Maverick Philosopher

Is There a Right to Health Care?

Arguments contra.

Top o' the Stack.

The Coronal Threat is Overblown . . .

. . . and is being exploited by the fascists of the Left to clamp down on our civil liberties, weaken the Trump economy and with it President Trump's re-election chances,  and to destroy the Republic to prepare the way for socialism. Or is it the multi-pronged claim I just bruited that is overblown?  You will have to decide that for yourself. But the recent scumbaggery of leftists such as Nancy 'the Ripper' Pelosi (see my man Hanson infra for a listing of some of her recent outrages) allows us no confidence in their probity.  They are to be presumed guilty until proven innocent. Such is required by my political burden of proof.  Better safe than sorry when dealing with leftist swine and their deadly flu.

I now hand off to Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn (bolding added):

But do you know the odds of any American getting this virus?  One would think that number is easily known or available.  It’s not. A lot of digging into various municipal data portals reveals, based on the population tested, that rates can vary from, at most, eight-tenths of a percent in New York City to two-one-hundredths of a percent in Phoenix. [.02 %]

Did you know the chances of recovery from the coronavirus are about 98%—if you catch it?  Did you know there are models showing 50% of the population may have already had it, never knew they had it, and recovered?  Again, one would think this data would be widely available and reported.  It isn’t. What is presented widely are numbers and warnings that scare and frighten us, and we are now being conditioned to a lot of panic and speculation.  But part of the reason we are getting conditioned to a lot of panic is because of the wide range of speculation about other numbers we accept as our new fright-inducing reality, an increasingly confusing and frenzied set of numbers.  And the normalization of our panic is having dire consequences and augurs for even worse.

[. . .]

Is it too much to ask for some perspective with numbers we do know about, numbers which have never shut down our country, much less a church or synagogue, much less entire industries; numbers which have never restricted travel or put this nation into one big frenzy? In any given month in America, we lose about 54,000 Americans to heart disease; 50,000 to cancer; 14,000 to asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema; 12,000 to stroke; 10,000 to Alzheimer’s; 7,000 to diabetes; 5,600 to drug overdoses; and 4,700 to influenza and pneumonia. Since February, in America, coronavirus: 9,500. Where is the sympathy for the victims and families of those other causes of death? The daily mortality count? The blaring headlines? The upending of the country? We hear almost nothing about them. Those deaths give us over 157,000 deaths a month. Given all that is being done about one cause of death, COVID-19, it turns out this is a very advantaged disease, indeed. And we will in time develop a vaccine for it, not to mention more and more good news coming in the short term about treatments from other extant medicines like hydroxychloroquine.

Read it all.  And don't forget: people will die from the economic depression caused by the draconian lockdown. It is morally moronic to opine, as NY Governor Cuomo did, that the extreme measures are justified if they save just one life.

Coronavirus and Secession

F. H. Buckley maintains that the first could hasten the second. 

We might have hoped that the pandemic would give us a respite from the nastiness of our politics, but not a bit of it. There’s a mild Trump bounce, as the president takes charge of leading the nation through the crisis, but the Trump paranoia continues unabated. Sec. Azar declared a public health emergency on January 31 and announced travel restrictions to and from China. At the time no one had a clue about how serious a problem it would be, and Joe Biden put the travel ban down to xenophobia and fear-mongering.

Xenophobia! What a senile idiot that Biden is! (Lately senile, he was always an idiot.) Does he know what the word means?

Apart from the White House, the coronavirus was on no one’s mind. Instead, impeachment took up all the air in the room. The House had voted articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, and this dominated the news until Trump’s acquittal on February 5. Obviously, other issues such as the coronavirus took up less of the president’s time than would otherwise have been the case, but if you thought he might have been cut some slack you’d be wrong. Instead, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff want to impanel a Coronavirus Response Commission to investigate the president.

Last Wednesday the New York Times provided a map showing the places where people traveled as the virus spread. In the North people stopped moving around by March 24, but in the former Confederate states people continued to travel more than two miles from home. Since infection rates are far lower in those areas, that’s not surprising. The Times also failed to mention that people also have a greater reason to travel in the Deep South, where stores are further apart. The story was thus a gratuitous swipe at a region that the paper’s readers could be expected to hate.

We used to be better than this. But since Donald Trump’s election a poison has entered America’s soul. It’s driven us apart and made the idea of a breakup more inviting. Non sumus qualis eramus.

F.H. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School and the author of American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup

I agree, except for the penultimate sentence. The poison has been present for a long time in the American soul. Trump has merely made its presence more evident by standing up and fighting for the conservative cause, something that milque-toast Mitt and his ilk were unwilling and incapable of doing.  Trump hasn't driven us apart; we already were apart. But by taking up the fight in earnest, Trump has driven the Left mad and forced them to show their true colors.  

The Latin sentence translates as "We are not as we were." It is Buckley's adaptation of Non sum qualis eram.

Did the Obama Admin Deplete and Fail to Replenish the Supply of N95 Masks?

Seems so.

I wonder if Chris Matthews, now that the Left has turned on him, still feels the thrill up his leg. That's probably as likely as that Nancy Pelosi is still praying for Donald Trump.

Arizona Governor Issues Stay-at-Home Order

Here:

Gov. Doug Ducey on Monday issued a statewide "stay-at-home" order to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, preventing Arizonans from leaving their residences except for food, medicine and other "essential activities."

The directive, which also allows for outdoor exercise, will take effect upon close of business Tuesday [3/31] and apply through at least April 30.

You extroverts will suffer, and it will be a moral challenge for us introverts to contain our Schadenfreude.