: disappointed.
I am Laslo.
I feel that the Chinese government is inessential, unless you work for the devil like me. Come, enjoy the fun, comrades.
Ron, I live in Las Vegas. We do work for the devil. It's not really that bad. Some of us even get a 401K.
That actually did make me LOL.
Ann Althouse said ... air travel should be minimized and certainly taxpayer money shouldn't flow into the airlines to keep them going. Let them drastically contract. It will be for the good. Pleasure travel and unnecessary in-person business should not be subsidized where there is damage to the environment. People have learned in this last month how to do without, and we'll get even better at it.
I quit the business psychology world after 20 years of exhausting air travel. I often wondered how much work could be done over Skype or some similar medium. It seems like a terrible waste of time and resources to meet people face-to-face when they are in distant locations.
Think of the money saved in shoes and suits alone, if I could have interviewed executives over Skype rather than having to fly to Atlanta for a three hour meeting.
Bagoh2o: what do you get when sociological and/or engineering models underestimate risk?
Ann...love the comments - great great arguments, the best really. Appreciate your method of pointing things out. Clever.
Considering that Wuhan deaths are overcounted, and many "victims" were seriously ill to begin with, 60K would be a good result: on the order of a bad flu season.
A lot of the people with underlying medical issues probably would have succumbed to the regular flu. All the models have to assume how contagious the disease is and how lethal. Back when the models were first constructed nobody had any idea what those numbers were, so they used worst, worst case scenarios.
Some of us even get a 401K.
Is the Devil hiring?
"what do you get when sociological and/or engineering models underestimate risk?"
First, they rarely do, becuase it's so easy and natural, and standard practice to build in safety factors, but it depends on what it cost to over compensate for risk. For example, nobody should ever get into a car, and if the common flu can kill 60,000 people in 13 weeks, shouldn't we shut down like this every year?
"Is the Devil hiring?"
Always hiring, and the work never slows down.
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