âThough in war, you only get killed once; in politics it can happen over and over.â â Battlestar Galactica (2000âs)
âThe taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.â âWill Rogers
Politics is not a great tool for a real, actual crisis.
Politics is, like our economy, about motion. Itâs about creating fear enough to spur people into an emotional frenzy, or bully bureaucrats. One of my favorite stories along this line was when Amy Klobuchar, D(emon)-Minnesota, wrote to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) about . . . Buckyballs®. Buckyballsâ¢, if you donât remember them, they were small strong spherical magnets that were fun to play with. They were generally marketed as a desk toy for adults.
One toddler died from swallowing seven of them. Apparently, during the life of the product, there were 19 other injuries as well, though I donât have details on those, but I have it on good advice (Ma Wilder) that nearly anything will put your eye out or result in a severed limb. Maybe I would have taken her more seriously if we had more adults who looked like Captain Hook.
But there were hundreds of thousands of Buckyball® sets sold, and MILLIONS of little magnetic balls in circulation. Cars, for example, are at least 287 times more deadly than Buckyballs©. 100 kids a year die on bicycles. The biggest cause of death for toddlers? Backyard pools. Most dangerous food product for toddlers? Hot dogs.
But dying because of small magnets?
Clearly, common sense assault toy safety should be important to all of us.
Thatâs somewhere lower than âbeing hit by lightning while holding an aluminum replica of Celine Dion above my head on a pole while covered in barbeque sauce and crushed potato chips.â
Did Amy go after those bicycles or pools or hot dogs? No, that would make her look crazier than usual and give her bad press. Instead, Amy went after Buckyballsâ¢.  And Amy got her way. The CPSC shut down Buckyballsâ¢, and went after the owner of the company with particular zeal. Why?
Amy asked them to. You see, in 2012, despite the looming Mayan Calendar Apocalypseâ¢, Amy needed something to complain about. So she found her reason in the newspaper and built her grandstanding off the back of that unfortunate fatality. I can hear her complaint now. âChildren are dying in a very rare yet odd and public way that puts them in the newspaper! The only thing that can save them? Senator Amy to the rescue!â
Iâm just sad that Amy didnât volunteer to catch the Jarts© when her brothers were playing and she was a kid. Seriously, Jarts⢠were fun. Jarts® child death toll over a span of 35 years before the CPSC banned them? 3. Thankfully, you can still buy them, but to beat the CPSC, the company asks that you assemble them yourself. Itâs a kit.
Ha!
Jarts®, when played right.
The problem wasnât with Buckyballs®, the problem was that there wasnât anything else pressing that Amy could complain about and get away with. Her party held the presidency, so most national issues were out of the question because if they failed, the Democrats would own the failure. But she could complain about a tiny toy company. The only victims would be the owner and the people who liked the toy. Confession: I bought six sets of Buckballs⢠in their going out of business sale to help contribute to the owner before he lost his business.
What does one stupid senatorâs quest against a (mostly) harmless toy have to do with today and the COVID-19 virus?
Everything.
Chuck saved me some joke writing.
Politics in 2020 is still about doing something. But, more importantly, itâs the art of been seen to be doing something. One day when I came home from work, The Mrs. was incensed. âSchumer wants to allocate $4 billion to the Corona virus! Heâs insane!â The Mrs. was skeptical at that point, primarily because weâre used to the media crying wolf about every little potential crisis, and secondarily because the Corona death toll was smaller than Jeffery Dahmerâs.
My response was simple: â$4 billion? Trump should say, âMake it $8 billion, Little Chucky, think big,â but put in an asterisk that weâll spend the money only if necessary, and in ways deemed by the President to stop a pandemic. Heck, he could even get a few miles wall out of that. Arenât you tired of the Canadians, dear, coming in with their beavers and maple syrup asking âabootâ everything? Initiate Operation Leafblower*.â
âBut John,â she replied, âthe country doesnât have $8 billion to spare.â
âSo what? We donât have $4 billion, either.â
*I actually love Canadians. And Canada, ever since I discovered Bob and Doug as a kid, beauty, eh. Itâs a joke, you hosers.
And this should add back in the RDA of bikini as suggested by the FDA . . . .
The Corona Virus, Chinese Virus, MOVID-19 (named after MOre streaming VIDeo in your basement) or whatever you want to call it is still an enigma. Those that say it is not any worse than the flu really should look at the real-time consequences weâre seeing in hospitals, especially in New York. However, is Corona Chan a wrecking ball like Joe Biden at a hair sniffing contest that, unless it was stopped, destroy civilization?
Nah. Weâve lived through, and thrived through, worse.
But are we the same people who did that?
Right now, people no longer hold the idea of sacrifice highly. Instead, the idea is the no one should ever be inconvenienced for the greater good. Which is because in the mind of most people, there no longer is a commonly recognized greater good.
You can see this in the stories of the infantile people licking products, spitting on food, and stating that if they came down with Corona, that they were going to go to Trump rallies to infect as many people as possible. There are people who think, âWell, the rules on staying home donât apply to me.â There is no us to them, no commonality, only the idea their needs, right now.
Iâm Joe Biden, and I forgot this message.
Why isnât there a greater good? Itâs primarily being driven by the political rift between Right and Left, though there are other factors, as well. Decisions are made not on the basis of what is for that greater good, but on the basis of what looks good for the cameras and can get more money for âmyâ group of constituents, and get more votes for me.
As such, every decision is a political one, meant to obtain or maintain power. And every opportunity should be made to attack an opponent, whether or not they deserve it. This means that every action taken in the muddled and unclear past is subject to criticism based on the perfect knowledge of the future. Political attackers are looking for errors.
Let me explain, using a discussion of Type I and Type II errors.
The best way to explain what these errors are is to use an example that always stuck with me:   prescription drugs.  The two primary jobs of the FDA are to approve drugs for sale in the United States and surf social media during the day. When the FDA approves a drug that it shouldnât have approved, thatâs a Type I error. What happens with a Type I error is that there is a body count. Drugs that show up on the market that kill people (even terminally ill people) make the FDA look bad, so they just wonât do it, and will go to ludicrous lengths to keep drug company profits high.
So, the cat did warn the dog not to eat out of itâs bowl.
What happens when a bad drug gets through and into the market? Does anybody at the FDA lose a job? No. Does anyone get demoted? No. But they look bad, which I guess is similar to public execution for a bureaucrat.
That leads to the second type of error, the Type II error. Thatâs when the FDA doesnât approve of a drug that it should have approved.  People still die, and maybe a lot of people. But since they really died of the condition and not the lack of a drug that legally doesnât exist, you canât get to a body count. You canât convict without a body count, or at least thatâs what my lawyer tells me.
Letâs go into an alternate universe where President Trump hears of the Wuhan Flu and shuts down access to China immediately. Not only that, he shuts down access to secondary nations that have contact with China, and perfectly protects the United States from Corona.
Does he get any credit if he does this? No. No one will count the dead bodies that didnât exist because he took decisive action. In fact, heâd be called a racist xenophobe abusing his powers by the media. You can read various articles making exactly this point that were written around the end of January and the beginning of February.   My favorite of these articles is one written by an avowed communist that includes the line, âThe Trump administrationâs âstate of emergencyâ should be regarded as a piece of more substantial and systematic hostility in its relations with China.â The author then complains that people should move freely. Thereâs a lovely comment at the bottom, âWell, this article aged poorly.â I expect articles like these to be scrubbed from the Internet as people get around to it.
Trumpâs critics kept complaining he was doing too much, until there was a body count. At that point, the problem became a Type I problem â people dying because of choices that were made in the past. So, with that upward ticking clock of bodies available live on the Johns-Hopkins Pandemicvisionâ¢, we are in a continually unfolding crisis complete with rolling odometer of sick and infected that, from a political standpoint, require visible action.
To get a quick test result, touch Johnny Deppâs face and see how soon his test results come back. Bonus? Contact high. Â
Or at least people pretending to take action. Is the current policy of shutting down huge chunks of the economy the best one? Iâm not sure. The information we have is very poor â we simply donât have sufficient information to make great decisions. Iâm thinking the President has better info, what with deciding to put the Northern Command (the bit of the armed forces thatâs concerned with North America) back into the nuclear bunker under Cheyenne Mountain, which is always the sign that things are going well.
The initial death rate was estimated to be up to 10%. I think itâs clear thatâs not the case at this point. Some hack said that itâs so mild that, âhalf of Britain may have already had it.â Itâs also clear thatâs not the case. But every credible report Iâve heard says itâs big â intensive care units being swamped. Time and data will tell.
But politician response has to be played for the crowd: Nancy Pelosi is already blaming everything on Trumpâs past decisions. Her quote, âBut as the President fiddles, people are dying,â seems to ignore Nancyâs own banjo lessons during the impeachment.
Iâve never seen a more non-essential employee . . .
In a sense, we are where we are as a society because there isnât anything that can ever be simple bad luck. Blame must be assigned. Every accident must have a cause, and every person at fault must pay, even if the outcome isnât one that was intended, or even remotely likely. The lady spilling coffee in her lap for hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from McDonalds is the norm now, not the outlier.
All political decisions are coming through these filters: Type I Errors and Assigning Blame. Donât be surprised by the mindboggling amounts of money and silliness that will come shortly.
But sometimes sanity wins. Buckyballs⢠were made legal again when the CPSC got thrashed in the courts back in June of 2018.
“being hit by lightning while holding an aluminum replica of Celine Dion above my head on a pole while covered in barbeque sauce and crushed potato chips”
John,
Do you ever have a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of Sun God robes, on a pyramid, with a thousand naked women screaming, and throwing little pickles at you?
Or is it just me?
Aesop,
Dream? Happens to me all the time. Well, except for the pickles, thank goodness. And the robes. And the pyramid. Actually, it’s one woman in a nightshirt yelling, ” Get back in the house! You didn’t take your medicine again, did you? “
Absolutely. That’s my Thursday dream.
We are in deep trouble.
https://i.redd.it/7ji35fxrq4p41.png
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/fed%20bs%20bofa.jpg?itok=sbOVIRq4
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ouClc76NXppaaKZogVQHRKlXW2calONf
Show of hands, please, those of you here surprised. Hmmm, yeah, that’s what I thought.
Yup. Solve problems, or create pork for votes?
Pork ahoy!!!
It gets worse.
The Kung Flue is everywhere now. Everyone is eventually going to have their chance to catch it.
So shutting everything down for months to destroy the economy and bankrupt millions of working families makes perfect sense. Especially while we invite tens of thousands of more immigrants into the country, and don’t shut down international flights.
I wonder if Trump has the power of executive order to cannibalize bureaucrat salaries, and use the money for the stimulus? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Have all bureaucrat’s birthdays in a large bingo machine, and like the lottery for the draft, the first 100 birthdays are drafted to go home without pay?
I think this is a workable solution for the increased debt, and should be implemented immediately. It’s much kinder than my original thought of having those chosen extradited to a deserted island.
During the Great Depression, government employee salaries (and retiree annuities) were simply slashed 50% across the board. I don’t know whether FDR did it by EO, or the Congress passed a law, but it happened fast, and the Supreme Court didn’t look kindly on FDR’s other actions (the Justices being federal employees, of course). I could see that happening again… much more likely than random selection. But look at the actual budget, some time, and see how much of it is “non-discretionary” entitlement; how much is contractual spending; how much is interest on the national debt. The actual employee salaries are a small fraction. (You might think that money spent on an aircraft carrier with toilets that don’t flush reliably is wasted, but that’s not how the people who built it, and their Senators and Congresscritters, think.)
I LOVE that idea. But couldn’t we make it the first 364 birthdays?
Politics as we generally understand it is mostly a form of kabuki theater to distract us. There is plenty of real power in D.C but it isn’t in some random Congress-chick losing her mind and screaming into the mic on the floor of the House. It happens in those awful limestone monstrosities that house the Federal bureaucrats who make all of the real rules and in the posh offices of the various lobbying firms who pay the Federal protection racket to protect their industry. The recent “stimulus” bill was vintage politics, a huge shotgun approach to a problem, using make-believe “money” and chock full of goodies for the various interest groups in the country. Now those funds go into the bowels of various Federal agencies to be allocated and that is where the real power is.
The Left-Right thing is so ridiculous that it barely warrants mention. “Liberals” like Chuck Schumer are bought and paid for by Wall Street lobbyists. “Conservatives” like Lindsey Graham are owned by the open borders Chamber of Commerce lobby. Both parties are working for stock prices and executive bonuses. The real ideological struggle in America is happening in entertainment and “education” on the Left and basically nowhere on the Right.
Or as the kids say, politics is all fake and ghey.
Well, the Left Right thing is real. The Republican-Democrat is just as you described. What scares me more than the money are the hidden, life changing provisions.
That’s a horror story.
Somehow I missed the Buckyball court case. I always learn something new here. I have a set on the my desk at work….wish I brought home for quarantine. I didn’t miss them until I read this….now I cant think of anything else.
As long as you stop swallowing them, you’re good.