We can do this the hard way or the easy way.

So, the University of North Carolina opened, and James Madison University (much closer to home for me) opened and both of them decided after a week, or even less, to close due to the increase of cases of Covid-19 and the immanent and obviously predictable spread of the pandemic and its death to their staffs and their communities.   I commented on this in a letter to my local news:

I was heartened to see that JMU students were concerned about the health of the greater Harrisonburg community.   If only the administration of the university were as empathetic and intelligent as the students, we wouldn’t have to learn the hard way that it is too early in the course of this pandemic to reopen the school.  As G. W. F. Hegel 1770 – 1856 said:  "What experience and history teach us is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." 

Apparently, the hard way is the only way.

Now, perhaps because Trump wants it, the Big Ten conference (14 teams) is going to play football.  The chancellors and presidents have made their implicit decisions.

“Yes, we know that this will kill people, but hey; you know, money.”

Two letters to editors

To   The Daily News Record, Harrisonburg, Virginia:

I was heartened to see that James Madison University students were concerned about the health of the greater Harrisonburg community.  If only the administration of the university were as empathetic and intelligent as the students, we wouldn’t have to learn the hard way that it is too early in the course of this pandemic to reopen the school.  As G. W. F. Hegel 1770 – 1856 said:  "What experience and history teach us is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." 

Apparently, the hard way is the only way.

         [The University closed down after less that a week of in-person classes]

To The Washington  Post, Washington, DC

Re:  What I learned when the contact tracers CAME for me.  Dispatch from South                 Korea:

I think that the Washington Post needs an ombudsman or at the least much better editors, (I refer to the “Dispatch for South Korea” article of Sept 3).  The headline: “When the contact tracers came for me" (emphasis added), was yellow journalism at its worst.  What?  Are you guys trying to compete with the Globe and Enquirer now?  Your use of an infamous phrase from the depths of fascist Nazism was completely out of synch with the rest of the article.  Click bait isn’t restricted to the internet; your Headline editor is doing the same thing to your newspaper.  Stop it.

Let’s Hire a Successful Businessman.

If you’re happy with Trump and his “turbo speed” vaccine, because it’ll save us time, and cure the disease and that awful “government bureaucratic waste” thing, and it will get here quicker and better because Trump is a “successful business man”.  Well great!  Successful has a very simple definition, right?

Please, just try to remember Martin Shkreli, (former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals).  He’s the successful business man who succeeded in buying a company that had a patent on a life and death cure for a deadly disease.  After he bought the company (with money he made in a totally different, not in anyway related, business), he immediately raised the price of this drug by 5,000%.  If this drug had been costing you $13.50 a week; he raised it to $750 a week.   Martin “successfully” purchased the company; it cost you, his customer, everything.  You see, he successfully collected lots more money for something that was already available.  A great success!   He succeeded in telling you: “Your money or your life.”   He was a very “successful businessman”.

Now, please ask yourself who is going to get the life saving Covid19 vaccine and how much is it going to cost.  Please, someone ask this question.  Given the record of Big Pharma and Martin, I think I know the answer.  

By the way, Martin Shkreli went to jail, not for LEGALLY extorting dying people of their money.  He’s in jail for cheating his investors.  Now THAT cannot be conscienced!  Stealing from the dying maybe OK, but stealing from rich investors?  WELL, we know what to do about that!

Now, how much money do you think those first anti Covid19 vaccines are going to cost?   Who do you think will get them?  If Trump is taking credit for them, then where do you think the money will go?

When someone tells you someone is a “successful businessman” ask yourself to whom the success accrues.   

You see, it’s never enough for those who have (always had) too much.  

YOU know what he meant to say

Some folks will recall that recently in the Washington Post News Paper, I took Kathleen Parker to task for suggesting that we should all (media people included) translate Trump’s words into something decipherable.   (You know; YOU know what he meant to say….). 

                       I disagree. 

Maya Angelou said: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the FIRST TIME.”  (Emphasis added). 

Donald Trump tells us all who he is, every day, sometimes several times a day.

It may be the job of indulgent parents, elementary school teachers, and therapists to stretch what they heard someone say into something acceptable; but that’s not the job of the American people (much, much less the media reporters).  It's not your job when listening to the president as he is making official statements of policy, his intentions, and his vision of what American is all about to translate him into cogent truthfulness.  He’s the president; he’s speaking; what more are our responsibilities above listening?

Why should we listen at all if we have to translate what he’s said into what we HOPE he meant to say?  We might as well elect an 8 Ball!  (Younger folks might have to look that one up).

I’ve given up on trying to communicate on Twitter, but I do believe that

#rightwordsmatter   If you say it; own it, or apologize if it’s shown to be wrong.  

Don’t expect anybody to clean up your mess just because you’re Trump, or one of his supporters.

Trump is insane; what's your excuse for accepting what he says?

More Floating Boats A "Bonu$" Sequel

 

I expect that all you honest,

“Rising tides lift all boats, ‘the genius invisible hand of the market’ people”,

(you, you bottom line; PROFIT is GOD and efficiency is defined as:  MY PROFIT MARGIN)      economists and rabid capitalists…  You know who you are.

 

You will forthrightly acknowledge the fact that all insurance companies pay a hefty bonus to their workers that have an amazing talent.  The talent is to DENY perfectly reputable claims; the bigger the claim; the better the bonu$ for the denier.  That’s a big plus for the bottom line: the company profit margin.  They’ll even argue that if they don’t make a profit, they can’t offer you “insurance”.  Then their CEOs go home with 7 figure bonuse$ of their own; sometimes even when they’ve been fired for not delivering big profits for the investors.

 

The other side of this ridiculous coin is the business model that doesn’t recognize cost benefit analyses, much less common sense and simple decency.

 

I just spent an hour on the phone with a “very nice” representative of a company that I had a very reasonable, reputable claim about their refusal to honor their responsibility to me.  The hour went away.  This “very nice person” was paid an hourly wage that was…    wait for it:

 

an order of magnitude greater than my reasonable request.

 

I guess they made a statement.  I guess they made an “example” of me.  By throwing their own money away by spending more effort assuming that I was the crook, they proved that they are the crooks.

Are all the wrong people being humble?

If you’re not allowed to point out Irony, is that a paradox?  Does not admitting something make it go away?  Are all the wrong people being humble?  

  

Whatever Floats Your Boat

   Is not magic.  Two ‘Happy Birthday songs’ (…  while washing our hands…)    is NOT magic.”    Easy short term answers are almost always too short, too little, too soon, and are based on assumptions.

The concept of a minimal response, to change a course, is one of those “economic” principals that seem to work.  Supply and Demand … ( let’s apply a nudge here or a tug there, and we’ll fix all our problems.)  They often even have math equations and graphs!  All we have to do, is just adjust a few little tiny, easy to manipulate parameters.  Just a tad; and all will be well (as defined in my Econ Text book). 

Our economists say that the  most “efficient” way for the world to work is for it to allow that wonderful  Invisible hand of the Market, with its ability to “weed out” those “inefficient” things that impede “progress” (or any other solutions old or new) is economic dogma.   It is the only way to set policy for the greater good of the greater fraction of mankind; and all because how much profit made is the only determiner of success.

 Man!  That invisible Hand is better than God.  Better than logic, empathy, justice, morality, or anything.

And the guy that made 1 penny per ton of extra profit on recycled used tires from Indonesia back in 1985:  he was a genius, (forget that the tax payers spent a 100 million dollar$ getting rid of the dengue fever epidemic that he brought to our shores with the Indonesian mosquitoes.  There was also a Cholera outbreak caused by “cheap imports”.   Cholera had been eradicated here for decades before the boat brought it to our shores.   The economically posited “genius”, the infinitely wise and omniscient God-like force that raises all boats (with its magical invisible hand) is the only way to set policy.   If you see the sarcasm here and you disagree with any of this, , Now is the time, the capitalists will scream at you: “Socialist!"

!” 

Let us all be like economists; let us assume that we have a boat.   I recall a discussion about a hypothetical problem discussed between two economists:  It was thus:  “You are stranded on an island and you are desperate to get off ASAP…” one economist asks the other, “What would you do?”  The answer from the other economist was, “Well, let us assume that I have a boat.”  And then he went on at length with lots and lots of details.  The economists at Goldman Sacks just predicted the unemployment rate for 2021.  That’s when the pandemic with be over.  Forget that there is no vaccine now, no one knows how soon there will be one.  No one knows how much of it can be produced how fast, how many people will need it, how long it might work…  But they’ve assumed we’ll have it.

Now….  “Efficient” as defined by almost all economists is, the CHEAPEST short term bottom line, corporate, (and now: governmental) way to run the world and everything in it all the time so as to $ave money...  Shall we quote those who have said that the USA should be run like a business? 

Perhaps by a successful business man?

That Supply Chain Problem!  I just heard that the collapse of the supply chain is due to the fact that most (capitalists) ran their decisions of supply, sub contractors, manufacturing, movement of product, and retail distribution, based on the bottom line: “WHAT is the cheapest way to maximize my profit?   TODAY.

The invisible hand of the market somehow (in its infinite wisdom) lifts all boats.

You might have to assume that you have a boat, though…