I’ll confess that all this self-isolation has hardly been difficult for me. I’m a homebody by nature anyway, and having an excuse not to go anywhere suits me fine. I’ve been reading a lot, walking in the woods, cooking, and spending a lot of time on various musical projects downstairs in the studio.
One thing I have not been doing is paying much attention to the news. In boringly typical fashion, the media have taken up this crisis as the latest cudgel to bash Donald Trump for allegedly botching the U.S. response. Now I know of course that they can’t be trusted; if he were healing the sick by laying on of hands, they’d arraign him for inadequate “social isolation”. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
So, what do you think? Did Mr. Trump fail bigly here? I can’t be bothered to figure it out for myself: I have a nice South Asian curry to prepare in the kitchen, and a song that needs mixing downstairs.
14 Comments
There are two tracks here: Trump’s public pronouncements and Trump’s actual decisions. His public pronouncements, especially early on, were unduly optimistic, which might have caused some persons to be less cautious than they should have been. (But shame on them for listening to any bloviator instead of using common sense.) Later pronouncements — mainly through the daily briefings — have been realistic and useful (though there’s a sizeable chunk of the electorate that reflexively scorns anything Trump has to say). Decisions seem to have been on the right track all along; that is, Trump has done a good job playing the hand that he was dealt. If the U.S. government was ill-prepared for COVID-19, it was because of political and bureaucratic decisions made before the crisis was dumped in Trump’s lap. But most of the media will never acknowledge that. While I have your ear, I have been tracking the U.S. statistics and have concluded that the number of U.S. cases will top out around 250,000, while U.S. deaths will top out at less than 10,000. Those projections assume that lockdowns, quarantines, and isolation continue through April, and that there’s no second wave or massive re-infection.
He’s glib, impulsive, and thin-skinned as usual. He’s doing better than I expected, but not great.
…but thank god he got elected. Hillary would have stayed in denial for weeks, and the media would have let her.
…the media have taken up this crisis as the latest cudgel to bash Donald Trump for allegedly botching the U.S. response.
He did botch the response, but not as badly as the media did. Tucker Carlson shouldn’t have to stage an intervention to put Trump in touch with reality.
Trump has pretty much tracked the response of heads of state in the Anglosphere. Initially too optimistic, then the crackdown, and I expect we’ll soon see a quick unwinding of the crackdown once more facts become available.
Scott Adams is correct: there are no right answers at this point, so the real measure will be how well we correct our mistakes as they become obvious.
Have also been gently laughing at the Horrible Nightmare this presents for my more sociable friends. Me, I’m just going out one time less per day than usual.
Gently gently.
I’m wondering what the t-shirts are gonna be like too – pussy hat like or maybe ‘what, I missed something important’?
The question might be not how Mr. Trump is handling things, maybe the question is is the another past present our future who would not make a hash of things faced with what President Trump is?
Personally I believe Mr. Trump is doing quite well. The President certainly has no lack of enemies in the yellow media or within the federal government who are not helping and doing their part as American’s.
I’m very OK with self quarantine. Enjoy the serenity and quiet, home is where the heart is. I want to keep mine ticking till I give up the ghost from natural causes, not some globo-pedo weaponized critter.
Never say die.
Picked up 5 WV Fish & Game kill permits, with a promise of 5 more when those first are turned in. Have a scrumdilly recipe from a fellow I worked with in the mines, his dad was a Chef at The Greenbrier Hotel, so good a jerky recipe that it will make bear meat taste like jerked prime rib. It’s a lemon juice with Lea & Perrins Worchester Sauce base
The deer getting in my farm plots already, aren’t but 150-175lbs, after all said and done, maybe 30-40 lbs of good natural prime red meat per deer, but 10 of the vermin makes one dandy of an amount of jerky, pemmican, and canned venison. I would not have the time regularly to tend to that much butchering and processing.
Nothing like quality time, all you can get, with my lovely wife and our dawg Muffy.
We always keep a large rotating pantry, and built our own off grid power system, heat with wood, try to source as much of the food we need locally and off our land.
It’s not prepping or survivaling, its how we where raised. I joke and call it surethriving. We eat so good its an embarrassment of riches. Lot of hard work, but thats okeedokee, got to work for fude regardless.
This panic-demic is killing a lot of birds with one stone.
It’s so quiet on this ridge, we hardly notice anything like what is seen on the internet, except for word from relatives out of state. The ones near KC are getting very concerned, they say it’s not good there. Like scared not good, fear.
Not a good sign at all.
Looking forward to getting a look at Comet Atlas, about May they say, though it’s magnitude is increasing most rapidly to everyones delight, could be eye visible sooner. A celestial display of a comet would be wonderful. Prophetic too.
Watched 17 satellites go by night before last. SpaceX supposedly has over 300 interwebs network satellites up since last weeks launch. Maybe why so many to see. The ISS is spectacular if it goes over within hours of sun set. Naked eye you can just determine it has those big sections sticking out. Last time it looked like a cross, like a tiny brilliant heavenly jewel.
I believe Musk will reach Mars and set up his dream of a colony. It is a remarkable story of improvisational seat of the pants innovative aerospace engineering, manufacturing and technology. They have turned aerospace on it’s head, changed everything. Wish I was twenty again, I’d be going by hook or by crook. God Speed you guys! Too many eggs in one basket on this gravity well, it’s raining soup in space. Truly New Frontiers. Took about 30 years longer than we expected after Apollo 11, but thats fine, its happening that counts.
The 7th is a Super Moon too. When you live with no light pollution in the sticks the sky is majesty, the heavens, so many stars, there’s a grand design, providence.
Martin van Creveld posted in his usual humble scientific style, an enjoyable scientific observation about uncertainty. At this point in watching the human extinction movement’s attempts, to take the Christian West with it, to it’s own inevitable dirt nap, I’m more inclined each passing “event” towards van Creveld’s and William S. Lind’s outlooks.
http://www.martin-van-creveld.com/the-reign-of-uncertainty/
Phil, Thanks for the link to Martin van Creveld. I read the essay and found it very enlightening. This is an area that I have thought about a lot over the years, but not to such good effect. I’ve added him to my RSS feeds.
Don’t mention it, glad you enjoyed reading it.
Yes, lot to get out of what van Creveld put into it. There’s a nice continuity to how he composed it, like a single long coherent running train of thought.
Seems to me of late the man is expressing more of the spiritual elements of human activity in his writing.
Thanks for this engaging and expressive comment, Phil.
Kudos should go to van Creveld and others like yourself for inspiring us humble commentariat to use our noggin’s in different ways. Gut lumber for the mind.
Any wonder there why the alt-media and blogosphere is so popular and the thought police are the modern Vandal’s of the Republic?
Two things I have noticed about the news coverage of this event, probably things that could be extrapolated to news coverage in general but which I’ve never seen so clearly as now.
1. There is a privileging, a showcasing, a featuring of, and by all this a general approbation bestowed upon, those who are highly emotional, as well as those who object in some sense to what is happening, either to some particular regarding governmental response, or in terms of a more general indignation expressed towards the universe. The sadder and more hysterical a person’s reaction, the more likely it is shown front and center on the news, and with sympathetic overtones. The person who faces current hardships with a stiff upper lip, who rolls up his sleeves doing what must be done, who carries himself with an air, gained from the study of history, that this is another trough (not the worst of them, but bad to some extent, we can grant) in humanity’s history of peaks and troughs, is nowhere to be seen, is even, by the lack of attention they are given, implicitly condemned as insufficiently feeling and unacceptably “superior” to the rest.
2. Unity and comity are completely rejected as having the status of desirable goods in the polity. When I am at a meeting at work, there is an overarching sense of commonality and fraternity resting in the background. It informs the tenor and substance of our remarks, which while certainly critical at times, are never launched with scorn for the unity of the enterprise, as if a feeling of unity, common purpose, fraternity, even collective subsumption under a recognized authority, are of no value at all, as if these contribute nothing essential whatsoever to a person’s psychical and spiritual health. By contrast, there are a handful of highly antagonistic and aggressive question forms which the media hammer home constantly. They include repeating what some public figure has said, and demanding, from the person questioned, agreement or disagreement with the statement, irrelevant as it may be to the present circumstances, but simply to force the person questioned into an uncomfortable or controversial position. They include demands to know the future, such as whether certain supplies WILL for a FACT be ready by a certain date. And so forth. Here I am wanting genuine information from my leaders on the present situation, and if I am to get it from news coverage, I am forced to endure the pettiest attempts at point-scoring. I have always remembered an old comment by Tim Russert, when he said that he’d been to many countries with only good news, and that you wouldn’t want to live in any of them. But what of places with only bad news, shaped as such intentionally?
Thanks, Casey. Very clear and to the point.
Unity and comity are completely rejected at this late hour in our coming apart. There can be no comity without commonality, and even this crisis — an externally imposed crisis that, in most periods of our history, would have been amply sufficient to remind us of our national brotherhood long enough to make us fight shoulder to shoulder until the outer foe was vanquished — is no longer sufficient to bind us together.
As bad as the Wuhan virus may be, the man in the White House is still the greatest enemy, and to see him fail — or, as far as the media are concerned, to make us think we see him fail — is worth it at any price.
To see that demonstrated so clearly is, to me, at least as dismaying as anything the virus itself might be capable of. To borrow a metaphor from Chiang Kai-shek, Wuhan flu is a disease of the skin — but the nation was already sick unto death with a disease of the heart.