Category Archives: War Commentary

The Virus

…has exposed Americans’ disconnect from reality.

[Update a while later]

Nancy Pelosi and the politics pandemic.

[Update a while later]

Goodbye, Green New Deal.

Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?

Not a prayer.

[Update later morning]

Yes, the president is not wrong: Pelosi is a sick puppy.

Five Needed Paradigm Shifts

revealed by the pandemic. The latter two are particularly important.

[Update a while later]

Related: A litany of useless laws have been exposed as well.

[Update a while more later]

The coming age of dispersion.

We’ve been wanting to get out of the city for a long time. Most people don’t realize how large and empty the American west is, including California itself. New technology is going to make it increasingly possible and affordable to live comfortably off the grid.

Bad Regulations

Yes, the best response next time would be to shut down the CDC and FDA. Even Cuomo admitted that the regulations were slowing things down.

[Update a while later]

Stop panicking over bad data.

I won’t be surprised to find out when this is all over that the mortality rate was one in a thousand.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ford is making ventilators from seat fans.

#Murrica

[Update a while later]

Sorry, first link is fixed now.

Lockdown

Is it inevitable, and soon? It’s a good idea to prepare, but I don’t think it will be necessary. In any event, unless we cancel tomorrow’s fumigation, we have to leave the house until Monday.

[Update later morning]

If this is true, it’s great news. The case-fatality rate may be only a tenth of a percent.

[Update mid-afternoon]

This is stupid. How do these people expect the needed goods to be moved with the war on truckers?

[Update Friday morning]

More on the trucker’s plight.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’d been needing a haircut, but put it off too long, I guess (I always procrastinate, because I hate getting haircuts). Other than the impact on the proprietors’ businesses, no one will suffer from not getting a tattoo, but hair grows.

[Bumped]