90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, May 21, 2022

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #420

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #418

First World Countries Don't Have Baby Formula Shortages...

When Joe Biden became president, the United States was coming out of the worst pandemic in more than a century. The country needed a steady hand who could unify everyone. Biden promised to be that kind of president.

But instead of implementing sound policies, Biden trashed the country. He declared open war on the U.S. energy industry on day one. He also pushed plans to print trillions more dollars and pump them into the ailing economy. It doesn’t take Warren Buffet to predict the impact of just those two decisions. It doesn’t take Jeff Bezos to recognize where this would end up, but belatedly Bezos has. Biden now finds himself lashing out at someone who is merely observing reality.

Squeezing the supply of the energy on which the modern economy depends while demand rebounded from the Democrat pandemic lockdowns would inevitably push energy prices higher. That’s middle-school level economics. Pumping trillions in funny money into the economy would make the dollars already in circulation -- and in your bank account -- worth less than they were worth yesterday.

Both of these inevitably led to the worst inflation that has wracked this country since the bad old days of Jimmy Carter. This is eating away at your savings while also making it more expensive for you to eat. This was predictable. In fact, Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers specifically warned the Biden administration. They didn’t listen.

Another side effect of lockdowns has been the supply chain mess. Biden laughed that one off too, then tried blaming Trump but the mess is his and he hasn’t put any serious effort into fixing it.

Biden is also not putting any serious effort into a side effect of the supply chain mess: the baby formula shortage.

As the shortage reached crisis levels last week, and young moms and dads (Including myself: I have a four-month-old) found themselves scrambling and sending out family across whole regions of the country futilely searching for the formula their infants need to stay fed, the Biden White House took a political trip and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took questions from reporters on the plane. When asked about what the Biden government was doing about the shortage, Jean-Pierre laughed nervously and offered nothing useful. Was the White House putting a point person in charge of the response, reporters asked. Jean-Pierre laughed and said she’d get back to them.

Biden’s Food and Drug Administration belatedly sued Abbott, the nation’s leading baby formula manufacturer, to get its closed plant in Sturgis, Michigan, open and producing again. But it will still take weeks before any formula from that plant is on grocery store shelves. The Biden administration knew of the problem for months, as it has admitted, but only acted when it could no longer ignore the problem.

This White House isn’t serious because it’s not run by a serious man and isn’t staffed by serious people. Everything, including your ability to feed your...

Morning Mistress

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You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

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This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

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Visage à trois #250

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #417

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When The Bottle Hits You!

Lockdowns, Closures, and the Loss of Moral Clarity

Last weekend, an 18-year-old kid slogged a powerful weapon into a Buffalo, New York, grocery store and started shooting people based on race. Thirteen people were slaughtered. His goal was to start a race war, along the lines of the fiction books that inspired his online gurus. He live-streamed the carnage and left a manifesto explaining his motives. His ideology – which has deep roots and has spawned genocides – is the kind of demonic gibberish that unstable kids find on the Internet when they are looking for some mission and meaning in life.

Why might this kid have allowed his brain to become poisoned in this way? He was a high school junior when the schools in his town were closed by government, from March 2020 through September at the earliest. That cut him off from peers and normal social life and the civilizing effect that they have. He lived online in isolated loneliness.

He admits this in his revolting “manifesto.”

“Before I begin I will say that I was not born racist nor grew up to be racist. I simply became racist after I learned the truth. I started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid…. I never even saw this information until I found these sites, since mostly I would get my news from the front page of Reddit. I didn’t care at the time, but as I learned more and more I realized how serious the situation was. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore, I told myself that eventually I was going to kill myself to escape this fate. My race was doomed and there was nothing I could do about it.”

These words reflect grave pathology. Recent surveys of people in forced covid isolation have found that some 30% develop strong symptoms of PTSD over the course of weeks. In this case, an already imbalanced kid found personal meaning through his own perceived “race” identity. He invented a sense of belongingness through an imagined artificial solidarity with others of his tribe. The next steps are obvious: the demonization of others who are blamed for his plight, the manufacturing of a mission, and the valorization of his own violent longings. The grotesque ideology he adopted was the replacement for what he lost or never had.

The disruption of closures and quarantines affected millions of others without the same results but the tendency is there: people are robbed of a moral center and a clarity about life’s meaning. In Freudian terms, the last two years provided every pathway for the id (the primitive instinct) to displace the ego, which consists of social norms, social realities, etiquette, and rules when deciding how to behave.

This displacement can leave nothing but instinct fueled by resentment and hate. Along with this comes the search for the “other” on which to blame all problems. Whether that is the racial identity, political deviants, the covid non-compliant, the unvaccinated, or make up any other category, we see the same dynamic at work: the attempt to stigmatize, exclude, dehumanize, and eventually eliminate.

This kid’s behavior is but a sign, a marker, an extreme example of the loss of moral center. It is also a warning. Millions more have been so affected, as we lost two years, not only of education, but also of socialization opportunities. Networks have been shattered. Expectations that life can be stable and good, and always will be, are gone for many among a whole generation. Even the Surgeon General has commented on the crisis for a generation, without of course identifying the most obvious causes.

What kinds of things unleash this Freudian id that is always just beneath the surface? What breaks the barrier created by sublimation? Isolation. Despair. Deprivation. This is linked to a shattering of social bonds (via “social distancing”) and also material loss. These cause hope to evaporate. A happy future starts to seem unattainable, and so there is a loss of desire to work toward that end. Instead, the psychology of reversion takes place: to behave in a primitive, anomic, and violent way.

Freud is a good guide to this tragic process, but to see the other end of the moral spectrum, we can turn to Adam Smith’s masterwork The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is heavy on the analysis of what it means to feel empathy, and not only to feel it, but to rely on it to the point that our own well-being is connected to the belief that others too are experiencing something like a good life.

What instills this higher sense in our minds? It is the practical experience of depending on others and finding value in their labor, productivity, contribution to community life, and coming to see our own well-being as bound up with the fate of others. This is what the market and socializing encourages: the gradual recognition that others, and indeed all people, are worthy of being treated with dignity and respect.

The universalization of this sense is never complete, but as civilization and prosperity grow, we make progress toward that end. This is what grants us ever better lives. Without it, we can very quickly descend into barbarism in the way The Lord of the Flies describes. This is particularly true in the volatile years of youth, when the search for meaning is active and the mind is malleable in both good and dangerous ways.

Take away community and you take away the thing that instills that Smithian sense of empathy that extends from a conscience trained by socialization. All of this is contingent on a functioning market and social order. Without that, a decline in mental health can lead to violent outbursts and even genocide.

The World Can Be Broken

Like you, I never wanted to live in a society that is devolving ever deeper into moral decay. Along with that is, inevitably, a fall in overall prosperity.

Years ago, I was having lunch with one of the great economists who had dedicated his life to studying economic freedom the world over. He developed the metrics to quantify this progress and ranked countries. I asked him the big question, whether there was ever a chance that in the West we could lose what we take for granted, and find ourselves falling back to ever more primitive ways, eventually losing both freedom and prosperity.

His answer came quickly: there is almost zero chance of that. Markets are too complex, law is mostly good, and humanity has learned the right path. The foundations of civilization are so strong that it would require a mighty effort to break them. People would never stand for it. I was relieved to hear this and went on with my naive ways.

Two years ago, in spring, this confidence in the future was shattered. A friend just now described it to me as a nightmare unfolding in real time, as ruling class elites play willy nilly with sacred rights and...