Quick jots: October review

NYT pens Tom Cotton op-ed about China under a pseudonym; NYT staff totally fine about it
Okay, not really, but really. Remember that Tom Cotton terrible op-ed? I think his opinion was utter dogshit, but it was good that the New York Times published it. How is it not important information for voters to see how bad the Republican from Arkansas is? Not the staffers at the Times. There was so much discontent at the audacity of the editor to publish thoughts from the senator that it led to the editor's resignation. Now Regina Ip, a high ranking politician in Hong Kong, wrote an op-ed that the New York Times published with more or less the exact premise as Tom Cotton's of cheerleading the utilization of military tactics by police or outright military suppression to quell discontented protesters. Think the staff will take up arms and the editor will have to resign over this? Probably not. Maybe it's because they think China's outright human rights violations in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Inner Mongolia, with some images from there mirroring 1930s Germany is not that bad. Hey, has anyone seen Regina Ip and Tom Cotton in the same room?

Trump gets COVID
Talk about a media firestorm. I didn't even think it was important enough to even mention, but rather just mildly amusing that he caught the virus while being so flippant about the pandemic. They won't even let me be amused in peace. Everyone else went insane, filling the airwaves with what happens if the president dies. I figured the chance of that happening was extremely low. Like, oh, about 0.28% to 0.5% chance low. Even the CDC numbers aren't that much higher. Even though he is older, he doesn't really have any comorbidities as far as I know, except maybe being overweight, but I guess the hysteria makes people vastly overestimate death probabilities. This isn't to say the pandemic isn't a big deal, but the irrational screeching doesn't help. Sure enough, it turns out that he's fine. What a waste of breath.

COVID Lockdowns in Africa
Gret Glyer of DonorSee was on the Tom Woods Show and predicted that Africa, while making continual strides against poverty, will see a sudden increase in poverty-related deaths due to COVID-19 lockdowns. He relayed a story about trying to air a video on the charitable website to promote donations to a little boy starving to death following lockdowns, but by the time they were able to compose the video, he had passed. Interestingly, they talked about the low death rates in Africa, due to populations being much younger than most, but even so, several governments on the continent still went forward with lockdowns. Not to marginalize the dangers of mental health, but it was a sobering reminder that in America, lockdowns are an annoying policy where our social life takes a hit, while in a destitute country, lockdowns could mean mass starvation.

SF Ice Cream Shop
Jason Yu, an aspiring ice cream magnate, had his plans cut off before it even started. He signed a lease in San Francisco to open up his ice cream shop, Matcha n' More, but sixteen months later and $150k melted away, he has nothing to show for it. The tenant improvement was minimal so he didn't think it would take long to open up shop. Too bad he's not particularly familiar with the nightmares of Planning Departments. It should have been a rubber stamp approval, but a neighbor (that's right, one neighbor...who happens to be a competing ice cream shop) complained so he needed a Planning Commission hearing, which takes three months to schedule. Drip, drip, goes the rent. Yu had to hire a lawyer and sit in on the one hour and fifteen-minute hearing for the commissioners to approve his project. Everything is icy now, right? Nope. The Building Department still stands in the way. Its incompetence and since it's a governmental regulatory body, being the only game in town, it has a backlog of months. San Francisco, of course, has numerous bodies to wade through, so he had to get sequential approvals from the Department of Building Inspection, the Fire Department, Public Works, and the Department of Public Health. Just another normal day in the Building Department. Thankfully, Proposition H is on the ballot in November, which would scale back some of the regulations and streamline the process a bit, and it looks like it has a good shot to pass. It doesn't nearly go far enough to remove headaches, but it's a step in the right direction, allowing parallel reviews of plans among the departments, except a small group from discretionary review, and allow a private third party to perform inspections on behalf of the city. Usually, when Democrats and Republicans agree on something, you can bet it's bad for the people, but the Libertarian Party also endorsed the proposition, leaving only the heartless and economically confused people over at the Green Party opposing it.

Efficacy of Mask Mandates and Lockdowns
Rational Ground has a series of charts made by Ian Miller that charts daily cases and indicates when mask mandates and lockdown policies were instituted. Unfortunately, they don't source the case data. They also have an interactive graph that plots data from a New York Times survey of mask-wearing with cases. Neither graph seems to show any correlation between lockdowns or mask mandates and COVID-19 case trend. Cherry-picking could be a concern, but the lack of any correlation, let alone causation, in any of the presented cases seems to cast doubt on the efficacy of these policies. Tom Woods in an episode with, Jennifer Cabrera, who compiles and analyzes data for Rational Ground, said of the charts that if you quiz someone on when the policies were instituted on the charts, nobody would be able to score above random chance. 

Political parties' #1 priority is not to win elections
Shant Mesrobian chatted with Glenn Greenwald on his podcast and talked about how the Democrats' primary goal (presumably, he includes Republicans in this as well) is not to win elections, but rather to maintain power within the Democratic Party (or GOP) itself. Whether or not they win the presidency, as long as they can hold on to the party from outside insurgents, they will control roughly 50% of the country, regardless of the presidency. Greenwald agreed, saying this was what happened in the UK as well, with factions of the Labour Party working to discard Jeremy Corbyn, even if it means Boris Johnson would be elected Prime Minister, because their actions would allow them to keep control of their party. I hadn't thought of it in these terms before, but it seems reasonable that this would be their primary priority.

This made me think of the recent debate between Angela McCardle and Theodore Quinoa on Lions of Liberty whether or not to "abolish" the Libertarian Party (where, in my opinion, Angela (on the negative) thoroughly defeated Theodore (on the affirmative) who seemed wholly unprepared for the debate). In it, Angela mentioned that the Republican and Democratic party members will actively sniff out and destroy any incoming libertarians trying to get elected within their party, even if a select few manage to get through like Matt Gurtler or Ron Paul. 

This is even seen in the Libertarian Party. Years ago, Howard Stern went into the New York LP convention, with a bunch of paid people to register, become delegates, and secure the nomination for an LP candidate position over far more libertarian candidates. State chapters of the LP changed their rules across the country to prevent this brigading from happening again. Insiders also know of the ongoing battle between the Pragmatic Caucus and the Mises Caucus, with the departed national chair of the Pragmatic Caucus worrying that the Mises Caucus would "take over" the Libertarian Party, despite the MiCaucs being no less libertarian than the Prags.

Russiagate Declassified
The Trump administration declassified documents and memos that show Brennan, while Obama's CIA director, had known about Hillary Clinton's plot to falsely tie Trump's campaign to Russia by hiring Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to fabricate a Russian dossier to distract from her email scandal. It also shows that he reported this to then-president Barack Obama, who allowed it to happen. So the person who actually tried to manipulate the elections was Clinton? After the media shitstorm over the past three and a half years, where are they now when the same shoe is on the other foot?

Lions of Liberty Felony Friday - Death Row episode
In a fascinating episode, host Lyle May interviews death row inmate George T Wilkerson. The interview is set up by Tessie Castillo, co-author of Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row, and who volunteered at a death row prison to teach writing. The book is a collection of essays from people on death row. Tessie talks about her experience with death row inmates and how many of them appear to now be completely different people than the person who originally committed the crime. She also talks about the complete imbalance of the application of capital punishment, pointing to a death row inmate who was only an accomplice to a robbery where an accomplice, who did not get sentenced to death, murdered someone. They also talked about how victims' families are much more varied on their death penalty stance than people often think. I have heard numerous times about how victims' desires must be considered. While I have typically argued that they do not hold an emotionally neutral position to make sound judgments, perhaps this argument is a better way forward. 

The interview with Wilkerson often painted similar pictures, talking about how he and many of his fellow inmates are completely different people now than before, how he was "as bad a person as one can be", illustrating the ability of people to rehabilitate. May asked Wilkerson what he felt when he was sentenced, in hindsight an obvious question, but one few of us consider, where Wilkerson responded that it was like being diagnosed with a terminal illness. 

Biden and Kerry Thwarted Snowden's Travel
I was delighted to see Glenn Greenwald on Joe Rogan's podcast, especially after Greenwald did a segment in his podcast System Update in defense of Joe Rogan from his detractors' completely baseless accusations of transphobia. On it, Greenwald talked about Joe Biden and John Kerry strongarming countries to not allow safe passage for Snowden, threatening economic sanctions, carrying out Obama's policies. This isn't new, of course, but I (nor Rogan) didn't know about this. Rogan wondered about presidents seemingly always doing a 180 when they get into office. Obama had a message of transparency and protecting whistleblowers, but prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president. Greenwald thinks they tend to think of themselves as the paragons of virtuousness and so when they blow the whistle on others, it's a major victory for good, but when it comes around on them, the whistleblowers are the evil ones. I think this is no more obvious than the handling of Wikileaks, where when they were embarrassing the GWB administration, the media and Democrats fawned over the organization. But when Wikileaks released emails damaging to the Clinton campaign, they were excoriated and now Julian Assange is in jail.