The New Segregation

Posted on December 15, 2021 by thezman

Walk around in public and it is increasingly obvious that Americans now live in at least two parallel worlds. For the bare-faced, the masked are a strange and alien people who are starting to fade into the scenery. The weirdness of these people strapping amulets to their faces has faded and it is now just something to be ignored, along with the person wearing the amulet. In fact, the weird collection of beliefs that lie behind the bizarre face-gear are also fading into obscurity.

The mask is no longer about following directions, complying with authority, concerns over public health and so on. It is about membership in a parallel universe that occupies the same physical space as this universe. If you want to know what segregation in the South was really like, go to a grocery store. Jim Crow was mostly two groups of people operating under mostly the same rules but living psychologically apart from one another in the same public spaces.

The masked versus unmasked is just the physical manifestation of the new segregation in current year America. Behind the mask lies paranoia and fear about those not wearing the magic amulet. The bare-faced are Trump supporters, possibly even insurrectionists or white supremacists. They most certainly are not vaccinated and therefore carry the latest letter of the Greek alphabet. These are the people against whom the elect are chosen to wage the holy war.

It sounds insane, but it is a generous description of the people living in the parallel universe that is the Left in America. Theirs is a world of magic and miracles where dark forces are resisted by the forces of light. They cannot explain how this works, but they have plenty of examples. The massive tornadoes that hit the bad people in Trump country were the wrath of Gaia. She is angry over climate change so she sent another warning to the sinners.

Exactly no one in the Gaia cult can explain how any of this works, but that is not how religions work anyway. The rituals and incantations are simple ways for the believer to show she is a believer, without knowing the logic of the belief. The overlap between Gaia worshippers and Covidians is not an accident. Both of these are viewed as supernatural occurrences by the Left. It is why your vaccination status matters so much to them. They have been told it matters, so they believe it.

Behind those masks is not just fear of Gaia, but a general fear of mysterious forces operating in the universe. It is why the Russian collusion hoax still circulates among these same people. They were never able to explain how it works, but they just knew it because that is how they imagine the world works. That is where you see the parallel universes at play. In one universe, hoaxes get debunked and people move on while in the other they become part of the canon.

In the world of normal people, the great struggle of life is the great struggle over the small things like money, family and work. Behind the mask, the great struggle is the defense of democracy. There is a war on democracy waged by those who oppose democracy for some reason. The faithful need Joe Biden to take on the real enemies of democracy in order to save it. Of course, those who criticize Joe Biden, in his noble quest, are threatening democracy by weakening his resolve.

One interesting thing about this new religion is it is mostly a grab bag of old ideas put to less interesting ends. For example, the crazies now have their version of the Inquisition where they will torment suspected heretics. Mark Meadows has been named by the Inquisition and will be brought to justice. He is charged with using the Devil’s own language to direct the armies of Satan. The point of this Inquisition is to finally defeat Old Scratch himself, former president Donald Trump.

To normal people, this obsession with the January 6th protests is completely insane, but lots of people believe otherwise. Behind those masks you will find that many, maybe most, buy into the insurrection myth entirely. Just as their magic amulet is about being on the right side of history, the basket of boutique beliefs swirling around the managerial class are about picking sides in the great struggle. The “insurrection” has become a rallying cry for those covering their faces in public.

Stand around in a public place where you can see a lot of believers and think about something that lies at the heart of it all. Can our societies continue to function when a significant minority of people believe these insane things? What Covid has really done is move this question to the forefront by bringing these people out of the shadows and giving them constant reinforcement. Those magic amulets are not just warding off the evil spirits, but reinforcing their faith in the new religion.

For the last two years the normal portion of the population has been buoyed by the hope that this will all peter out eventually. The madness of the Trump obsession would go away once Biden was in office. The Covidians would move onto something else once the cost of their madness was too much for them. Wait long enough and things will return to normal. It is looking like they can remain irrational for as long as it takes to pull the roof down on all of us.

One of the forgotten bits of truth about the segregated South is that without outside intervention, the system would have carried on indefinitely. The talented ten percent of blacks grumbled about not getting access to the elites and white merchants grumbled about the restrictions on commerce, but most people found it workable. Contrary to the cartoon version of the period popular with the crazies, the system kept the peace and most people saw it as an acceptable compromise.

The lesson is that two different people can live together in peace even if the separation is just psychological or cultural. Perhaps this is where things are heading. There will be no return to normal. One group will walk around with their magic amulets on their faces while normal people simply ignore it and much of what they say. The masked will traffic in their conspiracy theories about insurrectionists and white supremacists, while everyone else gets on with the struggle of life.

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Fear And Loathing

Posted on November 29, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week I take a deep dive into the legal theory underlying the recent political trials. Behind the green door I have several new items since last week.

Since the Great Panic began almost two years ago, the question on the minds of the curious has been how long will it last? Panics are not new in human society and they are not new to recent times either. The satanic panic that started in the 1980’s never really ended completely. The “face on a milk carton” meme is still with us, despite the fact few people remember is started in a panic. That was close to half a century ago, suggesting panics never really end.

The missing kid panic changed American society. Prior to that time, it was not unusual for children to walk to school with just the older kids supervising. Kids spent their after-school time playing outside, usually unsupervised. In big cities, kids would ride public transit to school. No one thought it was strange. After the panic, supervised activities became the norm. Video games found a target-rich environment of kids stuck inside by themselves or within earshot of their parents.

That suggests the Covid panic has a long way to go and may never end. That should be obvious at this point. First it was two weeks to bend the curve so hospitals could avoid being overrun by flu patients. That gave way to a regime of total fright with people required to wear amulets reminding everyone of the great fear. The vaccine should have broken the fear, but here we are facing new lockdowns due to the omicron strain, which reportedly attacks the vaccinated for some reason.

The omicron variant is probably the most amusing twist in the great Covid panic so far, because it suggests someone in the system has a sense of humor. As many have pointed out, the word “omicron” is an anagram for “moronic”. There is also the reference to a classic Star Trek episode. The spores on Omicron ceti iii made people euphoric and gave them everlasting health in exchange for a desire to never leave. The plants and the humans became two sides of a blissful relationship.

Part of what is driving this is belief. Humans are believing machines and with the collapse of traditional religion, people are falling into cultural and political cults that scratch the same itch as the old gods. Nature cults have been a staple of human existence since the beginning. At a certain level, the people swept up in the cult of Covid feel they are being punished for a sin against nature. Covid is nature’s vengeance against mankind.

That is why good news is always bad news with Covid. The new mysterious variant that does not make people sick is “symptomless Covid” rather than the natural weakening the virus with each new mutation. The omicron variant is similarly a weaker mutation, but it is setting off panic around the world. Covid is a proxy for a new mystery god, one that reveals itself only through it actions. Like all gods, it is eternal, so its manifestations will be eternal as well. Covid is here forever.

The main driver of the panic from the beginning has been the ruling class, which is looking like Howard Hughes at the end. Instead of shutting themselves up in their mansions and wearing tissue boxes on their feet, they are obsessed with conquering death itself. The actors they hire to perform the rituals off democracy are not quite as bad, but they are a gerontocracy now. As such, they startle at the slightest touch, assuming it must be the Grim Reaper.

There is also the weird isolation of the managerial class. It is not a physical isolation as they do leave their compounds to explore the land of the Dirt People. It is a psychological and cultural isolation. They can imagine hospitals overflowing and people dying in the streets, even though they see no evidence of these things, because they are conditioned by their existence to trust their coevals over their own eyes. If they see it in their media, it is true, no matter what reality has to say.

This combination of old and isolated has created a ruling class that is deeply paranoid about what happens outside the safety of their safe zones. Note how often the word “safe” comes up in their rhetoric. They see themselves as the protectors of society, so they are constantly going on about safety. The reason for that is they assume everyone shares their fear and paranoia about the world. Covid is powerful juju for a ruling class hiding from nature, reality and their own mortality.

Of course, a big part of the panic is the opportunity for the deranged to inflict themselves on the rest of us. Covid has been manna from heaven for the sort of person who sees herself as everyone’s den mother. These people will never get enough of the state of emergency, which provides the panic stricken elite with an amen chorus giving them the allusion of consent. One side pleads to be made safe while the other side pleads to be the savior of mankind.

This brings us back to the original question. When does this panic end? Most likely, it will require a generational turnover. The gerontocracy will die off and be replaced by something worse, but something younger. That means these health panics are probably a feature of the empire now. Like superhero movies, Covid will be rebooted and reimagined every few years. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an ornamental mask on a human face— forever.

Corona Warning

Posted on July 21, 2021 by thezman

It is becoming increasingly clear that most of what the ruling class has been telling us about the corona virus is false. The virus is real, and people have died from it, but everything else we have been told has not been 100% true. The origin of the virus is the most obvious example. Trump called it the “China Virus”, so the managerial elite denied that was the case. They made claims about it possibly originating somewhere else and just showing up in force in China. That was a lie.

Of course, the big lie to this point is that the measures the government imposed were rooted in science. Mask wearing was about preventing the sick from spreading the virus to the rest of us. Alternatively, it was about keeping healthy people from inhaling the virus as it buzzed around in the air. The social distancing stuff was also supposed to be science! None of the measures turned out to be rooted in anything more than superstition and a desire to abuse the population.

The reason that most people went along with these measures initially was that the official word about the virus was that it was Black Death. It is easy to forget, but the regime circulated images of bodies in the streets over in Wuhan. They used similar images when the virus hit Italy. Then they used images from horror movies claiming they were from overrun hospitals. They sold the virus as a potential extinction event, so even the most cynical prepared for the worst.

Corona has become the very definition of the big lie. The warnings about the virus were “lies so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” One should take a minute to appreciate the amazing bit of irony in all of this. Hitler is credited with coining the term to describe the people he saw as his natural enemy. Today, the people relying on the big lie to sustain themselves are making themselves mad looking for Hitler.

Putting all of that aside, we may be arriving at a point where those previous big lies start to shrink down in size and look reasonable. The number of people testing positive for the corona virus, despite being fully vaccinated, is becoming an issue. In the UK, they are reporting that between 40% and 60% of patients hospitalized with corona have been fully vaccinated. There is some confusion about the number as they originally reported the higher figure, but then the media made them change it.

We are seeing something similar happening in Israel. They have been one of the most aggressive countries on the vaccination front. They started early and were the most effective at getting people into the program. As a result, they are one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. They are currently reporting that over 60% of their severe cases are people who have been fully vaccinated. Moderna executives may want to hire food testers and people to start their cars.

In the United States, it is unlikely that these sorts of numbers will be reported as the government and media are simply too dishonest. We do have other ways of seeing if the pattern is the same here. Sports teams, for example, are the most vaccinated populations and they are seeing people come down with corona, despite having been fully vaccinated. They are young and strong, so the cases are mild. Nancy Pelosi’s staff just reported corona infections, despite being fully vaxxed.

Largely ignored by the media thus far is the fact that the vaccine makers think booster shots in the fall may be required. It is hard to know if this is just another lie to keep the money flowing or it is an admission that the vaccine is not as advertised. It could also be a way to sell another panic in the fall, when the normal flu returns. We have reached the point where the only thing we can trust is that whatever we are being told is a lie, but the motivation for the lie is a mystery.

There are a few things going on here. One is that the fanatical testing that should never have been put into place is turning up many false positives. This sort of testing is supposed to err on the side of the false positive. It is not supposed to be used on the population as a whole. It is supposed to be used when there is a serious medical condition that requires treatment. A vaccinated ball player with a runny nose should not be tested for the corona virus or anything else.

The bigger issue, however, is that the vaccines are not as claimed. Past experience with vaccines for corona viruses has shown that these approaches were not highly effective, and they were short lived. Even natural immunity fades with time, but with these vaccines it seems to fade quickly. That is fine if you want to create artificial herd immunity to eliminate the virus from a herd of cattle, but it is not so useful for human population in large diverse societies not fully vaccinated.

What may be happening is the vaccines are highly effective in the short term, but the immunity fades during the first year. This may be the reason for the booster shot stuff that will arrive in the fall. It could also be that the vaccine is narrowly effective for the initial variant, but not for subsequent variants. Given the lack of testing before the roll out, we can only guess. There is also the possibility that the vaccine is a trillion dollar boondoggle that has very little utility at all.

When public trust collapses, the truth no longer has meaning. What carries the day is the most compelling narrative. This should have been the lesson of Hitler, who came to power because he provided the most compelling narrative. Repeated and unnecessary lying by the managerial class regarding Covid means that the facts are quickly losing their value. Instead, it will be the best narrative that carries the day. No amount of censoring will prevent that from happening.

It is fairly clear that we are well past the public health concern with Covid. The treatments for those with severe cases are now highly effective. Most of the population has natural immunity. The variants appear to be less severe than the first wave of the virus, which is not uncommon in pandemics. In other words, we are at the point where we can live with Covid, just as we live with the flu. The question now is whether we can live with the people who have spent two years lying about it.

Blessed Are The Covidians

Posted on April 22, 2021 by thezman

Back when the Covid-19 panic started, a clever fellow pointed out that one possible way out of it would be a vaccine that did not work, but with enough effort could convince people it did work. The rulers could claim it is 80% effective at preventing infection and there would be no way to know it was a lie based on medical statistics. The vaccinated who got Covid would just be those for whom the vaccine did not work. If the producer could keep the secret, no one would be the wiser.

The reason for this is simple math. The claims about the infectiousness of this virus were always nonsense. A year of aggressive testing has resulted in about 10% of the public having tested positive. We know that the false positives are very high, but we also know many infected people never get tested. Either they have no idea they have been infected or their symptoms are so mild they ignore it. Like the flu, Covid can be expected to infect around 20% of the public in a year.

If your vaccine is 80% effective, then that 20% is miraculously accurate. A clever ruler could roll out a fake vaccine and claim it is doing as it claims. The gullible media and research community would fall for it completely. Unless someone in on the scam spilled the beans, no one would know. In the age where the media is just the marketing department for the corporate state, whistleblowers are ignored. Given the money involved, a fake vaccine program is not a bad bet.

One problem with this scheme is that Covid quickly went from genuine public health concern to lucrative racket. Billions are being made maintaining the panic. It turns out that reorganizing the economy around lock downs is hard to reverse. Then you have the celebrity Covidians. Guys like Dr. Fauci are never going to let go of this thing as it is making him famous and rich. Of course, Covid is now a stock part of the media, like the weather or the previous night’s sports scores.

Then you have the Covidian problem. The fervent, but mentally unstable, have gravitated to the Covid panic as a new religion. The people who used to carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks in order to show their love of Gaia are now wearing eight masks when alone in their car. They really care and they really care most about making sure you know how much they care. Take away their masks and they have no way to tell you how much they care.

This has created a perfect storm. The racketeers are pushing the vaccine, but also saying that nothing changes. Once everyone is vaccinated, according to people like Fauci, everyone will still have to wear masks, stand an arbitrary distance from one another, and carry on like the atmosphere is poisonous. This pleases the Covidians no end, who arf like seals at this idea. Millions are rushing off to be vaccinated so they can keep wearing masks and staying home.

Since most of the media has now joined the Church of Covid, they are looking for proof that their plans for your future are science! This story from the New York Times says a member of the unclean caused a pandemic among the faithful, despite the fact they had performed the proper sacraments. They were vaccinated and they were wrapped in layers of shrink wrap. Despite that, the mere presence of an unclean made Covid angry and she took out her wrath on the nursing home.

A reasonable person would look at this and wonder why anyone is bothering to get vaccinated when you still get sick. In fact, many people are wondering why we bothered with the vaccine at all, given that everyone will have to keep pretending this is the zombie apocalypse. We stopped using the iron lung and lumbar punctures once the polio vaccine was created. That is the point of a vaccine. You get vaccinated so you are no longer at high risk of contracting the targeted disease.

Of course, the Covidians are never giving up on this new religion, so their take is that the vaccine only works when the sinners are forced to be vaccinated. Again, it is not science with these people, even though they are fond of telling us how much they trust science, peace be upon her. You see, this miracle of science only works when everyone believes in it. If just one heretic refuses the blessed sacrament of vaccination, the whole community, maybe the whole world, is at risk!

Those with a taste for history cannot help but notice the Puritan notion of communal salvation running through this panic. The idea that a community can be brought low by the presence of a lone sinner has been with us since the beginning. It was the justification for the witch trials. Today it is the justification for the media destroying the lives of people who donate money to the wrong sinner. Soon, the unvaccinated will be forced to wear a scarlet letter-C on their chest.

The Covid panic has revealed the real plague on American society. It is the plague of mentally unstable individuals searching for a purpose to their lives. These are people who would have been religious fanatics in another age. In this age, their disordered minds cause them to seek the order of ideology. Toting around grimy canvas sacks, displaying pronouns on their e-mail signature and wearing eight masks in the car are about the need for structure to give them a sense of order.

Does any of this mean the vaccine is fake? Probably not. The drug companies are craven enough to try it. The media is dumb enough and cynical enough to go along with what they are told, but none of these people are creative enough to think of it. The more likely scenario is the drug makers dummied up their studies knowing the FDA was under pressure to play along. These vaccines are probably not all that effective and probably less effective for the old than the young.

Allowing crazy people to call the shots is never a good idea. Time will tell if it was a good idea to vaccinate the public with a hastily conceived vaccine. It took about five years before the monstrous effects of thalidomide became clear. Five years from now the same people lecturing us about mask wearing could very well be lecturing us about the dangers of allowing untested drugs onto the market. The solution to their current panic will be the cause of their future panic.

The Ongoing Panic

Posted on March 2, 2021 by thezman

Depending upon when you mark the start of the Covid mass hysteria, we are either coming up on the one year anniversary or have just past it. Panic was setting in as early as January, but that was mostly with people who saw a profit in it. It was in February when the mass media started picking up on it. For example, no one was wearing a mask at CPAC 2020, which was in February. By March you could not buy a mask anywhere, along with toiletries and paper products.

A year on, we are getting a better picture of what happened in what may go down as one of the great mass panics in human history. Given that the panic is still with us, the picture that is emerging is blurry and incomplete. In parts of the US and Europe, Covid has turned into a weird religion. It is not just a public health issue to be managed and navigated, but a stand-in for Old Scratch. The faithful are not only vigilant, they are Covid vigilantes, minding everyone’s business about it.

One thing we are seeing is a collapse in the number of confirmed cases. This is in line with what we know about past pandemics. The number of cases is slow at first, often because we have no way of testing for the new bug. Then the number of cases rises quickly, partly due to awareness and partly due to panic. In the mass media age, the need for attention surely drove the case count. Contrary to media narratives, the drop in cases has nothing to do with government efforts.

In fact, there is no evidence that any of the measures, public or private, had any impact on the spread of Covid. The fact is the only way to slow the spread of a virus like this is what the Chinese did and that is lock everyone in their homes. Even the Chinese found this to be close to impossible. What the West could do and is doing is theater. It is about protecting the political health of the ruling class, by convincing enough people that the government is doing something about the virus.

Political theater is an essential element of liberal democracy. We live in the modern version of a Dionysian age. All public acts are public performances, and all public performances are part of the larger morality play of politics. Facts and the discourse upon facts is purely a private affair. It is why everything about Covid has been politicized and only came to our attention when it could be politicized. For a year we have been watching Covid theater, rather than a public health response.

Once the drama runs its course on the big stage, and it seems to be reaching that point now that Mumbly Joe is staggering around the White House, it will go off-Broadway and then close up shop entirely. The mass roll out of vaccines with highly questionable claims to effectiveness looks like the way out for government. Once the old people are vaccinated, they can then claim herd immunity has been reached and the rest of the public can get the jab at their leisure.

One caveat to that prediction is that the Covidians are getting worked up over the new strain of Covid. This is the super-Covid that the oracles prophesied back in the before times when this all started. This one is “armed with enhanced capabilities.” Apparently it has infrared vision and portable drones. Additionally, the Nth wave people will be with us forever, it seems. Then you have the Covid industrial complex that has invested heavily in lockdowns and all that surrounds it.

Assuming that the panic does end, and this drama moves off the stage this year, we will also start to get a sense of the degree of madness we have witnesses. For example, we are already getting a hint in the annual flu numbers. In Britain, the number of influenza cases was zero this flu season. Maybe we have witnessed a miracle or maybe Covid kills the influenza virus. Most likely, the flu numbers have been re-classed as Covid, which appears to be the case in the US.

The truth is most cases we call the flu are caused by unknown pathogens. In fact, only about 20% of flu cases treated by the medical system are known to be the flu. The rest are from something else. Since the medicines for treating the symptoms do the job, no one really cares what caused the symptoms. It is why we do not mandate testing for the flu or the common cold. Up until the past year, we just accepted the fact that people get sick in winter and sometimes need to be treated for it.

Once the dust settles and the sober minded can begin to look at the data, what we will find is that the number of deaths was wildly exaggerated. Similarly, the number of people needing hospitalization was also exaggerated. This is common to all pandemics in the modern age. Even the Spanish Flu was exaggerated. A lot of the deaths attributed to it were from other factors, like poor hospital conditions, poorly trained doctors, bad nutrition, and other pathogens.

Another lesson will be that modern government is not capable of managing a genuine crisis, even a mild one like Covid. The story emerging from New York shows that the people making the decisions not only lacked the basic skills to manage a crisis, but they were obsessed with the politics of the moment. Like everything about partisan politics, everyone chose sides. The left-wing states chose first, so the right-wing states were left with the right answer by default. That is no way to run a country.

It is not just a partisan political problem. It is a systemic one. This paper examining the political economy of this panic looks at the role of mass media. The initial reality of the virus was amplified by the mass media, which the decision makers in government rely upon as their primary information source. They acted on the exaggerated claims, which had the effect of confirming those claims to the public. This was picked up and magnified by the media and we had a vicious cycle.

The interesting bit in that paper is the parallel between how a virus spreading faster in a dense population and how panic spreads in a media dense population. Before the mass media age, most people were outside the media environment, in the same way most people were outside urban areas in agrarian times. Just as a pathogen needs a network of people, bad information needs a way to pass from person to person. Our connected age is now a breeding ground for informational pandemics.

Another aspect to this is a growing number of people seem to need the emotional energy that comes from crisis. We saw this in the early days of Covid. The auxiliary volunteer army of scolds were suddenly swarming the public square. That energy eventually transferred to fighting the virus that they call Trump supporters and insurrectionists but is now looking for a new host. They will need another panic this spring and you can be sure one will be supplied.

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Death From Above

Posted on September 1, 2020 by thezman

Imagine a small kingdom that is faced with a disease outbreak of unknown origin and unknown severity. The king, upon being briefed by his staff, gives a speech to his people informing them of what is known and what efforts are being made to determine the severity of the disease. He asks his people to take reasonable precautions, as they would during the cold and flu season. As more information is gathered, he will inform the public so they can act accordingly.

As it becomes clear that the disease is hard on the very old and very sick, but not much of a threat to everyone else, efforts are made to insulate the very old and those in nursing homes. The public is informed of this and told to be extra cautious around the very old and very sick. Resources are made available to those charged with caring for the very old and sick. Otherwise, the public is asked to go about their business as they would in the cold and flu season.

This probably sounds completely insane to most people, but it used to be the way rulers handled public health matters. In the Asian Flu and Hong Kong flu outbreaks last century, the public was informed and reasonable precautions were taken by local government to limit the impact. Schools might be closed for a few weeks until the wave passed through a community, for example. The flu came and went, as they always do, with a varying degrees of impact on communities.

Of course, this was not the case with the Covid pandemic. Instead of doing what has always been done, our rulers rushed to the nearest television camera and told everyone they are going to die. Hairy old men in sundresses were sent out to scare the public and not just over the idea of mentally disturbed men in sundresses being put in charge of public health. No, their job was to convince the public that this is the end times and that everyone must lock themselves at home.

Not only was it not the end times, but it is looking like what skeptics have been saying all along, a tougher than normal flu season. The CDC has updated their kill data, adjusting the death toll down a modest 94%. Just six percent of deaths can actually be attributed to Covid. That’s about ten thousand people. The rest were afflicted with other diseases that were likely to kill them. Covid may have hastened their demise, but that is speculation. William Briggs has a good summary of the new data.

The long and short of it for those looking for the condensed version is that Covid by itself is not much of a threat to most people. Even old healthy people are not particularly vulnerable to this virus. It is the very old and the very sick, especially the very sick, who are at risk of this disease. In fact, the man-made panic may very well have killed more people than the disease itself. Think about all of the health care not being done due to closing hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Now, the obvious push-back will be that we did not know six months ago that this disease would not live up to the promise. The panic was a necessary precaution against the possibility of a much more lethal disease. The implication here is that we must assume the worst-case scenario in every instance and react accordingly. The fact that the worst case is also the rarest case, means we have to operate as if the natural world is nothing but exceptions, a world of miracles.

Even if one wants to turn the precautionary principle on its head this way, we had enough data early on to know it was not going to be the Black Death. Data from Italy and China showed that Covid was a killer of the very old and the very sick. The early models used to justify the panic were invalidated from the start. as far back as April, the justifications for the panic were undermined by what we knew. There was never a good reason to do what has been done in response to Covid.

The bottom line in all of this is the man-made panic has done more damage to American society than the virus. There are the unnecessary deaths and suicides that were caused by the panic. There is the massive transfer of wealth from small business to corporate giants. This will accelerate the decline in social capital, accelerating the decline in local community. The Covid Panic is not the Xhosa Cattle Killing cult, at least not yet, but the comparison is too obvious to ignore.

Perhaps the most important take-away from this man-made disaster is that none of the people responsible for it will be held accountable. In a sane world, there would at least be a truth and reconciliation commission, where the people responsible would explain themselves and ask for mercy. Instead, these people peddling panic will face no consequences and no doubt profit from their crimes. They won’t even have the decency to admit they were wrong about the severity of the disease.

Finally, this is example six million that the people in charge of America are too corrupt and incompetent to perform the basic duties of rule. In order to live something close to a normal life, Americans have to navigate around a thicket of pirates, bandits and incompetent bureaucrats all looking to rob the public. Slathered onto that is a ruling class ham-handedly addressing problems of their own creation. American are being strangled by an anaconda of incompetence from above.

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Covid Capitalism

Posted on July 16, 2020 by thezman

For most people, buying a car is not a pleasant experience. Getting a new car is always nice, even if you are not a car person, but the process of getting it is almost always a hassle due to how cars are sold in America. Getting a used car can eliminate the hassle of the dealership, but then you have to worry about getting hustled by someone trying to unload their lemon onto a sucker. The car market is extreme capitalism, where no one gives a sucker an even break or smartens up a chump.

Strangely, this makes it the ideal place to understand what has happened to our society over the last six months. For example, every car dealership website now has a prominent banner informing the visitor just how much the car dealer cares about the health and safety of their customers. There’s usually a link to their page detailing just how much they care about you, the sap they hope will buy a car from them. All of these mission statements are titled, “Our Response to COVID-19.”

In case it is not obvious, a business built around the phrase caveat emptor is not concerned about the safety of anyone, even the employees. Like every business in extreme capitalist America, the car dealers see an angle in presenting themselves as guardians of public health. At the far end of capitalism, the business must be both rapacious and patronizing. Telling you how much they care about your welfare while stripping you of what they can is the standard business model.

The thing about all of this that goes unnoticed is how predatory economics has not just been normalized, it is now celebrated. Forty years ago, soulless money grasping was seen as immoral. The movie Wall Street presented a morality tale about how extreme capitalism was soul destroying. Today, the ruthless businessman is in the morally superior position, while the person doubting the ethics of his behavior is portrayed as a naive and stupid person, possibly even dangerous.

Maybe it is just a case of monkey see, monkey do with these dealers, but all of their steps to show just how much they care are the same across the board. They have “contactless” car buying, which is a very strange thing, when you consider it. How much physical contact would one normally have with the the car salesman under normal conditions? Of course, since their goal is to screw the customer, maybe this is a strange inside joke or possibly a cry for help.

Of course, all of this is just a racket and everyone gets it, except for the people firmly in the panic camp. They see it as confirmation. In fact, that’s the point of all these ads from giant corporations telling us how much they care about us and the communities they are destroying. It is pure partisanship. On one side there are the people sure this pandemic is punishment for Trump. On the other side are people who are sure the other side is using the virus to advance their ideological goals.

This is the world of today. There are now two camps of people. One camp consumes every event and metabolizes it into fuel for their ideological war. As soon as the virus became news their chief concern was in how to turn it into another weapon in their social war to control society. As soon as the hated Trump declared his side on the virus issue, the Left immediately embraced a set of positions on the virus. Every left-wing and adjacent governor blew up his state to spite Trump.

The second camp are the people who realize that the new issue is becoming politicized and they form up an opposition to the Left. In the case of the virus, they started as curious or maybe mildly skeptical. These were the people who said it was just going to be a very bad flu most likely, but we needed more information. Now they are the people who say the face muffler is the six pointed star of totalitarianism. For them, the facts of the virus no longer matter anymore.

In this environment, there’s no truth or even the desire for truth, as all truth is determined by which side of the line you stand. The car dealers, for example, would have lepers selling cars if it moved more product. It is in their interest to go along with the safety campaign, so they go along with the safety campaign. They would have their people in hazmat suits putting the buyer through a delousing station if that’s what it takes to sell cars. They care, because they don’t care.

Everywhere else, the caring capitalists are either proof that the plague is real and a punishment for the Orange Man or it is just part of the fraud perpetrated by people obsessed with hating the Orange Man. Not only does this make everything extremely simple, it means the simpletons rule the day. If you’re inclined to automatically take one side or the other based entirely on your feelings toward the people on each side of the line, this is a glorious time to be alive.

The car dealership is now the metaphor of our age. The people running it engage in the most extreme form of ruthless transactionalism. They do so while pretending they care deeply about the people they will gladly fleece. Meanwhile, on the lot, one group of buyers is misty-eyed over how much the dealer cares about this plague sent to spite the Trump people. The other group grits its teeth behind its face mufflers, fantasizing about the revolution and that sports car in the showroom.

Custodialism

Posted on April 15, 2020 by thezman

Every political philosophy starts with a set of beliefs about the human condition that are claimed to be universal and timeless. Based on these assumptions, there is a critique of the present state of affairs and the political organization responsible for it. What comes after that is an alternative. The claim is that the alternative will more closely correspond to man’s natural condition. Usually, there is a list of principles put forward that are intended to increase the good and diminish the bad.

Communists, for example, assumed that human beings are naturally cooperative, but that private property creates conflict. The greed of a few, exploiting the many, results in conflict between the classes. Eliminate private property and you eliminate that social conflict. They argued that the move to industrial societies meant scarcity could be eliminated through collective ownership of capital. The elimination of private property would lead to the equitable distribution of production.

Libertarians see cooperation as the result of the diversity of talents among humans and their rational self-interest. Once two people figured out that they could increase their output by combining their efforts, the foundation of society was set. People soon figured out that combining diverse talents increases collective productivity and material prosperity. Because humans are motivated by self-interest, they naturally cooperate with one another to increase their material prosperity.

The people who currently rule over us, start from the assumption that all humans possess the same natural raw material. The differences we see in people are the result of racism, poverty, inequality and the legacy of white supremacy. Otherwise, people come into the world as amorphous blobs that can be shaped into whatever society makes of them. Whether the rulers truly believe this is not important. Public policy is based on the blank slate and extreme egalitarianism.

If the starting point for a political philosophy is a set of universal truths about the human condition, then it is necessary that those truths be based in reality. Marxism has been a bloody disaster, because it assumes things about man that are contrary to the reality of the human condition. Marxists tried to remedy this by killing off the inconvenient, but it turned out that you just can’t kill enough people to make it work. Transforming society into an abattoir lowers productivity, rather than producing plenty.

Similarly, but without the bloodshed, libertarianism has been a complete failure as a political movement, because homo economicus is not real. Material self-interest is certainly part of the puzzle, but humans are motivated by all sorts of things. More important, the assumption that people will deal with one another in good faith, once the monopoly of the state is removed, is false. Every society has some portion motivated to rule over the rest. Someone will always be in charge.

Much of what vexes the modern West is that the people in charge have embraced a political philosophy based on invalid assumptions about human nature. People are not born as amorphous blobs that can be molded into model citizens. Instead, they are the genetic result of thousands of mating decisions that came before them. Further, nature does not distribute her gifts equally between individuals or groups. The diversity of man extends to all aspects of the human animal, not just the superficial traits.

The main reason the West is struggling to square what it believes about humanity with what is happening in the world, is that the core assumptions of the West were formed in the Enlightenment. The great debates about the nature of man were between Europeans, who were primarily concerned with how Europeans would organize themselves, manage relations between groups of Europeans and conduct commerce between and within groups of Europeans.

Another issue is that Western style liberal democracy is a creation of an age when smart people knew very little about the human sciences. Their speculation about the evolution of settled society was a work of imagination. They may have had some sense that humanity progressed from savagery to civilization, but they had no understanding of genetics, evolution or the interplay between culture and biology. They had no knowledge about what we inherited from our simian ancestors.

The big flaw is the assumption that there is some reason, beyond the material, for why humans are the only intelligent species on the planet. We’re special. As such, there must be some reason for it. The very notion of human progress assumes there must be a reason for our existence. After all, to what are we progressing if there is no purpose to our existence? What is the point of the arc of history if it does not have a beginning, middle and end? There must be some reason for it.

Current events are a good lesson in the reality of the human condition. Humans are not relentlessly pursuing their self-interest or naturally cooperative. The engine that drives humanity is the need for safety. We see that all around us as people meekly hide in their closets because they are told the bogeyman is outside. The great panic would not be possible if people were driven by self-interest. Why would the overwhelming majority sacrifice for the one or two percent vulnerable to the virus?

The fact is, people have gone along with this because down deep, in the store of man’s oldest desires, is the urge to huddle in the cave with the rest of the tribe, as the storm rages outside. That is man’s oldest desire as a social animal. To bind together in a shared fear of the natural world is what makes us human. The great motivator of mankind is the desire for safety. If there is a point to our existence, it is to shelter with our cave mates trembling in fear at the great danger outside.

For sure, people do more than just shelter from the danger, but it is the desire for safety that drives our actions. We will cooperate with one another to defeat some threat and will profit greatly from saving people from a threat. Safety and its traveling companion comfort are the great drivers of human progress. A great way to get rich is to eliminate a danger from life. The most popular way, however, is to make the sheltering from the dangers of life as comfortable as possible.

If there is to be a new moral philosophy for the post-Enlightenment age, it will have to be based, at least in part, on man’s nature desire for safety. In fact, the neo-liberal order may very well be the moral philosophy to first root itself in safety. The legion of schoolmarms and harpies monitoring our speech and making sure we have no unclean thoughts are all here for our collective good. They even say their role is to create safe spaces for every conceivable type of person.

The Enlightenment was as much about observing what was happening on its own as crafting blueprints for future societies. Marx, for example, had plenty of examples to draw from to form his ideas. Maybe that is what we are seeing today. As the custodial state forms up, what we call the neo-liberal order will become more formal and get a new name that captures its essence. Perhaps we are living at the dawn of Custodialism, the politics of keeping everyone safe from any possible danger.

The Great Retreat

Posted on April 14, 2020 by thezman

It is becoming increasingly clear that the great zombie apocalypse of 2020 is not going to live up to the hype. At this stage, the models and their experts said we would have bodies in the streets and chaos at the hospitals. Instead, what we have is a shuttered country and hospitals furloughing staff due to a lack of sick people. The curve benders keep changing their forecasts, but the virus keeps letting them down. The big question now is how will everyone retreat from this debacle.

To his credit, President Trump has sensed the end game from the very beginning and has been talking about “reopening the country” for a while. He knows this cannot go on much longer and his job will soon shift from battling dingbats in the press room over the virus to battling dingbats in the press room over the economy. If he is to continue in his role, he will need the promised V-shape recession. If it is a depression, then he will be replaced with the first Alzheimer-American to run for president.

This may turn out to be what saves his presidency. He will have six months to go around the country talking up the economy. He will also be able to blame Congress for a whole host of things in the process. Running against Congress is a good way for a President with soft support to win over skeptics. If the economy is quickly recovering by the fall, with employers hiring back furloughed workers, Trump can run as the guy who not only saved us from the invisible death but also saved the economy.

A lot of that will depend on the local politicians. They have suddenly found their spines in this panic and are now claiming to control our destiny regarding the lock down. They are coordinating their plans to re-open, which is smart politics. They don’t want to give Trump credit, but they don’t want to risk being the first to open up. They will pretend to be operating as a team in order to not risk getting blamed if the media does not follow orders and continues to report on the virus.

That’s the big part of the coming retreat from this panic. The media will have to be coached carefully so they don’t screw up and accidentally report the truth. A whole new gaggle of experts and actors playing experts is being prepped to explain why it is now okay to go outside. At the same time, they still have to blame Orange Man for the deaths that never materialized. In the end, they may just drop the whole thing and pretend it never happened, like the impeachment fiasco.

Perhaps the hardest hit by the great virus flop has been the curve benders. They will have the task of explaining why they are still smarter than the rest of us, but were ridiculously wrong about the biggest event in their lives. As RamZPaul pointed out the other day, in most professions, being this wrong gets you fired. Being an internet expert, however, means never having to be right, so maybe they just follow the lead of the media and forget the whole thing happened.

The problem with that plan is the curve benders personalized this from the start, calling the skeptics all sorts of names. It is unlikely that the skeptics will forget how Nicky Taleb threw his dress over his head and ran around squealing like a girl. Many of the curve benders will be able to recover their reputations, but some will not. In a better age, the curve benders would be packing their stuff and heading out of town right now, but in this age, they will probably be rehabilitated without much effort.

Then there are the people who fell for the hype and then piously lectured the rest of us about how the virus was more important than the economy. Many of these people claimed to be on this side of the great divide. They had lectured for years about how the media can never be trusted. Then they swallowed the official line on the virus like good little boys and girls. The internet never forgets, so they will be reminded of this for the remainder of their days, especially on this side of the divide.

It’s not so much that they were wrong or acted like smug bleeps. It’s that they revealed themselves to be every bit as out of touch as the mass media. This was just another game for them to play on-line, like their politics. Their clapping for the lay-offs and business closures revealed that they have no skin in the game. It is a good reminder to never take business advice from someone who has never signed the front of a paycheck and never take political advice from people without jobs.

As far as timing, we are getting close to the point where the lines of the alarmists and curve benders break. The one guy consistently right about this thinks the great retreat is coming soon. Governors are now preparing to declare victory, so they will be scurrying away from this in the next couple of weeks. Local business is already showing signs of rebellion, so they may set the pace for the governors. Trump now has a task force to re-open the economy. It even has his dingbat daughter on it.

What all this suggests is that in a couple of weeks, everyone will be talking about the economy and going back to work and school. In another month, the only people talking about the virus will be conspiracy nuts and the remaining curve benders who refuse to let it go. If the summer is a great recovery in the economy, this whole sorry episode will be sent down the memory hole. The great retreat from the panic that will change everything will be complete and no one will remember any of it.

Cui Bono?

Posted on April 9, 2020 by thezman

Early in my working life, I found myself managing a few salesmen, along with some entry level managers. Since my area of responsibility only required three salesmen, it did not warrant a sales manager, so that duty was mine, as well as operations. It was a good training job for a young guy. One thing I learned from the sales guys is something that stuck with me forever. That is, no one cares about a deal more than the salesman working the deal. He’s the one that will make it happen.

You see, even in a big company, every salesman is like a small business. His expenses are his time and his revenue is his commission. The really good salesmen are shrewd in how they spend their time, never wasting a minute on a bad deal. They never fight the commission structure. If selling the crap product gets a bigger commission, then they sell the crap product. If the product is so crappy, they can’t sell it, they find a new job where they can hit their commission goals.

Since sales drives everything about business, it was a great lesson about the reality of business and bureaucracy. The managers have goals and they try to craft incentives so their people naturally work toward those goals. The trouble is, they often see the world through their own myopic eyes, rather than through the eyes of their people. Alternatively, they will foolishly think their people will make personal sacrifices on behalf of their goals. They think everyone cares about their deal as much as they do.

We are seeing this play out in the response to the pandemic. The people making the models and making predictions care about things that are important to them. It has always been assumed that they care most about being right, but as the models have failed and they are now “updated” on a daily basis, it turns out that accuracy really was never all that important to them. Marc Lipsitch, the guy largely responsible for the panic, was never all that concerned with being right.

Similarly, the people making public policy were always working their deals, rather than working your deal. By that I mean they were not issuing crack down orders on people because it was good for the public. They did it because it was good for them or at least they assumed it was good for them. It is why we had a race between states to see who could arrive at the most absurd policies. The nation lies dormant now because of a bizarre beauty pageant among the nation’s governors.

The response from our imperial rulers to this shuttering of the country is another deal that means everything to the people who passed it. Trump and Congress were really proud of themselves for having done the deal in such short time. It turns out though, that the deal was a great public relations stunt, but not much of a deal for the nation’s small business people. This post at the Federalist walks through the math of the Payroll Protection Act. Be prepared for breadlines this summer.

Of course, the most glaring example of this is the health care system. In response to a theoretical problem, it is in the process of creating real problems by faking death certificates and indefinitely postponing medical care for people with real diseases, in order to perpetuate the crisis atmosphere. The system is acting in the interest of the system, because the people at the top making the decisions care about their deal more than anything else. They closed the system to save it from the virus.

All of this should be a good reminder about the reality of anything that has the word “managed” in its label. Whether it is a managed health care system or a managed economy, the people doing the managing care more about their deal than anything else, thus the system they manage comes to reflect their interests. The stone-heads on our side cheering the crisis and demanding managed health care and a managed economy will soon find out what that really means. Enjoy the bread lines.

Of course, the stone-heads will argue that destroying the civil life of the country is the price to be paid for discrediting the current order. That may be true, but that does not mean the people cheering it will suddenly be vaulted to the top by the people being made to pay the price for this disaster. Again, those people at the top with the monopoly of force will surely take care of their deal before allowing anyone else to profit from the turmoil that is coming our way this summer.

The point of all this is even small organizations become very complicated in a hurry, because people have lots of priorities individually, which can coincide with and contradict their collective priorities. Fine tuning those while working your own deal is beyond the skill of most managers. It is why bureaucracies become self-serving and why managed anything is a fool’s errand. Whether it is managed economies or managed health care, eventually, the deal that matters most is the manager’s deal.

Circling back to those salesmen I managed, the second big lesson I learned in that job was from my boss. I complained to him that the commission structure I inherited worked against our interests because it was too complicated to manage. He told me to make it a flat commission on gross, but that I was responsible for the performance of every deal I signed off on going forward. It did not take long for the sales staff to know what was good business for me and what was a waste of their time.

That’s the lesson the stone-heads from the planned economy camp and the free market zealots never grasp. The choice is not between a system managed by angels or a system run by the invisible hand of magic. The choice is always between clarity and opacity. When the incentives are clear and individual interests are clear, everyone makes better decisions and demands more rational sacrifice. When those things are hidden, it is when our virtues are soon turned into vices.

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