Month: March 2020

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

-Ayn Rand

Monday, Viceroy Donald Trump had another one of his press briefings, which are clearly less a means of informing the public on coronavirus and more a weak substitute for the redcap rallies where he gets to chew out the press and other cosmopolitans who want to destroy Real America. It doesn’t work as well, because he doesn’t have a crowd, and while the press themselves are allowed to practice social distancing (which means less reporters in the scrum, which I’m sure Trump thinks is a feature and not a bug) Trump has Mike Pence, Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci and whoever else he can rope in standing with him on the same stage, against the rules of social distancing, which kind of undermines the idea that he takes it seriously.

And what I saw on Monday makes it that much more clear how Donald Trump bankrupted at least four Atlantic City casinos: he would be a TERRIBLE poker player. The transcript reveals several tells: “I want Americans to know that we will get through this challenge, the hardship will end, it will end soon, normal life will return and our economy will rebound very, very strongly”,

“We also have a large team working on what the next steps will be once the medical community gives a region the okay — meaning the okay to get going, to get back; let’s go to work. Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down.”

“This was a medical problem. We are not going to let it turn into a long-lasting financial problem. It started out as a purely medical problem, and it’s not going to go beyond that. We’re just not going to allow that to happen.”

And, “Our country was at its strongest financial point. We’ve never had an economy like we had just a few weeks ago, and then it got hit with something that nobody could have ever thought possible. And we are fixing it. We’re fixing it quickly. And I want to just thank the American people for what they’ve been through and what they’re doing. Our country will be stronger than ever before, and we fully anticipate that. And it won’t be that long.”

The tells are that much more obvious in the video, but I won’t ask anyone else to subject themselves to Trump and his Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. But the point is, that wonderful economy Trumpniks have been crowing about makes him invincible (as far as they’re concerned), and without it, he is going through actual physical withdrawal.

I saw an entry on Quora asking what Trump’s real coronavirus notes would be if he’d written them in Sharpie, and I responded “PLEASE BRING THE ECONOMY BACK PLEASE RE-ELECT ME PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE I’M TOO PRETTY FOR JAIL”.

So now the plan – if “plan” can be used in association with Donald Trump – is for the economy to be restarted by Easter. This makes sense. Easter is when we celebrate a man coming back from the dead through faith. And since Trump is (for the sake of his job) a professional Christian, he is asking America to test that theory.

In the meantime, the joint Congress managed to pass an $8 billion dollar aid package (no thanks to one Senator – see below), and everyone’s time in Washington has been taken up with trying to create a large-scale “stimulus” plan that is less about stimulating the economy than about keeping people (and businesses) afloat while they’re not allowed to work. And as desperate as they are, Republicans still wanted to gum up the works. Before the Senate passed the stimulus on Wednesday night with a unanimous vote, the Senate defeated an amendment by Sen. Ben Sasse (BR-Nebraska) that would have limited unemployment benefits. At the same time they complained of the features that Democrats wanted to insert, such as providing stronger unemployment benefits than are otherwise available, considering it isn’t the workers’ or even employers’ fault that people are unemployed. There were plenty of Facebook conservatives wailing over real (riders for increased environmental standards for airlines) and fake (funding of abortion) obstacles that Democrats had created to stop passage of the Senate bill, including Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of a separate House bill against the Senate one. As it turned out, much of Democrats’ objection was to a $500 billion “Exchange Stabilization Fund” that the Republican majority had written into the Senate bill, which is totally at the discretion of Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Despite everyone (including Trump) being publicly against bailed-out companies being able to use their money for stock buybacks (like they did in the last financial crisis), the language also allows Mnuchin to withhold the names of the companies who do get money for up to six months. And when asked who would be the oversight, especially since his own companies would be eligible, Trump said, “I’ll be the oversight” – which made exactly one person in the room feel better.

As a New Republic article points out,

“In its design, and in the panicky desperation to pass it without argument, the bill resembled a repeat of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, crafted by people who thought the problem with the original TARP was that it included far too much oversight and transparency.”

The Democrats let the Bush Republicans buffalo them with a lot of shit after 9-11, because “In this national crisis, we must all put aside our differences and work together in support of Our President”. It would seem that even Democrats can learn from experience, although again this remains to be seen.

The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter if you love the Democrats, you hate the Democrats, or you’re a leftist who thinks that Democrats ought to have put Mitch McConnell’s head on a pike, collectivized the farms, nationalized McDonald’s and turned it vegan. The fact is, the Democrats can only do so much because Mitch McConnell knows the Senate rules and he has the majority. And the reason that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer can actually twist his arm, why Democrats have forced more than one vote since Sunday, why Bernie Sanders was able to push Wednesday to re-insert jobless benefits and why McConnell can’t just pull his usual Fuck You maneuver of forcing a party-line vote that he will always win, is because he no longer really has a majority.

And that is because some of the Republican Senators could not be present on the floor. Why was that? Well, mostly because Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky) found out he was positive for coronavirus after having himself tested last week. But between getting tested and getting the diagnosis on Sunday, Paul refused to practice social distancing and continued to use the Senate gym and pool. He did say “I believe we need more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms. … The nature of COVID-19 put me – and us all – in a Catch-22 situation. … For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol.” And he topped off by saying, “Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so.” And yet before this weekend, Rand Paul was the only Senator to vote against the initial aid package that has since been agreed to in both Houses and signed by Trump.

Thing is, because of Paul’s behavior between testing and diagnosis, other Republican Senators, including Mike Lee of Utah and Mitt Romney of Utah felt obliged to enter self-quarantine (despite being asymptomatic themselves) to avoid further spread. By Tuesday there were four Republicans missing the Senate for this reason – so Mitch no longer has his floor majority.

So now, even Republicans are saying: Fuck You, Rand Paul.

That’s what happens when you pretend this shit isn’t real. It has consequences. And Rand Paul is going to have to practice social distancing from his fellow Republicans for the forseeable future.

As in, AFTER he recovers from the virus.

But like it matters, because it is still easier for Republicans to find consensus with Democrats on an economic package than for non-Republicans to agree with the new foist that we can declare the crsis over with by presidential decree. There are two factors here that Banana Republicans don’t want to address. One, based on the exposure we’ve seen thus far, if we lift the state-by-state restrictions we do have, the virus WILL recur or spread to areas where it has not already. We need a serious nationwide regimen of testing to see who’s got the virus, and we don’t have that right now, because SOMEBODY didn’t think it was important. So we’ve got to make up for time that we don’t have.

The second issue is that because the virus did come from outside this country, and ravaged China, Iran and Europe before us, even if we lift restrictions and even IF we had testing and treatments available (which we don’t), the other parts of the world are still trying to contain the virus. So even if King Donnie, The First of His Name could wave his royal scepter and decree that the coronavirus crisis is over in America, the global economy is still fucked.

I mean, all the professional Christians have told us that playing Dungeons & Dragons is corrupting and destroys your sense of reality, but they’re the ones living in a fantasy world. We’re living in the real world. And in the real world, Clerics don’t have cure disease spells.

And this is the other reason Trump is so desperate and scared, because it’s becoming clear that the magic power of bullshit doesn’t work on coronavirus. You cannot bullshit or bully a virus. You cannot hand your lawyer a check and tell him to give the check to the virus so it will go away and not testify against you. Reality exists, regardless of human perception. Who knew?

And yet, if reality doesn’t conform to their fantasy, Trumpniks will do what Trumpniks do and carry on regardless. It has now made national news that “pro-life” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has endorsed old folks dying from exposure to the coronavirus if that’s what it takes to get the economy back, telling Tucker Carlson on Fox News, “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country”. This line has since been pushed by other Fox people, such as Brit Hume, commenting on Patrick’s remarks saying “The utter collapse of the country’s economy — which many think will happen if this goes on much longer — is an intolerable result”. And this might just be a coincidence, but Trump’s stance on virus control changed from working with Dr. Fauci to pushing for a return to normal by Easter after he realized how much money he was going to lose by keeping his resorts closed.

I have a Facebook friend who works (or did work) at one of the Strip casinos, and he talked to me on Wednesday about how pissed he was at his Mom and her new husband because they’re both Trump fanatics going along with the new politically correct dogma, and he said basically “Its just insulting thinking I need to keep making shit money while legit risking my health… (Mom’s) husband thinks we are a bunch of pussies. My mom hopes everyone goes back to work on Easter. They have no authority, that isn’t my point, my point is their shit opinions (are) making me dislike them cause they don’t give a fuck about our health”.

We’re getting to that scene in Jojo Rabbit where the Nazis are drafting 12-year olds and senior citizens and giving them hunting rifles and Panzerfausts to stop the Allies, cause there’s no more Jews or Communists for the government to blame.

Because just as Germany (sort of) survived the death of Nazism, the threat that Trump and his people care about is not the death of individuals. It’s the death of their system.

It goes back to what I’ve said about being a libertarian as opposed to a collectivist: A government is a creation of individuals. It is an empty set without its constituents. A government cannot exist without people. The people CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. And if the liberals need to be told that their favorite system of government is not a priori and inherent, that it is the product of consensus agreement and subject to change, then libertarians and “conservatives” need to understand that what we’re calling capitalism is likewise not an inherent condition but is an agreed-to situation and subject to change.

And while libertarians are pointing out that a lot of our budgeting and regulations are largely makework for bureaucrats, and that if we need to dispense with these things in an emergency, we probably never needed them in the first place, liberals and socialists are pointing out that our lack of health care and sick leave is inadequate for emergencies, because they were inadequate for everyday needs in the first place.

Isn’t the common thread that THE WHOLE FUCKING SYSTEM IS BULLSHIT and is not working for everybody?

Isn’t it true that so much of what we think of as “normal” is written up to serve the priorities of administrative classes, in both the public and private sectors, and now that we have (however haphazardly) been obliged to go without “normal”, we are starting to discover that we can survive without it?

And isn’t it obvious that the people squealing most loudly for “normal” to come back are the political-media complex that now controls both Big Business and Big Government? And that public health is NOT their first priority?

The elites aren’t afraid of the Constitution, or elections, because they’ve got that system sewn up on both ends. But they’re relying on capitalism to save them, and the irony is that it will save the public, because that is the last area where we have serious choices that affect the Powers That Be.

Right now, negative action – not participating in the economy – is causing more of a scare to the donor class than voting for Democrats. Those people are learning that WE are learning that they need us more than we need them. The people who are engaging in social distancing have a potential to create real change and have their demands heard, especially since the people who insist that this is no big deal are the most likely to take themselves out through exposure to the virus. And the fewer of them there are, the weaker they will be politically. To survive, they have to participate in the same safety measures as everyone else. And if they want to go out shopping again – why force them not to? Where are they going to shop? If they want us to go back to our workplaces when even our own bosses say it’s a bad idea – how do they force us?

Suppose they brought back the economy and nobody came?

Stay the course. And flatten the curve.

Hi, Trumpniks!

Sick of winning yet?

How’s your 401K?

Boy, it turns out that just because you have a captive political party that lets you do anything you want regardless of evidence, that there are still factors that can make your perfect world a little less perfect. Like markets, and science.

Of course this whole coronavirus thing really started in a lab somewhere in a lab somewhere in China that the Democrats sponsored just to undermine the stock market and make Our President look bad. But if this whole thing was a political hoax, somebody forgot to tell the Chinese, and the Iranians, and the entire Italian government, and the nursing home in Washington state where over 20 people died because our government knew that a global contagion was going on and yet the Trump Organization refused to accept World Health Organization-approved coronavirus tests.

And so since all these outside factors were contradicting the whims of our Dear Leader, the stock market continued to tank in the last ten days, wiping out virtually all the gains it had made since Donald Trump was declared president.

And as bad as that was, things got worse when Russia and Saudi Arabia decided to break their agreement on oil prices and boost production, dropping prices and thus market demand, along with the rest of the market.

Putin and bin Salman? They’re Trump’s two bestest buddies in the whole world! Well, next to Kim Jong-un, of course. I mean it ought to figure, both of these guys are probably best known for ghastly assassinations of political dissidents who fled abroad, so it stands to reason they’d stab each other in the back. The good thing of course is that the price of gas is low. But of course that’s due to the simple market factor of gas not being as necessary since no one has anywhere to go. If they really wanted to make a killing, the Russians would find out how to corner the market on toilet paper.

So perhaps realizing that it might help if Trump said something besides “just go to work, you’ll be fine,” the Trump Organization got its mini-brain trust of Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner to help draft a speech that Trump read on Wednesday, which among other things didn’t help because of the extremely flat affect he has on camera when he isn’t allowed to just be an off-the-cuff insult comic. Not only that, he didn’t look well, after he was repeatedly photographed with people who have turned out to have the coronavirus. Of course he has been sniffing and wheezing his way through public events since at least the Hillary Clinton debates. But now we have to ask, was Trump sniffing and wheezing his way through that speech because he has coronavirus, or just because he’s a 73-year old man with sleep apnea and an Adderall addiction?

But what really didn’t help was when people actually went over the details of what Trump said, and apparently he wasn’t supposed to say the Europe ban “will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval”. But this was a prepared text on teleprompter! Did somebody insert the wrong lines into the text just to trip him up? Did he riff? Oh, that Trump! He’s such a card!

I mean, eventually on Friday Trump did finally announce a national emergency, which he said was “two very big words” (for him), and he did announce various initiatives to coordinate with Walmart and a few other companies. Of course some of these companies didn’t know exactly what the plan was. And Trump still seemed to have a bit of an issue with cleanliness, and not touching the mic at the outdoor press conference, and not shaking hands, and all that. But the idea that he was at least trying to act like a president and take the situation seriously did inspire Wall Street to gain 900 points, which sorta made up for losing so much in the previous four days.

Here’s the thing, not only did Trump’s surprise block of European travel royally piss off EU nations, it did that much more to undermine the stock market on Thursday because of that throwaway line about trade and cargo! And when the travel restrictions were officially imposed over the weekend, the end result was American travelers from Europe being channeled into one of 13 designated airports where an already over-worked Customs and TSA staff will be obliged to get them in line and answer questions. (Of course they won’t be tested for coronavirus, because we don’t have the technology that frackin’ South Korea has.) Twitter and other media reported vast crowds of people in line for the process, returned from Europe, all crammed together in one place. Coughing and sneezing. Talk about social isolation.

Hey – I wonder what THAT’s gonna do to the stock market on Monday?

Who woulda thought that containing a global pandemic could be so complicated??

I mean, are you guys really this clueless or is this intentional policy? Because if it is, and all this chaos and suffering is on purpose, what does that say about your morality and ultimate goals?

Liberals keep saying, “the cruelty is the point,” but this is cruelty you’re inflicting on white and affluent people!! It’s almost like you hate everybody!

See, there’s a difference between Donald Trump and the coronavirus. Viruses aren’t racist. Viruses don’t care if you’re Chinese or Italian or American. They can’t be stopped by your magic wall (anymore than it stops ladders and bolt cutters) and they can’t be stopped by Mike Pence’s prayers. A virus is a factor of science, and as Neil DeGrasse Tyson likes to say, “the beautiful thing about science is that it works whether you believe in it or not.”

And just as the virus is not impressed by balderdash, bluffing and bullying, apparently the markets are not either, because the people there have to predict trends for a living. And even if the United States continues to stick its collective head up its collective ass (without hand sanitizer) the rest of the world will look at the evidence and their governments will set their own policies that affect us whether we like it or not.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong about Donald Trump. I’ve been wrong before. Look, Donnie. You know I don’t like you. And maybe things seem kinda negative right now, and I know you don’t like to hear any bad news. That is of course, part of why things are like this. But just remember: Where you are now is because of what you did to get here. And you’ve gotten this far on balderdash, bluffing and bullying, and nothing has touched you yet! Not even coronavirus! (Or so your press flacks have told us.)

It’s ALWAYS worked!

Just like it always worked for Hitler. And Saddam Hussein! And the Soviet Communist Party! And all your other role models!

So now that you’ve restored the confidence of the markets, you can get out there Monday and get yourself back on track. All you need to do is pay attention to the world around you and not make things any worse. And what are the odds of THAT?

Just remember, Donnie:

You are GOLD!
(Gold!)

Always believe in your soul

You’ve got the power to know!

You’re indestructible-

Always believe it!!

Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn
World serves its own needs
Don’t mis-serve your own needs
Speed it up a notch, speed, grunt, no, strength
The ladder starts to clatter
With a fear of height, down, height
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games
And a government for hire in a combat site

REM, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

So, now that an NPR world news story about Wuhan, China has pretty much transformed the world in about a month, let me give you my personal experience with the coronavirus scare.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing notable shortness of breath, not just “fat guy out of shape” shortness of breath but “if I stand up or walk for any period of time I get headaches and almost black out” shortness of breath. This was accompanied by various aches, not just headaches. And yet when I took my temperature, it was usually under 99 degrees and often under 98. And while I haven’t traveled and have no reason to believe I was in contact with a coronavirus case, I fit several of the risk factors: Over 50? Check. Existing respiratory issues? Check. Other pre-existing conditions? Check!

It got bad enough on Tuesday morning to where I politely asked my manager to let me take the rest of the day off – which because of the existing scare they freely granted – and I ended up spending the rest of the day trying, and failing, to get a coronavirus test.

I went straight to my doctor’s office. They told me they don’t do the test and referred me to Southern Nevada Health District. I couldn’t reach anybody on their phone line (for some reason). So I drove all the way out there, and even though there are big signs above the desk saying that if you’re experiencing respiratory issues to let someone on staff know, when I explained the situation they told me I had to get diagnosed by my doctor first. They gave me a handout list of various clinics, but when I went to the one in my area, they told me they don’t take my insurance.

I was told by my employer that Quest Diagnostics does have a test, and when I read their site it said that they don’t do the test directly for patients but rather collect samples from the doctor’s office. So I called my office again, and scheduled an appointment for Wednesday. And when I did, I was told by them that they don’t actually have a coronavirus program set up but they’re supposed to be doing that eventually. So I asked to be examined for what I did have, and since I have no fever, swelling or communicable issues, I was told that I am suffering an exacerbation of my existing asthma. I was already prescribed an inhaler which I normally don’t need, but I’ve used it more in the past five days than I have in the past five months. I did get a five-day prescription of Prednisone and Azithromycin, which have not solved my issue completely but made it less intense.

And if this is where I am WITH insurance, imagine what it’s like in the rest of the country, such as the New York school districts that stay open because otherwise kids wouldn’t have lunch, or with my friend who has his own diabetes, respiratory problems, and heart disease, and who is on public assistance and needs to travel everywhere on the bus.

The problem with coronavirus (COVID-19) is that even if more people have died from the flu (which seems to be no big deal, apparently) the coronavirus is potentially more threatening, largely because it takes longer to manifest and it is therefore easier for asymptomatic people to spread the virus.

This is what I got this week when I searched “are covid 19 tests available”:

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

“CDC has developed a new laboratory test kit for use in testing patient specimens for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. The test kit is called the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase (RT)-PCR Diagnostic Panel.” It is intended for use with the Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast DX Real-Time PCR Instrument with SDS 1.4 software. This test is intended for use with upper and lower respiratory specimens collected from persons who meet CDC criteria for COVID-19 testing. CDC’s test kit is intended for use by laboratories designated by CDC as qualified, and in the United States, certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) to perform high complexity tests.

On Monday, February 3, 2020, CDC submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) package to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to expedite FDA permitted use of the CDC diagnostic panel in the United States. The EUA process enables FDA to consider and authorize the use of unapproved, but potentially life-saving medical or diagnostic products during a public health emergency. The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services declared the SARS-CoV-2 virus a U.S. public health emergency on Friday, January 31, 2020. FDA issued the EUA on February 4, 2020. IRR began distribution of the test kits to states, but shortly thereafter performance issues were identified related to a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents which led to laboratories not being able to verify the test performance. CDC is remanufacturing the reagents with more robust quality control measures. New tests will be distributed once this issue has been addressed. CDC continues to perform initial and confirmatory testing.

Serology Test for COVID-19

CDC is working to develop a new laboratory test to assist with efforts to determine how much of the U.S. population has been exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19.

The serology test will look for the presence of antibodies, which are specific proteins made in response to infections. Antibodies can be found in the blood and in other tissues of those who are tested after infection. The antibodies detected by this test indicate that a person had an immune response to SARS-CoV-2, whether symptoms developed from infection or the infection was asymptomatic. Antibody test results are important in detecting infections with few or no symptoms.

Initial work to develop a serology test for SARS-CoV-2 is underway at CDC. In order to develop the test, CDC needs blood samples from people who had COVID-19 at least 21 days after their symptoms first started. Researchers are currently working to develop the basic parameters for the test, which will be refined as more samples become available. Once the test is developed, CDC will need additional samples to evaluate whether the test works as intended.”

Short answer: NO.

What we are witnessing is on one hand a challenge to libertarian premises and on the other hand a justification of them. On one hand, we can see that a coordinated response to public crises is necessary, or at least would prevent a lot of unnecessary suffering and death. On the other hand we can see that a coordinated government is not what we have, and we now know the consequences of not only handing over government to the worst possible people, but depending on a government that was not that dependable in the first place.

The people of the Soviet Union were no less in need of a wise hand during the Chernobyl disaster, and that is what they did not have. And while China is praised in some quarters for taking harsh but necessary measures to contain the virus in the short term, and the spread in Wuhan itself now seems to be contained, the Communist Chinese had at first downplayed the initial reports, including from one Wuhan doctor who later died of the virus. And as the disease left China, it had arguably its worst effect in Iran, where several government officials have turned out to be infected, or killed, because they were so determined to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak that they did not take their own precautions and engaged in casual contact with patients.

(Side joke: What’s the difference between the US and Iran? One country is technically a democratic republic but is actually run by a cabal of old fundamentalist whackjobs who want to start World War III in hopes that the Messiah will appear in the Middle East. The other is Iran.)

And the American apocalypse cult that used to be a main political party has been making much the same public front, with its Leader frequently shaking hands, touching mics and getting exposed to various people who have since tested positive for coronavirus.

Yet the designated official “anti-socialist” and “pro-business” party has been the primary barrier to private efforts to address epidemics through its control of government, even as it uses policy to deliberately hamper public efforts at disease control. There was an article in The American Conservative (no less) pointing out that before Trump took over, the US Army decided to help kickstart funding of development of a Zika virus vaccine to be licensed for commercial use, working with manufacturer Sanofi. However Health and Human Services withdrew its commitment to the project once the virus began slowing down.

“In 2017, Eric Sagonowsky of FiercePharma reported that “the collaboration [between Sanofi and the government] had come under intense public and political scrutiny this year as critics demanded pricing guarantees if a commercial vaccine grew out of the taxpayer-funded research.” These pressure groups typically fail to mention the immense costs of bringing life-saving treatments to market due to an onerous Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals process. It can take manufacturers a decade and more than $2 billion to bring a medication to market, and excessive FDA testing requirements hinder patient access to care.

“Currently, hundreds of COVID-19 patients are being treated with the antiviral drug called Remdesivir, which has had promising initial results but is not yet FDA approved. While the agency is allowing seriously ill patients to take the medication through their “compassionate use” program, this is only permitted on a limited, last-resort basis, and the drug remains unavailable to most of the population. Producers of novel treatments may need to wait months to bring life-saving therapies to market and face the real risk of getting FDA rejection letters if, say, new evidence were to come to light on the drug’s efficacy after the application was submitted.”

Another piece, on Reason Magazine’s site: “As the Times reports, Seattle infectious disease expert Dr. Helen Chu had, by January, collected a huge number of nasal swabs from local residents who were experiencing symptoms as part of a research project on flu. She proposed, to federal and state officials, testing those samples for coronavirus infections. As the Times reports, the CDC told Chu and her team that they could not test the samples unless their laboratory test was approved by the FDA. The FDA refused to approve Chu’s test on the grounds that her lab, according to the Times, “was not certified as a clinical laboratory under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.”

“In the meantime, the CDC required that public health officials could only use the diagnostic test designed by the agency. That test released on February 5 turned out to be badly flawed. The CDC’s insistence on a top-down centralized testing regime greatly slowed down the process of disease detection as the infection rate was accelerating.”

And yet, when we knew that the Obama Administration had contained Ebola in the United States to two fatalities (both African patients treated in America), Trump’s advisor John Bolton closed the National Security Council’s task force on global pandemics and the Administration cut most Centers for Disease Control funding on pandemics. As the global situation became more serious and cases were announced in America, Trump continued to downplay the threat, fearing (correctly) that a public response would lead to a downturn in business, when business growth has been his main public justification for staying in office and running for re-election.

It has in fact been the business community at all levels that took the initiative in fighting coronavirus in America, weeks before the Trump Organization finally announced a national emergency. It has been businesses that closed buffets, closed athletic events, removed audiences from taped media programs, all to encourage social isolation in order to tamp down the spread of disease. This ought to make sense. As arrogant as the upper class might be, they still have to run businesses and address the current moment and weigh the consequences of one decision over another. Some have had to lay people off because they simply can’t afford the overhead. Others have decided to have some level of paid leave because they are trying to keep employees in expectation of recovery after the worst passes. Most businesses are assisting in social isolation because losing customers in the short term can reduce the chance of having fewer customers in the long term – either due to preventable deaths or the hit to reputation that comes with customers knowing that the businesses could have helped prevent spread of disease and refused to do so. Businesses by and large deal in a world of consequences. Governments don’t have to.

The Trump Administration is what you get when you combine class privilege with the government’s monopoly on force. Trump himself is the natural result of a system that pretends to capitalism but actually relies on social capital – what Randians would call “pull” and we in Las Vegas call “juice” – in order to avoid the checks and balances that are supposed to be inherent in the capitalist system, in much the same way that party solidarity has destroyed the checks and balances written into the Constitution. Trump has never actually been the CEO of a corporation, because he has never run an incorporated business. The Trump Organization is a group of entities of which Donald Trump is the sole or principal owner. For that very reason, its financial returns are private. The Trump Organization is a family outfit, in every sense that applies. Trump has never been responsible to shareholders. Trump has a record of stiffing his creditors when his bills come up, raising the question of exactly how profitable and healthy his businesses are. And yet, someone more powerful has always covered his tab – his Daddy, Roy Cohn, his friends in government, Deutsche Bank, Vladimir Putin – and he’s always been able to avoid the consequences of his own mistakes. Trump’s survival up to this point is a measure of how the system traffics in deceit, and in retrospect, his quest for political power makes sense as a drive to the only position that would make his conduct literally unimpeachable.

When such a person is elected President of the United States, the present moment is what you ought to expect.

When Senator Lamar Alexander reviewed the impeachment case and made it perfectly clear that he knew how guilty Trump was and also made it perfectly clear that in professional solidarity he and the other members of the Party of Trump refused to hold their Leader accountable, I and many other people observed at that time that everything that would happen to America from that point on would be primarily their fault.

Now more than ever.

Seriously, what the fuck? MSDNC fired its handsy, Irish Catholic gaffe machine this week, why couldn’t the actual Democratic Party?

We know the story by now: Joe Biden was left for dead. He put all his chips on South Carolina. But (largely thanks to veteran congressman Jim Clyburn) the state came out for him in a big way, and everyone else’s vote take was underwhelming. So Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden. And then Amy Klobuchar, because Amy will not be one-upped by Pete on anything. And then Monday, Biden was at a Texas rally and got a surprise endorsement from Beto O’Rourke, complete with gratuitous Spanglish.

And Biden went on to win not only the states he was expected to win, but Texas, where Bernie Sanders was polling strong, and Minnesota, where Klobuchar’s endorsement helped break Sanders’ previous lead. (Don’t say I never gave Amy Klobuchar credit for anything.)

After Nevada, Bernie Sanders was the candidate to beat, but Biden performed so much better than expected this week that he actually overtook Sanders’ delegate lead. Now a veteran Democratic pollster says, “It’s done unless Joe makes some horrible mistake.”

Pfft. What are the odds of that?

Biden: Can at least have credit for staying power. His strategy all this time (conscious or not) is that that lots of Americans like the idea of Donald Trump – the straight-talking, politically incorrect populist – but unlike his cultists, realize he’s a Russian gimp who makes Biden look like Bill Nye the Science Guy. And he conveys himself in a positive way that neither Trump nor Sanders do. A point I kept hearing over the weekend after South Carolina is that Biden is a kind man, a decent man. Well, yes. He would certainly be a welcome change of pace after four years of Andrew “Dice” Trump.

(Seriously, I thought Trump was going to start his last State of the Union speech with ‘I got my tongue up Nancy Pelosi’s ass, see?’)

Biden also has the same thing that Hillary Clinton had in 2016 that sank Sanders the last time: party backing. It matters tremendously that everyone came out to endorse Biden, and to do so when they did. Exit polls indicated that a lot of Super Tuesday voters made their decision for Biden after his South Carolina victory and party endorsements.

I would have no problem voting for Joe Biden. But he’s still vulnerable. Banana Republicans are still trying to hang Hunter Biden over him. The same people who pretend Trump has no mental problems will pick on every mistake Biden makes (and it’s a matter of WHEN and how MUCH, not if). And his main problem remains his attitude that we can just wind back the clock four years and the Republicans will be a normal party again, which they haven’t been for quite some time. But as I’d said, the broader picture is that if the Democratic Party is settling in behind Joe, he at least has a very strong back bench to help him, including people who are not only more on the ball but more willing to accept that the political reality of our “two” party system has irrevocably changed, and will act accordingly. People like Pete Buttigieg. I very much got the impression that in the last few days of campaign appearances, Joe was letting Pete try out for the role of Vice President, which would make him a good auxiliary brain. Of course I’m sure that would make “progressives” hate him and Biden all the more.

Warren: The fact that Elizabeth Warren has not done as well as a lot of people, including me, thought she would has itself been the source of some media discussion. The best comment on it being from Reason Magazine: “Indeed, the media stumped for Warren so hard that Vox‘s Matt Yglesias recently had to write a post explaining to people why she was losing “even if all your friends love her.” By your friends, he meant friends of people like you, a reader of Vox.“

So – you’re convinced that your candidate is the objectively best choice for president and you just have to get around the trivial matter that the entire rest of the country doesn’t agree?

Hi. Welcome to the Libertarian Party.

There have been several pre-post-mortems of Warren’s campaign in the media, and they usually come to the common point that by emphasizing “progressive” politics while at the same time going back on some pledges – like not taking PAC money – Warren has alienated both progressives and mainstream Democrats rather than being a point of common agreement between the two camps. This means that any hope of her riding in as a compromise candidate to a brokered convention is probably futile, since that would require her to have a base that would take her as a second choice – when she didn’t even place second in her home state of Massachusetts.

I like Elizabeth Warren. I think Warren is a perfectly good politician and would make a fine president. I just don’t see anybody voting for her.

Sanders: Sanders is hardly beaten. But he’s in trouble. David Faris had a pretty good summary in The Week Wednesday. He started, as many analyses do, pointing out Bernie’s colossal mistake in praising Cuba’s education program, however qualified that praise may be.

Look, praising the Soviet legacy is not an unforgivable sin in America. Just look at Jane Fonda. Or Donald Trump. But Trump notwithstanding, that’s not a guarantee of political success. Socialists are being too cute by half if they think they can create a distinction between “good” socialism in Canada and Europe and “bad” socialism in communist countries, and then collapse that distinction by defending communist Cuba and socialist Venezuela. For one thing, what you have with Left parties in Canada and Europe is simply a more distributionist model of capitalism, because you cannot have the benefits of “socialism” without a capitalist system. And that is because you cannot redistribute income if there is no income to redistribute. That requires profit motive, that requires surplus value, that requires capitalism. And as I’ve said already, if you can point to other countries (including Costa Rica) that have welfare systems and social programs without putting priests and gays in prison, why do you not point to those countries as examples of success instead of Cuba? It makes the rest of us think that the one-party tyranny is not a means to an end but the end in itself.

It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes mainstream liberal hysteria over Bernie seem justified. The fact that Bernie is still a better choice than the Putin-Trump ticket says less for Bernie and more against what used to be the Republican Party.

But Faris also points out Sanders’ several other strategic mistakes, notably the fact that he has failed to reach out to potential fellow-travelers as well as Biden has. It’s one reason Warren is still in the race. It all comes down to the idea that there are two very strong constituencies in the Democratic Party – the (temperamentally) conservative mainstream liberals and the “progressive” leftists, and they both have enough force to make things difficult for the winning nominee going into the general election. But some of that potential force that Bernistas bring to bear was undercut by the results of Super Tuesday. Nevada and California disproved the liberal canard that Bernie can’t win non-white votes. But however much he has gained with Hispanic voters, he still hasn’t appreciably improved among black voters, at least those above their 20s. And that leads to another issue. As Esquire put it, “The Bernie Sanders Youth Revolution Was Nowhere To Be Found On Super Tuesday.” Voter turnout did increase over previous primaries, but mostly with the old white and black people who favored Biden. For example, Bernie’s percentage of the youth vote in Virginia went from 69 percent in 2016 to 57 percent this week. And this calls the best bluff that the Sanders wing has. It was thought that if Sanders was strong enough at the Democratic National Convention and party insiders pulled tricks to get a white-horse candidate to replace him, that huge voter base would just stay home and hand the election to Trump. Now if Bernistas say that they’re not going to vote in November, mainstream Democrats can just say, “Well, it’s not like you’re voting now.”

Bloomberg: As a lot of people predicted, Bloomberg dropped out after Tuesday. Not only that, he did endorse Biden, which on paper gives him a lot more campaign money. This is another strategic mistake of Sanders, who said he wouldn’t take Bloomberg’s support if he wins the nomination. But on the whole, Bloomberg’s campaign makes socialism look better than capitalism, because he proved you don’t need to be a government bureaucrat to spend hundreds of millions on a political vanity project that won’t do anything good for anybody.

Ironically, it also disproved Sanders’ central thesis that big money is the central focus of politics, since not only did his small-donor base make him competitive this year and 2016, both he and Bloomberg dwarfed Biden’s campaign spending and Biden still won most of the Tuesday states.

But really, the night was best summed up by anchor-in-exile Brian Williams on MSNBC, who made an off-hand remark to Rachel Maddow: “Perhaps if voting were central to our democracy, we’d be good at it.”

“On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, all socialist utopias flounder.”

-Werner Sombart

As Bernie Sanders becomes more and more popular and apparently more likely to win the Democratic nomination – assuming Joe Biden’s campaign doesn’t catch up by Super Tuesday – I see the same kind of question popping up on Quora and other discussion sites. The question is something along the lines of “why has socialism become so popular?” or specifically “why has socialism become popular along millennials?”

Well, I’m a libertarian, and a confirmed anti-socialist, so I think I can answer the question. But it’s going to go into some detail. There are three broad answers as to why socialism is getting more popular.

Socialism has lost its power to scare.

For socialism to be a bad thing, it must be worse than the system we have. “Conservatives” and most libertarians will point to Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela as an example of where socialism will lead. We will say, “If we went to a socialized healthcare system, the government would be in charge, we wouldn’t have any choices, and with only one provider, the government would be rationing urgent procedures!” And millennials will look at us and go, “Oh. You mean like what we have NOW?”

What we have is itself mandated by Big Government. During World War II, the federal government instituted wage and price controls and then allowed employers to sponsor health insurance programs to compensate for the wage increases they were no longer allowed to offer. So, a huge part of our country is run on the basis of a wartime policy which no longer has a reason to exist. Like much else in the government. This second-hand socialism means that government doesn’t have to cover the costs of healthcare like the United Kingdom does, but it also means that individual insurance is mostly dependent on the employer, if the employer offers it at all. In this system, your only “free-market” choice is to switch jobs. And if you do, you don’t necessarily know what your healthcare plan is going to be. You also don’t know if your job gives you medical insurance after 90 days, or six months, or the beginning of the year. And even if you like your policy, you don’t know if the employer is going to go through negotiations and change the plan, or change the provider. And then you have to find out what prescriptions and providers are actually covered, often after the fact.

As John Oliver recently put it, “the American healthcare system gives you so many choices in how to get fucked, it is truly the Kama Sutra of healthcare.”

Not only that, the fact that the healthcare system is based on private insurance is another flaw. Among other things, it’s one of the reasons that employers do have to negotiate prices for coverage, because these are largely dictated by the insurance giants. I’ve gone over this before, but let me do it again: While the Affordable Care Act is considered the government’s most unacceptable advance of socialism by many right-wingers, Obama with the ACA was trying to save the insurance-company paradigm of healthcare.

The comparison to other forms of insurance comes up, but what it amounts to is that with most forms of insurance, there is a difference between the “risk pool” and the total number of policy payers. The risk pool is the number of people who might be expected to collect on a policy. You don’t expect to crash your car and need auto insurance the same month you start the policy. You don’t expect to collect on your life insurance policy as soon as you start it, and if you do, the insurance company may investigate your estate.

But with healthcare, since private insurance is expected to cover all healthcare, including preventative medicine, the risk pool is functionally identical to the pool paying in. You buy insurance because you EXPECT to collect on it as soon as you get it. Insurance companies cannot survive on this principle. Forget “healthcare is a human right” – it’s just economics. Which is where the insurance companies came up with the bogosity of “pre-existing conditions” so that people couldn’t get coverage on the basis of the very conditions they needed coverage for. Otherwise the insurance companies would not be profitable.

The Affordable Care Act solved this issue – sorta – by simply obliging everybody to buy insurance and expand the payer pool whether they wanted to or not. However this does not make healthcare actually affordable, because forcing everybody to buy a service does not automatically decrease prices and in fact gives business an incentive to increase them. But that was the “socialism” right-wingers object to. And that IS socialist BS when your choice is eliminated, but this was the only way the system could preserve the private standard of health coverage. With socialism.

But since the system is still based on insurance-company coverage, we are obliged to play by insurance company rules, for example, this wonderful concept called a deductible. It’s a little hard to explain, mainly because it’s hard to justify, but basically as a “cost control” some plans require you to take a deductible, let’s say $2500, so that most of your services have to be paid for out of pocket until you pass that threshold, and only then does the plan cover you. Which raises a question I have never gotten a sufficient answer to: If I’m paying for my medical care out of pocket as if I didn’t HAVE a policy until I pass this threshold, then what the fuck am I still paying premiums for until then???

If we’re defending that as capitalism versus a nationalized system, the difference between capitalism and what we have here is like this: If I want to get satellite TV, I may have to sign a 24-month commitment for the equipment, which is bogus in and of itself, but then I don’t HAVE to have satellite TV. And that’s a choice that a lot of people have made. You can switch from DirecTV to Dish, or to cable, and back, or just go to Netflix or streaming services and antenna.

But if I have type II diabetes or some other “pre-existing” condition that obliges me to get regular prescriptions or get sick and DIE, then I can’t just “cut the cord” on my insurance or switch to Netflix.

Like I said, I’m a libertarian. And the reason I switched to supporting national health care is on fiscal conservative grounds: The US spends more money (both public and private) on the health care system than any other developed nation (most of which have ‘socialized’ systems) AND gets worse results. And that’s because, unlike most capitalist endeavors, the system is not geared to consumer demand. It is a cartel to benefit the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and it is set up that way by both Big Government and Big Business. Comparing the free market to American healthcare is not like comparing apples to oranges, it’s like comparing apples to Cadillacs. Most people don’t need Cadillacs. Most people don’t even want Cadillacs. But if you can’t afford a Cadillac, you have other options for transportation. But if the government tells you you either have to buy a Cadillac or you go on foot, and you still can’t afford a Cadillac, you’re fucked.

And if that’s what you’re calling capitalism, you can’t be surprised that socialized medicine is getting popular.

Socialism has lost its point of contrast.

If we on the Right – using innumerable examples in history – can describe socialism as a collectivist system that destroys freedom, human rights and political choices, the Left has a counter for that: Just call their system “democratic” socialism! Depending on the person, this may be more or less disingenuous. After all, even Lenin described his system as democratic. But the real problem with “conservative” opposition to the socialist agenda is that if we are going to define socialism in terms of Soviet-style communism and illiberal politics, we can no longer say that conservatism is the opposite of that. Donald Trump’s signature policy, almost a fixation, is building a border wall. The only other modern politician who likes border walls served in the KGB in East Germany. The Banana Republican Party has abandoned not only its flirtation with libertarianism but fiscal conservatism itself to embrace deficits, tariffs, and then, subsidies to farmers to cover up the natural results of the tariffs. This is all defined by Trump himself as a “nationalist” agenda. The resemblance of “good” nationalism to “bad” (Soviet style) socialism is something that the Left could really use against Banana Republicans, but they won’t, because that would require “democratic socialists” to admit that any collectivism could be bad. It might be a bit much to say that fascism is synonymous with socialism, but there are common roots (at least with Mussolini) common goals, and some common elements.

In fact, if you divorce the Aryan-vs.-Jew mythology peculiar to Nazism from every other type of fascism, you’ll see that all fascism, even original Italian fascism, is nationalist socialism, that is, it uses socialist means towards nationalist and reactionary ends. If you think that the purpose of socialism is to benefit previously oppressed groups of people, of course you see fascism as the radical opposite. But if you see the goal as nationalizing the entire society towards a certain ideology, it definitely qualifies.

This even applies to leftist “real” socialism, if only by default and not ideology. The goal of Marxist socialism of course was to create a total class revolution, but in practical terms it only happened in the Russian Empire at first, and then mainly under conditions that orthodox Marxism did not hold to be ideal for changing the system. Because of this there was a real struggle in the early days of the Soviet Union between endorsing a world revolution or the idea (ultimately championed by Stalin) of creating “socialism in one country.” For obvious practical reasons (among them, losing to the Poles in the Polish-Soviet War) Stalin chose the latter path. This led to various nationalist measures to create a new “Soviet” identity under Russian culture, which involved crushing dissent in Ukraine and other areas. Until the Soviets won World War II, they were simply not able to export their view of the world across national borders, and so their political ideology, internationalist as it was, was practically limited to national ends.

The point is not whether leftists disagree with the assertion that Nazism is a type of socialism. Let’s say I agree with the assertion, although I would phrase it more that socialism is one method of nationalism. The problem is that the new Right presents the argument in a bad-faith way that you don’t have to be a leftist to figure out. To wit: If Socialism Is Bad, and Nazis Are The REAL Socialists, then why are “conservatives” emulating the Nazis?

You might say that what you’re endorsing isn’t Nazism, but why did the Trump Administration change immigration standards based on race, why is the Administration not wanting the public to know about detention policies that lead to the deaths of migrants, and why does the government actively turn away volunteer efforts to stop such people from dying?

Just as the new Right deliberately confuses the definitions of socialism and liberty, they have also conflated the definitions of “democracy” and “republic” so that stopping an agenda that is increasingly unpopular is deemed to be “thwarting the will of the people” – with “the people” apparently being only those people who support the agenda. When socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently that the Electoral College should be abolished, Representative Dan Crenshaw (BR-Texas) responded, “We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.”

Quite so. But that raises the question: Why is it MORE fair for the 49 percent to boss around the other 51 percent?

What we now refer to as the conservatives claim to be defenders of freedom and democracy, but their idea of “democracy” is where a plurality of the most gullible and vicious gravitate to a demagogue because he validates their regressive opinions, so they allow him and his cronies to gang-rape the Constitution and loot the national piggy bank while the majority of Americans who knew better are apparently supposed to just sit and stew because Liberal Tears.

THAT’s what you’re calling democracy. And you wonder how socialism got popular.

Young people have no sense of perspective.

As the prospect of Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic nomination became more likely, lots of people – many of them Democrats – objected to Sanders’ previous support for hard-left movements around the world and even his recent defense of Castro Cuba’s education system. Leftist supporters act as though this isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a problem given that Sanders qualified his statement as not being a defense of the Cuban government in general.

Well yes, it IS a problem. And it’s that much more obvious because the same people who emphasize the differences between Leninist/Chavista socialism and democratic socialism are the same people who praise the Castro government and defend the Chavista government against any alternatives, such as, letting people vote for someone else.

But it comes down to the same factor as the other two points. We choose between the devil we know or the devil we don’t know. In 2016, people chose Trump because they didn’t like the “devil” (Democrats) that they knew. In 2020, people know Trump all too well but they don’t know much about socialism at all, either the “good” socialism that leftists endorse or the “bad” socialism that right-wingers emphasize in history. To choose A over B, or vice versa, and have that count as something other than an aesthetic preference, one must not only be different to but superior to the other.

Young people, frankly, don’t know why we thought socialism was such a terrible thing, nor why it is such a good thing to emphasize business over unions and business over regulations. They aren’t familiar with how Lyndon Johnson tried to have both an escalation in Vietnam and the Great Society, they aren’t familiar with how Nixon succeeded him with policies that were both culturally conservative and economically Keynesian, and that Carter’s policies at least in the short term made everything worse. They don’t remember how the Soviet Union seemed to be humiliating us at every turn. They also don’t know how people reacted by putting Ronald Reagan in office, and how his policies right from the get-go were intended to break unions and break inflation. In a certain respect, Reagan’s willingness to confront the Soviet Union also broke them, ultimately by undercutting their economy. Reagan was rewarded by having 49 of 50 states vote for him in his re-election campaign of 1984. Even after Reagan, those few liberals who did get in had to make concessions to the new paradigm, with Bill Clinton saying “the era of Big Government is over.” It wasn’t, really, but the era of leftist government was.

I had talked with a left-wing Facebook friend about these subjects, and told him my overall theory that just as leftists can’t seem to understand that the right-wing paradigm of today is a response to what went before, that the union-busting business model and anti-inflation fiscal policy were intended for previous conditions that no longer exist, and that while what they see as a golden age really wasn’t so great, likewise right-wingers can’t seem to understand that the economy they crow about really isn’t working for everybody and that they have set the conditions for their own upheaval. Not every leftist corresponds to the Right’s tyrannical caricature of them, but then one of the reasons Reagan succeeded back then is because it was very hard to imagine him as a xenophobic fascist ogre. It is on the other hand very easy to imagine Trump as such. The longer a given group stays in power with its assumptions unchallenged, the more they assume they can get away with whatever they want and not have to care about public reaction.

And that is based on the assumption that The Way Things Are is the a priori Way Things Are Meant To Be rather than a simple chain of causality in which the way things are now is because we previously did things a different way and didn’t like the results.

I mean, if you’re voting for duopoly, your two choices are Spam, Socialism, Sausage, Abortions, Socialism, Drag Queen Story Hour and Socialism, or Spam, Spam, Socialism, Border Walls, Racism, Corruption and Socialism. And if you stand up and go, “But I don’t LIKE socialism!” tough, because they’re BOTH socialism. If you don’t like socialism, you can always vote for the Libertarian Party, which is the only American party that is not explicitly or implicitly socialist. Assuming, that is, you’re serious about not wanting socialism.

But you’re not, are you?

You want a big, heavy handed government that creates the society you want. And the kids who want the socialism that admits to being such just want the same thing that you do: A big, heavy handed government that creates the society they want. It just happens to provide them with more material benefits than liberal tears.

I’m not sure why that concept is so radical.