Today in 1926, Radio Corporation of America — then owned by General Electric Co., Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit Co. (now known as Chiquita Brands International) — created the National Broadcasting Co. …
… which later returned to RCA’s parent, General Electric Co. (from whose name came the famous NBC chimes), and now is part of what used to be Universal Studios …
… and is part of Comcast cable TV.
Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan:
It has been five months since the American people were told they would be under house arrest for three weeks to “flatten the curve.” Under the guise of protecting us from Covid-19, America’s politicians completed one of the greatest nonviolent power grabs in US history, pushing the lockdowns well beyond the initial three-week prediction, thereby taking control of 330 million lives.
To justify this, they shifted the goal posts from flattening the curve, to halting transmission of the coronavirus entirely. Some even talked about maintaining lockdowns, at least in part, until a vaccine is developed. That could take years.
Quelle surprise.
How did it come to pass that a nation of 330 million was effectively imprisoned, with virtually every sector of the economy shut down either in part or in total? The answer to this question is as clear as it was wrong: In the early days of Covid-19, politicians and experts lined up to tell us that, if we did nothing, up to 2.2 million Americans would die over the balance of 2020.
As of late August, there have been fewer than 170,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States. If the 2.2 million projection was accurate, then the US lockdown saved in the neighborhood of 2 million lives. But at what cost?
In early March, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the economic output of the United States economy over the period 2020 through 2025 would total $120 trillion. Just four months later and because of the Covid lockdown, the CBO reduced its projection by almost $10 trillion. That $10 trillion difference is income Americans would have earned had the lockdown not happened, but now won’t.
Economists outside the CBO have estimated this loss at almost $14 trillion. For perspective, the median US household earns $63,000. A $10 trillion loss is equivalent to wiping out the incomes of 30 million US households each year for more than five years.
Our desire to keep people safe, no matter the cost, has already resulted in 10 million Americans being unemployed. By the time things have returned to normal, the total price tag, just in terms of lost incomes and adjusted for inflation, will have exceeded the costs of all the wars the US has ever fought, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan – combined.
And the costs are staggering. As of August, estimates from Chambers of Commerce indicate that around one-third of the 240,000 small businesses in New York City have permanently closed. If that ratio holds for small businesses elsewhere, we could see around 10 million small businesses close permanently across the country. Major retail bankruptcies in the US have been every bit as disconcerting.All in, the effort to save two million lives from Covid-19 will end up costing us somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 million per life saved. People generally assume the lockdown was worth this massive cost, but there are a couple of things to consider before drawing that conclusion. First, for the same cost, could we have saved even more lives than we did by doing other things? Second, how plausible was the prediction of two million dead in the first place?
If saving lives simply, rather than saving lives from Covid-19 were our goal, we could have likely saved more than two million lives and at a lower cost. How so? For every $14,000 spent on smoke and heat detectors in homes, a life is saved. For every $260,000 spent on widening shoulders on rural roads, a life is saved. For every $5 million spent putting seat belts on school buses, a life is saved.
Each year, 650,000 Americans die from heart disease, 600,000 die from cancer, 430,000 die from lung disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s. To fight these diseases Congress allocated $6 billion for cancer research to the National Cancer Institute and another $39 billion to the National Institutes of Health in 2018.
The lockdown will cost us more than three hundred times this amount. For a three-hundred fold increase to NCI and NIH budgets, we might well have eradicated heart disease, cancer, lung disease, and Alzheimer’s. Over just a couple of years, that would have saved far more than two million lives.
The lesson here is a simple one: There is no policy that just simply “saves lives.” The best we can do is to make responsible tradeoffs. Did the lockdowns save lives? Some people claim they did – at a cost of $7 million per life saved if the initial estimates were correct – while others fail to establish any connection between lockdowns and lives saved.
Regardless, there are all manner of other tradeoffs here. The lockdowns didn’t just cost millions of people’s livelihoods, they also cost people’s lives. Preliminary evidence points to a rise in suicides. Nationwide, calls to suicide hotlines are up almost 50 percent since before the lockdown. People are less inclined to keep medical appointments, and as a result life-saving diagnoses are not being made, and treatments are not being administered. Drug overdoses are up, and there is evidence that instances of domestic violence are on the rise also.
But what if the lockdown actually didn’t save 2 million lives? There is strong, if not irrefutable, evidence that the initial projections of Covid-19 deaths were wildly overstated.
We can refer to a natural experiment in Sweden for some clarity. Sweden’s government did not lock down the country’s economy, though it recommended that citizens practice social distancing and it banned gatherings of more than 50 people. Swedish epidemiologists took the Imperial College of London (ICL) model – the same model that predicted 2.2 million Covid-19 deaths for the United States – and applied it to Sweden. The model predicted that by July 1 Sweden would have suffered 96,000 deaths if it had done nothing, and 81,600 deaths with the policies that it did employ. In fact, by July 1, Sweden had suffered only 5,500 deaths. The ICL model overestimated Sweden’s Covid-19 deaths by a factor of nearly fifteen.
If the ICL model overestimated US Covid-19 deaths merely by a factor of ten, the number of Americans who would have died had we not locked down the country, but instead practiced social distancing and banned gatherings of more than 50 people, would have been around 220,000.
To date, the CDC reports around 170,000 covid deaths in the United States. In other words, adjusting – even conservatively – for the ICL model’s demonstrated error, it appears that the $14 trillion lockdown perhaps saved about 50,000 US lives. If that’s the case, the cost of saving lives via the lockdown was not $7 million each. The cost was over a quarter of a billion dollars each.
Finally, there is mounting evidence that even if targeted closures had been necessary, a general lockdown wasn’t. Eighty percent of Covid-19 deaths in the US are among those 65 and older. Even if ICL’s flawed model had been correct, and we had been facing the possibility of 2.2 million deaths, only 400,000 of those would have been among working-age Americans. That’s less than two-tenths of one percent of working-age Americans. Social distancing and mandatory masks might have reduced that further. We could have quarantined the elderly, saved nearly all the lives that even the most dire predictions anticipated, and let the economy continue on as usual.
But we didn’t.
Of course, in March, we knew a lot less than we do now. In the face of 2.2 million likely deaths, many claimed that locking down the economy was the right thing to do. Over the subsequent weeks, as data emerged that the threat was far less deadly and far more focused than it had at first appeared, politicians could have released the lockdown.
But they didn’t.
They didn’t because politicians invariably feel the need to “do something.” Despite volumes of evidence from disparate fields like economics, social work, ecology, and medicine, it never seems to occur to politicians that sometimes doing less, or even doing nothing, is by far the better approach. Why should it occur to them? When politicians act and their actions do more harm than good, they always say the same thing: “Imagine how bad it would have been had we not acted.”
But this time, we have evidence. We can compare what happened where politicians reacted with a heavy hand to what happened where they reacted with a light touch. And the evidence we have so far points to the same conclusion: Our politicians destroyed our economy unnecessarily.
This won’t stop our politicians from congratulating themselves, of course. Nothing ever does. When the next crisis comes along they will land on the same sorts of heavy-handed solutions they did this time. The only thing that will chasten them is the anger of the American people. Politicians did far more harm to Americans than Covid-19 did, and that’s what the American people need to remember next time our politicians start down the same pointless road.
Because they will.
Writing in the Financial Times on September 1, Robin Wrigglesworth reported that markets are signaling unease about what may lie ahead in the first week of November. It is not so much the election that’s causing agita as the fear that Election Night might not resolve the result. Investors do not appreciate uncertainty, and if everything is still unresolved by, say, late the next day, the only certainty will be uncertainty.
On Bloomberg, Ryan Teague Beckwith has invited readers to “choose your own election adventure”:
So . . . how badly could this election go? In our choose-your-own-election game, see if you can avoid landing in a Supreme Court showdown or constitutional crisis and keep democracy safe (for now).
To be blunt, given the way that both the Trump and Biden camps (and parts of the media) are already throwing shade on the election process (not to speak of the sour aftermath of the 2016 election, or, for those with longer memories, the Diebold paranoia of yesteryear, or, for that matter the halcyon days when an election hung on hanging chads), the nervousness, if anything, may be underdone, especially as there are some signs that the race may be tightening, thereby reducing still further the chances of a clear-cut outcome not too long after polls close.
The president’s dark ruminations about the election — many of them centered on the iniquities of mail-in voting — are too well known to need repetition, as is the use he makes of conspiracy theories. But comments from the Biden camp also seem aimed at preparing a claim that they were robbed.
To take one example, CNN recently quoted Hillary Clinton as saying this:
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is. . . .”
Then there was Biden in June:
“My greatest concern, my single greatest concern [is that] this president is going to try to steal this election.”
And the Washington Post cannot be said to have been calming things down by printing a piece by Rosa Brooks describing how things might play out under various simulations prepared by the “Transition Integrity Project,” an exercise that might not have been entirely even-handed:
In each scenario, Team Trump — the players assigned to simulate the Trump campaign and its elected and appointed allies — was ruthless and unconstrained right out of the gate, and Team Biden struggled to get out of reaction mode. In one exercise, for instance, Team Trump’s repeated allegations of fraudulent mail-in ballots led National Guard troops to destroy thousands of ballots in Democratic-leaning ZIP codes, to applause on social media from Trump supporters. Over and over, Team Biden urged calm, national unity and a fair vote count, while Team Trump issued barely disguised calls for violence and intimidation against ballot-counting officials and Biden electors.
But don’t worry, counseled Brooks, steps (some of them certainly sensible) can be taken to defuse the atmosphere ahead of the vote. “The media also has an important role” to play.
Oh.
In a rather more measured article for the New York Times, Trip Daniel put, so to speak, flesh on the specters, focusing first on the likelihood that many more Biden than Trump voters will vote by mail:
An NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll last month found that nearly half — 47 percent — of supporters of Mr. Biden planned to mail in their votes, compared with two-thirds of Trump supporters — 66 percent — who planned to vote in person on Election Day.
In some states, the discrepancy is even more stark. A recent Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin, another swing state, found that among voters planning to cast a mail ballot, Mr. Biden was favored by 67 percentage points. Among those who planned to vote on Election Day, Mr. Trump led by 41 points.
And so:
“We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Josh Mendelsohn, the chief executive of the group, Hawkfish [a data-analysis company founded by Michael Bloomberg “to inform progressive initiatives”], told Axios on HBO. The company’s survey of registered voters concluded that twice as many planned to cast a ballot by mail as ever before, and that they were mostly Biden supporters.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Thea McDonald, called Democrats’ concerns about the president prematurely declaring victory “an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory,” adding, “President Trump and his campaign are fighting for a free, fair, transparent election in which every valid ballot counts — once.”
“Once.”
Today in 1956, Harry Belafonte’s “Calypso” went to number one for the next 31 weeks:
Today in 1965, Daily Variety included this ad:
Madness! Running parts for four Insane Boys age 17-21.
My father was a Teamster for 15 years. I grew up in a working-class household.
And I don’t believe the propaganda for a second.
“The Weekend: Brought to You by Labor Unions,” reads the bumper sticker.
I see. So those Third World countries looking to escape poverty and enjoy additional leisure just need … some labor unions?
(What’s the point of foreign aid, then?)
Until society grows wealthy enough, all the labor unions in the world can’t make it possible to take two days a week off from work.
Can you imagine, in the primitive economies of 300 years ago, agitating for a shorter work week? People would have thought you insane.
With little capital, and with most goods produced by hand, it takes all the labor power all the hours it can spare just to make life barely livable.
That’s why people worked long hours in terrible conditions in the past (and why they do in the Third World today). Not because short men with white mustaches and a monocle took delight in oppressing them.
What emancipated people from these dehumanizing conditions was capital goods. With workers vastly more productive than before, thanks to the assistance of machines, physical output was multiplied in quantity and quality many, many times over. This greater abundance put downward pressure on prices relative to wage rates, and people’s standard of living rose.
At that time they opted for more leisure and more pleasant working conditions rather than more cash.
But if you ask people who work in sweatshops today if they’d prefer to have (1) more pleasant conditions (or fewer working hours) but (2) less take-home pay, they overwhelmingly say no.
Professor Ben Powell of Texas Tech University actually bothered to ask. And 90+% of them said that regardless of what Western do-gooders thought they should want, they wanted the money.
Meanwhile, American workers had the eight-hour-day well before their much more heavily unionized counterparts in Europe did, and they earned higher wages. Unionism never accounted for more than a third of the American labor force, and that was at its height.
So whatever your kids’ teachers are crediting unions for, just roll your eyes.
Given that I have worked every day (not merely weekdays) since the pandemic began, and I have worked every Labor Day since my return to the weekly newspaper world, Labor Day is just another day of labor for me. I’d prefer Constitution Day, Sept. 17, to be a national holiday.
James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal begins with the headline “Why Aren’t You Calling These Riots?”.
Today’s headline is one of the questions readers of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have been asking the paper’s editors about recent violent events in Kenosha, Wis., and elsewhere. No doubt citizens nationwide have the same question for many politicians and members of the press corps who have lately been extremely creative in conjuring euphemisms for destruction and lawlessness.
The Milwaukee newspaper attempts to respond in an article entitled “Why we aren’t reporting on the records of the victims of the Kenosha protest shooting, and answers to other questions about our coverage.”
As for the specific question on why the paper is reluctant to use the word “riot,” the Journal Sentinel claims:
We are very careful about labeling events — especially using politically and historically loaded terms… It’s not our job to characterize events with the same words that political campaigns or others with agendas might use. Rather, we aim to accurately and fairly report what we see, in plain English, whether we’re describing peaceful marches and demonstrations or violent clashes …
As we’ve seen in cities around the country this summer, protest participants and the activities surrounding them often change throughout the day and night. Peaceful protests can happen all day long and then fires can be set or violence occurs late at night by people not associated with the protesters. Would it be fair or accurate to label all that happened that day a “riot” — especially in a headline summing things up? We don’t think so.This column will go out on a limb and suggest that the demand for a plain-English account free of agendas was exactly what motivated the reader question in the first place.
Kenosha was back in the news on Thursday. But a visit from a high-profile politician may not have advanced the cause of plain English or done much to clarify the issues related to recent violence. Caitlin Oprysko reports for Politico:
Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to joke on Thursday that if he spoke any longer about his plan to increase taxes on the wealthy “he’ll shoot me,” as he addressed a group of Kenosha, Wis., residents after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
While explaining to locals in attendance at Grace Lutheran Church how he planned to pay for several of the initiatives aimed at combating racial inequality that he’d outlined moments earlier, Biden alluded to several people in the audience who appeared to stand up during his remarks or otherwise seemed antsy for the Democratic nominee to wrap up.Fortunately there are some politicians who have been speaking with clarity. Noah Rothman writes in Commentary about the unsung work of mayors across the country this summer who decided not to excuse violent lawlessness. Among the examples noted by Mr. Rothman:
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock defined in clear terms the distinction between peaceful, productive protest and intolerable violence amid the very first signs of impending civil disorder. Those terms were repeatedly violated, and clashes between rioters and law enforcement in this notoriously progressive city have become a common occurrence. The local press has focused primarily on the police use of tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse violent crowds, citing activists who accused law enforcement of deploying non-lethal ordnance indiscreetly. But the city was and continues to be threatened by an organized menace.
“They had guns,” said Denver’s Public Safety Director Murphy Robinson following one late August spasm of violence. “They brought explosives, axes, machetes, and had one intent purpose, and that was to harm our officers.” Mayor Hancock has been similarly unequivocal. “We will not be using the words protest or march,” he averred. “This was a riot.” To this threat, the city responded by repealing COVID-related intake caps for local prisons, deploying hundreds of police, and dispersing potentially violent demonstrations. Police were assaulted and injured. Businesses were looted and vandalized. Residents were terrorized. But at no point did the city’s elected officials project anything other than intolerance for violence…
Today in 1963, ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand” moved from every weekday afternoon in Philadelphia …
… to Saturdays in California:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Doors’ “Waiting for the Sun,” their only number one album:
The number one single in the U.K. todayyyyyyy in 19677777777 …
One yearrrrrr laterrrrrr, the Beatles recorded Eric Clapton’s guitar part for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” making him the first non-Beatle on a Beatle record:
The College of Rock and Roll Knowledge reports:
… The Beatles’ George Harrison was heading in to London for a recording session for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. His neighbor, Eric Clapton needed a lift into London, so George offered to take him. George had a different idea though.
Harrison wasn’t happy with his own guitar tracks on the song so while driving, he asked Eric to come to the session and do a track on.
Clapton at first refused, saying that “nobody (famous) ever plays on the Beatles records!” but George insisted. Clapton came in and the invitation has its intended effect: the band members were completely professional and Eric’s solo sounded great.
As Clapton was listening to a playback, the thought his solo wasn’t “Beatle-y enough,” so the solo is run through an ADT circuit with “varispeed”, with the session engineer manually ‘waggling’ the oscillator: Engineer Chris Thomas has recalled: “Eric said that he didn’t want it to sound like him. So I was just sitting there wobbling the thing, they wanted it really extreme, so that’s what I did.” The effect sounded like the guitar was run through the Leslie rotating speaker of the Hammond B-3 organ cabinet.
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1975:
The number one song in Britain today in 1954 was the singer’s only number one hit, making her Britain’s first American one-hit wonder:
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1964:
Today in 1967, the Beatles probably felt like they were the walrus (goo goo ga joob) after needing 16 takes to get this right:
Kyle Rittenhouse deserves the best defense money can buy. He shot three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not because he wanted to but because he had to. He is, for all intents and purposes, a standup citizen with aspirations of being a great public servant. I hope he still manages to become one after all of this.
That said, the Rittenhouse situation shouldn’t be a situation at all.
I’ve gone into detail about what Rittenhouse faced that night, so I’m going to skip the details and get down to the point.
(READ: Kyle Rittenhouse Was Right to Fire His Weapon)
The fact that Rittenhouse was there in the first place isn’t a good thing. Not necessarily on Rittenhouse’s part, though. He felt he needed to be there. Looking at the teenager’s history, he’s clearly a believer in public service and holds police and firefighters in high esteem. This isn’t a bad thing, but it answers the question on both sides about why Rittenhouse felt he should be in that Kenosha warzone.
Rittenhouse’s inner voice that tells him to act for the good of his fellow Americans was likely pretty loud in his ears and, combined with the impetuousness of youth, he set out to put himself into harm’s way for the people of Kenosha. Being the person he is, he even gave medical aid to the people who were there supporting the riots.
His ideological stances and opposition to the mob eventually lead to him killing two people and injuring a third. Despite the fact that this happened, it doesn’t make Rittenhouse the bad guy in the story. Yes, two people are dead, but that’s not Rittenhouse’s fault, it’s theirs.
Arguments against that very point have arisen. Some say that Rittenhouse shouldn’t have put himself in the position to have to kill someone in the first place. He showed up with a gun and began doing things that could only upset the rioters. In a way, Rittenhouse was inviting violent conflict even if he wasn’t actively seeking it out.
Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner put it like this:
This isn’t a new story. In my family, we have a word for it: a “Plaxident.” It’s in honor of former Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, who in 2008 shot himself in the leg. Burress was walking up a narrow, dark stairwell with a drink in his hand when he tripped and fell. His gun came sliding out of his belt, and he tried to grab it. Then, bam.
Yes, anyone could slip on a stairwell. Trying to grab the falling gun might or might not have been rational. But showing up at a night club with a gun in your belt was the real error. So the accidental discharge wasn’t an accident: It was a Plaxident. If your kid breaks a window explaining that his grip slipped on the fastball he was throwing, the relevant question isn’t how his grip slipped but why he was throwing a baseball inside.
Rittenhouse’s error had far graver consequences.
Catholic teaching includes a concept called the “near occasion of sin.” Sometimes, the biggest mistake we make is putting ourselves in a terrible position. And in Catholic teaching, that prudential mistake is a moral error — a sin.
It’s a solid point to consider, but not one I entirely agree with. Rittenhouse definitely put himself into a position where he would have been forced to kill people. He brought a gun to a riot and began attempting to limit the damage the riot was trying to cause. That the teenager had a hand in developing what happened that night is a fact that cannot be denied.
Where I tend to diverge with arguments like the one above is a moral question. Is it wrong to go to a place where evil is flourishing and stand between it and innocent people? Is it wrong to show up to a lawless place and inject order?
There are different schools of thought on this with all sorts of variables and nuances to consider to be sure, but what I want to focus on is Rittenhouse’s situation in particular. If the kid had gone there with the intent to shoot someone and took an active part in arranging for things to happen that would facilitate homicide then yes, I believe that would have been wrong.
But that’s not what happened. Rittenhouse clearly reacted to the situation with self-defense after going there to assist people, not play the part of vigilante. Vigilante actions would mean actively seeking out “justice” against those committing injustices. All evidence so far points to Rittenhouse being there to help defend locations and assist where he can.
The rioters, who were clearly there to do wrong in the first place, could have left Rittenhouse alone. It would have been wise of them to do so given the fact that he was armed. Yet, they didn’t. They attacked Rittenhouse who was then forced to defend himself. They didn’t have to, but they did. The risk of death was their choice, not Rittenhouse’s. Rittenhouse attempted to prevent their deaths by retreating every single time. He was trying to show them mercy as he was in the position of a death dealer but the rioters rejected that and came after him.
The teen fired his weapon out of necessity, not vengeance. It was the rioter’s decisions that lead to their deaths.
The teenager is not to blame for the deaths despite the fact that he was there any more than officers who are forced to shoot attackers are to blame. Yes, it’s true that Rittenhouse could have stayed home and none of this wouldn’t have happened, but it’s also true that his being there wasn’t a moral wrong and the events that led to the shooting weren’t the kid’s fault.
Being there as a defensive measure will definitely invite retaliation from those on the offensive, but again, the option to attack is not on the defenders, it’s on the attackers.
Were the Koreans on the rooftops during the LA riots wrong to be there? We largely agree that they were perfectly in their right and their threatening posture paid off. The Korean businesses were spared the destruction the rest of the city suffered.
Rittenhouse’s situation differs slightly but not enough to be considered wrong. He was there doing what Americans do and was doing so legally.
If you ask me, the real blame for Rittenhouse’s fateful night doesn’t rest on the kid and while the protesters have the blame to take, I wouldn’t put the lion’s share of it on them.
The riot shouldn’t have been going in the first place, and it wouldn’t have happened if the leaders in control of these cities and states would do what they’re supposed to do and protect the citizenry. They aren’t. They’re allowing this burning, pillaging, and murdering to happen.
If there wasn’t a riot, there wouldn’t be a Rittenhouse, but if you allow your streets to be terrorized and destroyed, a Rittenhouse is bound to arrive.
As for the victims of what the black humor portions of social media call the “Kenosha hat trick,” Wisconsin Right Now has evidence that you would want none of the three as neighbors.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 