May 16, 2021

Please Don’t Let It End

As the pandemic finally winds down, I’ve been getting the eery sense that some people don’t want it to. I’ve had that sense for a year now. After it became clear that we had flattened the curve, we weren’t going to run out of respirators, and hospitals would not be over-run, people kept supporting restrictions. When it became clear that the mortality rate from COVID was less than the flu and therefore simply wasn’t an extraordinary risk, people kept wearing masks.

I used to think it was just political. The Left was vested in the COVID narrative, so Leftists insisted we stay the course.

I also thought there was a large amount of virtue-signaling and general pleasure in telling people what to do, feeling superior.

But now I think there’s something more. Mental illness? Weakness? Lack of character? I really don’t know, Professor Bidziszewslki senses it too. He calls it “fragility.”

The mental composure of a great many university students these days is fragile.  You would be surprised by how many miss classes, and how many classes they miss, because of depression or anxiety.  Student health administrators send letters to faculty asking them to excuse the absences of perturbed students, allow them extra time on tests, and make a variety of other accommodations for them, because their discomposure is considered a disability.

For that matter, the equanimity of a lot of other citizens is pretty fragile too.  They were anxious before the epidemic.  They have been anxious because of the epidemic.  According to therapists interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, now some of them appear to be anxious because the epidemic is tapering down.  Its windup hints at the possible loss of rules that not only soothe and comfort them, but also

Notes from the Garden

Happy first birthday to my granddaughter, Edith (Stein . . . but she’s not Jewish). I’ll be growing pumpkins for the grandkids for however long my ghost breathes.

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The May Gardening Push continues. This unbelievable cold snap has pushed back growing and planting, forcing me to “pot-up” my tomato plants (a chore I enjoy “in the moment” but that seems like a waste of effort . . . if I could just “time” the initial planting with the passing of all frost).

For non-gardeners: The act of “potting-up” means taking plants from a smallish container and putting them into a bigger container, so you can later put them in yet a bigger container or the ground.

Like I said, a waste of time, but fairly important or the plants’ growth will be permanently stunted.

One thing I like about potting-up, though: I am occasionally able to salvage two or three plants from the same small plant, creating two or three large pots. Over the past few days, I have potted-up 30 tomato plants from about 20 small containers, and they all look vibrant and healthy.

I continue to plant potatoes like a mad-man, though I’m a bit concerned at how bad the (very) expensive seed potatoes look. They’re soft and the sprouts have black tips. Neither, apparently, are a cause of concern, though, based on what I could find on the Google Machine.

I planted ten seed potatoes in burlap bags last night. While at the coffee shop with Meg (of Hillsdale College), I saw they were selling their old coffee bean bags for $3. I searched the Internet and saw a lot of articles about growing vegetables, especially potatoes, in burlap bags, so I bought five.

The experience wasn’t as idyllic … Read the rest

Well, not really, but I survived a totalitarian regime

If you listen to only one Joe Rogan Experience episode, make it episode 1639, Dave Smith. It came out last Friday. It’s three hours long. I’ve listened to 2.5 hours (out of three hours).

Smith is a comic and a libertarian. He also has a podcast (that, for some reason, I can’t warm up to).

But I definitely warmed up to this episode with Rogan. They covered an array of matters, with Dave Smith channeling Murray Rothbard, Tom Woods Scott Horton, and other alternative thinkers.

The COVID discussion was really good. At minute 33:48, Smith pointed out something I hadn’t thought of: We lived under totalitarianism in 2020, at least those of us who live in a blue state.

Now, it may have been good totalitarianism. It may have been necessary totalitarianism. It was “soft” totalitarianism (no one was arrested, tortured, and killed).

But it was totalitarianism: suspension of the Bill of Rights; governors ruling by fiat, often with apparent whimsy; rulers playing by a different set of rules; heavy propaganda, groupthink, and censorship (by private corporations with ties to government). Everything you’d expect from totalitarianism, we had here in 2020.

This doesn’t mean it was bad, incidentally. It simply means many of us lived under totalitarianism. The choices were (supposedly): die of COVID or live under totalitarianism. Okay. Given those options, I choose totalitarianism. Many of us did. Just because it was totalitarian doesn’t mean it was wrong. It just means it was bad, but not necessarily as bad as the alternative (dying of COVID).

Of course, we now know those weren’t really the only options (“false dichotomy”) and the COVID risk was way overblown, but still, reasonable people can disagree (though increasingly I’m abandoning that position, as the vaccine … Read the rest

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I never knew what happened to Schlitz. When I was a little kid, I remember seeing Schlitz all over the place and thinking it was “the” beer. By the time I started drinking, it was one of those beers I’d drink because I could get a case for $5 (in the 1980s), putting it in the category of Buckhorn, Blatz, Red White and Blue, and Beer (the generic “brand”).

It isn’t just my murky childhood memory. Schlitz was the beer. In fact, for much of the twentieth century, it and Budweiser duked it out for top beer in the United States. But then Budweiser took over that top spot in the late 1950s with effective marketing, and Schlitz fell decidedly to number two.

In response, it decided it would become the most profitable beer in the U.S. and started to slash production costs (now called the “Schlitz Mistake”). When drinkers noticed and its sales plummeted, it responded with an awful marketing campaign that seemed to threaten viewers (now laughingly called the “drink Schlitz or I’ll kill you” campaign).

It’s all laid out in this article that I stumbled across last night.… Read the rest

The Left’s dogma on COVID is slowly—oh so slowly—changing.

Governor Whitmer last week held a press conference to address Michigan’s surging COVID numbers. She said she wouldn’t impose more restrictions because they’re not working. Here’s her actual quote:

“Michigan still has some of the strongest protocols in place — capacity restrictions, we’ve still got a mask mandate. Other states have dropped all of these things. We still have them in Michigan, and yet, we have high positivity.”

Welcome to the reality, Governor. Tom Woods has been preaching for at least eight months that COVID is going to attack whoever it wants, regardless of restrictions. There’s been zero correlation between restrictions and COVID cases.

And then yesterday, Slate (!) ran an essay by a senior editor that suggested that wearing masks outside isn’t necessary.

When it comes to coronavirus spread, evidence shows that being outdoors is very, very safe. A paper published in Indoor Air looked at 1,245 cases in China and found just one instance of outdoor transmission, which involved people having a conversation, which means they had to be close to one another for some period of time and face to face. According to data from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, shared earlier this month with the Irish Times, of 232,164 cases in Ireland, just 262 were associated with “locations which are primarily associated with outdoor activities.” That is, about 0.1 percent. A meta-analysis published online in November in the Journal of Infectious Diseases suggests it’s possible the upper bound of cases potentially contracted outdoors is higher; it estimates that the total is less than 10 percent. 

Again, welcome to reality. Rogan has been pointing this out since last summer. My son’s wedding reception was held outdoors. One of my best friends, an extremely COVID-conscious … Read the rest

It might be terribly overvalued, but it’s not in a bubble

The cryptocurrency market was a lot of fun this week. The Coinbase IPO drove interest and prices to all-time highs. The leader: Dogecoin, which went from six cents to 50 cents in a wild frenzy (it has since settled in the upper 20s).

Dogecoin isn’t sustainable. Its creators have minted over 100 billion coins, they mint millions more every year, and they aren’t committed to capping it. It’s like the Federal Reserve.

Bitcoin, however, is different. It’s capped. Supply will run out. Other than land, it’s the only asset that can claim such a thing.

I hear two vigorous objections to Bitcoin:

1. “Each coin is worth $60,000. How are you supposed to buy a pack of gum with a $60,000 coin?”
2. “Bitcoin is in a bubble.”

Both of these objections, I believe, are bunk. I think there are other valid objections, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bitcoin is extraordinarily overvalued, but those two objections don’t cut it.

1. Look at the edge of your coins. You notice the serrated edges? That’s a holdover from the days when the king had the right to take chunks off coins (or “criminals” did it), in order to create sub-specie that could be used to buy small items (or melted down with others “bits” and recoined). I don’t know of any reason Bitcoin couldn’t be used like that. In fact, right now, I own Bitcoin: about 5% of one Bitcoin. My account breaks it down to the seventh decimal. Call me crazy, but I suspect these newfangled computers could break it down to the 100^th decimal, then reconvert the whole thing into a new sub-species currency (“Sub BTC”), like our dollars are broken down into quarters, dimes, nickels, and … Read the rest