Category: COVID

Another Way Politics Messes Things Up, Complete With A Bikini Picture

“Though in war, you only get killed once; in politics it can happen over and over.” – Battlestar Galactica (2000’s)

confuse

“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” –Will Rogers

Politics is not a great tool for a real, actual crisis.

Politics is, like our economy, about motion.  It’s 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®.  Buckyballs™, if you don’t 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 don’t 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?

buckyb

Clearly, common sense assault toy safety should be important to all of us.

That’s somewhere lower than “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.”

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 Buckyballs™.   And Amy got her way.  The CPSC shut down Buckyballs™, 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 Apocalypse™, 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.  “Children 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!”

I’m just sad that Amy didn’t 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.  It’s a kit.

Ha!

Jarts®, when played right.

The problem wasn’t with Buckyballs®, the problem was that there wasn’t 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 senator’s quest against a (mostly) harmless toy have to do with today and the COVID-19 virus?

Everything.

schumer

Chuck saved me some joke writing.

Politics in 2020 is still about doing something.  But, more importantly, it’s the art of been seen to be doing something.  One day when I came home from work, The Mrs. was incensed.  “Schumer wants to allocate $4 billion to the Corona virus!  He’s insane!”  The Mrs. was skeptical at that point, primarily because we’re used to the media crying wolf about every little potential crisis, and secondarily because the Corona death toll was smaller than Jeffery Dahmer’s.

My response was simple:  “$4 billion?  Trump should say, ‘Make it $8 billion, Little Chucky, think big,’ but put in an asterisk that we’ll 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.  Aren’t you tired of the Canadians, dear, coming in with their beavers and maple syrup asking ‘aboot’ everything?  Initiate Operation Leafblower*.”

“But John,” she replied, “the country doesn’t have $8 billion to spare.”

“So what?  We don’t have $4 billion, either.”

*I actually love Canadians.  And Canada, ever since I discovered Bob and Doug as a kid, beauty, eh.  It’s a joke, you hosers.

bikini

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 we’re 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.  We’ve 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, “Well, the rules on staying home don’t apply to me.”  There is no us to them, no commonality, only the idea their needs, right now.

biden

I’m Joe Biden, and I forgot this message.

Why isn’t there a greater good?  It’s 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 “my” 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 shouldn’t have approved, that’s 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 won’t do it, and will go to ludicrous lengths to keep drug company profits high.

HOT DOG

So, the cat did warn the dog not to eat out of it’s 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.  That’s when the FDA doesn’t 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 doesn’t exist, you can’t get to a body count.  You can’t convict without a body count, or at least that’s what my lawyer tells me.

Let’s 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 didn’t exist because he took decisive action.  In fact, he’d 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, “The Trump administration’s ‘state of emergency’ should be regarded as a piece of more substantial and systematic hostility in its relations with China.”  The author then complains that people should move freely.  There’s a lovely comment at the bottom, “Well, this article aged poorly.”  I expect articles like these to be scrubbed from the Internet as people get around to it.

Trump’s critics kept complaining he was doing too much, until there was a body count.  At that point, the problem became a Type I problem – 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 Pandemicvision™, we are in a continually unfolding crisis complete with rolling odometer of sick and infected that, from a political standpoint, require visible action.

ISOLATE

To get a quick test result, touch Johnny Depp’s face and see how soon his test results come back.  Bonus?  Contact high.   

Or at least people pretending to take action.  Is the current policy of shutting down huge chunks of the economy the best one?  I’m not sure.  The information we have is very poor – we simply don’t have sufficient information to make great decisions.  I’m thinking the President has better info, what with deciding to put the Northern Command (the bit of the armed forces that’s 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 it’s clear that’s not the case at this point.  Some hack said that it’s so mild that, “half of Britain may have already had it.”  It’s also clear that’s not the case.  But every credible report I’ve heard says it’s big – 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 Trump’s past decisions.  Her quote, “But as the President fiddles, people are dying,” seems to ignore Nancy’s own banjo lessons during the impeachment.

knuckle

I’ve never seen a more non-essential employee . . .

In a sense, we are where we are as a society because there isn’t 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 isn’t 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.  Don’t 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.

How I Learned To Love The End Of The World

“We estimate between two and four megatons.  Everything within a 30 kilometer radius will be completely destroyed, including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl.” – Chernobyl (HBO®)

Shelves

Thankfully, everyone is equally hungry under communism.  Bernie’s job is done.

I think I’ve always thought about what’s known today as “prepping” – even at a young age.  When I was young, we lived deep in the mountains.  How deep?  The next closest kid anywhere near my age was ten miles away and probably 2,000’ lower in elevation and was actually a yeti that had moved there from Tibet to get away from the crowds.  The nearest grocery store was twenty miles away.  The nearest movie theater?  Fifty miles.

When you live nearly so far from civilization that tourists try to pay you in beads and pantyhose, you have to think ahead.  Ma Wilder did.  Ma had designed the house with remoteness in mind.  Her pantry was always full, and it was huge.  She built in a pantry that consisted of one entire fifteen foot wall, floor to ceiling, a foot deep.

The pantry was always (and I mean always) stocked from floor to ceiling with canned goods.  Freezer?  Not one freezer.  Two.  And they were always packed to the brim with food.  Well, with the exception of when Pa would let the inventory go down so there would be room to fit half a cow.  Literally.  He’d buy a “side of beef” which was half of a cow.  Minus the hooves, of course.

Ma Wilder had also designed a root cellar that the contractor built.  For those of you not in the know, a root cellar is a small building (8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot) that is 90% buried to keep vegetables so they will neither sprout nor spoil.  In order to do that, the cellar is dark and cool, like Nancy Pelosi’s heart.  Ma Wilder kept hundreds of pounds of potatoes there.  I should know – I was often the guy taking them down in fall and hauling them up in winter.  And to be clear, we kept the potatoes in the cellar, since Nancy Pelosi’s heart isn’t big enough to hold a French fry.

FRY

Exercise?  No, with COVID-19, it’s extra fries.

The house was designed to be heated in winter with firewood.  Since electricity was incredibly expensive up there, Pa Wilder made gathering, cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood his summer hobby.  As it was Pa’s summer hobby, it turned out to be my summer hobby, too.  It was hard work, and paid poorly until it came time to hit the blocking sled for football when it paid off with massive thighs of steel.

There is no jean size for “massive thighs of steel.”

But it wasn’t just the remoteness that drove Ma Wilder to be prepared.  First, I have to explain a little bit about the family.  My parents were older than I was.  Oh, sure, that’s normally the case, except in some places like Hollywood, but in my case my parents were a LOT older.

Why?

It turns out that I was adopted, despite the original story they told me of finding me as an infant in a crashed space capsule in a wolf den near the summit of Mount Olympus.  In reality, Ma Wilder was my biological grandmother and not who hiked around Greece looking for wolf-raised space babies.  Apparently, as a child the only super-power I had consisted of making my biological mother and father both disappear.

I blame the heat ray vision.

ORPHANS

I made a website for orphans, but it doesn’t have a home page.

So, I was adopted.  Since my parents were not only older than me, but also much older than even standard issue parents, they had hands-on experience with the Great Depression and World War II while they were young.  Apparently, those were events that may been somewhat memorable.

I do remember sitting down in rocking chair in the kitchen while supper was cooking.  After Pa Wilder had finished his chores for the day, he and Ma would sit down to talk about life, most often with a libation, as Pa Wilder called drinking.  I believe it was mainly bourbon, but I can’t really say since they were quite poor hosts and never offered me any.  Often, Ma and Pa discussed people I didn’t know.  This was so boring it made me want to go to and stick forks in outlets to test breakers.

Especially when they talked about people, I was often admonished that “what we discuss stays within the family” though it was implied that that admonishment probably counted for every topic.  I can see how it might be considered controversial how irritated that they were that the neighbor dog kept peeing in the snow by the back porch and they didn’t want me to tattle to the neighbors.   Or how economic collapse might be a thing.  Or how we might be headed towards nuclear war, and had Pa thought about buying dynamite so he could blow up the road leading to our house so we weren’t the victims of marauding, murdering gangs?

Yup.  That was an actual conversation that Ma and Pa had.  I think they only mentioned that idea once while I was in the room, but when your mother is calmly talking about having your father blow up bridges to save you from hordes of people (the parents of the kids you go to school with) ransacking your home after the Soviets gave America a “just thinking about you” bouquet of 10 megaton fireballs?

You tend to remember that sort of conversation when you’re 12.

MADMAX

I heard that after a nuclear war, there are high radiation levels, then only the politicians will be left.

Ma and Pa were acutely aware that all of their material prosperity could evaporate in an instant.  Ma and Pa had both seen rich men laid low by the Great Depression, and Pa Wilder had fought in World War II.  He had driven all through northern Europe, having been on Omaha at D-Day +3.  I can’t even imagine what he had seen.  Of course I asked him the obvious question, “Did any Germans shoot at ya, Pa?”

“No, son, they never shot at me,” he replied with all the coolness of a Steve McQueen, “but I was with a lot of people they were shooting at.”

I’m ashamed at how long it took me to figure out what he was really saying.

PA

That’s not impressive, though.  One of my friends had a grandpa that brought down 15 German planes during the war.  Worst mechanic the Luftwaffe had.

I’m not sure that they ever mentioned the idea of nuclear Armageddon more than once or twice, but it doesn’t take long to make a kid connect the dots:  “Oh, that’s why we have all the food.  And all the guns.  And the 500 gallons of gasoline.  And the 250 gallons of diesel.  And Ma’s amusing utter failure to raise vegetables in the backyard, repeated year after year.”

My parents were preppers before it even had a name beyond “being prudent.”  It’s probably justifiable, especially on Ma Wilder’s part.  She had seen her family make it through the Great Depression okay, but her family had also raised several children whose parents weren’t well off enough to feed them.  I know that sounds crazy in the year 2020, but in the year 1930, sometimes parents couldn’t even figure out where to get enough money to feed a child.

I think those experiences were a driving force in Ma Wilder’s life.  She saved aluminum TV dinner trays.  She saved old clothes.  She could sew (fairly well), make soap (that was more like a caustic chemical burn in a bar), knit (very well), or ferment wine (she gave me a sip and to 12 year old me it tasted of pepper, hate and despair).  Back when she grew up, prepping wasn’t a hobby.  Prepping was what everyone did.

As I mentioned, one factor that made all the preparation seem even more normal was being so far away from anything.  Also, being so far away from everything meant I was pretty far away from the middle school.  I was the last one on the bus route.  That also meant I was the first one on, and the last one off.  It gave me a lot of time alone on the bus to read – a lot.

All of this might explain why I developed a love of fiction that featured the end of the world when I was growing up.  Lucifer’s Hammer, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Earth Abides, The Stand, On the Beach, The Postman, and I Am Legend were all novels that I read as I rode the green pleather seat on an endless loop back and forth to school.  My classmates might have been looking at the trees and houses or talking to each other, but I was living in a world where everything had changed, all at once and strong men did what they could to rebuild.  And without communists this time.

BALTIMORE

I think Baltimore jokes are just a riot!

My middle school’s library was filled with books that were older than me – many from the 1950’s with pages already becoming yellow and brittle with age.  There were dozens of science fiction anthologies.  Science fiction in the 1950’s was filled with the paranoia of a country that was just coming to grips with the concept of being able to destroy an entire planet and wrestling with the now obvious fragility of the human species.  One of the short stories I remember was A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber.  You can read it for free here (LINK).  It’s worth it.

If you’re not a fan of apocalyptic stories, you might think that the attractive part about reading the end of the world was about death – and you’re wrong.  Reading that literature was, for me, a celebration of life.  In most of those books and stories the human race didn’t die out.  To me, apocalyptic books weren’t about gloom, they were about hope.  No matter what was thrown at humanity, we would find a way through.

I am unabashedly pro-human, and most fiction in the 1950’s was pro-human.  Somewhere after that, we became a bit more self-loathing and reveled in the idea of our destruction.  I can’t help but think that self-loathing started with Doogie Howser, M.D., but I might be wrong.  Much of today’s literature isn’t fun, and isn’t optimistic.  Sure, I see tough times ahead.  But I feel quite strongly that we can make it through them.

Trust me.  We will.

What, you don’t think I developed psychic powers on Mount Olympus?

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in?  I didn’t even know sleep.  It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.” – Deadpool

BATSLAP

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.  I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman®”

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.  Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.  I call that a win-win.  Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?  You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.  When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.  Good times.  I do have a concern – The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR.  I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.  I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derrière, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.  While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do.  Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop.  Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.  I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?  Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisis™, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other – this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.  This is like the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.  Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?  It’s so nice and cheery.  The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

FRANZ

Who would he assassinate for a Klondike® bar?  Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.  It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.  Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say “no.”  The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.  With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?  We don’t trust the media very much.  Why?  They don’t seem trustworthy.  Example:  when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist.  When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNN™ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:  in the end, wolves really attacked.

DINOS

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.  It’s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.  The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.  It’s the spark that lights the fire.  When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards – The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.  It is disruptive.  It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.  In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.  COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.  Was it poised for a fall anyway?  Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:  what if we haven’t seen The Event yet?

DISB

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.  When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.  Why?  Habit, partially.  But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.  It’s more inertia.  You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction – COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.  But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.  Italy is locked down.  In two weeks, we will know more.  In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

PANIC

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.  But the rules are new, and unknown.  What to do?  One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?  One could Panic.  Panic is easier, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.  So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time?  Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®?  Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought?   Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

HERO

Not all heroes are able to walk.  I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.  Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.  Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism – realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.  Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story – Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.  She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.  Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Why ration needles and sugar?  To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.  To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going.  Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).  Read it all.

CLIFF

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.  My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.  Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.  In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.  Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff.  I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.  Is it certain that there is one?  No.  But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there.  I believe we will see it.  The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.  Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that we’ll see The Cliff soon enough.  How deep will it go?  As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows.  The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.  Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.  80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.  The average monthly car payment is $800.  Me?  I’d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.  But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off.  The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.  The second best restaurant didn’t survive.  There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses.  I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.  Overall loss to the economy?  40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?  Sure.  We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.  We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.  That’s the best case.  And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is.  If we’re lucky.

EMPEROR

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.  We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.  Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal.  Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.  The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be.  Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves.  The length of time Disillusionment lasts?  Months to years.

FIX

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.  Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.  Rebuilding the economy will take years.  If we do it right, we’ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?  The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.  Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.  Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

DISHWASH

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding.  Dishwashers on the Internet.  Amazing.  My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.  Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!  They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

Essential Decisions: Coming to a Town Near You

“They call it a panic room.  I know that’s a difficult concept for you, because for you, every room is a panic room.” – Monk

TP

I hear that the Australians have really started hoarding toilet paper – they are superstitious about problems down under.

What’s essential?  Right now, there are hundreds of Federal bureaucrats asking exactly that question.

That scares me.

Why?  The Federal government could cause an ice shortage in Antarctica if they were given a mandate to make more ice, so I’m not hopeful that they’ll make the right decisions.  It should probably scare you, too.  When Hurricane Ike hit Houston, we were there.  Here are some examples of the great competence that was on display from our Federal, state, and local governments:

  • Radio telling us to go the FEMA website for crucial information. During a power outage.  Where cell phones weren’t working.  So, I assumed we were to access the FEMA website psychically.
  • Radio telling us to go and bail out “first second responders” because they didn’t have food or water, because no one can plan for a Hurricane in Texas, right?
  • FEMA water showing up over a week later after power was nearly completely restored. Oh, and you could get one case.  In contrast, a local radio station had a semi-load of bottled water delivered for distribution in only two days.

america

Okay, I may have yelled at a hurricane like this during Hurricane Ike after a wee bit of wine.  No flag.  But there was a bathrobe and it was after midnight.  Does that count?

Federal response is good for, oh, responding late and poorly to any real event.  And why did I call government people “second responders” up above?  Because they are generally the second (or later) person to respond to any crisis.  In most cases, you’re the first responder.  Fire at your house?  It’s you and your trusty extinguisher or cell phone.

Bad guy in your hallway?  First responder is you, because the average police response time in the United States is ten minutes.  Then?  They’ll generally not run into the house like Rambo on steroids, they’ll come in slowly so they can go home that night.  It’s not unlikely that you’d be alone with that robber for fifteen minutes after you made the call to 911.

Do you think you’ll have time to take selfies with the burglar?  Maybe share photos of your kids and amusing anecdotes?  The old saying is right:  when seconds count, the second responders are minutes away.

burglar

One burglar stole all my lamps.  I was upset, but I was also delighted.

It’s not that I dislike the government, I think their inefficiency is cute and endearing in the same way that dealing with a young child is.  If government were actually efficient at anything that would scare me.  The government (at every level) is horrible at coordination and planning, as illustrated by my examples above, with the exception of taxation, where money is on the line – they won’t even give fishermen a break on their net income.    Individuals that are motivated by profits, however, are exceptional at planning and fixing bad situations.  Plus, do you really want to be 100% reliant on government for anything important (besides national defense)?

Let’s take an example:  food lines are a constant theme of Socialism.  I know Bernie Sanders says, people lining up in lines for scarce food, “is a good thing.”  But in capitalist systems, the food waits for you, in abundant variety.  Why?  So people can make a buck.  That’s why we have more than one kind of beer, and one kind of ketchup.  Heck, in the local Wal-Mart® there are like 8 different kinds of Heinz™ ketchup in five different sizes.  The market works to satisfy you, in ways great and small.  Especially if covering yourself in ketchup is what satisfies you.  Mmmm, jalapeño-ranch ketchup.

smooth

I got some Heinz™ ketchup in my eye, and now I don’t need glasses anymore.  My optician said that Heinz®-sight is 20/20.

The profit motive is at work even during this COVID-19 panic.  I heard this week an amazingly Good Thing.  At work, I heard we were waiting for some widgets and some polishing compound for a racknpinion molecule, and heard that there was no shipping on some of the stuff we wanted.  None.  Every single truck that normally shipped gizmos and lefthanded-transaxle wax was being put into hauling food.

That’s a lot of trucks.  As confirmation of this, The Boy went to go retrieve his things from his dorm, college having been cancelled for the End of the World®, and noted that there were huge numbers of trucks moving on the interstate.  The Boy estimated there were probably 150% of the number of trucks he normally sees, and this was on a Saturday.  State Troopers were entirely absent.  Even the cops want the food to move.

hillary

So, next time you get pulled over, just roll down your window and start a nasty dry cough.  I’m betting the lights go off and the trooper heads out . . .

This was accomplished not by bans.  Not by government edicts .  Just, “the people are scared and want more food?  Give it to them.”  This is easy because there’s plenty of food in the system.  The corn that’s being turned into Tostitos® was grown with sunlight from 2019.  Next year’s Tostitos have yet to be planted.  Rice?  We have tons.  Fuel?  As I told you several weeks ago – it’ll be the cheapest in the past 20 years.  Taking inflation into account, it may be the cheapest in history, so cheap you’ll be able to start bathing with gasoline instead of tap water, like Jeff Bezos does to clean grease from his moving parts.

You can shut down some parts of the free market because they’re non-essential – we did that in World War II.  My folks tell stories of rationing of sugar and sewing needles and tires.  And at some point those semi-trucks hauling the radishes and rutabaga and rhubarb and redfish will need new tires.  They’ll need oil changes, and wiper fluid, and the drivers will need coffee and meth.

And farmers must farm, and ranchers must ranch, and people must be ready to pick the pizza rolls from the pizza tree when they are ripe.  Someone has to milk the mice.  But farmers live for that, so as long as they have gallon milk jugs, they’ll keep filling them.  Economic incentives are still working.

The longer we go on with “nonessential” businesses being closed, the more businesses will become essential.  In Modern Mayberry, we regularly close down non-essential businesses.  It’s a day we refer to in our local dialect as “Sunday”.  On Sunday, if Wal-Mart® or a fast food restaurant doesn’t have it, you’re not getting it.  That was one of the bigger changes in moving here from bigger cities – businesses close down on Sunday, and the hours aren’t all that long on Saturday.  Most businesses close at 5pm.

So, we live with non-essential shutdowns all the time.  It’s hard to argue that the steak restaurant is essential to the public, though it’s certainly the opinion of the waitress and the owner that it’s essential, but even they agree to close it down on Sunday and Monday.

SUNDAY

It’s the first five days after Sunday that are the always the hardest.

In a true governmental paradox where bureaucrats live on a different planet than the rest of us, schools are closed but daycares remain open.  Having the grimiest, most germ-laden creatures on Earth (first graders) congregate for seven hours at school is wrong, but having those same infested viral fermentation pots play together for eleven hours at a daycare is okay.

I guess daycare workers need better unions.

But reasonable people could work together and come up with a definition of what’s essential.  My job isn’t.  Not today.  In a few months?  Maybe, but probably not.  In a few years?  Yeah, somebody needs to do it, for sure.  And most jobs, even within essential industries aren’t essential.  HR?  Let them work from home, or better yet, work from Nome or the bottom of the ocean for the next year.

Heck, I’d be surprised if productivity of home workers wasn’t greater than working in a traditional office setting.  I had read a statistic when I was starting off at work after college, and it said that up to 2/3 of the average office worker’s day was wasted.  But how do office workers waste time?  I had one boss who would just pull up a chair and talk.  For sometimes two hours or more.  About, well, whatever.

Before you snicker, around the same time I read a statistic that said something like 40% of industrial repairs fixed the wrong thing.  But it’s hard to take a steel smelter home to fix it, unless you sneak it out in your big lunchbox.

Anyway, we’ll soon be seeing what government bureaucrats feel is essential.

I’m just hoping it involves beer . . . .