Crisis

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When I was a kid, working at small-town radio stations in North Dakota, my favorite part of the job was working during tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings.

Which seems counterintuitive, perhaps – but there was something about the crackle and buzz of imporance, of purpose, in the air; the increasingly urgent National Weather service bulletins, the terse phone calls from the cops and sherif, that far more than overcame the whole “there’s a tornado coming!” thing.

And as a tall, gawky, greasy-haired, uncoordinated kid with little apparent athletic talent in a town that idolized the basketball team, it didn’t hurt that I knew, all over town, people were listening.

To me.

Of course, when the warning was over, I and the rest of Stutsman and Foster Counties went back to normal life. I didn’t keep telling people to stay in their basements when the front had passed and the warning was over. Because much as I enjoyed knowing that people were paying attention (and, more important, that I could deliver what they were tuning in for, with style), there were other things in life, and I didn’t need the state of crisis to keep giving me value.

A lot of people out there today can’t say that.

Covid has brought out a strain in a small, but socially prominent, group of people that find their self-worth in crying “Crisis!”.

Not just the media – it’s a given that they will make hay out of crises; pandemics and riots make them more relevant, just as tornados made Mitch Berg’s patter more important to more people than the usual diet of local sports and Rupert Holmes records that occupied most of my time on those stations.

No – it’s regular, workadaddy, hugamommy, usually but not always left-of-center types, for whom being the harbinger brings meaning to life.

And it’s to them that so much of Big Public Health’s narrative is aimed.

Great Twitter thread on the subject:

They – on social media, in the checkout line at Target, or in the comment section here – remind me. of the kids who ran to the teacher when someone stepped out of line when talking from the classroom to the water fountain. They got their sense of personal value from enforcing rules on others – whatever the rules, however niggling and petty and useless – back then, as now.

It’s the toxic corollary to “we’re all in this together”: the unstated “…and I’m not gonna let you forget about it!”.

14 thoughts on “Crisis”

  1. About 40 years ago, I was listening to a small local radio station, when the announcer said to call and tell them about the bad weather situation where they were at.

    A woman called in and said she could see the tornado. The announcer said: “Where are you.” The woman said: “I’m in the basement.” Announcer: “What city?” Woman: “Osceola.”

    I had a good laugh.

  2. I don’t believe that there’s anyone that wants this to continue as is. At some point, we need to draw a line and Omicron may be that point — where we transition to something that’s a much more manageable disease. It would mean that the country would have to move towards a future in which Covid is an endemic disease like the flu, rather than a pandemic that dominates our life.

  3. Intelligent people may never trust lavishly-funded “experts”, again. They certainly will not trust them without complete verification, release of all data and testing.

    Nitwits, like rat Emery et. al., are simply waiting for the next opportunity to run around drinking in the bullshit and squawking, like chickens in the rain. Competent, intelligent groups push these ignorant cunts out of their sight and sound at the first opportunity.

  4. From politico:
    At least one Democrat, Rep. Ro Khanna of California, has called for a new chief at CDC — someone who “really has the respect of the public health community, and has been right on a lot of the calls.”
    https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/11/democrats-covid-strategy-526924

    Yeah, find some establishment medico who correctly predicted that a more contagious but far less deadly strain would replace Delta in December. Find an establishment medico who predicted that the vaccines would neither stop you from getting or spreading covid.
    The problem with the “public health experts” is that have an inch of knowledge and they want 6 feet of authority.
    The science is not “evolving.” There is a very strong stochastic element to this pandemic, as there nearly always will be when a thing depends on social behavior. This means that you can only make probabilistic predictions, and this means that you are going to be wrong a lot and you will not know how likely you are to be wrong.

    But never fear! Madame Pelosi is here: “Pointing to her own N95-type mask, she added, “My message is that if everyone wears these masks, not cloth masks, we could be rid of this in a short period of time.”

    So Pelosi is overriding CDC recs now? Holy shit these people couldn’t lead a group of cub scouts out of a walmart.

  6. Mandate over turned.
    The people who said the mandate was unconstitutional were correct.
    Yet another unforced error by Team Biden.
    We know from leaks that there were strong arguments within the administration that the mandate was unconstitutional. More Buden political capital flushed down the toilet.

  7. Here is cumulative US VAX data over time for all of the states:
    https://ourworldindata.org/us-states-vaccinations
    Biden announced his mandate on September 9, 2020.
    I do see a small increase in vaccination in many states about December , then a return to the earlier growth slope.
    But there is a point of diminishing returns in operation. Getting the first 50% of the unvaxxed population vaxxed is easy, Half of the remainder is harder. Half of the remainder after that harder still. Hard to justify the political capital spent on this to vax a few more people, likely so young and healthy that covid posed a small risk for them, especially since we know that the vax won’t prevent that young, healthy person from spreading the disease.
    There was a chance that the justices would have dealt a hard blow to the administrative state by limiting the ability of congress to delegate its authority to fed agency bureaucrats. That would have utterly crippled the Progressive Project. So Biden and the radical left dodged a bullet there.

  8. How a True North Dakotan deals with a tornado.

    I mean ,if it’s moved to your north and/or east, you’re pretty much safe, and burning daylight…

  9. The Biden administration forgets that the US is a republic. The interstate commerce clause has been reinterpreted since Teddy Roosevelt to widen federal authority but there are logical limits. It seems the Supreme Court has started to draw an outer boundary for presidential over reach.

    Biden would be better served by thinking ahead such as anticipating the need for more and better testing (which he laments not having done) and having the CDC offer coherent guidance rather than trying to coerce a divided citizenry. The country needs creative leadership and not bullying by an administration without a decisive electoral mandate.

  11. How much should we be upping our probabilities that a bunch of other mysterious ailments are caused by viruses too? Or revealed by viruses. None of the covid co-morbidities are viral.

  14. The challenges ahead require rational decision making that considers costs and benefits and keeps sight of the many things in life that matter.

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