RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/how_the_coronavirus_changed_president_trump_and_america.html

The media are piling on President Trump for not instilling confidence during the COVID-19 crisis: “There is no new Trump.”  “Don’t be fooled.”  “The new Trump is the same as the old Trump.”  “He’s incapable of leading us out of it.”  “Trump shrugs off responsibility.”  “He’s putting the blame on the Chinese.”  “Trump is fundamentally unfit — intellectually, morally, temperamentally and psychologically.”  The media could not be more wrong.

As explained in my book, Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump, his personality — replete with intelligence, imagination, consistency, charisma, organization, and optimism — is well designed for modern America.  But I did not think Trump’s personality would evolve in the Oval Office.  I was wrong, deeply wrong.  He has changed, profoundly, and for the better.

During the March 17 Tuesday White House coronavirus press conference, a reporter asked if President Trump’s mood was more somber on Monday’s briefing.  With great seriousness, Trump outlined how he had been solemn from the get-go — in January, restricting travel with China.  Although he may genuinely believe that self-description, what he has progressively revealed of himself in this crisis is different.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-psychology-of-viral-paradoxes/

There are a lot of known unknowns and paradoxes in these times of uncertainty. Here are a few.

1) Trump is criticized as both “racist” and “xenophobic” in his condemnations of the “Chinese” virus, while he’s also criticized for “appeasing” President Xi when he makes friendly references to their coronavirus chats. How can Trump be both?

Is he merely erratic? Perhaps any smart president at this moment would prefer both to galvanize Americans about the threat of Chinese near monopolies of industries key to the U.S. in extremis (such as medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and rare earths) and  yet to not to so offend our  only importer that it cuts off a vulnerable U.S. in the middle of a crisis.

2) The media hype the increased number of cases (the denominator) without much attention to the number of deaths (the numerator) caused by, or perhaps mostly by, the virus. The numerator, however, is not increasing daily at a rate that’s commensurate with the denominator, despite a number of important other extenuating criteria:

a) Those seeking tests are mostly those with some sort of malaise or exposure, and yet they test overwhelmingly (so far) negative, perhaps at rates, depending on locale, of 80 percent to 90 percent negative (an increasingly not widely reported fact), and thus they may underrepresent percentages of the infected in the general population.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/when-will-it-end/

Congressman Chip Roy (R., Texas) argued on the homepage Friday that the “government needs to make a decision about when we are going to free up the economy.” From the true premises that uncertainty is bad for the economy and that an indefinite shutdown of social life is as uncertain as it gets, Roy makes the case that the government must select a date to lift the shutdown — a virus “D-Day.” By that date, the government will vow to have the epidemic under control, and it’ll mobilize all federal, state, and local resources toward keeping that vow. Our current path risks economic devastation and its attendant downsides.

There’s something attractive about this argument, but in an article in The New Atlantis, Ari Schulman gives the obvious objection:

It is not possible to place meaningful estimates on the true economic cost of [the worst-case scenario in which the virus spreads unchecked], except to say that there is good reason to believe it would be worse than the current shutdown. We simply do not have a good frame through which to view this future. Our world is too different from 1918 for the Spanish flu pandemic to offer much guidance. . . .

The most urgent task for the president and national leaders is to articulate the purpose of the shutdown, what it aims to achieve, and how we will know when we have. The current answer — “15 days to slow the spread” — is arbitrary and unpersuasive. The question is not How many more weeks or months? but Under what conditions can we relax blanket national closures?

Various answers suggest themselves. We might say that the shutdown can end when the case curve bends: That is, when new daily confirmed cases peak and decline. We might also look for the share of tests returning positive to steadily decline, suggesting that testing is finally widespread enough to capture most cases. Perhaps most importantly, we might look for a peak and decline in Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths.

That doesn’t mean the shutdown is the only way to deal with the pandemic. As Schulman goes on to argue, the U.S. was forced to take such an extreme measure only because our early response was insufficient:

We already have a gold standard for fighting epidemics: early identification of symptomatic patients, contact tracing, isolation of those infected and exposed, and widespread random sampling of the population to detect new outbreaks among unidentified contacts. Only by identifying and isolating the sick can the healthy get back to work.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/03/covid-19-the-blunt-instrument-of-suppression/

“‘A country which is fully employed, or close to it, is in a better position to fight a public health emergency than one confronting an impending recession or depression. As jobs are shed and stock markets plummet the need is to at least consider a different approach to the coronavirus pandemic.”

The precautionary principle was in vogue some years ago in the context of the climate debate. However, the argument is a general one. It turns on the outcome of something being so bad that even a small probability of it occurring is unacceptable. In other words, its expected cost (the probability of it occurring multiplied by the costs it would impose if it were to occur) would almost certainly exceed any costs of putting in place measures to prevent it from occurring.

The precautionary principle has a frailty as a guide for taking preventive action. The costs of taking action are real and tangible, whereas the costs of not taking action are speculative. What has this to do with combatting the coronavirus pandemic? It provides a foil. The situation facing us effectively stands the precautionary principle on its head.

To explain. Whereas the costs of inaction on the health of the population due to the virus can be calculated with a fair degree of confidence by epidemiologists, albeit along a scale; the costs of taking a range of aggressive actions to curb the spread of the virus are speculative. At worst, the social and economic costs of such actions could be so high as to outweigh their public-health benefits. And this is what I would like to discuss in light of an influential report (“Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand”) issued on March 16 by the Imperial College London on behalf of its Covid-19 Response Team. The “IC Report” is based on epidemiological modelling.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/time-for-trump-to-address-the-dread/91057/

President Trump may have had his reasons for denouncing an NBC reporter at the press briefing this week, but we thought the question from reporter Peter Alexander — “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” — was a slow pitch, meaning an opportunity for the President. Our sense is that the country is filled with dread over the pandemic. Its’s aching for an answer from the president of the country in a presidential setting. The country is waiting.

The question sent us back to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural on March 4, 1933. It was the last inaugural on the date originally set in the Constitution. Roosevelt delivered the speech from the East Front of the Capitol moments after being sworn to the Constitution. The speech is one of America’s most memorable — and echoes powerfully in the current crisis.

Roosevelt began by saying that he was certain his fellow Americans expected him to address them with candor. We were, after all, well into what came to be known as the Great Depression. FDR called it a time to speak the whole truth. “Nor need we shrink,” he said, “from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper.”

And then the famous words: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Among the many comments I received on my essay of four days ago – “COVID-19 Pandemic – Random Thoughts” – was one from a woman in Australia that gave me a start. She referred to my last sentence: “We cannot and should not let fear and panic catapult us into a recession or worse – where Constitutional rights are abrogated.” She wrote that she fears this is where we are headed and “that something about this doesn’t add up.” She’s right; the response to the pandemic seems more onerous than the virus itself. Since last Thursday, a number of states, including New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut have issued measures aimed at keeping residents in their homes. While those measures are not strictly enforced, the New York Times reported on their front page yesterday: “By the end of the weekend, at least 1 in 5 Americans will be under orders to stay home.” Over 3,300 National Guardsmen have been deployed across 28 states in COVID-19 support roles. An overreaction?

Perspective is needed. For example, comparisons have been made to other pandemics, and the favorite of those who deal in hyperbole is the Spanish flu. It lasted two years and was the deadliest since the Black Death killed a third of the population in mid-Fourteenth Century Europe. While the origin of the Spanish flu is disputed, most authorities believe it began in a UK staging and hospital camp in Étaples, on France’s northern coast near Le Touquet, in late 1917. Allies chose not to publicize the pandemic, for fear of alarming folks at home. It finally died out in late 1919. By then an estimated 500 million people had been infected (a quarter of the world’s population), with 50 million dead – more than combined military and civilian deaths due to the War. Estimated U.S. deaths were 675,000, almost six times the 117,000 U.S. soldiers killed in the War. A comparable number of deaths in the U.S. today would be more than two million. But apart from its infectious nature, the comparisons make little sense. Then, news of the disease was hushed up. Today we have daily White House briefings. Then, the disease spread through crowded Army camps, hospitals and troop ships. Today, we have “social distancing.” Modern medicine, in 1919, was a thing of the future. Penicillin was not developed until the start of the Second World War. Today, public-private partnerships have been deployed seeking tests, curative drugs, immunizations and vaccines. One has only to look at old photographs to recognize that hygiene was not the same then as today.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/21/covid-19-the-elephant-and-the-house-cat/

Here’s something special: a headline in The Economist that speaks the truth: “In Europe, and around the world, governments are getting tougher.” You betcha. Last week, I wrote with contempt about San Francisco’s mayor who had just announced she would “legally prohibit residents from leaving their homes except to meet basic needs.” “Well,” I thought, “It’s California, what do you expect?”

But now several other states, including New York, Connecticut, and Illinois, have issued “shelter-in-place” orders. They closed all “nonessential” businesses (nonessential to whom? To they people who work there?) and are throwing their weight around in other ways.

Restaurants: closed, except for take-out and delivery. Gymnasiums: closed. Museums: closed. Concert halls: closed. Public fraternization: essentially prohibited.

Why? Because of the biggest threat to mankind that the world has ever seen: the COVID-19 virus, also know as the Chinese flu, which to date has killed—are you ready—276 people in the United States, almost all of them over 80, almost all with serious co-morbidities.

Two-hundred-and-seventy-six people! And yes, that frightening number will rise. It will be 400, 500 before you know it. Maybe when all is said and done, we’ll see 1,000-1,200 identified who have died from complications that can be traced to this respiratory illness.

Meanwhile, somewhere between 22,000 and more than 50,000 people have died from the seasonal flu in the United States this year. Why is there no panic about that?

The Wuhan virus is a bad bug. But far more lethal than the “pandemic”—it sounds so much scarier to say “pandemic” than “epidemic,” even if the term is not justified—far more lethal, I say, are two other “P” words: panic and passivity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-vindicates-capitalism-11584659306

The left is never apt to let a serious crisis go to waste, as we see with its daily use of the coronavirus pandemic to bash the Republican administration. The bigger danger is the efforts it is already making to exploit the panic for its longer-term goal of destroying U.S. capitalism.

Socialist Bernie Sanders led the charge last Sunday in his Democratic primary debate with Joe Biden. Bernie rolled out his usual themes, this time through the virus lens. The pandemic “exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunctionality” of the U.S. health system, he said; the cure is centralized, socialized care. Americans can’t get the drugs they need because “a bunch of crooks” run drug companies, “ripping us off every single day.” The virus exposes the “cruelty and unjustness” of an economy that allows “big-money interests” and “multimillionaires” to profiteer off “working families.”

He’s hardly alone. The coronavirus has “laid this bare: America was less prepared for a pandemic than countries with a universal health system,” declared Vox. The pandemic has “inflicted new stress on a system already too unequal to function,” wrote Sarah Jones in New York magazine, lecturing on the need to “devolve power from wealthy interests.” “The coronavirus crisis exposes the stupidity of Trump’s healthcare policies,” railed Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik. A Morning Consult poll suggests this opportunistic sloganeering is resonating, with 41% of the public more likely to support universal health-care proposals amid this pandemic.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-tests-american-society/#slide-1

Is American society ready for the coronavirus pandemic?

Afew months after September 11, 2001, David Brooks went back and looked at coverage of Pearl Harbor for an article in The Weekly Standard (“After Pearl Harbor,” December 10, 2001). What he saw intrigued him. A sense of unity and patriotism followed both surprise attacks. But media after Pearl Harbor had none of the sorrow, sensitivity, and angst that filled the news, with reason, after 9/11. Recognizing the inevitable costs of war, Americans on the home front at the outset of World War II were nonetheless eager to carry on as usual. They did not apologize or second-guess. They soldiered on. “When you step back and contemplate the range of post-Pearl Harbor media,” Brooks wrote, “you are struck by how extraordinarily proud of itself America then was.”

I revisited Brooks’s article this week while thinking about the differences between America during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1919 and America during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic today. Some of the distinctions are self-evident. America is far more wealthy, free, and technologically advanced than it was then. We enjoy the benefits of incorporating half the population into our economy and society, of ending de jure anti-black racism, of attracting the best and most ambitious talent from across the globe. We are no longer a rising power but a reluctant hegemon. A raw deal awaits any American who trades places with a doppelgänger from midway through Woodrow Wilson’s second term.

What changed is the American ethos. Expressive individualism replaced self-restraint. Narcissism and the therapeutic sensibility triumphed over the reticence and sense of tragedy that comes from living in places and times where there is no safety net and death is a constant presence. The culture of debunking, revisionism, and repudiation informs education, entertainment, art, and occasionally sport.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/20/what-happens-when-everything-stops/

Our ordinary lives and routines have been upended, but let’s see that as an opportunity to do some good even as we grapple with the very real challenges we’re all facing. It only seems like everything stopped. Life goes on.

The days after 9/11 were eerily quiet. There were no airplanes in the skies; they had been grounded. People were still in shock and waiting to see if another deadly attack would come. It didn’t, thank God, but the nation slowed down dramatically that week. And then we adapted and went back to living, albeit aware of a newly aggressive enemy.

But now much of the nation is under official or semi-official lockdown. Schools have sent students home for the year in many places. Professional and college sports have stopped. Concerts are canceled. The stock market is down more than 30 percent from it’s recent high. Even churches—the very place where people seek solace in times of crisis—have temporarily closed their doors, too.

And now all nonessential businesses are closed by government order in California, Illinois, New York, and a growing list of other states. Rumors are rife that the federal government will invoke the Stafford Act and declare effective martial law. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s a rumor that is making the rounds so widely that you’ve probably already heard it.

Strange rumors and semi-plausible scenarios are what you get in uncertain times when people fear for their lives and their futures.

But what happens when everything stops?

Of course, not everything has stopped. The electricity is on. Water still comes out of your faucet. You can buy groceries, though there are spot shortages of key items. But it’s all of those nonessentials that make life sweet, right? So what now?