Category Archives: Political

Domestic Violence or a Bleak Future?

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On the other side of town a woman is being beaten. It’s been going on for over a month.The whole town knows about it, in fact it’s all over the news with pictures of her injuries, videos of her assaults and tales of her heroic fight to stay alive. The townspeople send her meals, praise her resistance, and supply Raine—that’s her name—with helmets and gloves for defense. 

The man committing the assault, Russ, became fabulously wealthy through corruption. He owns a host of businesses that provide the town with essentials such as heating oil and gasoline. Plus, he has an enormous supply of TNT and plastic explosives. He says he’ll blown up anyone who intervenes, but then he and his fathers before him fine-tuned intimidation and mendacity to an art. He claims Raine is his wife and that she is bound to him by God, history and nature—not that he cares about God; he simply uses the manipulation.

Some of my neighbors claim that the woman has low morals. She is of little value to the town and perhaps, because of her manner of dress and history of doing anything for a price, she is getting what she deserves. If she had joined the Westside Enterprise and Social Team, they would feel compelled to come to her assistance as an alliance with far greater power and resources than Russ possesses. She had wanted to join, but her tarnished virtue made the board of directors resist. Raine had been married to Russ in the past and finally, years after the divorce, was courting other men in the WEST. It was only when some of the board expressed willingness to accept her that Russ decided to take her back. He cuts and shoots her, trying to force her to submit. She pleads for a knife and a gun for defense. She asks for a lock, a roof, a wall. The committee refuses, thinking these steps will provoke Russ into attacking them. Cowards.

I live in the richest part of our village. Our councilman, Joe, is an old character (whose intemperate son, by the way, had dalliances with Raine, which simply amuses me but is of no consequence in this matter.) He talks about standing up to bullies when he’s on camera, but he is more frightened by Russ than almost anyone else. He and other townsfolk have ceased doing business with Russ for the most part, but not completely. Russ has them over a barrel, so to speak, since homes would grow cold and trucks would stand idle if they stopped buying his fuel. Old Joe and many other leaders of WEST sound like they simply want Raine to surrender, allow Russ to possess her and have his way. Then they can go back to fretting about the weather a hundred years in the future over champagne and caviar.

Fear is a losing strategy, as is any emotion. For me, it’s not the heart-breaking images of destruction and woe but the knowledge that history teaches us that tyrants must be stopped with the tool they use, force. Otherwise, their appetites are never sated. They continue their rampage until they conquer all or die or are stopped. 

In my prime I was a physician. I saw that the patients sho showed up with an emergency got the doctor on duty at that moment. If they were very bad off and were lucky to get one that was excellent, they might survive. If they were unlucky and the doctor was sub-par, they didn’t. Life, as we all know, is not fair, despite our human compassion to make it so. Raine has the council in the WEST that exists: risk averse, indecisive and pusillanimous. Perhaps Russ knew this when he attacked or maybe he didn’t care. Their wishful thinking that a surgeon can fix her up afterwards and that a good attorney can enforce the divorce later, when the devastation ends will lead to her death. It’s not like we haven’t read this tale in history books over and over again.k

Of Motives and Treason

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Could supplying the Taliban with a vast stockpile of armaments and ammunition as occurred over the last two months be construed as treason? I have no training in law but it seems it cannot, unless the act was deliberate. Intent is a key element in any act of treason. If the transfer of potentially well over a billion dollars of materiel was lost in defeat, the victor has earned the spoils. The same question could be asked about the capture or death of soldiers and civilians and the same answer should apply.

An undetermined amount of supplies and armaments, including aircraft, bombs and other explosives, ended up in the possession of the Taliban when the Afghan soldiers surrendered. When the US closed the Bagram air field, the Taliban began an aggressive campaign to conquer provinces. They fell rapidly. The sudden closure of the one military complex that provided dramatic military superiority was seen as an act of betrayal, according to news reports. It left the Afghan military both vulnerable and hopeless. (The psychological impact may have been made worse by the US giving the enemy a date-certain for withdrawal from the country but no warning to allies about abandoning Bagram.)

As the provinces fell, US leaders made a willful and conscious decision to value the departure date more than the security of the military equipment that was falling into the hands of the enemy.

Later, when Kabul fell sooner than anticipated, President Biden valued the departure date and troop levels higher than the lives and freedom of the hundreds of thousands who found themselves suddenly surrounded by Taliban. He did not delay the date or change the plan despite the dramatic tactical changes. Good generals make decisions based on active circumstances.. Politicians do not share the same propensity.

The question then arises, what was President Biden’s motivation to value that date above the lives and freedom of American soldiers, civilians and at-risk Afghans; to value that date above the harm of arming a force opposed to western values wherever they exist? Since that date had nothing to do with ending US presence in Afghanistan, it cannot be anything other than either personal credit and aggrandizement or gaining strategic partisan political power, unless I’m missing something.

Intent is a key element in treason. The experts in law can argue over whether the motives of the President and his advisors who do most of the thinking were pure or corrupt.

The yin and yang of Donald Trump

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I’ve worked with more egocentric, puffed-up personalities than I ever wanted—I’m a cardiologist—and the 2016 version of Donald Trump was just one more. I find all of them unlikable. Yet, I voted for him twice, and even donated a few bucks to his campaign because I thought he was better than the alternatives. 

I see yin and yang (dark-bright; cold-warm) in people and actions in every aspect of life. President Trump’s personality yins that I see include his management style, his mental-emotional incontinence, and his pettiness. His obsequiousness toward brutal dictators stands in stark contrast to his harshness toward his allies. He was a poor loser and left office badly with a giant exclamation point on January 6. My metaphor is that he prepared the menu, bought the food, and cooked the dinner but he didn’t start the food fight.

In terms of legislative accomplishments his were few, maybe only one: tax reform. That’s pretty meager when in his first two years both the Senate and the House were in Republican control. His absence of political experience and his insulting manner were problematic.

His performance had a host of yangs. Through appointments and executive orders, he enhanced the federalist nature of our government and was, in that regard, a very conservative president.  Judicial appointments are durable but executive orders are easily undone and Mr. Biden’s writers have been working overtime to reverse the meaningful ones. By being an ardent disestablishmentarian, President Trump gathered a great and loyal following of common people who love the country and distrust the career politicians that run it. The ideas he supported such as enforcing laws, rebuilding the military, supporting the law abiding and law enforcers resonate with many Americans, notably in rural regions; eighty-four percent of counties voted for him. The yin there was that his approval rating never exceeded fifty percent and that detractors became more stridently opposed to him.

He disdained the elitist policies and theories. In reducing taxes for the lower income brackets, minorities and middle class Americans saw more income and higher standards of living. The political opposition frothed and tried to destroy him. (Was it because they feared the result of conservative taxation was the empowering of the demographics that kept them in power?) In his usual self-promoting style Trump referred to his first three years as “my great economy.” Funding his economy came at a cost. In his first three years we averaged close to $1 trillion in annual deficit and the federal debt increased around $3.5 trillion. In 2020, there was blowout spending that increased the national debt by nearly $4.5. In Trump’s four years the national debt increased from $19.6 trillion to $27.7 trillion. This makes him the least conservative president in history in a fiscal sense. He increased the debt more in his four years than his predecessor did in eight.

Perhaps the country cannot fiscally afford another term of Donald Trump. But whom can we afford? The current occupant of the White House is headed toward one more year of more than $4 trillion of deficit spending. National debt has increased 320% in fifteen years and has doubled every nine years. Debt-to-GDP has increased 220% in the same period. When the crash comes, blame will fall on many, Democrat and Republican alike. Mr. Trump will deserve a lion’s share.

Facts and Thoughts About Income Tax in 2021

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The sixteenth amendment, ratified in 1913, created the first direct relationship between individual citizens and the federal government. It was the first great erosion of the federalist nature of the country.

I’m not against income tax. We need reliable ways of funding government at all levels. Yet, this amendment weakened the original idea of a union of states formed to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide common defense, and promote general welfare among them. 

Article I, section 2 of the constitution declares that taxes shall be apportioned among the states according to population. Since there are significant differences in prosperity between states, this means of raising money was problematic. Having a tax based on income seems more just and tolerable. 

Money yields power. In the creation of the direct citizen-federal relationship, the central government gradually, over decades, accreted more power over the states. States now petition Washington DC for funds, the direct opposite of what was created at our founding.

It is possible to restore state power and still retain the ability to tax income by placing the collection mechanisms in the states, abolishing or greatly downsizing the Internal Revenue Service.  States could combine their income tax burden with the federal and have some leeway with deductions, incentives and other market manipulations without affecting the rest of the country. The handful of states without income tax create a bit of hurdle that would need to be cleared. Those that favor federalism and states’ rights would rejoice. The expanding statist populace would oppose this.

Power is a zero sum notion. The more power an individual, county, or state cedes, the less is retained. The founders disagreed on a lot of things but on one idea they agreed, that a unitary government with vast sums of wealth and power was an anathema to individual freedom. The founders and politicians ever since have differed in opinion about how much power to give to the central government. With the sixteenth amendment, enormous power has been achieved.

***

After breaking the barrier against direct citizen-federal relationships and a drift toward incrementally more social benefits, other connections were established over time. A national retirement plan was established during the Great Depression. A national healthcare funding plan for the elderly began thirty years after that. We have disaster insurance, and a growing array of federally funded health plans today. (Note that the preamble said promote the general welfare. The verb chosen was not provide.)

Historically in the US, progressives have managed to increase federal size and power by appealing to the emotions of the voters, citing desperate need for one group after another. Regardless of why or how it is done, by placing more money in one system, its power grows. I, for one, would like to see a balance restored by getting all social programs away from the federal government and let individual states run them, with a set of simple, unifying principles throughout the country.

The polarization that grips our nation in this era seems to be between the citizens who object to power being removed from states and individuals and concentrated in Washington DC and the citizens who want a strong central government, as long as it is run by people who agree with their position. The number and extent of federal social programs makes our country in the category of social democracy now. Progressives want more while conservatives was less. Without reaching a durable compromise about federal, state and individual power, we will fracture and fail.

Utah’s unfaithful Senator

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My family likes Mitt Romney, in particular the ones that are Democrats and don’t live in Utah. To me, Mitt is the prime example of why the seventeenth amendment was a mistake. In Utah, Mitt is well liked by Democrats, as is Jon Huntsman, liked so well, in fact, that hundreds changed party in order to vote in the primary election to get them on the Republican ballot. Mitt, for those that don’t know, is a Republican Senator who was elected to represent the state government of Utah. That is his singular objective. 

In the constitution before amended, Utah would have appointed a person to represent the legislature and governor by some mechanism that the state, not the federal government, had chosen. To be clear, the US senator was to represent the needs of the state government in a union of state governments (y’know, just like the name says.) In the current version, he represents himself. It is almost certain that a supermajority of the state legislature disapproves of many of his high profile votes. This means that he frequently votes against the institution he was elected to represent. Mr. Romney fails to represent his state. That’s his only job and he can’t do it.

This is what happens when senators are elected by a popular vote. They do not differ from representatives, except they have a longer term. There were problems with the Senate before the seventeenth amendment. We’ve only acquired different problems, ones that erode the basic structure set out in 1786. Arguably, it has added to the strain on our Union currently. Given diversities in many dimensions and planes and given that humans are not angels, there is no perfect system of government. It is also possible that the best form of governance varies according to the culture of those governed. For the people that loved liberty and freedom so much that they or their predecessors fled monarchies in Europe, the best structure seemed to be ours in its original basic structure as it balanced the needs of the people and the needs of state governments with the needs of the union of state governments, aka the federal government. (This explains in part why the states, not the people, elect the president.)

Mr. Romney is a good man, a popular guy, handsome, clean-cut, erudite, successful, wealthy and talented. However, he is unfaithful. He, not a Utahn, philandered to a state with a populace that would elect him, but, it turns out, not a state to which he could be true. He has long focused on the lengthy list of sins of Mr. Trump but cannot see his own political promiscuity. He repeatedly argued and voted to rid the country and the republican party of a man who, despite his flagrant flaws, did a hundred times more to advance conservative ideals than Mr. Romney ever could, ideals that Mr. Romney claims to support during his campaigns, and aspirations that dominate the state government. A man with no flaws has very few virtues, Lincoln said about his choice of generals, but he could have been speaking about Romney and Trump as well.

Lack of fidelity to party is, at most, a peccadillo. Making the state government you were elected to represent a cuckold is unforgivable. 

The Domestic Intel-Op, 2016 – 2020

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One of my personal aphorisms is that we see the world from where we stand. For example, an educated elitist may believe that most people need a college education. A young urban dweller may think that automobile ownership is a luxury.  A person who is left of center politically typically sees a person at the center as being on the right and sees those on the far left as moderates.  Every person is biased. Failure to recognize this constant of human nature leads either to gullibility or dogmatism. Many studies looking at various metrics over the years have shown that most media people dwell on the political left. A group of people that have a similar political worldview is likely to make decisions often without intent ranging from content to vocabulary that demonstrates this leftward bias. That’s rational and also reflects what I had perceived before Mr. Trump came to Washington. My belief that media bias was largely unintentional was shattered by the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

First, I should point out that a large chunk of Americans believe that the scandal is misinformation, a fiction created by Russian intelligence, the GRU, to disrupt our democratic process. My summary follows. A laptop was left at a repair shop. Many months later, the shop owner sold the old device as abandoned material, which act was legal. The buyer found that it contains material indicating the previous owner was a grifter of sorts, a man who sold access to his father, a former US senator and the current Democratic Party nominee for president, to several questionable or even frankly hostile governments through business ventures. New York Post reporters gained access to this trove of information and spend weeks vetting it before it was published two weeks before the presidential election. The material supported a former business associate who provided documentary support and testimony that the son and his father reaped millions of dollars of profit from a company tied to the communist leadership of China.

A normal news outlet would cover this astonishing breaking news story. Instead, the vast majority of media buried it, just as they had largely suppressed the video of Vice President Joe Biden threatening to withhold $1 billion of foreign aid from Ukraine if they failed to fire the prosecutor investigating his son and the company that hired him. Social media and search engines hid the NY Post laptop story. The reason given for keeping this information away from the public was that it was not only false but an intelligence operation of the Russian GRU. Former CIA director John Brennan said, “It has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” What media people heard Brennan say, however, was that the story was Russian disinformation. 

The CIA is a great place for clever liars and we appreciate them there, when they are working to keep us safe but not when they are misleading the country, using intel-ops in support of a personal political agenda. The entire Russia Hoax of 2016 – 2020, has all the hallmarks of a John Brennan operation, since it began with his CIA assets as soon as Trump became a nominee. By leveraging Trump’s ill-advised sycophantic approach to Vladimir Putin, Democrat leaders were able to give the Russia  hoax credibility. To be clear, there are still millions of Americans, including Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff, who still cling to the precept that Donald Trump is a Russian agent and that Russian oligarchs control him, possibly through blackmail or perhaps through some secret club. This notion provided the platform to claim the laptop was a Russian plant. Brennan and others only needed to keep the story out of public view until the election was past or, failing that, make the story another Russian ploy to keep Trump in office.

However, the laptop did not mysteriously appear; that it belonged to Hunter Biden was confirmed in several ways. Much of the laptop material was verified by secondary sources. A former business partner of Hunter Biden’s, who provided a great deal of the hard evidence confirming Biden’s ownership of the laptop, produced additional hard evidence and testimony of questionable dealings by the Biden clan. The partner, as I understand, was not a Republican and not a fan of Donald Trump. 

A pathetic tale of a profligate son grifting on his famous and powerful father’s coattails would normally sell a lot of copy. What was the compelling motivation to suppress this titillating tale of corruption at the height of the father’s campaign? Patriotism or partisanship? Was it elitist patronizing, or the media puppet masters deciding what string to pull? Regardless of reason, suppressing the story was intentional interference with our basic democratic process, honestly informed voting. The left got the electoral result they wanted.

To be or not to be…an autocrat.

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A man with a reputation as an early riser can sleep until noon. That was one of Mark Twain’s observations pertaining to expectation bias.

Let that sink in for a moment.

To paraphrase Shakespeare with a current event twist, the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Trump. The noble Biden hath told you Trump was authoritarian; if it were so, it was a grievous fault and grievously hath Trump answered for it. 

Mr. Trump was fond of saying, “Sleepy Joe,” in reference to the man who now has succeeded him as our president. Mr. Biden is not sleeping, at least with respect to extending power. He signed scores of executive orders and actions in a few days and continues at a rapid pace. It took (Mr. Authoritarian) Trump, several months to sign as many. Mr. Biden ran as one who reaches across the aisle, one who achieves compromise, and a man who will reduce partisan fighting. This was the reputation he, and the media, cultivated. But, now in the light of scores of actions, will the real authoritarian please stand up?

Perhaps half the country cannot see President Biden as authoritarian. The power of expectation bias is that even compelling facts can be rendered invisible. At least, for a while.

***

Sea turtles and insects lay many eggs. This is a trick of nature to ensure that enough of them survive to propagate the species. We have witnessed a flurry of orders that overwhelm the balance-of-powers mechanisms of our constitution, smothering the legislative and judicial branches. President Biden is counting on the legislative branch to support him and likely surmises that the judicial branch is loath to challenge him. Not only has Chief Justice Roberts been remarkably reticent, each order must be challenged and a lower court must review and support the challenger’s position in order for each order to reach the Supreme court. This avalanche of executive power is a clever trick and is likely to succeed on its own. The fourth rail of political balance (and the fifth column?), the media, will do its job of promoting, not challenging, this power play as well as the bipartisan, cooperative stereotype they stamped on the current president. Newlyweds and freshly minted politicians get away with excesses during the honeymoon.

One more thing. When President Biden had an opportunity to act with bipartisanship, he continued his autocratic style by rejecting a generous $600 billion bipartisan Covid relief bill and pushing his partisan $1.9 trillion bill.

Losing faith in electoral security.

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In the 2016 presidential election, Russians created pro-Trump advertisements on Facebook and other locations. C202andidate Trump joked about Russians turning over Hillary Clinton’s lost emails. For the next four years, federal investigations ran and congressional hearings were held on a wide range of Russian issues. Other than getting president Trump out of office, one laudable goal was making our elections more secure. President Trump has been called an illegitimate president under the premise that he would not have won without Russian interference. 

In all presidential elections, fraudulent voting has been reported.  People cheat. The amount of cheating is like shoplifting or employee theft; it happens on a small enough scale that it rarely makes a significant difference. There are notable exceptions, perhaps such as the election of Senator Al Franken.

In the recent 2020 presidential election, the reports of highly questionable activity were widespread and far in excess of any prior election in well over one hundred years. Improper vote counting was recorded on video and other cheating was substantiated with hard, factual evidence, supplemented by thousands of sworn affidavits. Most of the claims were that votes cast were not legal, but the remedy the states chose to deal with the complaint came from the school of Scrooge McDuck, where possession is nine-tenths of the law. They recounted all the votes that had been cast, without reviewing the legality of the votes in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the outcome did not change. In the NFL, this would be like reviewing one second of footage where a pass was incomplete and failing to review the seconds before when the receiver was held.

According to a recent piece by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist, a rapid analysis of voting records in Georgia showed the following: 

  • 2,560 felons,
  • 66,247 underage registrants,
  • 2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls,
  • 4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible,
  • 395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election,
  • 15,700 voters who had filed national change of address forms without re-registering,
  • 40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering,
  • 1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address,
  • 98 people who registered after the deadline, and, among others,
  • 10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted).

Such a litany of findings demands an in depth review, but, unlike football, where the evidence is footage from a few high speed cameras, the amount of data is voluminous and an adequate review of such claims would take months to years. There were only six weeks between election and the electoral college vote to collect probative evidence. The list of other problematic issues in several other states is longer and more complicated. Statistical anomalies abound.

Courts rejected the claims by the Trump campaign, citing lack of evidence, which is understandable. Courts as well as William Barr opined that number of ballots provably in question were insufficient to reverse the outcome. The major caveat is that the absence of evidence cannot be construed as evidence of absence, particularly apropos when the collection of evidence was just starting. Unspoken is the expectation bias, the unwillingness to consider that hundreds of thousands of votes could be fraudulent. We want—no, we need—to have confidence that our democratic process works.

Cynically, I note that strict Democrat partisans claim that looking into suspicious activity in the 2020 election is unpatriotic and harmful to our republic. It seems that whoever wins an election does not want any review while those that lose, demand that no stone should remain unturned. I tire of the whole party first mentality that seems to exist on all sides. I would think that with complaints by Democrats of interference in 2016 and the claims by Republicans of mischief in the 2020 election, that there would be some bipartisan support for a review and reformation of our electoral processes. I am, as usual, disappointed with politicians.

As in football, the Trump team is forced this year to accept the call made and the loss that came with it, regardless of their accusations of cheating. However, in the off-season, a great deal of work is needed.

  1. Purge and clean voter rolls in every district and state.  This is mandatory as there are millions of errors.
  2. Investigate the voting irregularities and claims of cheating in the 2020 election with a goal of preventing mischief in future elections.
  3. Return to in-person voting as the default. 
  4. For other methods of voting, increase security measures to equal those of in-person voting. (If we can safely conduct banking and commerce on a smart phone, we should be able to vote with it securely.)
  5. Ensure that state laws and regulations that affect elections for federal officers, such as president, senate and house, meet federal standards for fairness, security and voter eligibility.

The National Commission on Election Reform was formed after the problems with the 2000 presidential election. The report, datedAugust 2001, is anemic and vague. For example, it provides tables and data about signature verification in the various states but no data regarding the reliability of methods used to verify that a signature, or data that sheds any light on fraudulent voting by mail or ballot box versus in-person voting. The long report is what I have come to expect from the process followed and the people involved, dealing more with expanded access and not at all with security. We need data that deals directly with electoral veracity.

The goals should be to enable reasonable access for all eligible voters, to count all legal votes and not count any votes that are illegal by making fraud impossible. I’m not sure what road blocks Washington Republicans might erect but Washington Democrats typically contend that access is restricted, that some demographics are disenfranchised, that the voting age should be even lower, that anyone living inside our borders should vote, etc. However, we cannot afford to have another debacle of this magnitude where tens of millions of voters are fairly certain that the election was stolen and tens of millions of others have much less faith in the system. Lost faith is very difficult to restore. Ask a cheated-on spouse…and the cheater.

Millions of Democrats across the country maintained for four years that Mr. Trump was unfairly elected, stole the election with foreign interference, and was illegitimate. Here we are again, same chorus but a different verse, claiming that widespread cheating led to the election of Joe Biden. Failing to restore confidence in the democratic process could lead to catastrophic consequences for our nation. Washington, fix this!

Good Reasons

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A successful maneuver for political power is usually driven by a compelling emotion with a rationale that dupes people into complying, or at least fail to vigorously oppose. Fear: Carbon is destroying the planet, so you can’t buy things we don’t approve and you must buy expensive substitutes that we do. We will save you and the world from burning up. Envy or anger: wealth is bad and rich people abuse you, so give me your power against them, so you will all be equal; equally ho-hum. Pride: Deutschland über alles!

Now a pestilence is upon us. What a fortuitous opportunity to allow government officials, abetted by the fear-mongering media, to drive the capitalist economy off a cliff and substitute a centralized socialist economy that concentrates power. It was so compelling and esoteric, the proponents even cajoled a president with the most conservative record in American history into complying. For a while.

Suppose political power were a zero sum substance with each adult endowed with an equal amount. The more one cedes to any level of authority, the less is retained. While this is likely a true and immutable principle, some visible factors such as wealth and weaponry sometimes confuse the picture. Jefferson, a Democrat, saw inalienable rights as at least part of this substance. The US was founded as an egalitarian society with individuals and states retaining much of this substance. This changed about one hundred years ago when a series of constitutional amendments changed the very fabric of the country. Some called this progress and claimed the euphemistic title progressives. (Federal income tax was a stroke of genius in this regard. Money is power and most of it ended up controlled by the central government.)

Mitigating the pandemic provides a compelling reason to abridge basic rights and thereby accrete more power. Manipulative words are used such as science, mortality rates, overwhelming collapse, etc. Indeed, infection management has provided many good reasons to curtail many civil liberties such as financial independence, going to work or school, recreating, even visiting with friends and family. The uber-adherent busybodies, like brownshirts of the 20th century, run about reporting noncompliance to the authorities. Shop owners and surfers get thrown in jail. Those who cower-in-place gradually become vassals of the state. That may sound extreme. It is, but if what is reported as news is true, then who can argue otherwise? Progressives (aka socialists) strive for their ascendency while forcing the common man to cede autonomy, control, and power. The “progress” in progressive refers to their vaunted social and political status. For the rest of us, it is a regression to the state of civilization that existed for most of the last ten thousand years.

Trying to prevent a catastrophic collapse of our hospitals is appropriate and laudable. It’s also the threat used to compel compliance with the diktats from the overlords in capitols across our once free land. It’s a better reason than most for extracting power from individuals and amassing it to the government. Surely, in a world and nation replete with geniuses, we can learn to do two things at once: keep the death rate reasonably low while feeding the economic engine that allows us to do so without amassing five or ten trillion dollars of additional debt.

The Off-Plumb Covid-19 Quiz

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  1. In the old, wild west, a financially distressed sheep rancher has to move his herd of one thousand to the stockyard to sell. One route is through Indian territory where feed and water are plentiful. He knows the Indians demand six lambs as the price of using that route. The other route avoids the Indians altogether but the route is longer, the terrain is rough, and feed and water are scarce. He knows he will lose only two or three sheep to wolves on that route and that his herd will sell for as much as 20% less because they’ll be in bad shape. Which route should he take?
  2. A hungry, fire-breathing dragon is outside an enormous medieval castle, where ten thousand villagers have fled for protection. The dragon, fluent in French of course, gives the Lord two options. One was that he could provide thirty people to the dragon for her consumption. The alternative is providing twenty people plus twenty-five percent of the livestock and grain, a food supply vital to the fiefdom for the approaching winter. Losing that much would result in famine and possibly a number of deaths by starvation. The Lord asked the dragon if she would like to choose the people for her meals? She said, after a flaming roar, that she didn’t care, but older, tougher meat was better for her dentition, yet it was always pleasant to enjoy something younger as an aperitif. If you were the Lord, what would you chose and why?
  3. It’s early in the evening and the urban bar is full of professionals. The bartender comes out of a back room, looking gloom. “What’s wrong?” the psychologist asks. “Conflicted? Loss? Disagreement?”

“The health department says the place has too many flies,” he answers. “I have to shut it down.”

“I’ll sponsor legislation,” the senator says before anyone else can say a thing, “to make sure you and your staff have plenty of money and that the rent is paid. I’ll make sure you get a tax break, too.”

“I have a ten-thousand volt fly zapper I could lease to you,” said the salesman.

“I can write you a prescription for oral and topical medications against vector-borne diseases,” the doctor says. “And you probably need blood work, a CT scan and a colonoscopy.”

“I’ll sue the city health department,” the attorney says. “And the mayor, the city council, the zoning commission and the treasurer. Then I’ll go after the county and the state. Then Donald Trump.”

An entomologist offered a genetically manipulated male fly that would mate but not reproduce.

“I can depreciate your business, consolidate your liabilities and inflate your assets,” said the accountant. “By the way, what do you want the bar to be worth?”

“Why don’t you fix your screens, dude?” The contractor asked. “I could do that tomorrow if you bring me a few more boilermakers tonight.”

Question:  Is advice from highly intelligent people invariably helpful?

This Covid quiz is based on an estimated mortality rate of 0.25% when the medical system is not overwhelmed and 50 – 200% higher when it is.