Category Archives: Education

Bankruptcies

Bernie’s press secretary says that 500M American go bankrupt each year.

I think that’s the same number that Sleepy Joe says are killed by gunshot. Are they shooting themselves after going bankrupt, or what? And how can there even be that many when we were all killed by the end of Net Neutrality and the Trump tax cuts?

[Update mid-afternoon]

Why can’t “liberals” do arithmetic?

Partly, I think, because they are not in fact liberals.

California

…is a cruel, medieval state.

As a resident, I can attest. Not sure how much longer we’ll stay here, though there are signs that perhaps the Democrats have overreached.

What they don’t tell you, of course, is that while the state is technically in surplus currently, it has unfunded liabilities of hundreds of billions in pensions. California is a poster child for what happens when you let uninformed innumerate idiots vote.

Covid Speculations

…and notes on the American response:

In the approval of new medical tools (drugs, laboratory tests, and medical devices), our system — including direct federal and state regulators and our civil liability regime — massively prefers safety (avoiding sins of commission, if you will) to the introduction of new technology that might save lives. We don’t put a feather on the “safety” side of the scales, we weigh it down with an anvil, and are thereby far more willing to commit the sin of omission (doing nothing) than commit the sin of approving a technology that is dangerous or ineffective.

Voters, politicians, government officials, and the press overwhelmingly favor the “safety paramount” approach of the United States. Unfortunately, the highly deliberative manner of the American approach becomes dangerous in a rapidly spreading pandemic. Much as the media and citizens wish it were otherwise, we cannot change our system, or even our bureaucratic impulses, suddenly. Even if lives depend on it.

There is no way to know how many millions of lives both the caution of the FDA in approving drugs (requiring “effectiveness,” and not just safety), and the federal junk-science approach to nutrition have cost us over the decades.

[Update a while later]

Related, and (speaking as a boomer) darkly amusing:

Good job, team! The FDA is forcing the CDC to double test for the virus. Because, you know, testing was going so smoothly and rapidly, and we knew who had it.

[Saturday-morning update]

She shoots, she scores.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Bernie: “We must seize the means of toilet-paper production!”

[Update a few minutes later]

Globalization may be the biggest victim of the virus. It was definitely insane to put China on the critical path of our drug production.

Bernie Sanders

Thoughts on the evil of normalizing Marxism.

Bernie isn’t just misguided; he’s evil. There should be just as much opprobrium for having a Che poster or teeshirt as there would be for a Hitler poster or teeshirt, but the cultural Marxists’ Gramscian march through the institutions has been successful. At the suborbital researchers conference last week in Broomfield, CO, I was talking to a professor of physiology from Brandeis. She was a refusenik who managed to get out of Leningrad in the early eighties. She was appalled that the Democrats were on the verge of nominating a communist apologist.