This article by Lyman Stone at The Dispatch is certainly interesting, and I think has strong persuasive elements. One has to get to paragraph 32 (I think. It begins “But while I think decadence is a possible explanation…”) to get to what I think is the strongest point, but the whole thing seems solid.
We have chosen the wrong extreme measures, he thinks. Because we are a wealthy nation, which can afford medical research and expects first-rate medical care, we have tried to dodge the proven solution to epidemics in hopes that something else, which doesn’t involve making people leave their homes, will work instead.
There is good discussion of masks and other related topics, all done in an efficient few paragraphs each. There is history going back to Leviticus and leprosy, and not just for decoration. There’s a lot of bang for your buck in this article.
Read that article first. My own thoughts are next and are less valuable.
I wonder, in that context, if the increase in home ownership over the last few generations, including the growth of suburbia and now exurbia, because of reliable auto performance and willingness to drive for many errands, has lead to a different way of looking at our right to get away from problems by moving farther out. “A man’s home is his castle” does not mean what it used to. In forcible* quarantine, no one is taking your house from you. You get it back when you get out of quarantine. This was understood in previous eras, but because it is lost now, as we are the ones that are more mobile and have a different attitude toward houses as places we can “get away” to, the rules of quarantine have been reversed. Now you have to stay home, rather than being taken out of your home. We feel differently about that than we did even fifty years ago. It is our era that is out of step with the others. The people from 1950 could completely understand what was done in 1850 or even 1150. We are the outsiders. Because we are rich and have actual health care beyond the rudimentary – a luxury unknown before about 1940 – and can live alone outside of the city, instead of being surrounded by servants and peasants who provided our needs, we have different expectations. Or you could be dirt poor and live in family units. There’s that. Yet even that often required significant contact with others to survive. “Livin’ off the land” was a Mother Earth News fantasy, and they found some people who actually came close. But there were always exceptions where the missus had a job in town.
I think this is worth sharing widely. Please consider that.
*The article explains how that does not have to mean “at gunpoint.” Yet as businesses are being shut down and the proprietors taken at away at gunpoint under our current system, would that be worse even if it were true? But you were supposed to have read the article before you got to that asterisk, so you knew that already. Or I caught you out.
I’m confused…how does he want to isolate Infected people without mass testing to identify them, which he apparently doesn’t think it feasible?
Not sure we have any actual data on transmissibility of non-symptomatic cases vs symptomatic cases, either way, but the general assumption seems to be that the non-symptomatic cases are indeed transmissible.
My bet is that the symptomatic people, plus their known contacts (and that is going to be where individuals start objecting) is what he considers sufficient. You may be right. It may not be, and the whole exercise futile. I have a guess that method may be darn good, however.
re Contract Tracing…I understand that this is always done, or at least attempted, in the case of sexually transmitted diseases…and that even in that case, there are a nontrivial number of people who can’t remember who they slept with two weeks ago. Seems like for something like Covid-19, it’s a lot harder, especially if the person has ridden any form of public transportation.
There’s a historic dinner theater on the Chicago lakefront that was originally built to be a children’s tuberculosis sanitarium around the turn of the last century. It was just renovated a few years ago, but like every place else it’s now closed. Who knows when it will open again. Maybe they should’ve restored it back to its original function.
Mr. Stone eventually got to the heart of the matter: “Finally, there’s a last theory on why [Western] governments eschewed centralized quarantine. China responded to COVID by locking down Wuhan”
Exactly! In the feminized West, politicians are deathly afraid of thinking for themselves. The Western Political Class are just like the Mean Girls in junior high school — always looking left & right to make sure they are not getting out of step with the other Mean Girls.
China’s leaders know their enemy — they knew that virtually none of the Western Political Class would dare to do something different from the approach China had already adopted so publicly.
Mr. Stone makes the fascinating point that in reality China’s approach to dealing with this relatively mild virus (same order of magnitude of mortality as the flu, and mostly affecting those who were anyway close to the end of their lives) was not their widely-publicized kabuki theater of lock downs. Instead, Mr. Stone notes:
“Wuhan’s outbreak was resolved through quarantine, not lockdown. What ended the outbreak in Wuhan wasn’t welded-shut apartments, but massive field-quarantine units where tens of thousands of people spent weeks at a time being protectively isolated from society.”
Lock downs are much more damaging to the import-dependent financialized economies of the US and much of the rest of the West than to China’s massive manufacturing economy focused on producing real goods & services. We have to assume China’s leaders knew that.
A historical analogy. Winston Churchill knew German bombers were headed to Coventry … and he did nothing. Churchill accepted death & destruction of British citizens in the city of Coventry to preserve the secrets of radar and code-breaking so that he could later wreak bigger damage on Germany. Will future Chinese historians praise Xi for the cunning he displayed in Wuhan, accepting some loss to his own citizens so that he could bring the detested West to its knees and finally expunge the dishonor of China’s Century of Humiliation at the hands of the West?
Things would be much simpler if COVID caused a purple dot to appear on your forehead but it doesn’t.
Any argument premised on the Chinese experience is empty noise. The only question is what the ratio between the reported deaths and actual is. My bet is 100 to 500, i.e., 200,000 to 1,000,000. There is lots of evidence that there were at least 45,000 cremations in Wuhan alone. The Chinese government has had much practice and grown very adept at hiding mass graves.
The thousands killed at Tienanmen were disposed of by crushing them under the treads of the tanks and after ripening, washed down the storm drains. The number that they reported are only 2/3s of the number they will admit to executing not including the victims of the organ sales.
Contact tracing and quarantine are premised on a limited number of contacts and a known period of contagion. Neither of which is applicable here. STDs are passed on by discrete indiscreet acts not by simply passing someone on the street. Multiply that uncertainty by hundreds of people a day with no real idea when they may have started to be contagious and it breaks down in the first hour. Look how quickly the system breaks when they are trying to trace TB.
We’ve already found cases in late December and if we can look, will find them in November I have no doubt.
I’ve said from the beginning that there was something “off” with the Chinese numbers and response. Miscalculation on their part, secret knowledge, incompetence, whatever–None of that matters, at this point.
What does matter is that the incompetent “elites” we have running things in the West cribbed their notes from the Chinese totalitarian response to this issue, and did as they did. Which is rather revelatory of their mindset and belief systems, when you consider it all.
Root of the problem we have here in the West is that we’ve allowed incompetence and venality to become as prevalent as they have in our leadership cadre. Much of this stems from an unwillingness to call these jackasses on their consistently poor performance, or to do anything effective about it. They lie, they cheat, they steal from the public fisc to enact their pet theories, and all we do is acquiesce to it all, even in the face of massive evidence that none of it works at all.
Fact is, none of what these asses have promised has worked. Look at California–That “high-speed rail” prospectus? How’s that worked out? The “care for the homeless” BS? How about the thing that generated the whole deal with the homeless, that initiative to “de-institutionalize” the mad minority that can’t function in modern society? How has that worked out for the rest of us?
Most of the people running things in the West belong at the end of hempen ropes outside the massive office blocks they’ve built up with our money. Not only are they incompetent, they’ve actually become the biggest part of the problem. China is what it is not because they do things better, but because they have a bureaucracy and government that’s not actively trying to drive people out of business as they are in the US. Most of what went to China went there not in pursuit of higher wages, but because they could no longer produce products here in the US competitively. Sure, the “captains of industry” like Jeff Immelt played their part, but the root fact is that things like the intrusive financial compliance laws and environmental “initiatives” had rather more to do with industry and jobs departing for China than anything else.
Also, the general lackadaisical attitude a lot of Americans are absorbing towards work. I’ve got personal experience with two fairly large players in my industry who’ve basically thrown up their hands and shut down operations in the Pacific Northwest because they can’t find employees who are either competent or who give a damn about taking pride in the product they produce.
Anyone trying to “reshore” is in for a rough ride–The government agencies are going to be doing what they do best, which is prevent things. The worker base has become corrupted by the various pathologies we’re all familiar with–Poor education, lack of work ethic, welfareism, and all the rest. My guess is that a lot of jobs simply aren’t going to come back because the socialist statists have trained and inculcated attitudes in the proletariat that are entirely inimical to effective reform happening.
Things are going to have to get really bad, and a bunch of the au courant rice bowls are going to have to be broken before we really see significant change. If we do. I kinda feel cynical to say this, but I think a tipping point was reached awhile back, and that we’ve essentially managed to recapitulate what the Communist Party did in Russia during the Soviet Union–Taken a hard-working honest national culture and turned it into something else entirely. If you spend time with a lot of the younger generation in the work force, you want to throw up your hands and scream, given some of the attitudes and ethics on display. The fact that the government sees fit to take our tax dollars and reward people with higher pay for staying home than they’d earn at their jobs is a perfect example of where things are going seriously south–The kids simply can’t understand that that money has to come from somewhere, and that there isn’t some magic money tap that never has to be repaid.
We reap as we have sown, and what we’ve sown is a general ignorance of basic economics as we’ve known them. Maybe the basic facts of things have changed, with regards to automation, but I suspect they have actually not. There’s more elasticity in things, but there is no way in hell we can get by with such a significant part of our workforce being non-contributors.
The erstwhile Doctor Sanity posted an article on her FB page that noted that, right smack in the middle of the 1968 flu “pandemic”, which killed 100,000 Americans (modern per capita equivalent, 160k), they held this great big party they called… what was it ?? Oh, yeah: “Woodstock”…
We are so spoiled and cowardly these days.
My own favorite meme is a sepia-tone of two kids fooling around with a hose, that said,
“If covid happened 50 years ago, and some neighborhood kid got it, moms would send their kids over to make sure they got it, too, to get it the hell over with.”
There’s a lot of truth to that.
Hard to believe the human race survived this long without experts.
I read the piece and had a hard time verifying his arguments.
I saw this courtesy of Rand Simberg at http://www.transterrestrial.com/
https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
The short version is that Ferguson’s Imperial model is a random number generator.
I would bet that none of the other models are any better.
Kirk: “Root of the problem we have here in the West is that we’ve allowed incompetence and venality to become as prevalent as they have in our leadership cadre.”
Your whole comment above is a spot-on analysis of the hole we have dug for ourselves, Kirk. I wish it were not so — but there we are.
Increasingly, it seems that we are now in a worse position than Germany & Japan were at the end of WWII. It took a few years of bombing for the Allies to destroy their industrial base. It has taken about a quarter century of “free trade” for our Betters to do something similar to the US industrial base — 60,000 factories shut down, and most of them off-shored. Big difference is that the Germans & Japanese knew they had been beaten, and realized they had to buckle down to hard work and pull themselves back up. Our Betters have led us to defeat, but they (and we) mostly don’t realize it yet.
Part of our problem is that “democracy” has become dysfunctional. In most places, elections are really decided in Primaries, in which only a small minority of activists participate. We are suffering from the Tyranny of the Minority.
“I would bet that none of the other models are any better.”
Some of them may be; there is a collection of them at the CDC site (about 20!) for your reviewing pleasure.
One defect that most of them seem to have is that the geographical entity used is a State…I think this is pretty irrelevant for this purpose; NYC and Upstate New York are two different worlds in terms of population density, etc. It is also not clear which ones, if any, are considering the influence of of inter-state or other inter-area travel.
This is all in addition to any coding problems that may exist.
But there is a more fundamental problem, I think: Regardless of the quality of any particular model, there is a the problem that **we don’t know** what the effect on transmissibility is of any particular kind of “social distancing.” What is the effect of closing indoor movie theaters versus closing factories versus closing construction sites? What is the effect on the transmissibility number if you close drive-in theaters and forbid boating on lakes? How about the effect of keeping a big-city subway system open?
I have not seen any attempt to estimate or quantify effects at this level even roughly; instead, the modelers use things like assuming that Social Distancing reduces R0 by 40% and Re-Opening increases it back by 40%, as if “social distancing” and “reopening” were single things. Not much else they can do with the data they were given, although at least one model attempts to dynamically estimate the disease-propagation rates in various locales as they evolve over time. Which procedure has its own problems.
Epidemiologists should clearly state their best estimates, with all necessary disclaimers and reservations, about the effects of various kinds of “social distancing”…there are probably some statistical techniques that could help extract things like *how bad are the subways*, and also just common-sense about things like drive-in theaters. It is not sufficient to just say “more social distancing is better.”
Grurray, that link goes to a blank page. I think you were linking to La Rabida Sanitorium, which was used for children with rheumatic fever in the 40s. The daughter of friends, he was an orthopedic surgeon, spent two years there on bed rest after a bout of rheumatic fever about 1945. She recovered and lived a normal life.
I was quarantined with my mother for scarlet fever in 1944. She was allowed to stay. My sister and father had to live with relatives for two weeks.
Please, no more about how much braver we were in the old days and it all turned out fine. If you were a problem, if you lived at all, you were sent away to a large institution. State hospitals, “schools” for the developmentally delayed, sanitariums, hundreds of thousands of people. And this was in an era when there were still lots of physical labor/low-intelligence jobs that you could slot people in so you you could keep another large batch out of sight that way, too.
They were sent away and you never saw them again. That’s why you have the impression that we just didn’t define things as problems then. That and the usual rosiness of nostalgia.
AVI, I’m not sure what your last comment about “sending away to never be seen again” has to do with quarantine.
I am all in favor of resuming the use of “reform schools” for the disruptive non-students that make public schools a hellish experience for so many children. That has nothing to do with quarantine or epidemics. Leprosy today is quite treatable and is not the public health problem it was in the Middle Ages. It is now called “Hanson’s Disease” and LA County Hospital, has a clinic for the treatment.
Here’s another problem with all this: The Boy Cried Wolf Syndrome.
This time, the arrogant idiocracy massively overreacted. We can all see that, I think–And, the next time around the mulberry bush? Who is going to believe them?
I mentioned before that I have a thesis going which runs along the lines of our “elites” not understanding how things work, how and why their attempts to “manage” issues in our institutions usually fail. This is another aspect of that, and it goes to show just how poorly they understand governance and management.
Credibility is something that you have to carefully husband and recruit; it’s all too easily lost, and once lost…? You’re done for, trying to run things.
Examine something out of another recent headline: The death of Ahmaud Arbery. This is a significant thing, I think, but not for the reasons you might think.
According to accounts, Arbery was out running for exercise through a white neighborhood in a Georgia suburb. Supposedly, he was seen in a construction site, pursued, and then shot dead. First glance, we see “racists” and an innocent victim of a lynching mentality.
Rightly or wrongly, Mr. Arbery is dead. No idea on the merits there, but… It strikes me that this is a marker along the way towards a world we’re not going to like, at all. One which was produced by the idiot leadership we have running things in this country–Right now, they’re releasing criminals from prison and jails because they might get COVID-19. For the last many generations, they’ve been declining to prosecute more and more crimes, lowering penalties for stealing from the law-abiding. Look at the pictures coming out of California, where you have society’s dregs looting entire stores. Notice how so many local police departments won’t even respond to a theft report, or a burglary out in the community.
You think this doesn’t have an affect on things? You think that there aren’t people looking at the overall situation, and going “Well, if they’re not going to do something about this, then I will…”.
This is how you get vigilantes, and a lynch culture, people. The elites don’t recognize it, because they’re too damn stupid and feckless to grasp the point, but the fact is that law and order aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, they’re both there to protect the criminals (real and perceived) from the public. You present the appearance that there is no effective law and order going on in a community, then you’d best expect a lot more cases that will look like what happened to Mr. Arbery. Hell, most of them will be even worse, and look like those incidents coming out of Central and South America where they’ve burned people to death in bonfires because the community thought they were child kidnappers. That’s what an absence of law and order really looks like–It’s not the criminals running rampant, although they often do. It’s more generally going to demonstrate itself as the mob taking over, and doing what mobs do with unthinking and overwhelming violence.
The genius “elites” have been setting the stage for this over the last several generations. We’re about to reap the whirlwind they’ve sown, due to their general unwillingness to support law and order, accountability and responsibility. When you make life cheap by refusing to enforce capital punishment in unquestionable cases of murder, don’t be real surprised when the general public demurs, and starts ensuring that the malefactor never sees the inside of the “justice system” they’ve lost all faith in.
Mr. Arbery is a harbinger, regardless of the merits of his case. Why did the people who did what they did to him feel motivated to take action themselves, as opposed to making a 911 call? I would suggest that the choice was made because we’ve set up a situation where that 911 call is both ineffectual and unlikely to result in effective action on the criminal.
Which is a situation that may, for the short term, look a lot like “racial justice”, but the fact is, the long-term result is going to lead to a return of vigilante justice and lynch mobs.
We’re led by the worst political class in the history of this nation, right now, and they’re pissing away everything we fought so hard for, and spent generations building up. The results are going to be ugly, and epic.
Seriously, what Kirk said about vigilante-ism. People can only be pushed so far. Can only be robbed, abused, attacked, and raped (physically or economically) for so long, and then to have the authorities standing around ineffectually, adding social insult to economic injury … before they snap. In California, it seems that the organized mobs are carefully shoplifting only until a certain threshold.
It’s one of Insty’s precepts, isn’t it? That the police exist to protect accused criminals from mob justice.
And I did a series about the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, and what happened when law-abiding citizens were finally pushed too far,
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/27865.html
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/27935.html
http://www.celiahayes.com/archives/639
And, you know what is the most amazing/frustrating/infuriating thing about all of that, Sgt. Mom?
You try discussing that entire sorry history with the “intellectual elite”, the self-anointed “intelligentsia” that have been running things in this country since Wilson’s day, and they’ll all look at you like you’re trying to discuss differential equations with your dog. They have not one ‘effing clue about the overall effect of what they’re doing, or how they’re tearing down carefully erected barriers between mob justice and the real roots of civilization.
They simply don’t get it. Which is why I think that the entire shoddy construction we’ve built up since the turn of the 19th Century is almost certainly going to collapse under the ministrations of this idiocracy that we’ve allowed to take over.
Go look at Chicago. The various Constance Do-Gooder types have rendered the expectation for civilized conduct and swift justice moot. What follows next? I can draw the line for you, and you’ll see it. They will not, and will deny the possibility right up until the city goes up in flames.
One way or another, something will be done. What they’re doing is guaranteeing that it won’t be within the confines or control of the established “justice system”. Mr. Arbery is just the first snowflake in the avalanche that’s coming.
What sucks about all this is going to be the truly innocent victims that will get caught up in it all, and who will wind up paying the price. Mr. Arbery may actually be the grounding-rod that years of frustration about black criminality and ineffectual law enforcement grounded out through, which is the precise position that a lot of innocents are going to find themselves in. Won’t be fair, won’t be nice, but it will happen. What that does for race relations? Doesn’t even bear thinking about, TBH.
Let’s take a quick look at the mirage of contact tracing.
The reported infection rate for New York city was 20%. for a population of 8.4 million that works out to 1.7 Million people. That works out to 68,000 people a day over 60 days. That takes us back to around March 1. If each of those people had 10 contacts, that would mean 680,000 that had to be traced every day. This is both impossible to imagine happening and an impossibly low number of contacts.
Add to that that 90%+ never even knew they were sick.
David, I would bet real money that every model in that list turns into a random number generator if you try to run it for more than a few cycles. All iterative computations eventually fall apart and generate random noise if allowed to run long enough. This is true for well understood, easily measured and experimentally verifiable problems like strength of materials.
An epidemic and the climate have none of those characteristics. If the only thing that the lockdown accomplishes is to instill a visceral skepticism of expert pronouncements and models in the population at large, it will have been worth it.
As it is, I’m sure that the advocates of each of those models that David pointed to is working feverishly, re-jiggering them to match whatever the supposed outcome turns out to be and will claim prescience when they do.
Worse, Kirk. They’ll look at you like you are the very worst raaaacist since (insert bad Democrat example here) for pointing out the obvious. Look at what happened to every white cop, or neighborhood guard volunteer, who had the gall to go up against an obvious or suspected criminal of color. Raked through the hellfire.
And there are going to be perfectly innocent victims of color caught up in this. Because there are so many, so many, vicious criminals of color excused and waved away.
Oh, like the demented woman who started shooting in a McDonalds because the poor teenaged employees told her that the seating area was closed, because of the Chinese Wuhan Corona-virus crud. Yeah – about what was expected.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8297943/PICTURED-Woman-32-shot-three-teenage-McDonalds-workers-angry-rage.html
Sgt. Mom,
Like I said… It goes back to the fact that the people we have “running the machine”, pulling the levers, and punching the buttons? They have no idea how it works, this machine we call society. They are all sitting up there in insulated comfort, watching the dials and gauges in their imagined control room, and think that they know what the controls they have access to are actually doing out on the ground.
They haven’t a clue, really.
Mentioned it the other day–One way to think of society is as a succession of Skinner boxes, ones created by existing circumstance, and only somewhat influenced by the things the elites do to try to exert some influence over things. People respond to the overall signal they get, the actual stimulus/response cycle that they experience. The anointed pronounce one thing, and the actual signal that’s sent through social circumstance is actually the diametric opposite–Yet, the elites never bother to examine what it is those circumstances are actually signalling their subjects to do.
Which is how we get the perverse incentives we have set up–They put up signs telling people not to litter, not to dump their trash, but… The actual signal is that it’s pretty damn inconvenient and expensive to take your trash to the dump. So, people find places in the countryside to dump their trash, and what it winds up costing to clean that up is far in excess to what the costs would be if they simply didn’t charge to drop at the landfill…
Message was “Don’t litter…”
Signal was “We’ll make it so hard and expensive to get rid of your trash that you’ll dump it out in the countryside, making the problem exponentially worse…”.
Wonder why “it” doesn’t work? That’s why. The people who are making these decisions are lost in delusions of “diktat”, thinking that their words create reality, that what they say, goes. Well, it does indeed “go”, but where it goes is in one ear and out the other, for the vast majority of the general public.
We’re overburdened by an elite that has no idea how the real world works, and who have been selected for an almost autistic mindset, one that can bear no contradiction, no argument. It’s their way, or they throw a tantrum, refusing to acknowledge that they might have gotten things wrong.
I don’t think that the first calculations were “estimates” as much as they were “range finding salvos”. Guess the initial infected population, guess the R(0)[R-Naught]. guess the death rate and turn the crank. That was good enough for the UK to see that the NHS had little to no surge or reserve capacity. It was good enough to allow the President to judge what effort was needed.
As a practical matter, no one knows how the US works. That is why all the “experts” were sure that Madam Hllary was a shoe-in in 2016. Handing the problem off to 50 governors wasn’t much better. Chicago is not Illinois. A few years ago a friend’s Mother had a problem, infection, or bowel obstruction or cancer. The family physician was at a regional center 1+ hour away. A neighbor called the hospital and the state police to let them know that there was fast traffic incoming.
“Flattening the Curve” mean slowing the disease spread so that healthcare could keep up. Oh, yeah! Where was that supposed to be?
The US doesn’t have enough guns and uniforms to quarantine anything. There is no useful means of “taking control”, at the state or Federal level.
Most people seemed to be witing for the next commercial/snack/potty break. I’ve worked as a plumber, worked in several hospitals, and have flown TWA. Always: NEVER TOUCH YOU FACE OR FOOD UNTIL YOU WASH/SANITIZE YOUR HANDS/PAWS! ALWAYS! Maintaining “sterility” for Bac-T, tissue culture or surgery is a whole other world. I see endless people (at a distance, or in the media) who wear masks like a fashion accessory or as an after throught.
I give President Trump a lot of credit. He saw the crematoria smoke over China, saw Italy and Spain implode, and did a fine bit of soft-shoe in the Bully pulpit to get people to try and “cooperate”. “Slowing” the thing down was the best he, & we , could hope for.
I am 73 and in pretty good health, so I am not “X-Ring”, maybe out to the “9-Ring”, but if this thing was the big nasty, I planned on a lot of funerals. I explained sanitation, masks, and “crowds”, scaring some people in the process.
The light rail, bus, or office were going to be a “kill zone”. Don’t go there. Plan ahead. Shopping list. Adapt.
But, “Damn good show in the Bully Pulpit”. There was nothing “irrevocable”. There were no riots. Stupid people behaved in stupid ways, as always. The President, and the Governors, had nothing effective to use. Things didn’t work everywhere but worked well enough to keep things going until it was clear that the Monster that made it to North America wasn’t as savage as it might have been. It has not been cost free. There is always an opportunity cost in preserving options. No population could just jump into the hole for a year. Plus we now know who has “jack boots” in their closet.
So, for a potentially lethal situation, with no established tools or procedures, things went pretty well. Whatever he is, or ain’t, President Trump was a fine showman who had faith in his audience. I think that is related to “Leadership”, or something.
Yeah. For the “Elite”; I got rope. If for no other reason than to stop the useless screaming. And that includes the CDC, especially.
Now, the real crisis. I am out of valilla.
The last was by me, and I still have to do the vanilla run…..
Mike-SMO
“Mr. Arbery is a harbinger, regardless of the merits of his case. Why did the people who did what they did to him feel motivated to take action themselves, as opposed to making a 911 call? I would suggest that the choice was made because we’ve set up a situation where that 911 call is both ineffectual and unlikely to result in effective action on the criminal.”
Possibly they didn’t think they needed to call 911, because they didn’t expect a violent confrontation. But I also expect they knew it wouldn’t do any good, because they knew they’d be told there was nothing to be done. Anecdote- I was told of black criminal gangs who would go down streets looking for open garages to loot- and would then organize the looting via radio. The police were called- and, yep nothing could be done. I expect these folks had similar experiences in the past, so why bother calling?
All that said, I’m not sure this case is a harbinger of anything yet. If nothing else, they may have been just bothering some guy simply out jogging, for no reason. Even if the dead man was guilty of something, even if they just defending themselves against his violent attack, now they’re going to get the George Zimmerman treatment and likely end up with their lives destroyed, if they don’t end up in jail. This is suboptimum for them, I think.
And for everyone else. Every time some white person kills a black person- even in self defense- it’s another excuse for the left to trot out the racism charge for the trillionth time. A while back I even heard on the radio of a gun battle between police and bank robbers- and the cops were attacked racist because the bank robbers they were shooting at were black! Meanwhile, the endless numbers of white people attacked or murdered by blacks is simply accepted as normal and not commented upon, pretty much by anyone. I can think of a bunch- and the reaction of the cops was very often, yep, nothing could be done.
I find this unpleasant to note, but reality has famously been described as that which does not go away when one ceases to believe in it. Reality doesn’t care if I dislike it, so I will describe it as I see it.
Thus, I will posit that a real harbinger will be when the residents of any given area get fed up enough with the criminals and with the numb irrelevance of the local police department to evict both sorts from their vicinity, replacing the latter with a group capable and willing to remove the former. In other words, to create no go zones similar to muslim areas of Europe.
I’m not sure if that’s coming anytime soon, but I certainly think the continuous rolling lockdowns some states have imposed are eroding the authority of the government at a fast clip, so we’ll see.
Two more models for your consideration.
First:https: //www.afp.com/en/news/15/covid-19-lockdown-risks-14-mn-extra-tb-deaths-study-doc-1r04nn2
The lockdowns will cause 1.4 million additional deaths from TB over the next five years.
Second: https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/07/australia-projects-more-deaths-from-suicides-in-lockdown-than-from-virus/
Additional deaths from suicide in Australia will outnumber the Wuflu deaths there.
I’m certainly not in a position to evaluate either of these although I find the reasoning for the increase in TB a little suspect. It’s not hard to believe that this big of an economic dislocation would cause increased suicides, putting a number on them in advance seems rather speculative. But that’s what models are for, isn’t it. Us ignorant proles aren’t supposed to question “Science”.
The Arbery thing seems … odd. I am suspicious that there are aspects to this that we are not being told in the establishment media. A pair of so-called “white racists” going after and hunting down a blameless black jogger on the streets of a so-called “white” part of town? Look, this is not the 1920s deep, deep South. Hunting down a black interloper of color hasn’t been “the done thing” in half a century.
The story as presented initially is … curious. There are elements left out of this. I’d want to know what they are, before I leap to any conclusions about all this.
I agree the issue of black crime will get more and more a flash point. The gangs of black teens doing the team shoplifting in high end stores will drive them out of business as black gangs have driven malls out of business.
In a case in Chicago last summer, a small group of white women, no doubt suburban and leftist politically, surrounded a group of black teens who had been robbing a store on north Michigan Avenue to “protect” them from arrest.
More and more arrogant black political figures, the latest the black judge in Dallas who jailed the woman for opening her salon, are inviting pushback but the “racism” defense will be used by white and black progs.
Without placing much faith in the media, the video I saw showed Arbery running toward his attacker in a tee shirt. He surely didn’t seem to be carrying much loot or acting like he had something to hide. The sort of thing you’d steal from a construction site wouldn’t fit in a pocket very well.
I’m not sure I’d want to hold this up as much of an exemplar.
The senior McMichael had some sort of history with him as a juvenile offender but that likely goes for hundreds or thousands of others in a 30 year career in law enforcement.
A trial would do a lot to clear the air but I suspect this will end in a plea bargain for some form of manslaughter. Maybe time will bring more details to light.
Sgt. Mom,
Yeah, I’m thinking there’s something we’re not being told with regards to Mr. Arbery and his activities.
That said, the surface optics on this incident are horrible.
And, I find myself somewhat horrified to discover that after the hatchet job they did on Zimmerman with regards to “the sainted Trayvon Martin”, my instincts are that Mr. Arbery likely deserved what he got. I don’t trust those instincts, but that’s what all the varied and sundry false front exercises have gotten us to in this arena. I no longer assume that the crap they call “racist” actually is, and I strongly suspect anyone claiming it right off the bat. Maybe Mr. Arbery is the exception that proves the rule, but I strongly suspect anything off the get-go that’s sold the way this case has been by the media.
I’ll bet money we’re going to find out that a.) he’s got a lengthy history of petty crime, b.) that the neighborhood he was in was his playground for it, and that c.) the authorities never did anything about it.
You’re going to see more and more of this as the criminal justice system renders itself irrelevant and ineffective under the leadership of our oh-so-sensitive elites, and the results you get from that ain’t gonna look like what you have in the UK. Here in the US, I suspect you’re going to see a lot of “Vigilance Committees” and a lot of application of the “SSS” principle–Shoot, Shovel, and Shutup. The missing persons rosters are gonna grow by leaps and bounds, and instead of legions of young women who’ve made poor choices being on them, it’s gonna be a lot more like Mr. Arbery and Mr. Martin “goin’ missin'”.
I agree the issue of black crime will get more and more a flash point.
I can’t believe it hasn’t been more of a flashpoint before now. As you note, black crime has been a notable factor is decline of malls- this topic has come up over the years and I’ve had several people offhandedly remark that they stopped going to this or that mall for exactly that reason- but this seems to have inspired nothing to be done by anyone. I note a while back a Somali immigrant grabbed a small boy and tossed him over the railing at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. He lived, but obviously this sort of thing is bad for business. The end result was that the Somali got a twenty year sentence and the boy got a lot of surgery, I presume. The story went away quickly, as these stories always do. But my wife suddenly told me she had no interest in ever visiting that mall ever again.
I’d have thought mall owners would have enough political influence to get something done about this sort of thing, but nope. If I recall, there was even a court case that declared malls to be public spaces. Funny, leftist media can censor conservatives with impunity because they’re private businesses but malls also private businesses are somehow public utilities who must serve everyone, including criminals.
I’ll bet money we’re going to find out that a.) he’s got a lengthy history of petty crime, b.) that the neighborhood he was in was his playground for it, and that c.) the authorities never did anything about it.
I’d bet money too.
But this has been going on a long time- decades at least. Why will people suddenly now lose tolerance for the never ending crime wave?
The end result for shopping malls appears to be their abandonment, not a movement to make them safe.
Time and attention will eventually provide more facts and, it’s hoped, clarity.
It will require more than a rap sheet for the victim to make this look like anything other than an armed ambush in broad daylight.
The lying liars that lie throughout the media told us that “sweet little child-martyr Trayvon” was an innocent victim of the “evil white Hispanic” Zimmerman.
Instead, it turned out that he was a well-grown hoodlum who had ambushed Zimmerman and was doing an MMA-style “ground and pound” with Mr. Zimmerman’s head against a concrete sidewalk when the actual victim in this case was forced to shoot precious little Trayvon off of his body.
That was the straw that really broke the back of my tolerance for this propagandized crap, TBH. At this point, if you are black and the media immediately takes up your case and cries “Racism!!”, I automatically assume you are probably guilty, just because of what the media is saying and doing in your case.
I fear you are going to see this play out in racialized juries, before long.
Blacks assumed that the white liberals were their friends, helping them get to the head of the line. Nothing could be further from the reality than that forlorn fantasy. The next go-round is going to make Jim Crow look like a walk in the park, and I don’t think there will be a second Civil Rights movement, now that enough people have seen the results of the first one.
Vis-a-vis law enforcement, The San Francisco DA is the child of two of the Weather Underground imprisoned for a 1983 bank robbery that left three people dead. Apparently raised by members not in prison. Just who I’d choose for DA.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/08/chesa-boudin-father-david-gilbert-weather-underground-jail-coronavirus/
A bit more on topic. Royal Caribbean has finally made provisions for allowing their crew, at least one of them, to go home. Passengers might not be the only thing they’ll have trouble finding when they try to start up again. Both the cruise industry’s and the port’s handling of crews have been shameful that includes the crews on cargo vessels as well.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/tourism-cruises/article242595896.html
Right on schedule…
Daily Mail now has a story up saying that they’ve now got security cam footage of our sainted Mr. Arbery going in the garage door, wandering around back of that house which was under construction, and then leaving by the front door.
Guarantee you that a significant fraction of what led to this was likely a history of calls to 911 about casual theft in the neighborhood, with nothing being done.
You see here the results of what happens when you “de-escalate” law enforcement. The nice people who came up with the brilliant idea of not prosecuting or even enforcing laws against petty theft are the cause, and this is second- or third-order effect. Good luck convincing any of the “good people” of that fact, though.
Ah, well–I’m sure they’ll love the world they are creating. Their grandchildren will likely think nothing of joining a lynch mob.
MCS
Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn were Chesa Boudin’s foster parents. Chesa spent a year working as a translator for Hugo Chavez.
What more credentials do you want. If he was a Black Lesbian he’d already be running for President.
Gavin Longmui… repeats a historical myth – to wit:
“Winston Churchill knew German bombers were headed to Coventry … and he did nothing.”
The facts are quite different. Peter Calvocoressi was head of the Air Section at Bletchley Park. All decrypted messages relating to the Luftwaffe passed through his group. And he stated flatly that “ULTRA never mentioned Coventry.” Messages decrypted in the week before the German attack pointed to a major operation that night, but the target was unclear. German radio navigation beams indicated several possible targets. On the day before the raid, the analysts concluded that the target was London, and Churchill was so informed. It was a Friday, and Churchill was about to leave for his usual weekend in the country. He cancelled it, choosing instead to remain in London “at his post” in time of danger.
By evening, the beams and other factors pointed to Coventry. The British forces took all possible countermeasures: nightfighters, AA guns, and beam jamming. The nightfighters had no airborne radar, and failed to intercept; the AA guns were ineffective; and the beam jammers were set to the wrong frequency due to an error in calculation.
The myth of Churchill’s conscious sacrifice of Coventry originated with FJ Winterbotham in The ULTRA Secret. Winterbotham was very deep in ULTRA – he supervised the Special Liaison Units that delivered ULTRA intelligence to field commanders. But he wasn’t involved in codebreaking or analysis, or the delivery of ULTRA to Churchill. He must have heard a rumor or bit of chat that he ran with. As he was writing 30 years later, some confusion was inevitable.
But there is no reason for the myth to be perpetuated any further.
“The myth of Churchill’s conscious sacrifice of Coventry originated with FJ Winterbotham in The ULTRA Secret.”
Winterbotham’s ‘The Ultra Secret’ was published in November 1974. In the 1950s & 60s, World War II generation people in the UK were talking about Churchill’s decision to let the German’s bomb Coventry rather than expose secrets. Apparently, much of that discussion was sympathetic to Churchill for having had to make such a difficult but understandable decision. If the story is a myth, its roots go much deeper than Winterbotham in 1974.
But let’s not lose sight of the point which the story of Churchill & Coventry demonstrates, whether true or false — the importance of deception in warfare; and the need sometime to make some sacrifices on the road to eventual victory. Sun Tzu was spreading that message in China centuries ago.
If war is the continuation of politics by other means, how does a ruler pursue politics by other means when kinetic war is no longer feasible because of the certainty of nuclear destruction? The objective remains to undermine the economy of the enemy so that the enemy can no longer resist. With the West’s over-reaction to C-19, it may turn out we have fallen into just that kind of deceptive trap.
<The facts are quite different. Peter Calvocoressi was head of the Air Section at Bletchley Park. All decrypted messages relating to the Luftwaffe passed through his group. And he stated flatly that “ULTRA never mentioned Coventry.” Messages decrypted in the week before the German attack pointed to a major operation that night, but the target was unclear.
I read that account quite recently and I think the other is a myth,