Rod Dreher's Blog, page 166

It’s Not Panic; It’s Reality

A reader writes (I’ve concealed details to protect his privacy):

I’m an emergency doctor in [greater capital region of major state].

For the past 5 years or so we’ve had a chronic intensive care bed shortage.  One factor is well intentioned state mandated nurse to patient ratios. These don’t apply in the emergency department but they do in the ICU. Our hospital has 12 ICU beds, but is routinely staffed with 2 nurses who can care for only 2 patients each.  There are other potential places within the hospital to provide ICU level of care, such as recovery rooms (now called PACU’s, post anesthesia care units) and day surgery areas. The hospital does not spend the money to have the nurses to do this. Also, the hospital cannot hire or retain enough nurses to fill the positions it is willing to pay for.

We often have to transfer patients from our emergency department to other hospitals that have ICU beds. Frequently there aren’t any – none at [name], the biggest hospital in the state, or [list of other major hospitals in the capital city], nor at other area community hospitals.

This is our baseline. We have no capacity for a surge of patients who can’t breathe because of Covid-19.

I read this e-mail after reading this short, informative piece from Bloomberg News, about how coronavirus kills people. Excerpts:

Infection generally starts in the nose. Once inside the body, the coronavirus invades the epithelial cells that line and protect the respiratory tract, said Taubenberger, who heads the viral pathogenesis and evolution section of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. If it’s contained in the upper airway, it usually results in a less severe disease.

But if the virus treks down the windpipe to the peripheral branches of the respiratory tree and lung tissue, it can trigger a more severe phase of the disease. That’s due to the pneumonia-causing damage inflicted directly by the virus plus secondary damage caused by the body’s immune response to the infection.

More:

“When you get a bad, overwhelming infection, everything starts to fall apart in a cascade,” said David Morens, senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You pass the tipping point where everything is going downhill and, at some point, you can’t get it back.”

That tipping point probably also occurs earlier in older people, as it does in experiments with older mice, said Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who has studied coronaviruses for 38 years.

Still, even healthy younger adults have succumbed to the illness. Li Wenliang, the 34-year-old ophthalmologist who was one of the first to warn about the coronavirus in Wuhan, died last month after receiving antibodies, antivirals, antibiotics, oxygen and having his blood pumped through an artificial lung.

Some people may be more genetically susceptible, possibly because they have a greater abundance of the distinctly shaped protein receptors in their respiratory epithelial cells that the virus targets, Taubenberger said. It’s also possible certain individuals have some minor immunodeficiency or other host factors that relate to underlying illnesses.

I have a weakened immune system because of Epstein-Barr virus. I am 53 years old. This is all very real to me.

You readers who think this is all silly panic ginned up by the media and the Democrats, feel free to nurture your comforting illusions. This doctor I quote above is on the front lines. He’s telling you that if you come to his hospital unable to breathe with coronavirus, they will not be able to take you … and chances are, none of the hospitals in his major American city will have room for you either.

New York City has 8.5M people.

If just 5% get coronavirus (a low number for something this contagious), that’s 425,000.

Fauci said today that 15%-20% require hospitalization. That’s 65,000.

de Blasio said we have 1200 hospital beds available.

Scary.

— Mark B. Spiegel (@markbspiegel) March 1, 2020

You reader who prefer to live in reality, take note, and please protect yourselves. Most of us who get sick from this stuff will be fine without too much trouble. Some of us won’t. People like me, because of my immune system, are in more danger. People like you, if you’re over the age of 60, or have diabetes, you’re in trouble too. In normal times, you might have been able to go to the hospital, get intensive treatment, and come out fine. None of that is guaranteed now, not with what’s coming.

Please, do your very best to avoid, or at least delay, getting the virus. You want the hospital to have a bed for you if you need it. This is not panic; this is reality. The media isn’t making this happen. The Democrats aren’t making this happen. The coronavirus is making it happen. We are not powerless here, folks. If we will avoid crowds, and stay at home as much as possible, we can avoid or delay getting the virus.

This morning, the financial markets are crashing, but President Trump continues to message like Baghdad Bob (‘memba him?):

The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant. Surgeon General, “The risk is low to the average American.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

The Obama/Biden Administration is the most corrupt Administration in the history of our Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

There are no mixed messages, only political weaponization by people like you and your brother, Fredo! https://t.co/NqH4pHfuwt

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

There are more. Even by the, shall we say, expansive standards of presidential conduct to which we’ve grown accustomed under Trump, this is absolutely extraordinary.

This is not a fake crisis! Read the letter from the ER doctor above. It’s not a crisis caused by irrational panic. Yes, people do panic, but investors are not destroying trillions of dollars of wealth for nothing. There really is radical economic uncertainty now. In Lombardy, the public health system is on the verge of breakdown. There is every reason to expect something similar in the US, over the next couple of weeks. If we avoid it by some miracle, well, thank God. But even as we hope for the best, we must prepare for the worst. 

Having a president who does not take any of this seriously is incredibly destabilizing. Don’t know if you saw this, but this is what he tweeted on Sunday evening:

Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me! https://t.co/rQVA4ER0PV

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2020

Notice that this was not tweeted by an enemy of Trump, but by Trump himself! Could it possibly be that Donald Trump is the only non-crackhead street bum adult in America who has never heard of Nero fiddling while Rome burns?

I write all this as someone who has never liked Trump, and who didn’t vote for him (or for anybody) in 2016, but who has been grateful for some of what he’s done — especially on judges — and had resolved to probably holding my nose this fall to vote for him, because the idea of the Democrats, who have gone far, far off the deep end on social issues, appointing judges genuinely frightens me. As I’ve said before, I’m a social and religious conservative, and as such, I believe that in the years to come, the federal judiciary is going to be the last effective line of defense against aggressive liberalism, of the sort that has no respect for First Amendment freedoms — of religion, of speech, and so forth. I say that because the younger generations are much more left on these issues than Gen Xers and older, and are much less favorable towards the First Amendment when it is seen to harm the dignity of their favored victim groups. That leaves social and religious conservatives out in the cold. In a democracy, the Congress and the presidency will eventually reflect this reality. This is why it really is so important to get conservative judges in place now, while we have power.

I don’t have to love Donald Trump to recognize that it is massively important to the causes I really care about — religious liberty, free speech, and abortion — to keep the Democrats out of the White House. The things that Trump ran on — immigration policy, less interventionist foreign policy, a more nationalistic trade policy — are also things that are important. Not as important to me personally as judges and social policy, but still significant.

And now, with his deranged response to the coronavirus crisis, he’s blowing it all. He does not have to do this! All he has to do is act like a normal president. What the people around him need to realize, and to act on, is that however you feel about Donald Trump personally, he is putting at risk everything that all of us in the Trump coalition believe in.

There are people who will never abandon Trump no matter what he does or says. But they aren’t enough to win him re-election. If the people who aren’t particularly pro-Trump, but inclined to vote for him anyway, decide that it’s simply too dangerous to have such an unstable, manic president in charge in a crisis like this — then Trump will lose, and not only will he lose, but he might bring down the Republican Senate too. This month — the Ides of March are coming! — will be critical. This president will be judged in the fall in large part by the way he has responded to this crisis. If America somehow dodges this bullet — and we have no reason to believe it will, but let’s just say that it does — then Trump will not suffer. But if it looks here like it looks in every other country that has faced its outbreak in the general population, then Trump will have established himself as a reckless fool.

I don’t think Trump is consciously lying to the country. He’s working a rope line in Florida this morning. If he were afraid of coronavirus, he wouldn’t be doing that. But good grief, he is living in total denial about the threat to the country, and — to speak in a purely political vein — to himself, and to the causes he supports.

It’s driving me nuts. As I wrote yesterday, the failure of the Tsarist regime to respond effectively to the 1891-92 famine in Russia was a catalyzing moment in building opposition to the imperial system. The Marxist parties were fairly marginal prior to that. But the Tsar’s failure opened the minds of the Russian middle classes to Marxism, because it offered an explanation for why the government failed. Within twenty years, one of those radical parties, the Bolsheviks, had seized dictatorial control of Russia, and had turned the state into a charnel house. The famine response was not the sole cause of the revolution, of course, but historians agree that it was a big turning point in the decline and fall of the regime.

Conservatives who have influence with this administration need to wake up, now. There are lots of conservatives who admire Trump for his defiant response to the disease, but they are completely blind to the political risk here. Nobody really knows what is coming to the US from this. We will know over the next month or two. Trump is very, very far out on a limb with his extreme, radical response — and it stands not only to completely discredit him, but also to discredit his causes. That’s just how politics works. The risk is extreme. 

The reason Nero fiddling while Rome burned is still a metaphor we use 2,000 years later is because it is such a powerful symbol of a narcissistic autocrat who cannot see beyond his own ego to grasp the seriousness of the crisis around him. Trump is so ignorant, and so absorbed in himself, that he actually made that comparison of himself to Nero. If thousands die in this crisis and millions lose their jobs in the economic destruction related to it, think of how this is going to look in Democratic ads throughout the autumn:

Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me! https://t.co/rQVA4ER0PV

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2020

If Trump goes down, a lot of us, and the causes we care about, are going with him. It will not have been a political murder; it will have been a political suicide.

Anyway, enough about politics. The most important thing you, reader, can think about today is protecting yourself and the ones you love. You are not powerless. Become a leader of your little platoon.

UPDATE: This just in from the Wall Street Journal’s White House reporter:

“The fundamentals in this economy are unbelievable.” —HHS Secretary Azar to reporters just now at the White House.

The Trump admin’s top health officials took no questions, said nothing about the health issues around coronavirus and spoke only about the economy.

— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) March 9, 2020

This has to be the message he’s been dictated to state. Breathtaking.

UPDATE.2: Some reality from former USAID official who dealt with Ebola outbreak:

This is the literal opposite of what he needs to be saying.

Flu kills more (for now) because COVID isn't yet as widespread. Reason for urgent preventive action IS TO KEEP IT THAT WAY.

Because if we fail, COVID-19's vastly higher fatality rate will kill far, far more people. https://t.co/Lamt2gXmKM

— Jeremy WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March 9, 2020

UPDATE.3: The COVID19 death stats are based on Chinese government numbers, which, if false, are almost certainly worse than being shown here. Even if the death rate in the US is only half of what it has been in China, that’s still catastrophic. Point being, do not believe our president, readers:

The post It’s Not Panic; It’s Reality appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Political Effects Of Cataclysm

As regular readers know, I’ve been studying the Russian Revolution as part of writing my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies. I had been struck by something I had never known about the revolution’s roots, until my reading last year: that a terrible famine in 1891-92 was a landmark in discrediting the Tsarist regime, and paving the way for revolutionary upheaval.

This bears pondering as the United States is at the early stages of what will almost certainly be a public health and economic crisis like none in our nation’s living memory.

In his terrific book A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, historian Orlando Figes explains why the great famine shook the imperial Russian system to its foundations. The state bureaucracy “was far too slow and clumsy, and the transport system proved unable to cope. Politically, its handling of the crisis was disastrous, giving rise to the general impression of official carelessness and callousness.”

The government’s mishandling of the crisis was manifest in many ways, but by far the error that most outraged the public was its export ban on grain, to make sure there was enough to feed the starving millions of peasants. It wasn’t the ban itself that was the problem, but the fact that the government telegraphed it a month in advance, which gave cereal merchants the opportunity to fulfill all their foreign contracts — leaving little for the hungry peasants. The tsar’s minister of finance opposed the ban entirely. Fair or not, the public came to see this policy as the main cause of the famine, Figes writes.

This was not unjustified. The government began by refusing to admit the famine’s existence. Figes:

The reactionary daily Moscow News had even warned that it would be an act of disloyalty [to use the word “famine”] since if would give rise to a “dangerous hubbub” from which only the revolutionaries could gain. Newspapers were forbidden to print reports on the “famine,” although many did in all but name. This was enough to convince the liberal public, shocked and concerned by the rumours of the crisis, that there was a government conspiracy to conceal the truth.

At last, the government admitted that it could not cope on its own with the crisis, and called on the public to form voluntary organizations to assist with famine relief.

Politically, this was to prove a . historic moment, for it opened the door to a powerful new wave of public activity and debate which the government could not control and which quickly turned from the philanthropic to the political. The “dangerous hubbub” that Moscow News had feared was growing louder and louder.

Figes writes that “the public response to the famine was tremendous.” People from all walks of society dropped everything they were doing, and jumped in to help the sick and starving. Some aristocrats (“Prince Lvov … threw himself into the relief campaign as if it was a matter of his won life and death”), progressive landowners, and bourgeois joined the relief campaigns. Anton Chekhov served as a cholera doctor to the famine-stricken, and went broke because he refused to be paid for his services. Tolstoy and his daughters “organized hundreds of canteens in the famine regions, while Sonya, his wife, raised money from abroad. ‘I cannot describe in simple words the utter destitution and suffering of these people,’ he wrote to her at the end of October 1891.”

A peasant who worked alongside Tolstoy in the relief campaign said the great man’s suffering was such that his beard went grey, he lost hair, and a great deal of weight. Figes again:

The guilt-ridden Count blamed the famine crisis on the social order, the Orthodox Church and the government. “Everything has happened because of our own sin,” he wrote to a friend in December. “We have cut ourselves off from our own brothers, and there is only one remedy — by repentance, by changing our lives, and by destroying the walls between us and the people.” Tolstoy broadened his condemnation of social inequality in his essay ‘The Kingdom of God’ (1892) and in the press. His message struck a deep chord in the moral conscience of the liberal public, plagued as they were by feelings of guilt on account of their privilege and alienation from the peasantry.

Keep in mind, readers, that the word “liberal” in this context does not mean what it means to contemporary American readers. “Liberal” here refers to those who wanted constitutional reforms to the monarchical system. They were to be distinguished from radicals, who wanted the overthrow of the system.

Figes:

For the guilt-ridden liberal public, serving “the people” through the relief campaign was a means of paying off their “debt” to them. And they now turned to Tolstoy as their moral leader and their champion against the sins of the old regime. His condemnation of the government turned him into a public hero, a man of integrity whose word could be trusted as the truth on a subject which the regime had tried so hard to conceal.

The historian notes that the Orthodox Church, which had recently excommunicated Tolstoy, forbade the starging peasants to accept food from his relief campaign.

Figes:

Russian society had been activated and politicized by the famine crisis, its social conscience had been stung, and the old bureaucratic system had been discredited. Public mistrust of the government did not diminish once the crisis had passed, but strengthened as the representatives of civil society continued to press for a greater role in the administration of the nation’s affairs.

The famine also reinvigorated the socialists and the radicals:

Marxism as a social science was fast becoming the national creed: it alone seemed to explain the causes of the famine. Universities and learned societies were swept along by the new intellectual fashion. … Petr Struve (1870-1944), who had previously thought of himself as a political liberal, found his Marxist passions stirred by the crisis: it “made much more of a Marxist out of me than the reading of Marx’s Capital.'”

Figes writes, “Even the young Lenin only became converted to the Marxist mainstream in the wake of the famine crisis.”

In short, the whole of society had been politicized and radicalized as a result of the famine crisis. The conflict between the population and the regime had been set in motion — and there was now no turning back. In the words of Lydia Dan, the famine had been a vital landmark in the history of the revolution because it had shown to the youth of her generation “that the Russian system was completely bankrupt. It felt as though Russia was on the brink of something.”

Now, what does this have to say to America in 2020, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic?

In the 1891-92 Russian famine, around 400,000 died (of a population of roughly 125 million). Nobody knows how many Americans will perish ultimately from this coronavirus epidemic, but the Washington Post reports:

Public health officials need to prepare for “disease burden roughly 10X severe flu season,” according to James Lawler, the director of international programs and innovation at the Global Center for Health Security and a professor for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in a presentation given to the American Hospital Association and obtained by The Washington Post.

The CDC estimates that since 2010, between 12,000 and 60,000 people in the United States have died each flu season. Since the flu season began on Oct. 1 of last year, between 18,000 and 46,000 people have died among 32 million to 45 million illnesses, the CDC estimates.

In the worst-case scenario here, that would mean between 120,000 and 600,000 Americans would die. Out of a population of 331 million, that’s obviously a lower percentage. But it’s still a massive number, and they would meet their mortality in a nation that is much less inured to death than peasant Russia.

The mortality numbers are not the most important thing to think about politically. We have seen what happened, and is still happening, in China. Closer to home, culturally speaking, we see that the entire Italian province of Lombardy has been locked down in a quarantine attempt. As I wrote last night, the public health system in Lombardy, Italy’s richest province, is now on the brink of breakdown. Doctors there are openly talking about the prospect of triaging patients — in blunt terms, of allowing the elderly to die to reserve scarce medical resources for those more likely to survive. This is not peasant Russia; this is a modern advanced capitalist society.

Despite what our president says…

We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2020

… we are not prepared for what is hitting us now, and is about to sweep the nation. To be fair, and to be clear, no government could have prevented this virus from striking its shores. This is the reality of living in a globalized world. But as has been said many times, the US, and the world, had a month to prepare — February — after it became clear that this thing was going to go global. The Trump administration blew it. That month is not coming back.

This is not just Trump’s fault, though. This morning I spoke to the wife of a physician, who told me that her husband has been complaining that there is “no protocol” in place at his medical facility for handling coronavirus. She told me a couple of anecdotes that indicate they’re flying by the seat of their pants. A surgeon (not her husband) whose daughter is in home quarantine after having returned from Italy, is on site doing surgeries, not knowing whether this is right or not. My guess is that this confusion and lack of leadership is a lot more common around the US than we care to think. This morning on CBS’s Face The Nation, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, said:

DR. GOTTLIEB: Well, we have an epidemic underway here in the United States. There’s a very large outbreak in Seattle. That’s the one we know about, probably one in Santa Clara or maybe other parts of the country, other cities. And so we’re past the point of containment. We have to implement broad mitigation strategies. The next two weeks are really going to change the complexion in this country. We’ll get through this, but it’s going to be a hard period. We’re looking at two months probably of difficulty. To give you a basis of comparison, two weeks ago, Italy had nine cases. Ninety-five percent of all their cases have been diagnosed in the last 10 days. For South Korea, 85 percent of all their cases have been diagnosed in the last 10 days. We’re entering that period right now of rapid acceleration. And the sooner we can implement tough mitigation steps in places we have outbreaks like Seattle, the- the lower the scope of the epidemic here.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Let’s talk about mitigation because when I asked Governor Inslee what he is doing and I asked him a few ways if he’d consider doing what Italy just did,–

DR. GOTTLIEB: Right.

MARGARET BRENNAN: –which is essentially trying to- I mean, they’re quarantining a quarter of their population in the most economically vital part of their country. This is a massive decision for them to have made. When I asked him about doing something like that in Washington state, he said, well, they’re talking about more distancing and–

DR. GOTTLIEB: Right.

MARGARET BRENNAN: — more measures like that. Is it just that it — governors like him don’t want to say out loud that we may have to do something like what Italy did?

DR. GOTTLIEB: Well, I think no state and no city wants to be the first to basically shut down their economy. But that’s what’s going to need to happen. States and cities are going to have to act in the interest of the national interest right now to prevent a broader epidemic.

Do you see the parallel with the Russian famine? The national government screwed up the initial response, which triggered action from local authorities, as well as civil society groups. Mind you, ours is a federal system, not an autocracy, so there is built into the system a separation of powers that makes national coordination more complex. Nevertheless, from a public perception point of view, the feds — in particular the Trump administration — has bungled the initial handling. Mind you, we still do not have widespread testing available … and the president continues to bumble-stumble and Potemkin-village his way through that embarrassing reality.

So as Dr. Gottlieb avers, it’s going to fall to state and local officials to take up leadership. Some will do well at this; others will do poorly. And private industry, and hospitals, will have to make these hard decisions, under very tight time constraints. They will be judged politically by how well they’ve done. Even though the president of universities and hospital systems (for example) do not have to stand for election, the impressions left on the public by how its public and private institutions performed in this crisis will either reaffirm faith in the current order, or dramatically undermine it.

Keep in mind too that America enters this crisis with a historical deficit of public trust in government and many other institutions of US life. We don’t have a lot of cushion. Do I even need to say anything about the economic impact this thing is going to have — and how that too will have a dramatic political effect? The fact that many of Russia’s wealthy were seen to be partying and enjoying the good life while so many peasants starved was not forgotten.

To wrap up: nobody can say for sure what is going to happen next. These next two weeks are likely to be when the real crisis begins here. Lombardy today may well be large parts of America over the coming fortnight. This black swan could easily cost Trump the presidency — read Douthat today about how, if Trump loses in November, it will be down to what he failed to do in February, with the pandemic coming toward us — but beyond that, it could lay the groundwork for a more sweeping and radical set of political and social changes. The imperial system remained in place in Russia after the famine, but within twenty years, the Romanovs had been murdered, and Bolshevik terror ruled the country, and eventually caused the deaths of exponentially more Russians than were lost in that famine.

Whatever happens with coronavirus, it will not be as severe as the Russian famine, nor will it be as serious as the 1918 flu pandemic, which did not bring down democracy. But it doesn’t have to be so deadly to have tremendous political effects, even if not revolutionary ones. We had better not underestimate this possibility. For example, today the conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party is aligning itself behind the more moderate Joe Biden. But most of the delegates are yet to be decided, and if the country’s hospitals are overrun with pandemic patients in the weeks to come, Democratic primary voters may be far more likely to support Bernie Sanders, a candidate promoting more radical change, especially of the health care system.

Lydia Dan, quoted by Figes above, was 13 years old when the 1891-92 famine struck. Imagine the American Lydia Dans of our time: the kids and young adults who are about to live through this pandemic crisis, and its after effects. Do not imagine that they are not going to notice what this event reveals about the truths of the society in which they live.

UPDATE: And to put an absurdist cherry on top, the President of the United States tweeted this out today. He really did:

Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me! https://t.co/rQVA4ER0PV

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2020

Who’s going to tell him?

UPDATE.2: Just now:

The post The Political Effects Of Cataclysm appeared first on The American Conservative.

View From Your Table

God bless the Italians. Our Italian reader and commenter Giuseppe sends this VFYT from Macugnaga, in the Italian Alps, where his family is holed up under the Lombard quarantine. He writes:

A hot infusion of apple, cinnamon and orange peel with a dash of genepy herbal grappa, a view of the Alps, and a good crime novel.

I’m almost in a mood to sing: “these are a few of my favorite things.”

Meanwhile, in another hard-hit region, Washington state, reader and commenter Surly sent this on Saturday night:


Walla Walla, Washington

Surly adds (I’ve slightly edited this to preserve privacy):

For those of your readers/commenters who are mocking the Wyoming doctor for being alarmist–we are in the ass end of Washington. You have to work hard to get here. According to my new friend, there are 2 people at St. Mary’s here who are sick enough with COVID 19 to be in hospital. She has every reason to downplay this and no reason to be alarmist–she is all about promoting tourism here.  Two people may not sound like much but we are a small community of 35,000 souls, and there have been no publicly reported cases east of the mountains in Washington.

Tonight my friend and I sat at a bar, not eating huîtres, unfortunately–that was last night’s decadence.  We watched the three bartenders happily mixing drinks, picking up used dishes and glasses, drying glasses with an incredibly dingy bar towel, handling money and credit cards, cutting up fruit, scratching their necks and faces, and no hands were washed. Once my friend fixated on it and pointed it out, I could not look away.  The more we looked and fixated, the more we saw all the ways they casually just did what needs to be done to spread a surface virus around.  I am not reading “The Plague” but from your excerpts I think we are in that city here.  I think I will have to pick up the book and catch up.

I think it is important to use this because go look at Google about  where we are–we are even further from civilization than the site selected by the gubmint to  build nuclear weapons because it was so remote and barren nobody would give a crap if it went sideways.   Sasquatch says Hi!

Here was our appetizer last night from Brasserie Four–sorry it is so dark.   Walla Walla is a lot like Provence.  The oysters were delicious.

UPDATE: Technically it doesn’t fit the VFYT basic criterion (needs to have environment, not just be a photo of the food), but this is a beautiful photo composition, and the deliciousness of it knocked my Lenten socks off. Check this out, from an LA reader who was in NYC with his son:

New York, New York

He writes:

8 course blowout Italian dinner during father/son trip to NYC. They had a black truffle grater for my beef course. Veal, tuna, grilled branzini, bonito flavored spaghetti, pork rigatoni, dessert spread, etc over 3 hours. New Yorkers staying indoors, making tourist activities a breeze, like going to Disneyland on an off day (Angelenos will understand).

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Virus-Hit Lombardy On The Brink

You will have heard that the Italian government is planning to put the entire region of Lombardy, as well as the area around Venice, under a one-month quarantine, probably starting tomorrow. Someone irresponsibly leaked the plan to the Italian media, which irresponsibly reported it, and now people are fleeing Lombardy before the borders close.

The medical crisis in this, the wealthiest region of Italy, is overwhelming its ability to cope. Here’s an interview that went up tonight on Corriere della Sera, the Milan daily. I’ve translated it from Italian with DeepL. I’m not in the habit of posting entire articles, but I feel this is necessary for public health reasons. Read this and realize that this is coming for us very soon — but we have the power to slow it down if our leaders will get more blunt and urgent, and the rest of us will do our part:

“We are now forced to create intensive therapy in the hallways, operating theatres, waking rooms. “We’ve gutted entire hospital wards to make room for the seriously ill. One of the best hospitals in the world, the one in Lombardy, is one step away from collapse.”

Antonio Pesenti, 68 years old, is the coordinator of the Lombardy Region’s crisis unit for intensive care. Publicly praised by the scientist Alberto Mantovani as one of the best men of science in Italy, he is an ICU doctor with strong nerves, accustomed to governing every kind of emergency. But at nine o’clock on Saturday evening, after 17 days of non-stop work, his voice is broken by tiredness and worry: “If the population doesn’t understand that he has to stay at home, the situation will become catastrophic”.

You, together with your colleagues from the resuscitations, are the author of a very harsh letter addressed to Giuseppe Conte’s government: “The scientific projections are very alarming”. What do you mean by that?

The picture is so serious that it requires an increase in ICU posts up to ten times the current availability. The number of patients admitted to hospital on 26 March is expected to be 18,000 in Lombardy, of whom between 2,700 and 3,200 will require hospitalization in intensive care. Today there are already more than a thousand patients among those in intensive care and those who risk becoming worse from one minute to the next. We monitor the situation 24 hours a day.

In the letter he speaks of risks not only for coronavirus patients, but also for all the others: “In danger is the survival not only of Covid-19’s patients” – you write – “but also of that part of the population that in any case accesses the health system”.

So far in Lombardy ambulances have always arrived in 8 minutes, now they risk not arriving within an hour. An enormous danger for those who have a heart attack, and not only them.

In short, the emergency-urgency system in Lombardy is no longer able to guarantee ordinary standards.

Unfortunately, it’s the truth. I’m not saying this to alarm the citizens, but to make everyone understand that it’s not the time to go out, to go shopping or to go for a spritz, as we’ve been saying for days now. We need to change social relations, with the shops and neighborhood markets closed. In Milan, where I live, at least up to now there have been too many people around unnecessarily. You have to go out just to buy food.

The number of beds in intensive care is increasing every day, but it’s never enough.

We’re creating Covid-19 blocks everywhere. By now, all the major hospitals in Lombardy have been involved, at least fifty or so. As we know, infected patients cannot be mixed with others. It means having resuscitations where everything happens with special protection systems: from filtered air to doctors and nurses who always dress and undress in the presence of another person to check that the procedures are correct because all it takes is the slightest distraction to become infected.

In what conditions are you working?

We’re working covered up to protect ourselves from the virus. After 4 hours we are soaked by sweat, our movements are slowed down and we have to get out of resuscitation to hydrate ourselves. We’re doing everything we can, and more, but we have to stop the contagion. The only way is prevention.

In one of the last meetings with the intensive care doctors there are those who have not been able to hold back tears.

We’re used to dealing with any situation in cold blood for a living. But only those who are experiencing it on the front line can understand the drama of the events.

Is it plausible to think of transporting seriously ill people to the rest of Italy?

They are very complex patients to move. Both because of their physical condition and because of the protections that must be taken in order not to infect us. I see it as difficult.

Readers, stay home. If you are a government official, or head of a school or other institution, or a decision-maker at a company, consider strongly whether or not now is the time to tell your people to stay at home. There’s no way to keep coronavirus from coming to us now, but we still have the power to slow the rate of infection, and give our hospitals a better chance of managing the tsunami headed this way.

I do not understand what is stopping the president, governors, and others from acting now. What are they waiting for? By the time they feel pressured to make the inevitable self-quarantine calls, it may be too late to do much good for our health care system.

UPDATE: The President of Amity Beach says to ignore those dorsal fins, old folks, there’s no better time to celebrate the greatness of America than by a dip on the Fourth of July:

The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but they have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.

The person who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity did not have authorization to talk about the matter. The person did not have direct knowledge about why the decision to kill the language was made.

In a tweet, the press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence, Katie Miller, said that “it was never a recommendation to the Task Force” and called the AP story “complete fiction.”

I don’t believe that. Katie Miller might be telling the truth here, but at this point, I believe nothing this administration says.

UPDATE.2: In Lombardy, doctors warn the public that they might have to start administering triage treatment for coronavirus patients, only giving care those who have the greatest chance of survival. That means that old people will be allowed to die so what resources remain can be used to attempt to save younger patients.  Read the story here, in Italian (Google Chrome offers a translation.)

Here’s an important tweet from a constructive thread by former FDA deputy commissioner:

2/n In last 10 days Italy diagnosed 95% of total cases they now report; South Korea 85%. 2 weeks ago, Italy had just 9 cases. 7 weeks ago, China reported 50 cases. The point: once the epidemics are discovered, they’ve been underway. Case counts grow quickly. Same likely true here

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) March 8, 2020

Two weeks ago, only nine confirmed cases. Now Italy has quarantined its wealthiest province, whose health care system is on the brink of breaking down.

What will it look like in America two weeks from today?

Well, it depends who in the Trump White House you ask:

President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, falsely claimed on Friday that the coronavirus “is contained” in the US. Another senior Trump official, counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, made a similar though slightly less definitive claim, saying that the virus “is being contained.”

“In the US it is the opposite of contained,” said Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. “It is spreading so efficiently in so many places that it may be difficult to stop.”

Don’t worry, President Trump, seeing the threat this pandemic crisis poses to the lives of thousands of Americans, to the US health care system, and, with the stock market plunging, to the overall economy, was in the White House over the weekend working hard to stay on top of the federal response. Oh, wait, he wasn’t:

President Donald Trump on Saturday headed to his golf course in West Palm Beach after saying earlier this week he’s ‘too busy’ to have his annual physical.

… Trump arrived at the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach at 9:21 a.m. on a sunny but breezy day.

Once you have lost credibility, you will never, ever get it back.

 

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Trump’s Coronavirus Ironic Tragedy

Ross Douthat has a knockout column that just posted online, in which he reflects on how the coronavirus pandemic might end Donald Trump’s presidency — and why that is ironic, and for Trump, tragic. Excerpts:

On Jan. 31, over a month ago, the Trump administration made an excellent decision: In an effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus, it forbade most foreign nationals from entering the United States if they had recently traveled to China.

This move was immediately attacked in the language of cosmopolitan sophistication, which assumes that because travel bans and quarantines are associated with things liberals consider bad — nationalism, hardened borders, migration restrictions — they necessarily must not work as well.

But this supposed sophistication is really just a superstition. It’s certainly true that the travel ban could not, and did not, prevent the coronavirus from reaching the United States. But as with local quarantines and closings — all of which emphatically do work, whether you’re looking at the history of the Spanish flu or Hong Kong’s success combating the coronavirus today — you don’t need 100 percent effectiveness for travel restrictions to be wise and helpful. What they buy you, above all, is a slower rate of spread, and with it precious time for preparation.

So Trump made the right call, and in so doing he briefly vindicated a case that his supporters have always made for him: He acted like the guy who would make common-sensical choices in the national interest, even when they went against the nostrums of globalization and the supposed wisdom of the do-gooders.

And then his administration took the month that his decision bought the country and completely wasted it.

Douthat explains what Trump did, and failed to do. And then:

And how ironic that would be. In 2016 we elected a China hawk who promised a “complete shutdown” in response to foreign threats, a germaphobic critic of globalization who promised to privilege the national interest above all.

Now he is in danger of losing his presidency because when the great test came, in the form of a virus carried by global trade routes from Communist China, he didn’t take the danger seriously enough.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I took down the Seth Bannon tweet that led this post. It has been claimed that he falsely represented his own estimations for those of the American Hospital Association. Until I can clear that up, I have taken the post down.

UPDATE.2: The Italian government is about to announce a lockdown of the entire province of Lombardy, and Venice:

Italy prepared Saturday to quarantine more than 10 million people around the financial capital Milan and the tourist mecca Venice for nearly a month to halt the spread of the new coronavirus.

A draft government decree published by Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper and other media said movement into and out of the regions would be severely restricted until April 3.

It was not clear from either the decree or the reports as to when the measure would go into effect.

Corriere Della Sera said it was “imminent” — and that those who violated the measures could be jailed.

Think about what this will mean to poor Italy economically: nobody can come into our get out of Venice for an entire month at least. So much for the Venice tourist economy. Milan is the country’s economic powerhouse — and now it is about to be essentially cut off from the world.

How the hell we are going to avoid a global economic depression, I have no idea.

UPDATE.3: To no one’s surprise, the train stations in Lombardy are full of Italians trying to get out of town before the rail lines to Lombardy are cut. Now, each one of those potential coronavirus carriers is headed south, or north. Great job, Italian government and media.

A final chance to evacuate from the COVID19 red zone. People rush to catch the last trains leaving Lombardy after government declared the quarantine and lockdown of 16 million people in Northern Italy. The mandatory quarantine will last until early April. pic.twitter.com/9m5Sf7nuhH

— Max Howroute (@howroute) March 8, 2020

UPDATE.4: Wokeness will always find a way:

I’m still not entirely sure how to process the “coronavirus prevention is actually cultural appropriation” absolute miracle of a Tweet pic.twitter.com/MP4tyHUezk

— coronavirus hugs (@paxthedog) March 7, 2020

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Hounding The Heretic Bo Winegard

Yesterday we were talking about how the protests by a woke contingent of employees led to the publishing giant Hachette canceling its upcoming Woody Allen book release, and presumably will lead to the pulping of all existing books. The protests came from Hachette employees who believe that Allen is a sex criminal who abused Dylan Farrow when she was seven. If true, that would obviously be a horrible thing, and Allen should be in jail. But Allen has always vigorously denied the charge, which emerged out of the savage collapse of his relationship with Mia Farrow, and has never been tried in court. The lesson of what happened to Woody Allen’s memoir is that the mere accusation of a crime, if it fits the woke narrative, is enough to destroy you professionally. Think of it: the leaders of a major publishing house decided to surrender their principles to the protest of an in-house mob.

Yesterday it happened to Woody Allen. Tomorrow it’s going to happen to someone less of a social pariah, but who is nonetheless despised by these ideological vigilantes. Who is standing up for Woody Allen? I am! And so should you be.

Today I’m reading about the firing of evolutionary psychologist Bo Winegard. It has happened so fast that his faculty page is still there. I screenshot a part of it, because it will soon be gone:

Marietta College fired him because he had become the target of a woke mob. In Quillette, Winegard explains what happened to him. Here’s how it begins:

Until a week ago, I was a tenure-track assistant professor at a small college. Then I was fired. And although I am but one professor at one small college in one small town, I want to persuade you that, if you care about free speech and free inquiry in academia, you should be alarmed by my termination. My troubles began in October 2019 when I was invited to address an evolutionary group at the University of Alabama. I had decided that I would discuss human population variation, the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time. I planned to defend this view as most consistent with a Darwinian understanding of the world.

My first day in Tuscaloosa was uneventful. On the second day, I visited a class and had an enjoyable discussion with students about various topics, including human evolution and social signaling. I was then supposed to meet professors and students for lunch, but instead my guide delivered me to an empty room where I received a number of texts from my host: The professors had found my RationalWiki entry, which accuses me—inter alia—of writing “racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette.”

Notwithstanding its name, which indicates a commitment to thought and reason, RationalWiki is a highly partisan and tendentious site which its authors use to mock and defame their political opponents. (They have also refused to update misinformation about my work and views even after I have written corrections.) Which is to say that it is not a reliable source of information about anything, still less a sound basis upon which to judge a person’s character. Professors routinely warn their students not to cite Wikipedia, but the lies and misrepresentations on my RationalWiki page were thought to be so unanswerable that the faculty who read them refused to meet with me so I could speak in my own defense. (A handful of other curious professors did extend me the courtesy of a meeting, and we enjoyed a perfectly civil chat.)

I assumed that my scheduled talk would be cancelled, but it was not. I thought the room would be empty, but it was not. Word had evidently spread and a number of angry students were in attendance. The atmosphere was hostile, and the audience was eager to challenge me, but I was able to deliver my talk as planned. The Q and A that followed was quite rowdy, however—one of the students yelled that I was a racist and someone else accused me of promoting the long-discredited pseudoscience of phrenology. And so on. It was not an especially cordial or constructive exchange of ideas.

Winegard then links to the student newspaper’s coverage of the talk. It’s basically Pravda for undergrads. From that article covering the talk (at which their reporter was not present!):

Anthony Earl, a junior majoring in political science, questioned Winegard’s claims of objectivity.

“My concerns are more social/political, the idea that science help us find the objective truth,” he said. “Objectivity is a little more elusive than that. My concern is when you explore science without keen eye to ethics or history, or how even that science that you’re trying to do may be informed by your social or economic position, your ideology, then you lose control of it in a way, and it can become dangerous. I think that’s why that one guy made the allusion to Hitler.”

Earl was referring to a student in the crowd who compared Winegard’s research with Hitler’s racist ideology, to which Winegarded responded: Hitler’s regime was not informed by science.

“That’s definitely not true,” Earl said. “Hitler was certainly informed by science, and a lot of the race scientists were Americans. The Germans admired the American caste system, the racial system that we had.”

After falsely noting that the ideas of ethnic cleansing were not influenced by “sophisticated science” of the time, Winegard expressed a need to return to conversations about racial genetic difference, which has also proven to be false.

“I think what I’m trying to do here is have reasonable conversation about it, precisely so that those more extreme voices get drowned out by more moderate voices,” Winegard said in response to the question. “That’s what I think. I could be wrong about that and we could have that discussion. But I honestly think that’s true. That it would be better, not worse for society that more people talked about this in a moderate, judicious way.“

Tobin said Winegard’s talk demonstrated the failure of the group’s informal system of inviting speakers, and the group is now planning on “implementing a more rigorous vetting process.”

There was no quote from Winegard giving him a chance to answer these outrageous accusations. The journalists who wrote this piece knew what they were going to write before they typed the first sentence.

The men and women I interviewed for Live Not By Lies, they know about all this. They saw, under communism, the way the press devoted itself to destroying enemies of the state and the ruling ideology by all kinds of lies and distortions. I’m telling you, they see it happening here. Some of you don’t want to listen, because you think it can’t happen here. It can, and it is. It’s well under way.

Read Winegard’s entire piece.

I don’t know anything about Winegard’s scientific work. For all I know, he doesn’t have any sympathy for people who believe the things I do about religion and politics. He might believe things that appall me. I don’t care. He sounds like exactly the kind of professor I loved when I was in college: someone who had convictions (perhaps wrong ones!), but who was fair, challenging, and who welcomed debate. The kind of professor who could have written something like this. Professors like that are no longer welcome at Marietta College, which, by firing him, has told the world the most important thing to know about Marietta College. Professors like him are increasingly no longer welcome in academia. Saw this on Twitter this morning:

No one on Twitter discusses contentious issues more civilly than Bo. I’ve disagreed with him on things minor & major, and he’s always up for real dialogue. Many come at him aggressively, and he tries dialogue with them too.

Some preach civility and don’t practice it. Bo does.

2/x

— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) March 7, 2020

Marietta College has given no public account of why it fired Bo Winegard. Let’s remember that it’s possible that there’s something going on here that we don’t know about, that would dramatically change the story. But I can say that based on what is publicly known as of this writing, what has been done to Bo Winegard is very, very wrong — and not only wrong, but evil. The gutless leaders of Marietta College are no different than gutless publishers who surrender to the woke mob. Winegard tweeted this morning:

Literally just got an email from the troll who was sending shit to my university (which likely led to my firing) that said “I win.”

This is why colleges shouldn’t cave to such callous social “justice” warriors.

Shameful.

— Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) March 7, 2020

And this:

Most American colleges are religious colleges, and their faith is Diversity.

— Darel E. Paul (@darelmass) March 7, 2020

Just before I was set to publish, I checked Winegard’s Twitter account, and saw this:

13/ I hate to do this, but if you want to help, then please think about funding me somehow. I set up this page https://t.co/rBDhjS1fRO

And I have a Patreon now: https://t.co/elMYWCvq7E

— Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) March 7, 2020

There simply has to be a place for independent-minded academics of the Left, Right, and Middle, to come together to do their work, to ask questions, to provide answers, and to teach. Wokeness is destroying academia, it’s destroying journalism, and it’s going to destroy publishing too. These are fundamental institutions within a free society. Will we not defend them? What will be there for our children? I admit that I have a soft spot for academic, artistic, and journalistic heretics. Not religious heretics — but then, the academy, the arts, and journalism are not supposed to be religious institutions. Right-winger though I am, I really do believe in the old-fashioned liberal view that you might be an appalling person, but that most (but not all)of the time, and in most (but not all) disputes, it is important for me to defend your right to speak. I would rather err on the side of allowing someone with whom I strongly disagreed to speak than to silence him.

Here’s something that Winegard said in an interview with Banter magazine that tells me that as nervous as academics like him make me when they talk about race and genetics, given human nature and the history of the 20th century, we need to listen to them:

Banter: You are on the front lines as an educator. How often do you see college students who needn’t be in college, and do you have any advice for those souls that the mantra of “everyone should/can be a student” has failed?

Winegard: I think we need to rethink our approach and our attitudes toward what humans can and can’t achieve. I think of intelligence/learning ability the same way I think about athleticism. Now, I’m a horrific athlete, just awful, and I tried to play sports, I wanted to be a good athlete, I was just terrible. And it was disappointing and in some sense humiliating. I think there are students that simply don’t have learning ability, they’re not as good at learning as other people are. It’s counterproductive and probably frustrating and humiliating for them to pretend that if they just worked harder they would be learning.

Banter: Can you put your finger on any of the more sinister mechanisms that might have propelled those people into colleges they shouldn’t be in, or educational paths they shouldn’t be on?

Winegard: I wouldn’t use the adjective ‘sinister’ because it makes it sound like there’s something nefarious going on. But, there are a few things at play: obviously colleges want more students because that’s how they make money, so of course they are going to emphasize the idea that people should go to college. Also, there’s this widely shared, I don’t want to call it blank slate, but environmentalist-oriented belief that everyone can succeed in college. I just don’t think that’s true. It’s pernicious in fact, because there are people who could have successful lives doing something else, and they’re stuck in a math class in college where they can’t possibly succeed, maybe they can scrape by and get D, but they’ll forget about it the second they leave and they’re just wasting a ton of money. It would be better if we punctured this myth and started to emphasize some other outlet for these people, some place in society that is dignified and respected that isn’t based on being hyper-educated or intelligent.

One of the problems with talking about this is that the term ‘intelligence’ is so loaded with social significance that if you say some people aren’t intelligent it sounds bad, it sounds insulting. But it’s true, there’s a distribution, a standard deviation and there are people with IQs of 80, 70, and it’s going to be incredibly hard for them to succeed at scholarly tasks. Expecting that they will do so is both painful for the person and counterproductive for society as a whole.

I would like to see us value labour that isn’t based on intelligence as much as possible. How do we provide meaning for these people? How can they belong to our coalition and succeed? It’s always a tough call because sometimes you get students who are struggling but then you turn them on to something and they get invigorated by it, they work hard, and it feels good as a professor. It’s tough, you never want to tell a specific individual they can’t make it, but we need to figure out the best way to gauge potential.

What he says here is absolutely true. I discovered it myself when I entered 11th grade at a gifted and talented school. The school’s premise was that gifted kids were equally gifted across the board. It was not an unreasonable premise, given that in order to get into this school, you pretty much needed to have all As on your report card. And I did. I didn’t enjoy math, but I did well in it in my normal public school.

But I got to this gifted school, and could not remotely keep up with many of my classmates. It was one of the most traumatic things that ever happened to me. I should have worked harder, heaven knows, but nearly forty years on from that experience, I am convinced that I couldn’t have kept up with those math geniuses no matter how hard I worked. I just didn’t have the natural ability. I gave up too soon, though, and retreated into myself. I shamed myself, felt terribly guilty over it all. Somehow I got through school, but I was so traumatized by it, and so filled with self-loathing, that I never again attempted math. Just yesterday, I was talking with my 16-year-old after a math tutorial in which he was talking about how he finds math hard, but boy, does he love geometry. It struck me that when I was his age, I loved geometry too — I really did! And I made As in it. But the next year, in a different, more advanced school, I lost all my interest in anything mathematical.

I’m not blaming the school here. I have to own up to my own failure to work as hard as I ought to have done. Still, it was as pointless to assume that everybody is equally good at math as it is to assume that everybody is equally good at science, or everybody is equally good at English, and so forth. We are so afraid of hierarchy in this culture that we will crush people who are naturally great, and crush people who naturally are not, with false expectations. I was a terrible athlete as a kid, just hopeless. I hated sports, and only participated because I wanted to make my dad happy. As soon as I was able to muster the courage to quit, I quit. Felt guilty as hell about that too, though it was easier for me to get over that than it was to get over failing at something intellectual. When I had boys of my own, I made sure that the one who didn’t like athletics never felt pressured to do them (he discovered cycling last year in college, on his own, and is totally devoted to it now), and the one who was naturally athletic knew that his dad would support any sport he wanted to try (he’s into weightlifting and bodybuilding).

After that long digression, my point is this: the kind of work heretics like Bo Winegard does is important, and challenges shibboleths that need challenging. They should not be suppressed because somewhere, there might be a Nazi in the woodpile. If we uncover a Nazi, find him, and expel him. What colleges are doing now is no different than fundamentalist schools firing scientists because evolutionary biology poses a threat to a particular theological account of Creation. People on the Left are very good at seeing the problem with that — but in perceiving the problem with their own rigid orthodoxies, not at all.

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‘The Plague’ Book Club.2

(This is Part Two of this blog’s online book club discussion of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague. Part One is here. Please do not participate in the comments unless you are reading, or have read, the book. I will allow relevant comments from readers who have not read the book on a case by case basis, but all commenters should keep their remarks tightly tied to the narrative itself, and not side issues. Keep in mind also that we’re reading ‘The Plague’ to help us reflect on what life might be like, and how we should behave, should the coronavirus pandemic upend life here as it has in China.)

Part Two brings with it a dramatic shift in Camus’s narrative. The first part was the big scene-setter, leading up to the closing of Oran’s gates. I have found the first chapters in Part Two to be so rich in observation and thought that I’ve read them twice.

We have met the people of Oran, and found them, in the author’s description, to be unreflective and immersed in everydayness. They never imagined something as life-changing as a siege by the bubonic plague, because they had come to think of themselves as modern people to whom catastrophes like that never happen. And yet, here it is. Now, all the townspeople are girding themselves for “the long period of exile that lay ahead.”

Now that they were cut off from the world outside, and even the possibility of normal communications with their loved ones outside the city gates, the people reconsidered the relationships they had taken for granted. Old Dr. Castel, who had a cordial, but only that, relationship with his wife, found that the two of them could not live apart. She was outside the city when the gates closed, but chose to enter the plague zone to be with him, risking a horrible death rather than live without her husband. More:

The narrator tells us that people quit thinking about when their exile might end, because in truth, nobody knew, and imagining that future, and the blessed reunion with their loved ones outside the gates, was a pain they could not easily bear. More:

“The incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.” What a piercing observation! I think of Dante’s meeting in Paradiso with his ancestor Cacciaguida, who prophesies the poet’s coming exile from Florence:

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:

this is the arrow that the bow of exile

shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know

how hard a path it is for one who goes

descending and ascending others’ stairs.

In Florence, bread is not salted. Every taste of bread outside the city will remind Dante of his exile. “Descending and ascending others’ stairs” refers to the fact that the exile will sleep each night in a house not his own. Many of us have known that kind of pain. Widows and widowers ache from it. People whose marriages have ended against their will know it. Mothers and fathers who have buried a child are on intimate terms with those purposeless memories. The great lamentation of the Psalmist, writing from the Jewish people’s exile, captures it well:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. (Ps. 137)

I’m not sure, though, that those memories are useless. Dante, like the Psalmist, used them to create great poetry. Christians believe that sorrowful suffering can be a pathway to redemption. But it can also be a road to defeat and despair. I don’t know where the narrator is going with this thought — that is, why he calls the memories of what once was “without purpose.” They do have a purpose, if we can build our redemption on those memories. Right?

More:

So they have been returned to the condition in which the plague found them: lost in the everyday. Except now, they are aware of their condition. That’s the difference. The plague has revealed to them the essential nature of the way they have chosen to live in ordinary times.

The narrator tells us that people created sorrows for themselves by perseverating on things they wish they had done with, or for, their loved ones — when they were free to choose their own path.

(Sorry for the sentence fragments; I can’t copy-and-paste from the electronic version of the book I have.)

The Narrator says that in the early days of the panic, nobody thought of their neighbor. Their trauma was such that even the words that passed between them seemed to be inadequate. The only thing anybody thought about were their loved ones outside the walls, and how painful was the separation. And that “egoism of love” saved them, because it kept them from panic, says the narrator. All they could think about was the day they would be reunited, and focused on it so intensely that those who were killed by the plague barely had time to think about what was happening to them.

After that very moving, philosophical chapter, the Narrator draws back to describe the way the townspeople behaved in the first days. They began by griping about the authorities — hey, we’re doing that now, aren’t we? — and still treated the reports of deaths as an abstraction.

Folks, I’m going to have to switch gears here. My laptop just crashed, and it signed me out abruptly from the electronic version of the book that I was working on to quote here. I’m having trouble signing back in electronically on my laptop, and will have to go to the library tomorrow to get this worked out. Fortunately, I have the book on my phone still, and can read there. I’m going to quote some more from Chapter 10 now, but leave it at that for tonight — there’s so much to digest in these two chapters. I plan to post again over the weekend, though; I don’t like leaving so many days between posts.

In Chapter 10, the Narrator says that the loss of economic activity (e.g., idled cranes at the port) was obvious, but “in spite of such unusual sights our townsfolk apparently found it hard to grasp what was happening to them.” Boy, does this ever ring true. Just a few minutes ago, I read this stunning post by a biologist, who explains what it means for a virus like this to spread exponentially within a population with no immunity (as the entire world is for this novel coronavirus). My sense is that most Americans, despite all the footage we’ve seen from China (including of cities where almost no economic activity has been happening for weeks now), have not yet come to grips with what this pandemic portends for us. They’re fixated on death rates, which, even if they’re multiples of the ordinary flu, are still going to be relatively small. What they’re not seeing is the non-mortality impact of this thing, on our health system and our economy. This book-club blog entry is not the place to argue about whether or not we’re reading the signs of the times correctly; I simply note that Camus’s fictional account describes what we’re living through now: a population that finds it “hard to grasp what [is] happening to them.”

The Narrator says people were “worried and irritated,” and responded by wanting to “abuse the authorities” — yep, that’s us. That’s certainly me, scandalized as I am by the incompetence of our political leadership, who watched China burn, and did not take prudent advantage of the six weeks or so we had to prepare. The Narrator tells us that even as the bodies began to pile up in the morgue, people still negotiated with reality, wondering if all these people dying wasn’t still within the normal order of things. It was only when people began to experience tangible changes in their lives — electricity cuts, shortages in stores, idled businesses — that they started to take it seriously. Even so, says the Narrator, people still mostly focused on their own feelings.

I find the description of poor Grand’s falling in love, and then his wife leaving him, so moving. He says he lost the words to tell her how he felt about her. He says to Dr. Rieux, “A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me — only I couldn’t.” I hear in these words the plaintive cry of a man who believes that the power of his fate lie in his words, or lack thereof. Recently I read an academic critic of postmodernism saying that the fundamental error that postmodernists make is their naive faith in the power of words to create and govern reality. I’m not saying that Camus anticipated the postmodernists (though perhaps he did, I don’t know), but I am saying that there is something modern, perhaps, in Grand’s analysis of why he lost his wife. We know from earlier chapters that Grand, the modest civil servant, is trying hard to write a book, but the words just won’t come.

Compare Grand’s diagnosis of why his wife left him with the story we hear from Rambert, the Paris journalist, who meets Dr. Rieux on the street, and tries to talk him into giving him a certificate of health so he can leave Oran and get back to Paris, and the woman he loves. Rieux tells him that’s impossible, but Rambert doesn’t want to hear it. Rieux suggests that it’s not the worst thing, being a journalist living in the middle of a big story like this. Rambert says that his mission in life is not to write newspaper articles, but to love this woman. Rieux says that may be, but there’s no way he can get out of the city.

“But I don’t belong here,” Rambert protests.

Ah, life! Isn’t it like that? We feel that we are not able to do what we are meant to be doing, and we tell ourselves that we don’t belong there, living that kind of life, when we were made for something else. Rambert also has a naive belief in the power of words: he thinks Dr. Rieux’s signature on a piece of paper declaring him plague-free will somehow open the gates of the quarantined city for him. He accuses Rieux of being heartless. He can’t face the truth, because as Camus told us earlier in the novel, Rambert, like everybody else in Oran, is a humanist, and feels in his bones that everything should work out for good.

Rambert rebukes the doctor. “You’ll soon be talking about the interests of the general public. But public welfare is merely the sum total of the private welfares of each of us.”

There is an entire stance towards life in that line. After Rambert parts in anger, Rieux wonders: did Rambert have a point? Am I being too abstract? But then he settles his mind: “Still, when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it.” There is an entire stance towards life in that line, too.

The chapter ends with a description of the exhaustion of Dr. Rieux’s days, bearing witness to the death agonies of patients under his care. Thinking of this, Rieux comes to realize that “one grows out of pity when it’s useless.” This, says the Narrator, caused the doctor’s heart to close in on itself, and it was the only thing that gave him the strength to do his duty. Rambert didn’t yet know this; the abstraction of the plague “was all that stood in the way of his happiness.” Yet the time may arrive when abstraction proves stronger than happiness. What then?

The drama of the town’s life, concludes the Narrator, became a struggle between “each man’s happiness and the abstractions of the plague.”

The people of Oran are struggling with the plague. But is this not a metaphor for the human condition? Even absent a plague, don’t all of us live between what we desire for ourselves, and think will make us happy, and the brute fact of limitation, of suffering, and ultimately, of death? I am thinking at this moment of a man I once knew, decades ago, who was in an unhappy marriage. By his account, his wife was harsh and unfeeling. Their kids were grown and out of the house. He was miserable. “Why don’t you divorce her?” I asked. I knew from our past conversations that he wasn’t a religious man, so that was no barrier.

“I made a vow,” he said, and would not look at me. He said it with such finality, and with such pain in his voice, that I didn’t challenge him. I was a lot younger then — in my twenties, at the start of my career — and simply did not understand him. This man was in maybe his early fifties — probably close to the age I am now, come to think of it. I kept track of him over the years, and though he eventually died, I know from the obituary I read that he never divorced. The man was a white Southern male of my father’s generation. I know the type well: Stoic, determined never, ever to let the corruption of the world violate the inner sanctum. The abstraction that kept him from his happiness was his wedding vows, which, I suspect, were tied tightly to his sense of honor. But now that I’ve been married for over twenty years, I understand that these vows are not an abstraction when you are prepared to sacrifice to make them real. Maybe that’s what I didn’t understand about that man those many years ago: that he had to harden himself to a situation he had no power to change (as he saw it) so he could do his duty as an honorable man. The drama of that man’s life was a struggle between his individual happiness and the abstractions of his personal code of honor, which required him to endure a joyless, loveless marriage.

I wonder at what point that man ceased to pity himself, because it was useless; it would only keep him from doing his duty. What was it like for him to think of the happy days of his marriage (for nobody enters into a marriage that’s bad from the beginning)? Were these memories of his past love, for this man, “the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company of a memory that serves no purpose”?

Time for bed. How strange that reading this novel of a fictional plague brought to my mind the sadness of a lonely man and a conversation I had decades ago. I did not imagine that I would end my night with that suffering man front to mind, and planning to say a prayer for his soul before lights-out. What an amazing book about the human condition Albert Camus has written.

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The Woody Allen Witch Hunt

Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, announced this week that it would soon publish a memoir by Woody Allen. This came as a surprise to many employees of the publishing giant. Today, a number of them staged a walkout in protest. From the NYT:

The free-speech nonprofit PEN America defended the Hachette workers’ right to protest, as well as the company’s right to publish the book.

“We believe everyone — including authors and publishing employees — has the right to express their opinions and raise their voices in protest. That said, we also are concerned about the trend of pressuring the withdrawal of books from publication and circulation, depriving readers of the chance to make their own judgments and disincentivizing publishers from taking on contentious topics,” Suzanne Nossel, its chief executive, said in a statement. “While we don’t take a position on the editorial judgments in question, we think that once a book is slated for publication, it should not be withdrawn just because it’s controversial or gives rise to vociferous objections.”

Here’s a tweet about the event:

75 plus employees of Hachette are standing in solidarity with @ronanfarrow, @realdylanfarrow and survivors of sexual assault and walked out of the Hachette offices today in protest of Woody Allen’s memoir. #HachetteWalkout #LittleBrownWalkout pic.twitter.com/wTNi3c7gy8

— Kendra Barkoff Lamy (@kabarkoff) March 5, 2020

I would love to know something about the demographics of the crowd — specifically, how many of the walkout protesters are under the age of 40. The reason I ask is because for a long time now, I’ve been hearing from conservative academics that as the old-school liberals move into retirement, they are being replaced by Millennial and Gen Z academics who are Jacobins, with no respect for liberal values of free speech, free inquiry, and expression.

Slate published an anonymous interview with one of today’s protesters. Excerpt:

Do you see any value in publishing the book?

I do not. Perhaps [Allen] still has fans, but I don’t think any of that matters in the slightest considering the things he’s been accused of doing.

How many people walked out?

Around 75. It wasn’t just from Little, Brown. There were people from Grand Central and Orbit, but the majority of the people were from Little, Brown. Most of my team walked out. The people I work with are so amazing. Normally in publishing, we’d be told to defend the company but my entire publicity team is women, and our director supported us in walking out. Especially, in publishing, which is historically older white men and problematic, it’s nice to know there’s a team like this.

What do you hope the walkout will accomplish?

We want the book to be canceled. It’s going to be expensive, but it’s the right thing to do. We want a public apology from the CEO. This has ruined a really amazing relationship that Little, Brown had with Ronan Farrow, who’s been in touch with us and sent us support. The least they can do is cancel the book.

This scares the hell out of me. Here’s why.

Grand Central Publishing brought out my 2013 book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. The editor who acquired the book left the company a few years ago, and I haven’t had any contact with GCP since around 2014. I had nothing but a great experience working with them. Put me down as standing 100 percent in their defense on this Woody Allen thing, solely as a matter of principle.

I say that as someone who used to be a Woody Allen fan, but soured badly on him after the Soon-Yi scandal broke in the early 1990s. What he did was morally reprehensible — a symbolic form of incest. I think he’s a real creep. I have found it difficult to watch his movies since all that. I am not the target audience for this book.

I also say it as someone who cannot be fairly considered to be soft on child abusers. My record of reporting on the child sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, and speaking out in harsh criticism of the bishops for their role in it, cannot be denied. I lost my Catholic faith over it all — the most painful experience of my life. I would do it all again (though somewhat differently, as I’ve explained elsewhere). It was, and is, extremely important to stand up for victims of sexual abuse, especially children. I regard the #MeToo movement mostly favorably, because I recall being part of the NYC film journalism community in the late 1990s, and hearing stories from sources within Miramax about what a horrible bully Harvey Weinstein was to others, but not being able to get anybody to go on the record about it. Harvey was really that powerful. It is justice that he is sitting in a cell on Rikers Island tonight.

That said, we do not know if Woody Allen abused Dylan Farrow. He has been accused of doing so. He was investigated and not charged. Perhaps he really is guilty, but investigators didn’t find enough evidence to charge him. Perhaps he was, and is, falsely accused. I don’t know. I don’t know that anybody other than Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow will ever know. I don’t blame Ronan Farrow for severing his relationship with Hachette over this. He believes his sister, and I respect that. That doesn’t make his judgment on Woody Allen’s behavior correct, obviously, but I understand why he has made the decision that he has made.

But employees of a publishing house demanding that the publishing house not publish a book because its author is a pariah to them is something very, very different.

Notice what this anonymous publicist within Hachette told Slate: “I don’t think any of that matters in the slightest considering the things he’s been accused of doing.”

Accused. Woody Allen has never been tried in a court of law. He was investigated, but Dylan’s mother, Mia Farrow, declined to press charges. He is judged guilty of a sex crime by this protesters simply on the basis of an accusation.

It is a vile thing he is accused of. In this 2014 piece, Dylan Farrow talks openly about what she says her father did to her sexually when she was seven. She might be telling the truth. Hear me: Dylan Farrow might well be telling the truth. 

But we don’t know that for certain. We probably never will. Read the Wikipedia page devoted to the case; this is an extremely complicated affair. Are we never supposed to listen to anything Woody Allen has to say about anything else because he stands accused, and an accusation is as good as guilty?

This is not like that French pedophile writer, who was open about his pedophilia, and still praised and celebrated for ages by the French elites. That writer never denied his pedophilia — he was quite open about it. There can be no doubt that Woody Allen has a thing for young women, and yes, it’s gross (try watching Manhattan again, and his scenes with Mariel Hemingway), but he has vigorously denied these allegations of child sexual abuse, and again, they have never been subject to court scrutiny.

Would I be surprised if that were to happen, and they were actually true? No, I would not. Would I be surprised if Woody Allen made a deathbed confession of this crime? No, I would not. But we are not supposed to live in a society in which someone who has merely been accused of a horrible thing finds himself unable to publish a book telling his side of the story, or silenced because the cultural winds have shifted. Thirty years ago, or less, children who made accusations against powerful men were not believed. Women too. It is not progress to go from disbelieving women and children as a matter of course to believing them reflexively. We think we are advancing justice, but really we are just rearranging our prejudices.

But look, my argument here is not with people who think Woody Allen is guilty. My argument is with publishing industry employees who demand that the book be canceled. My argument, as a writer and former editor, is about professional standards in a liberal society. I’ve been a professional journalist for over thirty years. In some of that time, I was the editor of a Sunday commentary section of a major metropolitan daily. As an opinion columnist, I was a conservative. I saw my job as section editor to publish a section that was editorially balanced. That meant helping writers whose views I did not agree with — strongly, at times — shape their essays into the best and most persuasive versions possible. I think abortion is abhorrent, but I saw it as my professional duty to publish as many pro-choice pieces as pro-life ones — and not just to put a desultory pro-choice column in the paper so I could be technically “balanced,” but to publish the best pro-choice piece I could find. If I ever thought that I could not have done that in good conscience, I would have quit. Editors have that responsibility.

Journalists also love to complain about their employers. Go to a bar where journalists gather, and you will find endless — and endlessly entertaining — bitching sessions in which writers run down their editors, the publisher, and bean counters, and so forth, and talk about what they would do different if only they were in charge. I’ve been part of those scrums at every newspaper at which I’ve worked. With some distance from all that, I can see that sometimes we were prima donnas … but I can also see that sometimes we were right on target. And yet, it never would have occurred to me — or, I think, any of my colleagues — to walk off the job to protest the editorial policy of the newspaper. That would be an appalling lack of professionalism. If, say, a journalist at the newspaper landed an exclusive interview with Woody Allen, in which he denied all the allegations, we might have gathered around the bar to complain about what Woody Allen said in the paper, but we never would have faulted the paper for publishing the interview. Why would we? Woody Allen — like everybody else — might be a hero or a villain, but he has the right to speak his mind.

True, neither a newspaper, magazine, or book publisher is obliged to publish his words, but to refuse to do so solely on the basis of an unproven allegation is a hell of a thing. But that’s exactly what these protesters are demanding. Why are they in the book business? I mean it. Where does this stop? Do publishing employees (or journalists at newspapers) reserve to themselves the right to dictate who their employers can and cannot publish, based on the sentiment of their employees? It’s Woody Allen today, but tomorrow, it could be someone less vividly controversial who has nevertheless gotten on the wrong side of the woke mob.

We have seen these past few years important liberal institutions – universities and academic associations, chiefly – surrendering to the illiberal demands of the progressive mob. Now it’s moving into publishing. I hope Hachette will stand firm. If the protesting employees win, then precedent established will give staffers a heckler’s veto over editorial decisions – and any writer whose work, personal life, or demographic status (“older white men”) offends militant progressives within a publishing house will find their livelihoods in jeopardy.

In fact, if Hachette were to announce plans to publish the memoirs of Ted McCarrick or Harvey Weinstein, it would turn my stomach, but I would still defend the publisher. Despite the undeniable and catastrophic moral failings of these powerful men – and in Weinstein’s case, proven crimes — they still would be writers with important stories to tell. That’s what publishing (and journalism) is supposed to be about, and what it must always be about. If you don’t agree, then your vocation might be to the ministry or politics, but not the making and selling of books.

One more time: I do not like Woody Allen, I think his sexual exploits have been ugly, and I have no interest in buying his book. But I strongly defend his right to write the book, and the decision of Grand Central Publishing to publish it, because I don’t want any writer to have to face cancellation by an internal revolt of publishing industry employees. It’s a terrible, illiberal precedent. Yale University, like many other institutions, have surrendered to the demands of the woke mob. Stand firm, Hachette!

One more thing. A fellow Hachette writer tweets:

So apparently my publisher decided to put out a memoir by a notorious child sexual abuser, and the employees have walked off to show solidarity with survivors. As they should. Come on, @HachetteUS, don’t do this. #HachetteWalkout

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) March 5, 2020

Wait, “a notorious child sexual abuser”? This is libelous. N.K. Jemisin joins the mob today, but what happens tomorrow when she finds herself on the wrong side of an issue, based on an unsupported accusation alone, or because she has become associated with an unpopular viewpoint, and there are publishing industry employees clamoring for Hachette to cancel her books? Who will she expect to stand up for her? As I say above, if the employees win here, it will be terrible for writers, because it will give all a publisher’s staff a veto over who gets published.

If the employees feel so strongly about the wrongness of publishing the Woody Allen memoir, then they should resign. That would be a sacrifice worthy of respect. But as far as I can tell, nobody is offering to surrender their job on principle. They are rather demanding that other people pay the financial cost of their #MeToo moral convictions, and their abandonment of professional responsibility.

So, you can count me as a Grand Central/Hachette author who stands up for victims of child sex abuse — and who has done so at significant personal cost — but who in this case, also stands up for a writer, and his publisher. I cannot believe that I’m taking this stand in defense of someone as unsympathetic as Woody Allen, but the principle of the thing is what’s most important here.

UPDATE: Too late, too late:

BREAKING: Hachette Book Group has decided that it will not publish Woody Allen’s memoir A Propos of Nothing, originally scheduled for sale in April 2020, and will return all rights to the author.

— Shelf Awareness (@ShelfAwareness) March 6, 2020

So if you get on the wrong side of the woke mob, neither the fact that the accusation against you has not been proved, nor your status as one of the most important film artists of the 20th century, will help. My God.

Who’s next?

UPDATE.2: More details on Hachette’s call, from the NYT. Excerpt:

Hachette Book Group on Friday dropped its plans to publish Woody Allen’s autobiography and said it would return all rights to the author, a day after its employees protested its deal with the filmmaker.

“The decision to cancel Mr. Allen’s book was a difficult one,” a spokeswoman for the publisher said in a statement. “We take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books. As publishers, we make sure every day in our work that different voices and conflicting points of views can be heard.”

Bulls**t. They caved to the progressive mob. Now woke 27-year-olds can push around the head of publishing houses, and determine who can and cannot be published. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Still available from Hachette Book Group: the autobiography of Joey, a “gripping” account of a mafia serial killer who copped to 38 murders. You’ll be wowed by “the frank intelligence of” the author! https://t.co/J5i0l72Awx https://t.co/XUROWnaox3

— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) March 6, 2020

UPDATE.3: Yep:

The Hachette decision to drop the Woody Allen book makes me very uneasy. It's not him; I don't give a damn about Mr. Allen. It's who gets muzzled next that worries me.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 6, 2020

 

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Make America As Great As South Korea Again!

America, we have a problem. From The Atlantic:

It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?

This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.

But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found.

“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”

Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.

More:

The figures we gathered suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that of other developed countries. The CDC confirmed eight days ago that the virus was in community transmission in the United States—that it was infecting Americans who had neither traveled abroad nor were in contact with others who had. In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.

Read the whole thing. It is a freaking scandal. But President Larry Vaughn says all is well:

With approximately 100,000 CoronaVirus cases worldwide, and 3,280 deaths, the United States, because of quick action on closing our borders, has, as of now, only 129 cases (40 Americans brought in) and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 5, 2020

It is FAKE NEWS that @HHSGov @SecAzar is “sidelined” from the great job he is doing on the CoronaVirus Task Force. He has the total confidence of the @VP and myself, and is doing a fantastic job, as the numbers would indicate!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 6, 2020

The numbers are so low because we are not doing much testing!

Make America Great Again? Hell, I wish we were half as good at responding to coronavirus as South Korea.

I don’t know if it’s much of a comfort to conclude that our president is not only lying to us, but he’s also lying to himself.

UPDATE: Oh look, now America is facing generic drug shortages, because of the China situation. Just like Wyoming Doctor warned two or three weeks ago, but people thought he was a hysteric.

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Annals Of Anti-Christian Europe

Two items this morning from post-Christian — indeed, anti-Christian — Europe.

First, a church in Edinburgh has been kicked out of a venue where it was going to have a summer conference because one of the speakers, an American evangelist, holds traditional Christian views on homosexuality. The City of Edinburgh is the venue owner; it is a public space. Excerpt:

The council said at the time: “We’re committed to promoting diversity and equal rights for all. We have high standards, which we expect those hiring and visiting our venues to respect and observe. We have cancelled this booking and served notice to terminate the contract.”

Now Destiny Church is trying to raise £150,000 to cover the cost of legal action against the city council over the cancellation.

A fundraising page set up at GoFundMe has so far raised over £12,000.

In a video update to supporters, the church’s founder, Andrew Owen said that the council’s actions should be of concern to churches everywhere.

“We as Christians are facing a crisis in our nation,” he said.

Addressing the cancellation, he said: “If that is allowed to stand, every single church in the UK will face the same challenges. You will be locked out of public venues, you will be locked out of the public space.”

Traditional Christians as pariahs. No better than racists. Drive them out of the public square!

The Scottish church being bullied by the City of Edinburgh has launched a Go Fund Me to pay for their legal fight against the city. Help if you can.

Meanwhile, in Finland, the police inquiry into the Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen, a Lutheran who believes that all Lutherans believed about same-sex behavior until the day before yesterday, continue to persecute her. I interviewed her about her ongoing ordeal last year. It continues. From a statement she released this week:

A moment ago I received information from the Finnish police that Ms. Raija Toiviainen, Prosecutor General of Finland, has ordered criminal investigations of my comments on two television programmes, interviews, first with Maria Vietola and then with Ruben Stiller. This is how the third and fourth criminal investigations of my speech are getting underway. I have already been interrogated on two separate occasions by the Helsinki Central Police in Pasila, and now there will be at least two further interrogations. In my opinion, this situation is inconceivable and totally absurd.

TV host Maria Veitola came to my home for an overnight on her serial programme “Yökylässä Maria Veitola” [Maria Veitola, Overnight visit], broadcast on Finnish MTV3 on 1 Feb. 2018 and on Finnish TV-channel AVA on 27 June 2018. In this programme we discussed the Bible, the significance of Jesus, of sin and of grace. This mandate of a new investigation addresses very similar comments on homosexuality as those taken from my pamphlet published in 2004.

The second order for criminal investigation is for my appearance in one episode of the YlePuhe [The Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, Talk Show] series with host Ruben Stiller on the topic “What would Jesus think about homosexuals?”[translated]. This was broadcast on 20 Dec. 2019 at 1:02 pm. This radio discussion can be found at the following link: here.

Previously, the police had reached decisions regarding both these programmes that there was no reason to initiate a preliminary investigation as no crime had been committed.

The police arrived at a similar conclusion last autumn with respect to my pamphlet: “Male and female He created them”, 2004, Luther Foundation Finland [here]. Nonetheless, the Prosecutor General proceeded to order a preliminary investigation of this booklet, which is why I was interrogated by the police earlier this week [2 March 2020]. The preliminary investigation of my Tweet from last summer has been completed, and that case is now under consideration for whether or not to raise criminal charges.

These requests for investigations and the criminal procedures arising out of them are attempts to restrict free speech and the freedom of religion. Concurrently, there is a danger that the media and publishers will begin to limit certain topics of discussion and leave particular discussants outside public discourse. We must not yield to the vicious circle of fear and being silenced.

This is breathtaking. The prosecutorial powers of the state are being brought to bear against a Christian woman who is merely talking in the media about her religious beliefs.

The Homintern is real. Don’t read this and think, “Wow, too bad for them, but thank God we live in America.” It’s coming here too. We have a First Amendment, but US Christians and church groups are going to have to go to court to fight for it. Thank God for organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom. If you’re a church person, you should be directing some of your tithe to it. The liberty you save may be your own.

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