Rod Dreher's Blog, page 170

Coronavirus Gets Real

I’ve been driving all day from Dallas, and am just now getting caught up on the news. Things appear to have gotten a lot more real on the coronavirus front today. From the NYT:

Americans should brace for the likelihood that the coronavirus will spread to communities in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday.

“It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country anymore but a question of when this will happen,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

… “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad,” Dr. Messonnier said.

More:

Lawmakers from both parties made it clear they were unconvinced the Trump administration was prepared. When Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, pressed for an exact number of people expected to be infected, the acting secretary of the Homeland Security Department, Chad F. Wolf, could not answer.

“I’m all for committees and task forces but you’re the secretary,” Mr. Kennedy responded. “I think you ought to know that answer.

He’s right about that. It’s not like this thing sprung out of nowhere. I don’t expect this or any president to keep a global pandemic out of America. If the Chinese, a dictatorship and one of the world’s most advanced police states, can’t stop it, a democratically elected leader in an open society can’t. Nevertheless, this is exactly the kind of crisis that one worried that a president as incompetent and disengaged as Trump would face. If this is the narrative the president is relying on, we’re in trouble:

“It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Limbaugh said during his Monday show. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

You’d think Limbaugh, who was just diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer, and whose immune system will be devastated by the chemo he’s about to receive, would be a bit more sober about what a serious respiratory virus would mean for people like him. But no, that’s not how he rolls.

Last week, some people on this blog’s comments section were saying that this really couldn’t be such a big deal, because the stock markets weren’t reacting negatively. This week, so far, the Dow Jones has dropped 1,900 points. And oh, look: experts are predicting that China will use this public health crisis to increase its monitoring of its people. This will happen here too, if we have serious trouble from coronavirus. Watch.

Here’s something interesting: Iran’s deputy health minister, who has been briefing the press, raised eyebrows earlier in the week when he repeatedly mopped his brow as a government spokesman talked. Folks wondered if he might have coronavirus. Today he confirmed that yes, he is infected:

Deputy Health Minister of #Iran Harirchi who is infected with #CoronaVirus had a joint presser along with spokesman of the government Rabiei yesterday among journalists. A footage published earlier had raised suspicion that he might had been infected with the virus. pic.twitter.com/IWKsga06SC

— Abas Aslani (@AbasAslani) February 25, 2020

While I was on the road today, the Doctor wrote from out West to say that at the hospital where he works, they have begun mandatory drills on using P95 masks and hazmat suits. They’re getting ready. When patients ask him how to prepare, he tells them this, and gives them a written version:

It is your civic duty to remain calm. It is your civic duty to prepare yourself if, God forbid, the worst occurs. You must have a month of non-perishable food ready. If the numbers are correct, and if this gets started here, almost 100% of us will have this virus before the next 12-24 months. Ninety percent of us will have a mild, cold-like syndrome, or absolutely nothing at all. I do not believe there is any way to stop that. There is certainly nothing you, I, or anyone else can do.

But you can help yourself and your family and your country by remaining strong — remaining brave — and as hard as it is, do not let panic descend into your psyche. When you see things happening here in the USA, be prepared at a moment’s notice to bug out [Note: I think by this he means “take action” — RD] — but do not panic. Pray, take deep breaths, do whatever you need to do. Think about your neighbors, your family members, your church members, and any frail elderly in your sphere of influence. This is going to be an “all for one and one for all” moment in our history — and we will be remembered 100 years from now how we handle this.

And the most important thing: WE CAN DO IT.

Preparing now makes it less likely that you will panic later. Again: top federal health officials said today that this is almost certainly going to hit us. Do not take health advice from Rush Limbaugh. Prepare.

Finally, I want to commend to you Ross Douthat’s column saying that the coronavirus is not just a health crisis, but a “test.” His basic argument is that none of us have been taking this thing seriously enough — and that both liberals and conservatives have particular reasons why they’ve failed at this. Excerpts:

From what we can tell, the coronavirus outbreak in China followed a similar pattern of “all is well” folly and insufficient first response. But in the United States, too, the “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” messaging seems inapt, given that America’s slow internal response, our apparent failure so far to expand testing beyond those who seem most obviously exposed, means that we have no way of knowing whether and how many cases are already circulating here. We may have an Italian scenario on our hands already, disguised as normal flu cases, normal flu deaths; given the still-limited scale of United States testing, there is no way to be sure, and if we escape a major outbreak, it will be more from luck than prudence.

So already, the virus has exposed a clear weak spot in what you might call the liberal-globalist imagination: an overzealous “remain calm” spirit in the face of the real risks of a hyper-connected world.

More:

But before populists crow their vindication, we need to see how our populist president handles any of this. If globalism’s weakness is technocratic naïveté, populism’s faults are ignorance, incompetence and paranoia. Nothing about President Trump’s response so far instills confidence that he’s ready for the kind of crisis that Candidate Trump would have been quick to recognize and politically exploit.

Read it all.

OK, I’m not going to leave you on that note. I’m going to leave you on this one: my pals Susannah Black and Tara Isabella Burton were in Venice for Carnevale when coronavirus struck Italy, even Venice. Read Susannah’s dispatch, and marvel at this amazing old world.

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‘Woke Side Story’

Somehow, I avoided the 1961 film version of West Side Story until one night last summer, when, looking for something to watch with the kids, we settled on it. It was wonderful — especially Rita Moreno’s performance. Movie musicals aren’t exactly my cup of tea, but the exuberance of that one was completely charming.

Naturally, the wokesters hate it, and want it cancelled. To be woke is to live in perpetual fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying life. Here’s Carina del Valle Schorske writing in — where else? — The New York Times, about why West Side Story ought to be put out of its misery. Excerpts:

My mother taught me to resist the cartoonish stereotypes of macho teenage gangsters and hysterical lovers in “West Side Story.” But I also know that when the 1961 movie version came out, she and her friends went to see it twice at the local theater in Washington Heights and cheered when the Sharks came onscreen. If this musical is still our narrative ghetto, then the least we can do is make noise about what it feels like to live in it.

In 2020, it feels exhausting.

Gosh, lady. Thoughts and prayers. More:

Right from the beginning, these recent [Puerto Rican immigrant] arrivals didn’t like what they saw on Broadway. New York’s most widely circulated Spanish-language newspaper at the time, La Prensa, called for a picket at the premiere, and the Puerto Rican journalist and labor organizer Jesús Colón lamented that the show was “superficial and sentimental” and “always out of context with the real history, culture, and traditions of my people.” In subsequent decades, this tradition of protest and critique has only grown richer and more collectively exasperated.

Mr. Bernstein’s music and Jerome Robbins’s choreography are often cited as the musical’s redeeming features by its liberal defenders; a critical Los Angeles Times review of the 2009 Broadway revival nonetheless praised the “extraordinary variety and operatic fullness” of the score and the “ecstasy” of the dance numbers. But I’ve always been baffled by how the musical’s creators squandered the opportunity to engage the genius of Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms. The gym scene “mambo” is not, rhythmically, a mambo, and the famous rooftop number “America” has the Sharks dancing a Spanish-from-Spain paso doble mishmashed with whitewashed showbiz jazz.

That’s almost as bad as Puccini not utilizing gagaku music in Madame Butterfly! Cancel him!

Read it all. It’s a great hate-read. The sheer joylessness of these people, the woke, is a thing to behold. These politicized miserabilists should be kept as far away from cultural power as possible.

(Readers, I’m going to be driving all day, and won’t be able to approve comments till I get back home.)

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Toxic Theory Ate Her Brain

The Guardian, the voice of the liberal British cultural establishment, is rocking the crazy here. In this case, Emily Halnon discusses her boyfriend’s decision to wear a wedding dress to their wedding. You see, her Ian likes lady’s clothing:

On the first weekend we hooked up, I had to yank a green sparkly dress over his head to unclothe him. Foreplay involved palming his glittery glutes while dancing to Kesha’s Woman and caressing his furry thigh along a hemline so tight you could almost see the outlines of each and every hair follicle beneath it.

“That was the first time I’ve undressed a man – from a dress!” I shrieked the next morning. My palms slapped the concrete countertop as I regaled my housemate Eli with stories from the night before.

“Oh girl, what an exciting milestone! Congratulations!” hollered Eli, an effervescent gay man who dons many dresses himself and is supportive of any man excited to do the same.

Intellectually, I enjoyed that Ian was rejecting gender norms and expectations. But physically, my desire didn’t match.

Those feelings illuminated some unanticipated boundaries of where I define attractiveness in men and when I still crave traditional masculinity. I realized I wanted less dress and more flannel shirts, trucker hats and sandstone Carhartts.

When we left the store that day, Ian had a big bundle of wedding dress and I had some big questions to consider.

And:

When I started hanging out with Ian and he immediately wanted to talk about feelings, it was a gulp of ice-cold lemonade on a 98-degree day. I’d been craving this vulnerability and openness from the men I dated. Conversations like that one in the car drew me to him like a charged magnet, as did hisemotional openness, his fondness for communication, and his public displays of affection for close male friends.

My boyfriend’s wedding dress pushed me to perform a scrupulous inventory of my deepest ideas about masculinity and helped me identify my shortfalls as a woman who wants to help rewrite gender norms. As I went through this exercise, I chatted with a handful of girlfriends about it, who could all identify their own small hang-ups with masculinity: their need for men who are bigger and taller than they are, or who are better than them at sports, or who don’t cry in front of them.

As we interrogated our feelings about masculinity, we recognized gaps between our ideals and reality. I’m quick to blame men for perpetuating toxic behavior, but in this case, I, the woman, was part of the problem.

Read it all.

Who’s going to tell Emily the truth about Ian?

Identity politics and critical theory have done a number on this poor girl’s head. “As we interrogated our feelings about masculinity…” Well, gosh. I found a short author’s profile of her on a feminist website. It says, “She could do without the patriarchy.” That’s how you end up married to a dude in a dress.

Imagine being a society ruled by a cultural elite so rich and decadent that this kind of thing is considered a virtue.

In a few years, when Ian decides to cut his weenus off and undertake a transition, either the Guardian or The New York Times will be there to publish Emily’s celebratory op-ed.

UPDATE: I read the piece incorrectly in one respect: she didn’t marry this weirdo; he just wore a wedding dress because he’s into it. Still, the main point holds.

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The Politics Of Plague

A reader forwarded me a note from his nephew, and American who teaches in Japan. I’m posting it with his permission; I’ve slightly edited it to take out identifying details:

This idea that the epidemic is well under way in the U.S. is front headlines on Yahoo Japan this morning (which is different than Yahoo elsewhere in the world now; independent division and a primary news source in Japan); it is also in the prime news talk shows as well; that the ‘flu season’ in the U.S. could also be reporting on a portion of a coronavirus epidemic well underway.  Furthermore, another Japanese doctor speculates that the U.S. under reported (or blacked out)  epidemic was *concurrent* to the Chinese outbreak, or extremely close in timing.  This has led to speculation that there was a simultaneous attack/release (or a defensive counterattack after discovering corona virus in the U.S.). Of course, people are freaked out, so we are keeping a somewhat skeptical stance, but that this is in the mainstream Japanese is noteworthy.

The Princess Diamond was a fiasco and is likely to be the death knell of current administration; the backlash is so strong that the military has finally been activated to take over handling the ship and calls are for the military to handle further steps in managing the ongoing outbreaks here — there is greater trust in the military protocols than trusting elected bureaucrats (who infected many of their own staff already, Keystone Cops as they proved to be).

We decided to pull our son out of the last three weeks of classes starting Monday.  I am prepping my teaching for April for online teaching; we think there is a good chance that classes will not resume normally — if they try to, I may quit.  My wife can still work from home and we can hunker down pretty effectively — at this point we want to buy time until more effective treatments are tested.  Broader Japanese society realizes that life as we knew it is over.

There was a terrible famine in Russia, in 1891-92.  The tsarist government botched the handling of the catastrophe. This deeply undermined public confidence in the political order, and threw fuel on the smoldering revolutionary fire. Do not doubt for a moment how the state’s inability to handle a major public health crisis can shake the political order to its foundations. The American people already have very low confidence in our public institutions. We could be headed into uncharted waters, and indeed, may already be in them, but we just don’t realize it yet.

I’m eager to hear from readers in Japan, South Korea, Italy, and elsewhere dealing with outbreaks…

UPDATE: The Doctor says I should include the news that President Trump was furious about the decision to bring 14 infected Americans from that cruise ship back to the US — a decision that the CDC refused to sign off on. From the NYT:

President Trump was infuriated that 14 American citizens who had tested positive for coronavirus were permitted to return this week to the United States, said two senior administration officials. The decision had taken the president, a self-declared “germophobe,” by surprise.

Officials at the State Department decided to bring back the citizens, who had been quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, after consulting with a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services. But officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention objected, concerned that the passengers, among hundreds of Americans being evacuated from the ship, could spread the virus. News organizations reported on the decision on Monday, and the passengers arrived in the United States that day.

How on earth could the State Department go ahead and do something so dangerous to public health that the CDC refused to endorse it? Well, it happened.

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Bernie & Solidarity

I mentioned over the weekend that I had a remarkable conversation with the Uber driver who took me to the wedding reception this past weekend in Dallas. His profile: 24 years old, African-American, college degree, drowning in student loan debt, living at home with his mom and working like mad to pay off the debt so he can start life. He is a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer. I listened to him talk about why he’s for Sanders. All the usual woke language we hear from the Left never once came up. For him, it was entirely about a system that appears to him to have locked his generation out of what he said, “the things your generation took for granted that you would have, sir”: the possibility of a stable middle class life, including home ownership.

It was an Uber ride, not a political debate. I felt like I should not argue with this young man, but rather just listen. He was really impressive, and idealistic, in the best sense. He explained that he felt that if he wanted things to change for him and his generation, that he needed to get involved in politics. I realized, listening to him, that the things he says he wants are perfectly normal (I would have said that anyway), but I also realized that there is no reason at all for him to vote Republican. Certainly not vote Trump. And again, this is not for any reasons of woke social policy; this is about economics.

I realized that I am in a fairly stable place economically, and can afford to pay a lot of attention to my most important issues: religious liberty and abortion. I believe these issues would be supremely important even if I were poor and struggling. But I also have to concede that it would probably be hard to recognize those truths if I were in the economic position of this young man, and believed that the system was stacked against me. If you are an American politician, and you didn’t instantly sympathize with this young man — a man who was out on Saturday night not partying, but rather hustling to make money to pay off his loans — then something would be wrong with you. An American political party that is not instinctively on the side of a working man like that has real problems. Again: I am a conservative, and will vote conservative, but if you had held a gun to my head and told me to make a plausible argument for why he should vote Republican this fall, the best I could have done would have been to have created a scare-scenario involving a Sanders presidency. This guy would have just laughed. I don’t know if he shared my social-and-religious-conservative priors (as a Zoomer, I doubt it), but even if he did, he’s not thinking about religion and morality; he’s thinking about wanting to start a family, and not being able to because he can’t see a way to get his feet on solid economic ground.

The thing is, I don’t trust Bernie Sanders to change that system to make it more fair. I too am against free-market fundamentalism, in favor of economic policies that reflect more of an ethic of solidarity than oligarchy. That said, I have a great deal of skepticism about the radical left, which will come as a surprise to no one. Also, I worry that any vote for Bernie for the sake of economic change would undeniably bring in a lot of the woke social change. Bernie may care more about economics and health care policy than woke social policies, and appointing left-wing judges, but that only means he would outsource that stuff to ideologues within his administration, as Trump has done regarding judges to the Federalist Society. You may vote for Bernie to get a more humane and just economic system, but you’re going to get a rollback of religious liberty and abortion extremism in the bargain.

I also don’t think it is at all plausible to say, in 2020, that Trump has an answer to the structural problems in our economy. He has had three years to show what he’s made of. He had a great opportunity, but fumbled it, because in the end, he lacks the discipline to follow through. I will still likely vote for him, but only because voting Republican forestalls the left-wing extremism in power that I believe is inevitable. But I have no faith at all in Trump.

Having said all that, I recommend to you Ezra Klein’s piece about how Sanders is not running on socialist policies as much as he’s running on a socialist ethic. It’s an interesting and important distinction. Excerpts:

In 2015, I asked Sanders what being a socialist meant to him. “Democratic socialist,” he quickly corrected me. “What it means is that one takes a hard look at countries around the world who have successful records in fighting and implementing programs for the middle class and working families.”

When you do that, you automatically go to countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and other countries that have had labor governments or social democratic governments. And what you find is that in virtually all of those countries, health care is a right of all people and their systems are far more cost-effective than ours, college education is virtually free in all of those countries, people retire with better benefits, wages that people receive are often higher, distribution of wealth and income is much fairer, their public education systems are generally stronger than ours.

This is Sanders’s standard answer, and it’s a good one: it makes his political program legible, concrete. He doesn’t want to turn America into the Soviet Union, he wants to turn us into Denmark. But it still, I think, leaves something important out — something key to understanding Sanders’s philosophy and appeal.

More:

In his book Why You Should Be A Socialist, Nathan Robinson makes a distinction between the socialist ethic, which he defines as “anger at capitalism over its systematic destructiveness and injustice,” and socialist economics, which “rearranges the way goods are produced and distributed.”

During a conversation on my podcast — which is worth listening to in full if you want to understand how the rising generation of young leftists understands their movement — Robinson expanded on that distinction.

“There’s the great Eugene Debs quote,” he said, “which is, ‘While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there’s a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.’ And that’s not a description of worker ownership, right? That’s a description of looking at the world and feeling solidarity with people who are at the bottom with the underclass, with the imprisoned.”

Cutting the socialist ethic away from socialist economics is both frustrating and useful. It’s frustrating because it defines socialism in vague, expansive terms — a socialist, essentially, is someone who believes injustice is bad, equality is good, and solidarity is morally necessary. Lots of people who don’t define themselves as socialists believe those things to be true. But it’s useful in that it correctly describes Sanders’s ethic and appeal, and makes clear why he’s been able to build a coalition among people with no interest in a centrally planned economy.

I get that. If Bernie weren’t so far left on social issues, I would consider voting for him, for exactly this reason. There is no chance that I’m going to vote for the Democrat this fall, let’s be clear, but if Sanders weren’t so hostile to the traditional family, to the pro-life cause, and to non-liberal religion, I would probably vote for him, even though I in no way want socialist policies. (And we all know that Bernie would be the last one to get America involved in these stupid overseas wars.) I want to be on the side of that young Uber driver, who is only four years older than my oldest kid. This is why a lot of people voted for Trump in 2016 — they believed the system was rotten, and needed shaking up. He hasn’t done it. I believe that whoever takes the reins next of the Republican Party will be a politician who espouses this solidarity ethic (versus free-market fundamentalism), but who has the discipline to make good on his promises.

One more clip from Ezra Klein:

In 2016, Molly Ball, now a national political correspondent for Time magazine, made a sharp observation on why Trump was beating the rest of the Republican field. “All the other candidates say ‘Americans are angry, and I understand,’” she wrote. “Trump says, ‘I’m angry.’”

Sanders, too, is angry. And that sets him apart. Democrats who believe in, and in some cases built, the political and economic system balance a celebration of its successes — think of former Vice President Joe Biden repeating the Obama administration’s accomplishments during each and every debate — with an ongoing recognition of its failures. They recognize that Americans are angry about those failures, and these Democrats understand that anger.

Sanders helped build parts of that political and economic system, too, but he doesn’t celebrate its successes. He lives in fury over its failures. “The more you learn about what life is actually like for people at the top and bottom, the more grotesque everything seems,” Robinson writes, in what could serve as a simple, one-sentence summation of Sanders’s worldview.

Read the whole thing. It’s really important in helping one to understand what the Sanders phenomenon means, and why he’s going to be a formidable opponent of Trump’s this fall.

I’m interested to hear from conservative readers who are thinking about voting for Sanders, if he’s the Democratic nominee. What’s going through your mind? How are you thinking through this.

UPDATE: Some reasonable pushback in the comments on me for saying that I would probably vote for Bernie if not for his social leftism, and that I wouldn’t have been able to come up with a reason for this young man not to vote for Bernie. I overshot. I am not not not a socialist, and believe Bernie’s plans would bankrupt us. What I was trying, ineptly, to emphasize is that I’m really sick and tired of the Republican Party having nothing much to offer, and my eagerness to see serious disruption of the political system. It was the same reason why, in 2016, I had no faith in Trump, but was happy to see him overturn the GOP establishment. Still, I should have been tougher on Sanders’s economics.

UPDATE.2: Interesting comment from J.R. Miller:

I am a 24 year old like the Uber driver you wrote about (I don’t consider myself a Zoomer, I can remember 9/11 and dial-up. 1995-1996 doesn’t fit neatly into the Millennial- Gen-Z division)

I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life. In fact, I donated to Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018 I voted straight-ticket Republican in one of three congressional district in the country that flipped from Democrat to Republican (MN-8, all of these seats were open). I go to a state college where guns are stored on campus for students to go hunting in the middle of one of the poorest, most rural counties in the state. I am about as conservative as anyone I’ve ever met under 40 that isn’t an evangelical Christian. I will be voting for Bernie Sanders and have donated over $100 to his campaign and I would crawl over broken glass to do it.

I am disgusted by the transformation within the GOP who have completely embraced the postmodern relativism and abandoned their principles for power. Mark my words, we have doomed this generation to Republican politics and all conservatives will be sorry when Trump exits the stage whether now or 2024. The most meaningful political debate in the late 20’s will be inside the Democratic party while the Republicans and conservatives maul each other ala post-war Vichy France or the political equivalent of the Donatism heresy.

If you’d have told me I’d do this remarkable turn in 2016 I’d have laughed in your face. is there really a case left to make when I contact my representatives and they lie to me repeatedly as if I’m an uniformed yokel and I watch the President of the United States shit all over the traditions and principles of this country for some free media coverage on a daily basis? Seriously what heritage and values are we even preserving here? Trump’s “animal cunning” (Victor Davis Hanson’s description, not mine) and the viciously self-interested politics and governance require mental gymnastics to defend. He doesn’t care about the unborn or religious liberty or 2A or freedom of expression. He cares about himself. His policies are relative to his poll numbers and he’s boxed himself in with his supporters views. Remember when he waved around the LGBT flag pandering for votes? He would’ve been the most pro-LGBT president ever if it he had evidence they’d vote for him.

Here’s the problem with where Republicans are at in regards to Bernie (and believe me, only Bernie). Trump is corrupt, Bernie is clean. Maybe praise of communism or honeymooning in the USSR would have been a dealbreaker 8 years ago but not anymore. Binders full of women was the last time a gaffe like that will be fatal- this is the era of access Hollywood. This is entirely about the checkbook and with Bernie they see a chance to finally balance the checkbook against a corrupt system. It’s not about wokeness for 50-60% of his die hard supporters.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if the woke shit is toned down in the general. This is going to be a campaign about economics. Trump can’t do anything except repeat empty platitudes about how bad socialism is, he isn’t capable of mounting a serious intellectual defense of capitalism and anyone who thinks he is delusional. Trump’s economy is a Trojan horse for the Republicans. They are going to align themselves with the wealthy “milliunahs and Billunahs” and praise their corporate tax cuts and it’s going to play right into Bernie’s hands about the rigged system and socialism for the rich and the greed of the pharmaceutical companies. If their is anything I’ve learned observing the past 5 years, it’s that nothing sells like economic grievance. People will overlook poisonous policies, labels, and personalities if it means a chance at a better life.

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These American Lives

And now, time for some good news.

This weekend my family and I were in Dallas for the wedding of a dear family friend: Mariya Grygorenko, who married Ryan Mancl. Masha’s father, Vladimir, is my godfather in Orthodoxy, and a well-known iconographer. And he is the very proud father of three children, of whom Masha — who once babysat our children! — is the oldest.

The Grygorenkos emigrated to the US from Ukraine in 2000, I think it was. They settled eventually in Dallas, where they raised three children, two of whom — Masha and her brother Andriy — are out in the world doing well professionally. The youngest, Katya, is still in high school. Vladimir and Olga were born under a totalitarian dictatorship, and grew up under hardship. Vladimir’s father is a non-practicing Jew, and suffered from Soviet anti-Semitism. Vladimir’s parents divorced legally (though they stayed together, and are still together) so he could take his Christian mother’s last name; otherwise, he would have had his academic future curtailed by Soviet Jew-hatred. That’s the kind of world they left behind to make a new life in America. No wonder they are both now such passionate American patriots. There was nothing that they wouldn’t sacrifice for their kids. Their family was such an icon to my family, of what a faithful, loving Orthodox family looks like. We wouldn’t have missed Masha’s wedding for anything.

Orthodox weddings are so beautiful. This one was especially so, because Masha was married in a temple that God glorified through the hand of her father, who did all the iconography. Can you imagine? Here’s a shot I took with my iPhone, in which I tried to capture the dazzling beauty all around:

Vladimir made that iconography, all of it. I wonder if he ever thought, as he labored high up in the dome of the cathedral, that he was painting the faces of holy men and women, and of the Lord Jesus Christ, who would one day look down upon his firstborn child, as she was joined in holy matrimony with her husband. (You can see more of Vladimir’s iconography here, at his website, and even buy some.)

Here is Andriy Grygorenko congratulating his sister in the church. The love the members of this family have for each other is a wonder to behold:

 

I was late getting to the reception last night, in part because my Uber driver got lost. So I missed Vladimir’s toast to the couple. My wife was there, and said there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Vladimir gave me the text of his remarks, which I present to you here:

Remember what God did for you — He always had a plan. Please, have His Image continuously before you. May God bless your marriage and give you a long and happy life together!

Today you made a family. It means that you are no longer two independent individuals cohabitating in the same space but are united into one body under Christ.

Beginning today, you will share each other’s success and failure, joy and sorrow, debts and bank accounts.

For my highly competitive daughter: Masha, stop competing with your husband! His success is yours anyway! Instead, share your love and respect with him. And you Ryan, do the same! That is the only way to live your life.

Simple but practical advice: Every day you need to tell each other: “I love you!” No, “honey,” “sweetie,” or even “pumpkin” does not count — only these three important words. It worked for Olga and me for thirty-two years, so it should definitely work for you.

And finally: in our difficult time, this country needs more hard-working Americans. So, my personal request for you, Mariya: stop working so hard — we need grandchildren!

Let us raise our glasses to Mr. and Mrs. Mancl, and wish them many happy years together!

At the reception, I said to Vladimir, “You are a long way from Dnipropetrovsk,” his Ukrainian hometown. He smiled. The Grygorenko family came to America searching for a new life, a better life, and they found it. What a blessing America has been to them, and believe me, what a blessing they have been to America, and to the Americans who have been graced by their friendship.

Here’s a shot of father, daughter, and the new son-in-law, Ryan, at the reception. Ryan has married into quite a family! May God grant the Mancls many years!

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Bernie Sanders, Communist Sympathizer

He actually is. Said so on 60 Minutes last night. From the transcript:

Back in the 1980s, Sanders had some positive things to say about the former Soviet Union and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Here he is explaining why the Cuban people didn’t rise up and help the U.S. overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro: “…he educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society, you know?”

Bernie Sanders: We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?

Anderson Cooper: A lot of p– dissidents imprisoned in– in Cuba.

Bernie Sanders: That’s right. And we condemn that. Unlike Donald Trump, let’s be clear, you want to– I do not think that Kim Jong Un is a good friend. I don’t trade love letters with a murdering dictator. Vladimir Putin, not a great friend of mine.

What a lame dodge. This tweet is a John Derbyshire quote, cited by a man whose family fled Castro’s Cuba:

‘Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.’https://t.co/g8aFlQuFTQ

— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) February 24, 2020

It’s really true. I’ve had these exact arguments often over the years, with leftists defending communist countries. The element missing from Bernie’s remarks last night was, “And they achieved these things despite being under constant threat from the United States.” Heard that a lot.

Strangely enough, we never saw people fleeing from the United States to those countries, for the sake of the literacy and health care; we only saw the opposite. Funny how that happened.

Here’s why Bernie’s voters are motivated for him (boldface mine):

Bernie Sanders: Yeah, let’s go easy on the word rev– “political revolution”, you know? We’re– we’re trying to follow-

Anderson Cooper: Y– you’re the one who’s using the word.

Bernie Sanders: Well, I mean, you know, but I don’t want people, you know, to overstate that. But here is the point. It’s not good enough to complain, “Oh, I cannot afford my health care. I can’t afford childcare. I can’t afford to send my kid to college. I’m paying half of my income in rent.” You know? If you’re not happy about that, you got to be involved in the political process. Only millions of people standing up for justice can bring about the kind of change that this country requires. And I believe that has got to happen.

I really do believe that we on the Right who believe that yelling “But he’s a socialist!” will be enough are taking a dangerous chance. True story: When I was walking through Warsaw last year with my translator, he told me that as much as his family hated communism, his grandmother told him that they didn’t have regular doctors’ visits to their rural village until the communists came to power. Did that make it worth submitting to this godless totalitarian system. By no means! The point he was making is that it wasn’t exclusively about repression. That some material good came of it — though at the expense of generally impoverishing the entire nation, and turning it into a police state.

And that’s the point about Bernie and Castro. For some reason, his generation of leftists are shamefully sympathetic to those grim, repressive communist regimes — regimes under which they would not have lived for one moment. It reveals a repulsive lack of sympathy for prisoners of conscience under those regimes. When I hear Bernie talk, I recall an argument at a dinner table back in the 1980s that I had with an elderly leftist who had just returned from a “peace trip” to the Soviet Union. I myself was a liberal back then, but was active in Amnesty International on campus, organizing letter-writing campaigns for prisoners of conscience. As this elderly lady kept bringing up all the glorious things about the Soviet Union, I would ask her about the political repression. I was polite about it, but it made her angry. She finally fumed, “I think you just hate the Soviet people!”

I’m not worried that President Sanders would ally the US to Cuba. Fidel Castro is dead, and Bernie’s not looking so good himself. What I worry is that Sanders’s bog-standard sympathies for these regimes — sympathies of which he clearly has not repented — will characterize the kind of government he would lead: a government that has an insufficient regard for civil liberties, as long as the state is providing health care and literacy. Read this post about Bernie’s hostility to religious liberty, alongside his praise of atheistic regimes that imprisoned and tortured religious dissidents. No, I don’t think Bernie is going to send pastors to an American gulag. I am worried, though, that he would be the most hostile president to religious liberty that we’ve ever had, because it doesn’t register with him as something to worry about, except in a superficial, reactive left-wing way, e.g., a conservative Christian said that he doesn’t believe Islam is true, which made Sen. Sanders grandstand in a hearing to criticize “Islamophobia.” I think Bernie was sincere there, but sincerely shallow.

If any of these other Democratic candidates want to have a prayer of derailing Sanders, they’ve got to put him seriously on the defensive about his communist sympathies. Does Elizabeth Warren have the courage, and the good sense, to tear into Bernie over this the way she tore into Bloomberg over sexual harassment? Probably not, because in her social class, “red baiting” is the Worst Thing In The World, right up there with transphobia.

UPDATE: Yes, this is true:

Most likely Sanders is a committed socialist who wants the end of capitalism, but runs on the farthest left platform he thinks he could get away with. He would go farther if possible. This is what his life history suggests, and I'm bemused watching smart people suggest otherwise.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) February 24, 2020

Like, what in Bernie Sanders 70+ years on earth, his political record, or his platform, makes you think that Sanders is really just a Big Government Democrat who wants to smooth over the rough edges of capitalism, and make sure it hews closely to procedural norms?

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) February 24, 2020

The post Bernie Sanders, Communist Sympathizer appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jean Vanier, Sex Abuser

This is a hell of a blow:

A respected Catholic figure who worked to improve conditions for people with developmental disabilities for more than half a century sexually abused at least six women during most of that period, according to a report released on Saturday by the France-based charity he founded.

The report produced for L’Arche International said the women’s descriptions provided enough evidence to show that Jean Vanier engaged in “manipulative sexual relationships” from 1970 to 2005, usually with a “psychological hold” over the alleged victims.

Although he was a layman and not a priest, many Catholics hailed Vanier, who was Canadian, as a living saint for his work with disabled people. He died last year aged 90.

“The alleged victims felt deprived of their free will and so the sexual activity was coerced or took place under coercive conditions,” the report, commissioned last year and prepared by the UK-based GCPS Consulting group, said. It did not rule out other potential victims.

More:

During the charity-commissioned inquiry, six adult women without links to each other said Vanier engaged in sexual relations with them as they were seeking spiritual direction. The women reported similar facts, and Vanier’s sexual misconduct was often associated with alleged “spiritual and mystical justifications,” the report states.

Read it all. 

Fortunately, none of these relationships were with disabled women. It could have been worse. But this is an incredible thing to find out about this beloved man. And to read that he traded on his image of saintliness to get into these women’s pants — it’s just revolting. The BBC reports:

The women included assistants and nuns, according to Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail, which first broke the story.

Vanier was also a member of a small clandestine group which subscribed to and participated in some of the deviant sexual practices of disgraced priest Thomas Philippe, the L’Arche statement said.

The practices were founded on so-called “mystical” or “spiritual” beliefs that had been condemned by the Catholic Church, it added.

Vanier described Philippe, who died in 1993, as his “spiritual father”, but publicly denied knowledge of the practices.

A “clandestine group” of religious perverts. You just never know, do you? I wish I had something deeper to say, but after all we have learned about the insidious nature of sexual abuse and exploitation, what can be said? I mean, my God, Jean Vanier!

Writing in America, the Jesuit magazine, Colleen Dulle talks about how hard it is to reconcile what she knew of Vanier with these revelations (though she does believe them):

Mourning and grappling with the upsetting paradox of Jean Vanier has made me angry, but I am trying to resist letting it drive me to despair. I can no longer in good conscience call Jean Vanier a saint, nor will I hypothesize about any conversion he may have had before or after his death, but I cannot accept the disturbing truth about him as proof, as some have understood it, that sanctity does not exist. Rather, I think it challenges us to consider our own and others’ simultaneous capacity for profound goodness and evil, to seek models of holiness away from the world’s spotlight and to pursue holiness ourselves far from the spotlight, at the bottom of the ladder.

Here’s a link to the full report from L’Arche, which deserves credit for commissioning the investigation and making it public. From the report, this quote from the archives involving a 1956 investigation of Fr. Thomas Phillippe, Vanier’s spiritual father:

Then he began theories, to try to convince me, […]: the lost woman of Hosea, the sacrifice of Abraham, the glorious mysteries, the transcendence of the prophetic mission (of his mission) regarding the norms of morality. He asked me, most insistently, to bind myself to him by an act of absolute faith in this mission and in himself. I replied that I could only make an act of faith in God alone, and trust in creatures only insofar as they were God’s instrument for me […]. He explained to me that it was not for me to make this discrimination, that he was an instrument of God, and therefore at present and directly moved by God […]. He said that I lacked strength, that I had to get used to it gradually, that all this was a great honour to Our Lord and to the Blessed Virgin, because the sexual organs were the symbol of the greatest love, much more than the Sacred Heart -. And I said, “but that’s blasphemy! “Then he took up his theories again, saying that when one arrives at perfect love, everything is lawful, for there is no more sin.”

Here’s a question: Jean Vanier won the 2015 Templeton Prize for his work in spiritual advancement. Should it be revoked? I think not. The work Vanier did in serving the disabled stands on its own. The Templeton Prize, as I understand it, is given chiefly for great works. It is assumed that the doer of great deeds is also a great man or woman, but it is not necessarily so. I would feel differently if Vanier had abused disabled people, for those where the ones he was honored for helping. I just don’t think we should be in the habit of taking away honors and prizes in every case, when we have learned that the honoree was dishonorable.

Here is a link to Jean Vanier’s remarks when he received the Templeton Prize. How difficult they are to read now, knowing what we know about him. And yet, they are true, and profound, and important! Excerpt:

In L’Arche some of the people we welcome have deep anguish and even violence. They are difficult to live with in community. We have to be patient and to believe that their true self will gradually emerge. We also have to be patient with ourselves as well, and believe that if we try to love and become open to a spirituality of love, our own true selves will also gradually emerge. If we love, if we truly love other people and believe in them, then they are transformed, and we also will be transformed. Community then is a place of healing, of transformation, and of humanizing people. It’s a place where we are commissioned to grow in love, and in forgiveness, and this is real work. If you don’t want to be transformed and to grow in love, then don’t partake in community! When we find the strength to accept people as they are and to meet them in their secret being, they open us up to love.

Solzhenitsyn had it right: the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart. What a great and terrible truth!

The post Jean Vanier, Sex Abuser appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Pandemic Is Coming

A reader sends this story from Yahoo! Finance:

Just how severely has the coronavirus curtailed cargo flows to and from China, the world’s most important trade engine? Chinese government data is both after-the-fact and suspect, but Boston-based big-data company CargoMetrics is now providing a real-time answer.

CargoMetrics has spent the past decade amassing and analyzing ship-movement data, discerning patterns and developing quantitative predictive algorithms. It’s now bringing its powers to bear on what’s happening in China.

The company has just publicly released data that sheds new light on what transpired in the weeks following Chinese New Year (CNY). To better understand what the numbers mean, FreightWaves interviewed CargoMetrics CEO Scott Borgerson and Dan Brutlag, head of trading signal and data products.

You should read the whole thing, but these two charts tells you the basic fact: the Chinese economy has all but shut down:

More:

What happens in the next two weeks is “critical,” asserted Borgerson.

“We’re looking at this purely from the lens of the maritime perspective,” he said. “Shipping moves 90% of the planet’s trade, and while China is not literally an island, its economy is figuratively one because it imports nearly all of its raw materials and exports nearly all of its finished goods by sea. So, the lens we apply is very much a leading indicator for Chinese industry activity and productivity.”

Pressure on the global trade network could be alleviated if “China gets people moving around and factories open up, supply chains can deal with the inventories that are building up, and all the ships that are sailing there can discharge,” he said.

If not, warned Borgerson, “then we’re in uncharted territory.”

Read it all. 

Two things:

If this is happening to China, what’s to prevent it from happening to every economy in the world, if this thing truly goes pandemic, and hits other countries with the ferocity with which it has hit China?
Let’s say that by some miracle, the worst of it stays in China. We are still looking at the world’s second-most important economy grinding to a halt, for an indefinite period. How do we avoid a worldwide economic depression in that case?

Now, look at that exports chart. You know what is not being exported? Medications and medical supplies. From Axios:

About 150 prescription drugs — including antibiotics, generics and some branded drugs without alternatives — are at risk of shortage if the coronavirus outbreak in China worsens, according to two sources familiar with a list of at-risk drugs compiled by the Food and Drug Administration.

Why it matters: China is a huge supplier of the ingredients used to make drugs that are sold in the U.S. If the virus decreases China’s production capability, Americans who rely on the drugs made from these ingredients could be in trouble.

What they’re saying: The FDA declined to comment on the list, but said in a statement that it’s “keenly aware that the outbreak could impact the medical product supply chain,” and has devoted additional resources toward identifying potential vulnerabilities to U.S. medical products stemming specifically from the outbreak.

The Doctor, who has been providing readers of this blog with his analysis, writes of the Axios report:

The word is finally getting out…..and soon the run on meds will begin in earnest.  All I can say is this is not a joke. We have had shortages before — and I have received these pharmacy committee memos before — actually this has become rather commonplace since we shipped our industry to China – and India.  All that being said, in my 30 years of being a physician, I have not one time ever received a memo with more than 40 drugs listed out by name.  Always previously, there had just been one problem drug that was being addressed.  The word “ration” was not used in my memo this week,  but it was certainly implied.  And now I see this online today.

Again — be prepared. Any frail family members need to be getting 90 day supplies of their meds NOW.  Your entire family needs to be stocked up on Bandaids, gloves, masks, aspirin, Tylenol, non-steroidals, stomach pills – cough syrup whatever you routinely use — need to be getting supplied now.  I hate to be this way — and I know I sound like a kook — but this is as real as it has ever been.

Australian virologist Ian Mackay blogs that it is “past time to tell the public” that this thing is probably going to go pandemic, and that we should prepare now. Mackay quotes from a long memo that a crisis communication team wrote to guide officials and others in preparing the public for what’s coming. What I’m quoting here is from that team, Jody Lenard and Peter M. Sandman, quoted on Mackay’s blog.

Their advice is basically that we should stop saying “if it goes pandemic,” and accept that this is going to happen, and we need to get ready to be as resilient as possible under conditions of pandemic. More:

One horrible effect of this continued “stop the pandemic” daydream masquerading as a policy goal: It is driving counter-productive and outrage-inducing measures by many countries against travelers from other countries, even their own citizens back from other countries.  But possibly more horrible: The messaging is driving resources toward “stopping,” and away from the main potential benefit of containment – slowing the spread of the pandemic and thereby buying a little more time to prepare for what’s coming.

We hope that governments and healthcare institutions are using this time wisely.  We know that ordinary citizens are not being asked to do so.  In most countries – including our United States and your Australia – ordinary citizens have not been asked to prepare.  Instead, they have been led to expect that their governments will keep the virus from their doors.

More:

Hardly any officials are telling civil society and the general public how to get ready for this pandemic.

Even officials who say very alarming things about the prospects of a pandemic mostly focus on how their agencies are preparing, not on how the people they misperceive as “audience” should prepare.  “Audience” is the wrong frame.  We are all stakeholders, and we don’t just want to hear what officials are doing.  We want to hear what we can do too.

We want – and need – to hear advice like this:

Try to get a few extra months’ worth of prescription meds, if possible.
Think through now how we will take care of sick family members while trying not to get infected.
Cross-train key staff at work so one person’s absence won’t derail our organization’s ability to function.
Practice touching our faces less. So how about a face-counter app like the step-counters so many of us use?
Replace handshakes with elbow-bumps (the “Ebola handshake”).
Start building harm-reduction habits like pushing elevator buttons with a knuckle instead of a fingertip.

There is so much for people to do, and to practice doing in advance.

Read the whole thing. Seriously, do — it’s full of practical information and advice.

I’ve not quoted from their section on “emotional preparedness,” which is also hugely important. This is about preparing yourself, your family, and your community for weeks of quarantine at home — not only with food and medicine, but with other plans for how you are all going to get through it, and help your neighbors. Lenard & Sandman say that if you can come to emotional grips now with the possibility — and increasingly, likelihood — that our lives are about to change in a radical way for a period of time, then when the virus hits, you won’t freak out. If it doesn’t hit — if we are spared — then you will have had the satisfaction of knowing you were ready. The risk of not preparing is too great.

In fact, I just saw that the CDC has at last adapted the “slowing, not stopping” line about the virus:

U.S. health officials are preparing for the COVID-19 coronavirus, which has killed at least 2,249 people and sickened more than 76,700 worldwide, to become a pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

“We’re not seeing community spread here in the United States, yet, but it’s very possible, even likely, that it may eventually happen,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters on a conference call. “Our goal continues to be slowing the introduction of the virus into the U.S. This buys us more time to prepare communities for more cases and possibly sustained spread.”

Messonnier said the CDC is working with state and local health departments “to ready our public health workforce to respond to local cases and the possibility this outbreak could become a pandemic.” The CDC is collaborating with supply chain partners, hospitals, pharmacies and manufacturers to understand what medical supplies are needed, she said.

Messonnier goes on to say that the day may come when the US will have to do the same thing China is now doing: shutting down business and schools indefinitely.

What would you do if it came to that? You had better be thinking it through right now, while there is time.

UPDATE: This just in: Venice has cancelled Carnevale because of regional coronavirus, and more:

The Archbishop of Milan and the Patriarch of Venice have suspended all masses sine die, including funerals.

Pray for people in Lombardy and the Veneto!#CoronaVirusitaly

— Rorate Caeli (@RorateCaeli) February 23, 2020

UPDATE.2:

The post The Pandemic Is Coming appeared first on The American Conservative.

The China Apocalypse

Last night, I received an update from the American doctor who has been writing in about the coronavirus situation. His wife is from China, and is plugged in to Chinese media and social media. What he wrote last night is extremely frightening. I post it here with the obvious caveat that I can’t confirm any of this, and that you should take it as a comment, not as gospel truth. I know who this doctor is, and have been corresponding with him. I brought another physician, in another part of the country, into our conversation, and this second physician tells me he definitely believes the Doctor is onto something.

Read this below: either the Doctor is a paranoid with a vivid imagination, or he is seeing something that is not being reported in our media. If these stories from China are true, I don’t necessarily fault our media for not reporting them; I am sure that the Chinese government has things on intense lockdown, and would not let Western journalists into the most heavily affected areas. What I find interesting, though, is that these apocalyptic images of fighting locusts are being broadcast on Chinese television (which they watch via satellite), but are not being spoken of in the US media. The Daily Beast just posted a piece about the unusual threat from locusts this year, and how the Chinese state media has been trying to downplay it.

Note also the photo of the Buddhist prophecy. The Doctor has the right take on it — he doesn’t know if it is authentic or fake, but the more important aspect of the story is that lots of Chinese elites believe it could be true, and are passing the thing around on social media. One of the Doctor’s consistent themes in his post is the resurgence of religious consciousness in the face of this plague, and how sustained fear and anger is making Chinese people increasingly unafraid of their totalitarian government. That “prophecy” sounds like exactly the sort of thing someone would invent in a time like this — even a government propagandist who is trying to give the people something to believe in to make them more resilient. In fact, if I were a high-level Communist Party functionary, and I came to believe that we in the Party were facing a disaster that we could not control, this is the kind of propaganda I would make up and release into social media, in the hope that it would encourage people to develop resilience.

If you, reader, are the kind of person who is saying, “Well, that’s obviously a made-up document, so we don’t have to take it seriously,” you are missing the point the Doctor is making. At the risk of being obnoxiously redundant, even if this is a document invented five minutes ago, it is being taken seriously by educated Chinese people, and they may act on it. This is how a religious falsehood (assuming it’s fake) becomes a social fact.

One note on that, then I’m going to go to his post. Last night at a reception, I ran into old friends from when we lived in Dallas. The wife is a Chinese immigrant. She was telling me about her elderly parents, who live in an assisted living facility in Dallas, along with a few other elderly Chinese. She said that all the old Chinese are miserably paranoid of each other, and that this is the legacy of communism. She said that the Chinese Communist Party maintained control by making everyone mistrustful of everybody else (this is what happened in the Soviet Empire too). To trust others was to put your own life at risk. Naturally, society adapted to that fact. As a consequence, nobody trusts anybody. Now, she said, these elderly people are safe in an assisted living facility in America, but they can’t allow themselves to relax and to trust the others around them. They are out of communist China, but communist China is not out of them.

Think about how weak and fragile that ideology has left the Chinese people in the face of these plagues!

Now, to the Doctor’s latest dispatch:

I am very sorry this took so long – I wanted to make it as thoughtful as I possibly could. Much has happened in the past few days. Here in the USA, we are in the grip of a 2nd wave of influenza – and I have been profoundly busy the past few days because of this. People who comment about epidemics and the fact that influenza is much worse here in the USA are not making that up – this is a particularly bad year – but what is happening in China is really just as bad if not worse – and I am beginning to really despair that we here in America are just having this whole thing really downplayed by our media and leaders.

So here is the update on multiple fronts.

First of all my wife’s family.

Her father has still not been heard of — now approaching a month. No words can express my wife’s grieving. I am running out of ways to help her cope.

Her brother and his family are still in their upper floor apartment in a major metro area — not Wuhan. The martial law and lockdown continue. They have not left their apartment in about 3 weeks. Food is delivered to them twice a week. There is no end in sight at this time. The family immediately across the hall was forcibly removed about 3 days ago because one of them was sick. My wife is concerned about their mental health – but so far they are staying healthy.

Her mother remains under in home quarantine in her apartment in a small city on the Western frontier. She seems to be fully recovered. She is eating rice that she has had piled up in her apartment for just such a reason – and refuses to eat any food that is brought to her door. This city is in the middle of a vast agricultural area. Hogs, cows and chickens are a staple of their economy. My mother-in-law has told us that the “death stench” has permeated her city the past week or so and getting worse daily. She cannot even open her windows. Why? No one is going to work – and no one is taking care of the livestock. No shipments of grain are coming in for the animals — and throughout the land the animals are starving in the pastures. The bodies by the hundreds of thousands are just laying in the sun and rotting. All this while the industrialized part of China is beginning to have severe food shortages. Something in my doctor brain is telling me that having millions of people so close to rotting animals cannot be good. What could possibly go wrong?

Three days ago, 20% of the workers in my brother-in-law’s city were ordered back to work. The photo I have attached is from American media, showing a transit train during rush hour on that day. Yep, that worked. The people of that big city are in open defiance of the Communist Party in a way that has never happened before. It has been my concern all along that the lies and fraudulent numbers coming out would reap the whirlwind for the Communist government not just from the West — but also from their own people. When exactly are the people going to feel safe going back to work? Who knows?

Some of the comments I have read on some of my previous posts have been concerned that the tone was too macabre or apocalyptic. Well, snowflakes — that is because things are very macabre and very apocalyptic in China today. The true scope of this disaster is being grossly underplayed in the American media.

My wife is a PhD graduate of Tshingua University in Beijing. It is an institution that would be similar if our Harvard, Yale, and MIT were all combined into one place. The graduates there are heavily recruited by the Communist Party – and most of them go on to work in the government, the universities, and the law. It is their version of the one-percent elite. My wife belongs to multiple social media groups of Tshingua alumni and current students. Imagine my surprise reading multiple comments repeatedly bashing the Communist government and officials and their handling of this incident. These are future and current Communists and this would have been unthinkable just a few days ago. But the real stunner came last night — another jpg of Chinese text was sent to all current students and alumnus of Tshinghua. I have enclosed the photo.

 

The doctor continues:

My wife tells me this is written by a Buddhist monk in the Forbidden City named Gentleman Zigong probably in the early part of the 20th Century. This is a printed duplicate in more modern Mandarin. This is part of a large cycle of Chinese literature known as the “Ancient Internal Bible”. This is difficult to translate into modern language because it is written in a very old dialect. I view it as being similar to us in the 2020s reading Chaucer’s Middle English. So my wife really struggled to translate some of it – but in general – this is what it says….

“The year 2020 – The year all of China will weep. The omens will be so bad that the New Year will not be celebrated. Then the plague will come. It will come with a fury – the tigers and the wolves will hide in the mountains. The plague will encompass all the land – and will eventually spread to the whole world. Very soon – rice will become so expensive that no one can eat. Then the rivers will sink all the boats. People in that year will only be able to harvest rice in the very early spring. There will be no harvest of late season rice, beans, wheat, and oats because vast clouds of locusts will lay waste to the entire countryside. I, Gentleman Zigong, assure you Chinese in 2020 that the locusts will fall from the skies and the destruction will be complete. Smoke and fire will fill the fields – but nothing will be able to stop the swarms. Once the locusts have destroyed the land and the smoke is still coming from the ground, the rivers will flood the countryside. I, Gentleman Zigong, will tell you Chinese in 2020 how to survive. Remain very close to your families and your neighbors. The best is to have stored up plenty of gold and food to live and share freely with those you love. Tolerate no thieves among the people. Be uniters and not dividers. If you can do all these things, you will survive.”

Make what you want of that — I am not sure how I feel — my wife certainly believes it. But the more fundamentally amazing thing is the fact that this has been shared and commented on by thousands of Chinese elite. In complete defiance of the Communist Party which has done everything it can to stamp out their ancient religion and all its signs and portents. The defiance is happening with their real names attached to the posts — and just unbelievable commentary about their government’s incompetence in this affair. One after the other all day they come over her social media. This includes many members of the People’s Liberation Army. My wife is feeling that the cracks in the Party are getting bigger and bigger and this is way way bigger than anything that has happened in her lifetime.

And about the locusts. This is becoming an ever more important part of my wife’s Mandarin news feed every day. Vast clouds of locusts made it to Xinjiang (the furthest west Chinese province) last week. The videos are amazing. The Mandarin news is showing the government deployment of these gigantic fire throwers that lay waste to not only the locusts but all the land in the path of the fire. Huge bursts of fire blow out from them and they truly look like something that would be appropriate to accompany the Four Horsemen. Today we learned that the locusts have now arrived very close to the western border of Gansu province. Gansu is part of the ancient Chinese homeland and is a huge producer of wheat and rice. If this swarm gets started up, it will be a huge blow to China and their psyche. The CCP has now ordered that every live chicken in China is to be immediately dispatched to the western border, where they will be released to eat the locusts. To everyone who thinks this is not a huge problem — think about the decision being made. Take away eggs and meat for the people who are already angry — to stop the locusts. The CCP must have data that this locust swarm is going to become a disaster unless stopped immediately, no matter what the cost.

Now: to what is going on in the USA. This week we finally have very well-trained American physicians on the ball in Ground Zero. I feel this is a good thing. We have had credible research published in journals that some HIV drugs in combination with an old anti-malaria drug called chloroquine IN VITRO has great activity against this virus. (The bad news – chloroquine is a very harsh drug fraught with problems – and you guessed it – is only made in China).

Also, we learned that like other coronaviruses, this one engenders limited immunity in the host. A few days to a few weeks later, the host’s immune system has completely forgotten how to fight it. And it seems that the second time the host gets infected is much worse than the first time. And an interesting fact about this virus is the second infection will in some patients profoundly damage the interior of the arteries, and cause acute heart attacks and sudden cardiac death. Thus, all the videos of people dropping over dead. To my medical knowledge, this intimal arterial damage is unique in the viral world.

And as a physician, the first instances of medication shortages are now happening in earnest. A memo from the hospital’s pharmacy committee arrived yesterday. It specifically named the following drugs – IV antibiotics such as gentamicin, tobramycin and streptomycin – IV drips from the ICU dobutamine, dopamine, and norepinephrine – and the following pill medications – diltiazem, verapamil, amlodipine, losartan, valsartan and irbesartan. Also mentioned were all of the usual narcotic opioids used for pain – morphine, dilaudid, hydrocodone and fentanyl among others. The memo stated that while there was stock in the hospital on all of these at this moment — the intermediate suppliers had sent warnings that supplies were quickly diminishing — and that further supplies from the manufacturer were not going to be reliable into the foreseeable future. Therefore, we were strongly urged to immediately begin making sure that every prescription was appropriate — and to replace it with something else if possible.

Well, some of these things are not replaceable. Some of them are — but with much more dangerous alternatives. And just try doing surgery without morphine — I dare you. All I can say is you have been warned. This is here — this is now and this is real and very likely to get much worse. Shipping all your critical drug manufacturing to another very unreliable country is so dumb that only the elites could have thought of it. And all you snowflakes thinking that we can just magically build factories here immediately — well you are oh so wrong. First of all — manufacturing drugs on a large scale takes immense engineering, and will not be done on a whim. Secondly, when we exported all our manufacturing away, all the jobs went away as well. There is a human know-how that is critical to this kind of enterprise, and that went away when the factories went to China. And it takes years — maybe decades — to get that back. MY FELLOW AMERICANS — YOU HAVE BEEN FAILED AND BETRAYED BY THE ELITES IN BOTH PARTIES – PLEASE KEEP THAT IN MIND IN THE COMING MONTHS.

Sometimes, events like this produce the most amazing out of left field events that one would never see coming. I have now had a patient show up this week in full blown opiate withdrawal. That is very rare in my practice. Why did this happen? His drug of choice — heroin — was not available at any price from his usual dealer. I have now confirmed with local law enforcement that the street price of opiates and meth have substantially increased in just the past week or two. I have spoken with many colleagues in cities across the country this week. In some places, nothing has changed — in others there has been a noticeable increase in opiate withdrawal. And everywhere I called, colleagues have noted a marked decrease in opiate overdoses. All this is anecdotal, but very consistent. If this holds up, it appears our illicit opiate and meth supply is being affected as well. NOT COCAINE. China for the past 10 years or so has been producing all the precursors of illicit opioids and meth. These are then shipped to Mexico where the bathtub chemistry is done on a huge scale – and the final product is then shipped to American cities. What is this China supply problem going to do to our addicts here in the USA? What will happen to Mexico if the drug cartels begin to have problems with cash flow? Are we ready for chaos on our border?

Again – all anecdotal at this time — but this bears watching.

Last week, the FDA stated that it expects the medical supply line to be affected by the China crisis. I would like to hear from physicians and other medical personnel who read this blog. Does what the Doctor says toward the end of his dispatch resonate with your experiences?

If what the Doctor predicts about drug supplies comes true, then coronavirus will have destroyed globalization. No country can allow its critical manufacturing to be outsourced.

Again: what you just read is a letter from a physician appearing on an opinion blog, not a news report. Read it with that in mind.

UPDATE: From Bloomberg News:

The World Health Organization cautioned years ago that a mysterious “disease X” could spark an international contagion. The new coronavirus, with its ability to quickly morph from mild to deadly, is emerging as a contender.

From recent reports about the stealthy ways the so-called Covid-19 virus spreads and maims, a picture is emerging of an enigmatic pathogen whose effects are mainly mild, but which occasionally — and unpredictably — turns deadly in the second week. In less than three months, it’s infected almost 78,000 people, mostly in China, and killed more than 2,300. Emerging hot spots in South Korea, Iran and Italy have stoked further alarm.

“Whether it will be contained or not, this outbreak is rapidly becoming the first true pandemic challenge that fits the disease X category,” Marion Koopmans, head of viroscience at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, and a member of the WHO’s emergency committee, wrote Wednesday in the journal Cell.

More:

While more than 80% of patients are reported to have a mild version of the disease and will recover, about one in seven develops pneumonia, difficulty breathing and other severe symptoms. About 5% of patients have critical illness, including respiratory failure, septic shock and multi-organ failure.

“Unlike SARS, Covid-19 infection has a broader spectrum of severity ranging from asymptomatic to mildly symptomatic to severe illness that requires mechanical ventilation,” doctors in Singapore said in a paper in the same medical journal Thursday. “Clinical progression of the illness appears similar to SARS: patients developed pneumonia around the end of the first week to the beginning of the second week of illness.”

And:

Li Wenliang, the 34-year-old ophthalmologist who was one of the first to warn about the coronavirus in Wuhan, died earlier this month after receiving antibodies, antivirals, antibiotics, oxygen and having his blood pumped through an artificial lung.

The doctor, who was in good health prior to his infection, appeared to have a relatively mild case until his lungs became inflamed, leading to the man’s death two days later, said Linfa Wang, who heads the emerging infectious disease program at Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School.

A similar pattern of inflammation noted among Covid-19 patients was observed in those who succumbed to the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, said Gregory A. Poland, the Mary Lowell Leary emeritus professor of medicine, infectious diseases, and molecular pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Read it all. 

UPDATE.2: Washington Post:

Scientists were studying a case in China that suggested the incubation period for coronavirus could be longer than 14 days, potentially casting doubt on current quarantine criteria even as the epidemic moved into new regions.

The potential for a longer incubation period was linked to a patient in China’s Hubei Province, where the virus was first detected in December. A 70-year-old man was infected with coronavirus, but did not show symptoms until 27 days later, the local government reported.

And:

Among the new cases discovered Friday were a 70-year-old man in Hubei, who was confirmed as infected after 27 days in isolation, while a man in Jiangxi province tested positive after 14 days of centralized quarantine and five days of isolation at home. On Thursday, authorities reported that a man in Hubei had tested positive for coronavirus after what appeared to be a 38-day incubation period with no symptoms.

If you can go a month with the virus, without getting sick, then yeah, this thing is going to shut down the planet for a while.

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