Tag Archives: culture

The Coming Wuhan Virus War

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Daniel Henninger worries about the next Wuhan Virus war (he refers to it with the more press’ saccharine, more politically correct label, “coronavirus” war).  This is a political war between the American Left and the rest of our American nation.

In the course of his piece, though, he had a couple of remarks that I’m not sure he really understood.

A federally led policy is appropriate in a national crisis like this.

Indeed, but federally led, not centrally led.

But once it passes, the issue will be whether to revert to the freest private economy we had in a generation or whether deeper, explicit social direction and economic protections by the national government are justified.

This depends entirely on whether Americans in general understand the difference between “federal government” and “central government.” That’s a distinction Progressives, Progressive-Democrats, and their “education” divisions of teachers unions have been working so hard for so long to muddy.

We’ll need to turn out in force in the coming election to prevent Progressive-Democrat destruction. Yes, that’s part of the war which worries Henninger—but the answer to Progressive-Democrats’ divisiveness and destruction cannot be, at this crossroads for our nation, simply to turn the other cheek or otherwise ignore attacks on our freedoms and our personal responsibilities.

Wuhan Virus Tracking

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Many nations are using cell phone data and/or apps installed on cell phones to track folks known to be infected in order to identify those persons’ contacts and to build up anticipatory data of pending and developing hotspots. This is intended to facilitate more efficient targeting of medical resources, to more efficiently target more limited populations, and so to more quickly free up economic resources and activity.

The US Federal government, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is creating a portal that will compile phone geolocation data to help authorities predict where outbreaks could next occur and determine where resources are needed, though the effort faces privacy concerns.
… Alphabet Inc’s Google said Thursday it would share a portion of its huge trove of data on people’s movements.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an app to track Covid-19 patients and the people they interact with, and are in talks with the federal government about its use, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

The EU is going even further, developing and propagating apps that track individuals, ostensibly with their permission.

These moves are being sold as necessary for the present situation, even though they badly risk individual privacy—cue Ben Franklin.

Such sales pitches would be believable—and stipulate arguendo that the tradeoff might be minimally acceptable—if these surveillance moves had sunset clauses in them. Such surveillances need to be automatically terminated after some specified period of time or at some easily measurable milestone—Wuhan Virus infection rate drops below a particular threshold, for instance. Sunset clauses also must include destruction of the surveillance databases, with that being verifiable by anyone who asks—the present FOIA procedures would provide an example of how that would work.

Unfortunately, sunset clauses are notably absent from these moves toward government surveillance of us citizens—the danger of which is emphasized by the example of the People’s Republic of China and by our own FBI’s abuse of its surveillance authorities, along with our own FISA Court judges’ cynical acceptance of those abuses.

Resistance to Change

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Matthew Hennessey, writing in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal commented extensively on the current Wuhan Virus (my term, not his) situation and its impact on education, specifically the forced switch to a measure of home schooling.

Many families have found themselves running pop-up homeschools. Most students will return to traditional classrooms when the crisis passes. But some families—perhaps many—will come away from this involuntary experiment with a new appreciation for home-based education. They may even decide that homeschooling is not only a plausible option, but a superior one.

It’s that last bit, coupled with the article’s subheadline, that drew my attention. That subhead was

Education has long been resistant to change, but it can’t dodge the pandemic.

Education can’t dodge the pandemic any more than any of the rest of us can.  But it isn’t education that’s resistant to change.  The rapidly increasing demand for voucher schools, charter schools, straight-up homeschooling, and other variants to providing education for our K-12 children demonstrates the error of that claim.

It’s the parents who are pushing for those changes, and they’re supported by a few politicians and a few State and local governments who are, if not pushing for these changes, at least are staying out of their way.

It’s many other State governments and especially teachers unions who are actively opposing these changes. It’s the managers of education systems who have been long resistant to change, and remain so. The consumers of education systems, and especially their parents, are clamoring for these and an unfettered expansion of these changes.

Progressive-Democrats and the Law

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And contracts.  Since the SARS epidemic of some years ago, insurers have declined to cover losses related to virus or bacteria damage, and they wrote their policies to that effect. State regulators—who controlled and still control the structure of insurance policies and the premiums allowed to be charged for those policies outside Obamacare—agreed.

However.

New Jersey Assemblyman Roy Freiman, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would retroactively rewrite interruption coverage contracts and force insurers to foot some losses for any policyholder with fewer than 100 full-time employees.

Contracts be damned. They don’t fit the Progressive-Democrat agenda, so by Progressive-Democrat-run Government fiat, they must be tossed.

Here’s the kicker, though.

Mr Freiman says he doesn’t know if he has the legal authority to do this, but he says he doesn’t care.

The law be damned too—it’s in the Progressive-Democrat’s way. Don’t get enough of his fellows in the legislature to agree with him and change the law. Don’t get actual voters to agree with him and so get legislators to stand with him to change the law.

No. The Progressive-Democrat already Knows Better; everyone should just get out of his way so he can toss the law without any silly delays from the ignorant unwashed.

In Defense of an Election Defeat

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Ex-Congressman Dan Lipinski (D, IL) lost his State’s primary election largely—almost entirely—because of his pro-life position on abortion.  He wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal explaining how that loss came about:

I faced it [the question of whether he should have changed his abortion stance to win the primary] head-on in my statement. I defended my pro-life position, which is rooted in both my Catholic faith and science. “I could never give up protecting the most vulnerable human beings in the world, simply to win an election,” I said. “My faith teaches, and the Democratic Party preaches, that we should serve everyone, especially the most vulnerable. …”

Then he closed his piece with this:

[P]arty leaders and presidential candidates refuse to tolerate anyone who doesn’t support abortion on demand at any time, paid for by taxpayers.
The Democratic Party asserts that its highest priority right now is to defeat President Trump. The party’s treatment of pro-life voters belies that claim.

Party’s treatment of Party non-believers doesn’t belie the claim so much as it makes the claim harder to satisfy. After all, babies don’t vote, but pro-life citizens of all political bent do.

Kudos to this rare Democrat who put integrity and honor and respect for life above winning an election.