Real and imagined.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Data And Numbers
Where are we really with the virus?
Note that (as is often the case with healthcare statistics) different countries are keeping books differently, making it difficult to compare. I continue to believe that the fatality rate will ultimately end up being far below one percent.
[Update early afternoon]
A lot of links from Instapundit. Things are looking better than the models. One I found of interest is that if we can believe Chinese data, four out of five cases are asymptomatic.
Bill Withers
I was never a huge fan, but it sounds like his was a life well lived.
[Afternoon update]
Sorry, link is fixed now.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Fingernails
They harbor the virus; keep them short. Makes sense, though it will affect women’s fashion considerably.
The News Media
No other institution has failed the public worse. Which is pretty sad, considering the competition.
[Update mid afternoon]
The media lied, people died. And this was driven purely by Trump derangement. If he said something might be useful, it couldn’t possibly be.
[Update a few minutes later]
Great. It may be that the virus can spread through normal breathing. I don’t know; seems like it would be spreading much faster if that was the case. But we continue to suffer from a lack of data.
A catalog of the worst kinds of people on the platform.
The Toilet-Paper Shortage
It’s not about hoarding.
That makes sense. It would imply that places who specialize in supplying businesses, like Smart and Final in LA, would have plenty.
[Update a while later]
It’s disrupting the locavore supply chain as well.
We’re now seeing the fragility of our civilizational infrastructure. It needs to be more robust and resilient.
The Captain Of That Carrier
Why he had to be relieved of duty.
What struck us as particularly off in the captain’s letter was his statement: “We are not at war.” He added that “sailors do not need to die” and that “if we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our sailors.” The Navy, though, doesn’t need to be instructed on the value of its own sailors. Plus, too, under our system it’s not carrier captains who decide whether we’re at war.
The most important asset is not the crew, but the ship, and the crew must be ready to be sacrificed for the mission. I wrote a book about that.
The FDA’s Death Toll
It’s long past time to track it.
Bureaucracy kills.
[Update a while later]
I should add that, when this is over, we should have a national commission to review all federal regulatory actions and legislation, and see how much of it is still necessary (if it ever was) and how much of it is actively harmful (e.g., plastic-bag bans) with little benefit/cost ratio. At least we never got that nonsense at a federal level. So it would also be useful to examine state-level regs, for info purposes for those states. But unfortunately, contra bulls**t claims from the Democrats about being the “party of science,” this nonsense will likely continue.
A Fit Of Sanity
San Francisco (!) has reversed its plastic-bag ban, and instead (finally) banned reusable bags.
Hopefully this won’t be temporary; it was always stupid.
[Update a few minutes later]
Katherine was prescient (as was I).