Tag: epidemic

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First Amendment rights media and media people

Who’s Banned What?

Facebook, censorship, protests, corona virus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic,

Has dissent about pandemic policy been outlawed? 

I mean, “for the duration”?

Well, no. 

The Internet displays every possible view of policy and epidemiology, expressed with every possible degree of temperateness or intemperateness.

Yet we are indeed seeing signs of indifference to freedom of speech even when that speech cannot entail breathing a coronavirus on anybody.

According to CNN, Facebook told the network: “Anti-quarantine protests being organized through Facebook in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska are being removed from the platform on the instruction of governments in those three states because it violates stay-at-home orders.”

Online posts “violate stay-at-home orders”? 

Who knew? 

Obviously, a protest that violates social-distancing rules (if it does) is not the same thing as a communication about the protest.

Apparently, Facebook is a willing functionary of whichever state governments will instruct it to carry out their censorship. Tyler O’Neil opines that “it is disconcerting that Facebook would work with local governments to remove pages organizing protests against them.” 

Yes, indeed.

But such reports have been disputed. Facebook may be acting on its own. For example, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy says that his office “did not ask Facebook to remove pages or posts for events promoting lifting the provisions of the Governor’s stay-at-home order.” Nebraska also denies making such a request. 

Which version of the story is true? 

Which is worse? 

Both are creepy.

I just hope that this muzzling-speech-just-to-help thing doesn’t start spreading like a virus.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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Facebook, censorship, protests, corona virus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic,

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ideological culture political economy

The “Failure” of Capitalism?

bully, economy, Covid, corona virus, Wuhan, epidemic, pandemic,

“As the lock-downs come to an end,” writes economist Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan, “it will be expected by many — including many not on the political left — that the economy will pick-up at about where it was before the lock-downs.”

Mc Kiernan thinks a popular misconception will get in the way. 

Those who see the economy as “a kernel of processes that take inputs and produce outputs based upon purely technologic considerations” will let this techocratic model cloud their thinking. Viewing this “kernel” as producing not only “everything necessary to maintain itself” but also, and more importantly, a surplus that they treat as a zero sum affair — requiring the State to redistribute — they will regard the re-start as if a mere flipping on of a switch.

But the economy is not something to be un-plugged and plugged back in, and the lock-down super-quarantine was not a mere interruption of service. It was a huge blow that will demand uncountable adjustments. Those quite necessary adjustments may seem random, even wild, and because of this those on the “political left” will, Mc Kiernan predicts, do what they always do: “diagnose the failure to restore the economy quickly as ‘a failure of capitalism.’”

In other words, the bully knocks the victim down, stomps on him, and then taunts him for not getting up right away. 

Still worse: those taunts will become excuses for more kicking and stomping. And the flailing economy will be seen as all the more justification for more of the bully-boy Big Government policies that caused the “failure.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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bully, economy, Covid, corona virus, Wuhan, epidemic, pandemic,

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free trade & free markets too much government

Viral Michigan

Gretchen Whitmer, pandemic, corona virus, covid, epidemic,

Michigan is a state divided.

While Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has become a veritable dictator, in her stated desire to curb the contagion, the infection and death rate in the U.P. (which stands for “Upper Peninsula”) would look like a success story . . . were anyone to believe that her policies deserved credit.

But to some extent, “social distancing” is just society-as-usual for rural Yoopers.

Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders are the most restrictive of any of our states. All public gatherings are shut down, as are most stores and shops, though lottery sales are still allowed. And enforcement has not been slack, as Reason informs us: “Police stopped landscaper Brandon Hawley for carrying on with his business, although he lives in the northern city of Alpena, which confirmed its first COVID-19 case on Saturday.”

Not on board with every one of the governor’s executive orders are four sheriffs in westside counties of the main part of the state. They have proclaimed they will not be enforcing every single one of her edicts. “While we understand her desire to protect the public,” they wrote in a joint statement, “we question some restrictions that she has imposed as overstepping her executive authority.”

And Michiganders have started to rebel, with the state experiencing our nation’s largest protests.

So far.

Recognizing that the state has the third highest coronavirus death count, though most are in the southeastern part of the state, does this menace justify the governor’s restrictive measures?

Well, that will be an ongoing debate in Michigan — as elsewhere.*

The perception of costs will grow rapidly as negative results from the shut-down become more numerous and more obvious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The most startling report shows the virus forming the same pattern of contagion and lethality everywhere, regardless of “mitigation” measures (as Dr Anthony Fauci dubbed them), i.e. shut-down or no shut-down. Meanwhile, a few contrasts: the 2017-2018 flu season was quite bad, with 80,000 deaths, including “high severity across age groups”; the U.S. coronavirus death count hasn’t hit half that yet, which is worth keeping in mind as projections of the contagion’s extent and death rate plummet in most models.

Gretchen Whitmer, pandemic, corona virus, covid, epidemic,

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

Friends & Enemies

China, Taiwan, freedom, corona virus, epidemic, pandemic, authoritarian,

When times get tough, you learn who your friends are. 

Take the United States’ relationships with Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. The island nation sports a population roughly the size of Australia’s, about 24 million; just across the Taiwan Strait, what we used to call “Red China” holds the world’s largest number of people.

Like the United States, Taiwan has a democratically elected government that recognizes basic human rights such as freedom of speech. What do the Taiwanese want from us? They’re hoping for a military ally, one capable of deterring the free-speech-squelching, democracy-detesting Chinese communist state from making war on them.

In this pandemic, already nearly 24,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and over half a million have tested positive for the virus that appears to have originated in Wuhan, China. Worldwide, nearly 2 million souls have contracted it and, by the time you read this, more than 120,000 of them will have perished.

Excluded from the World Health Organization (WHO) at China’s insistence, Taiwanese medical professionals nevertheless managed to warn the international community on December 31, reports the Financial Times, that “its doctors had heard from mainland [Chinese] colleagues that medical staff were getting ill — a sign of human-to-human transmission.” 

Yet, on January 14, the WHO tweeted that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Six days later China publicly informed the world that this virus could be spread from human contact.

“A study published in March indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did,” notes Axios, “the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.”

Thanks for the warning, Taiwan. Thanks for nothing, China.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Taiwan has also generously provided N95 face masks to the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, even while facing continued military provocations from China. 

China, Taiwan, freedom, corona virus, epidemic, pandemic, authoritarian,

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general freedom too much government

Tyranny Resurrected

Corona Virus, Covid, epidemic, pandemic, hysteria, panic, religion, freedom,

Right after 9/11, much overkill was directed at the unsuspecting.

Friends of the Dumb Joke Brigade told dumb jokes when everybody was On Edge. It soon became clear that tasteless jocularity had morphed into an actionable offense.

And should anyone on September 12 have had the temerity to sit in a theater studying credits when all others had filed out? Heaven forfend! What schemes might the nonconforming cinephile be plotting alone in the dark?

Twenty years later, we’re at it again. 

We can argue (we do) about which social-distancing strictures are properly enforceable in our efforts to slow the pandemic. 

But surely some lines inarguably should not be crossed.

I don’t refer to the lone paddle-boarder or to the man who played catch with his kid in a park. I refer to parishioners who attended worship services at King James Bible Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi in their cars. Listened to the sermon on the radio in their cars. If the metal-and-glass shells in which attendees were encased couldn’t block the corona-fumes, what the heck could?

Nonetheless, eight Greenville police officers showed up to distribute $500 fines.

The state’s governor discourages but has not banned drive-in church services. It was Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons who has banned them.

The church is suing. Its lawyer, Jeremy Dys, says, “Americans can tolerate a lot if it means demonstrating love for their fellow man, but they will not . . . tolerate churchgoers being ticketed by the police for following CDC guidelines at church. This has to stop now.”

Beyond violating fundamental human rights, the city’s position also makes no sense.

Unfortunately, nonsense is, in these days of panic, not uncommon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Corona Virus, Covid, epidemic, pandemic, hysteria, panic, religion, freedom,

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national politics & policies too much government

The Ratchet Racket

ratchet, coronavirus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic, law, regulations, government,

Various models and curves and soothsayers predict that the coronavirus will lay off as the summer sun waxes. And then rush back in the autumn.

So we should not look at just near-term threats, but also look at cycles of contagion month-to-month, year-to-year. 

Yet, it is not just the dreaded coronavirus that must be seen over time. “Crisis measures are often ineffective,” writes Matthew Feeney, at Cato Institute, “and can survive the crisis they are implemented to counter.”

Because government power and interference tend to ratchet up with each crisis, there is a whole lot of reason to suspect that we will not go back to normal. Indeed, “the new normal” is now a catchphrase.

The quarantine shutdown has been, if not total, totalistic. Feeney acknowledges such extremist (he didn’t use that word) measures may sometimes be justifiable. But warns of that ratchet, of new powers given to government not devolving after the crisis.

Ted Galen Carpenter, also at Cato.org, draws a “fundamental lesson” from the panic: “Americans need to resist the casual expansion of arbitrary governmental power in response to the current coronavirus crisis.”

The extreme measures of the shutdown — called by economist Gene Epstein “The Great Suppression” — should have been widely discussed before the contagion hit. Instead, they were discussed in meetings behind closed doors.

But most of us were already up to our necks in the political muck fighting off the everyday kludge of the old normal level of too-much-government.

You know, from the previous turn of the ratchet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ratchet, coronavirus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic, law, regulations, government,

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media and media people

Another Contagious Disease

Senator Tom Cotton, media, coronavirus, Covid, epidemic, China,

“When Republican Sen. Tom Cotton speculated that the coronavirus outbreak might have come out of a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan,” Timothy Carney wrote for the Washington Examiner on Friday, “he was roundly pilloried, mocked, and chastised by politicians and journalists.”

“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” declared a Washington Post headline. Only problem? What the Post’s “experts” debunked, if anything, was that COVID-19 was man-made. 

That’s not what Sen. Cotton said at all. Cotton simply noted that the Wuhan lab did work with bats and coronaviruses and that this contagion may have come from that lab, possibly by accident.

“[I]t turns out that Cotton might have been correct,” informs Carney, “and the very expert the media used to attack Cotton as some kind of conspiracy theorist now admits as much.”

In his column last week for The Washington Post, David Ignatius quoted Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright, the “biosafety expert” used in earlier stories blasting Sen. Cotton, explaining that “the first human infection . . . could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker” — even noting that the Wuhan lab “provides only minimal protection” against such a dangerous event.

As Carney points out, “the idea that the virus accidentally came out of that lab may seamlessly move from ‘fringe opinion’ to respectable — even to consensus.”

“The first question,” argues Carney, “should be whether the folks who attacked that notion in February” — including The Washington Post and the Huffington Post — “will explain why they were unwilling to consider it.”

Media narratives — which Carney skewers regularly — are easy to come by. 

Objective news? Not so much.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Senator Tom Cotton, media, coronavirus, Covid, epidemic, China,

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responsibility

Don’t Panic, Prepare

Corona, Covid, virus, safety, hazmat,

The other day, on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show, Democrat Tulsi Gabbard — my favorite of the “blue” party’s blues-inducing candidates — suggested, inartfully, that the coronavirus is “something that requires all of us as Americans coming together, standing together . . . just as we would in wartime.”

The best way to fight contagion is to “come together”?

Maybe not so much.

What should we do? I mean, separately.

Although there’s a flood of information about the scary new coronavirus (COVID-19), that information is fragmentary.

Reliable tests for the virus are not easily available. It’s unclear how many people are really infected. But the fatality rate is apparently much higher than that of regular flu. The elderly and those with other medical problems are especially vulnerable.

The virus is spreading fast despite (and because of) efforts to contain it. Cases have now been reported in 45 countries.

COVID-19 may not yet be where you are or where I am. But what should we do now to be ready if and when things around us change drastically? 

One, stay informed. 

Two, follow advice about reducing the risk of infection, including such simple measures as carefully and frequently washing your hands.

Three, stock up — on food, water, medicines, other emergency supplies — in case you must hunker down at home for a long time. When panic strikes, grocery shelves can empty out fast. You may not want to go where many people are congregating anyway.

Some vendors specialize in providing bulk supplies of food at a discount: Wellness Meats, Bargain Wholesale, markets in your neighborhood. There’s also Walmart and Amazon, offering a wide variety of staples. You can trade advice and information at sites like emergency-preps.com.

Such preparation won’t be wasted. If we’re lucky and the coronavirus threat fades as flu season wanes, we’ll be ready for some other emergency that comes along.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Corona, Covid, virus, safety, hazmat,

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general freedom

Catching Something

virus, epidemic, coronavirus,

Our civilization depends on our ability to move about and trade. 

Which is based, in part, on trust and reciprocity and mind-your-own-business. The basic ‘deal’ is ‘I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me.’

But it’s not just manners and morality. When we fear that being around others, especially strangers, could lead to catching a severe or even life-threatening illness, the normal business of commerce breaks down.

Which becomes clear, now that a new disease in China threatens to break out worldwide.

Called the ‘2019 Novel Coronavirus,’ the illness has become widespread there, leading the government to quarantine the city of Wuhan, said to be the epicenter of the contagion.

“The lockdown follows fears that the respiratory disease could become a global epidemic,” writes Isabel van Brugen in The Epoch Times, “and as the United States this week became the fifth country outside of China — and the first outside Asia — to confirm a case of infection.”

“The closures,” said the municipal government, “will continue until further announcement.”

Pestilence and war are the two major reasons for this kind of collapse in normal commerce. But contagion may be less controllable even than war, so learning the lesson Wuhan’s inhabitants are now learning is something we can eagerly import from China right now.*

The lesson? 

Have food on hand, in case a pandemic bars you from going to market for days or weeks on end.

Wuhan folk are scrambling for supplies now.

Take it as a cue to shop for staples: stock up on bottled water, beans, sterno cans, and, say — with a tip of the hat to the beset Chinese — rice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Since my first draft, two more cities have been closed to travel, and six countries outside of China have experienced cases of infection. And questions have been raised about how transparent totalitarian China will be.

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