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Abortion Providers Plead With Supreme Court To Allow Abortion Pills in Texas

Several states have tried to block abortions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now abortion providers are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

Alabama, Ohio, and Texas have declared temporary bans on all or most abortion procedures, justifying this with vague nods toward conserving resources for COVID-19 treatment. Groups in each state have filed federal suits to try to block the restrictions from taking effect. And in all three cases, U.S. district judges ruled at the end of March that they would at least temporarily suspend the bans.

Texas appealed this preliminary injunction against enforcing the ban, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit sided with the state. U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel then narrowed the injunction to say authorities could ban surgical abortion but not the prescribing of abortion pills. On Friday, the 5th Circuit overruled this order too, declaring it fine for Texas to ban abortion as part of COVID-19 social distancing orders except in cases where waiting longer would push a woman past the legal time frame for terminating a pregnancy.

Abortion providers are now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the 5th Circuit’s decision.

On Saturday, several Texas Planned Parenthood centers and abortion providers filed an emergency petition with the Court. “As a consequence of the [5th Circuit’s ruling], virtually all Texas residents with unplanned pregnancies are unable to access early abortion care through medication abortion and must instead wait until they reach a more advanced stage of pregnancy,” it states.

“Delaying abortions by weeks does nothing to further the State’s interest in combatting COVID-19,” suggested Planned Parenthood et al., “and indeed runs directly contrary to that interest: individuals will require more health care—even in the short-term—if they remain pregnant than if they have a desired abortion, and some will engage in risky, out-of-state travel in an attempt to access earlier abortion services, thus increasing contagion risks in the midst of a pandemic.”

The abortion providers’ appeal was addressed to Justice Samuel Alito, who can now refer the case to other justices or rule on his own.

Meanwhile in Alabama, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson followed up on his initial temporary block of the state’s abortion restrictions with a Sunday ruling. It concluded that “efforts to combat COVID-19 do not outweigh the lasting harm imposed by the denial of an individual’s right to terminate her pregnancy, by an undue burden or increase in risk on patients imposed by a delayed procedure” or by prosecuting abortion doctors.

In Ohio, a trio of federal appellate judges decided on April 6 to uphold the lower court’s temporary block on abortion ban enforcement. Last Friday, a federal judge extended this block on enforcement for two additional weeks.

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The ‘False Debate’ About Reopening the Economy Is the One That Ignores the Enormous Human Cost of Sweeping COVID-19 Control Measures

Jon Allsop, who writes the Columbia Journalism Review‘s daily newsletter, argues that the conversation about when and how to relax COVID-19 lockdowns is a “false debate” that misleadingly pits “lives” against “livelihoods.” In reality, Allsop says, there is “no choice to be made between public health and a healthy economy—because public health is an essential prerequisite of a healthy economy.”

While that is true at some level, broad business closure and stay-at-home orders nevertheless entail tradeoffs that cannot be wished away by such anodyne assurances. Those tradeoffs are a recurring theme of a recent roundtable in The New York Times Magazine that Allsop himself mentions. The title of the forum is telling: “Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It?” The five panelists—especially Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer—repeatedly call attention to the moral implications of reducing COVID-19 transmission by shutting down large sectors of the economy.

Singer forthrightly questions “the assumption…that we have to do everything to reduce the number of deaths.” That assumption is manifestly wrong, as reflected in the decisions that government agencies make when they assess the cost-effectiveness of health and safety regulations—decisions that routinely take into account not just the deaths that might be prevented but the resources expended to do so. Those assessments assign a large value to preventable deaths, but the value is not and cannot be infinite.

“At some point,” Singer says, “we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life. No government puts every dollar it spends into saving lives. And we can’t really keep everything locked down until there won’t be any more deaths. So I think that’s something that needs to come into this discussion. How do we assess the overall cost to everybody in terms of loss of quality of life [and] loss of well-being as well as the fact that lives are being lost?”

Singer is equally frank in discussing the weight that should be assigned to COVID-19 deaths, whether they are prevented by current control measures or allowed by loosening those restrictions:

This is killing mostly older people. I think that’s really relevant. I think we want to take into account the number of life years lost—not just the number of lives lost.

The average age of death from COVID in Italy is 79½. So you do have to ask the question: How many years of life were lost? Especially when you consider that many of the people who have died had underlying medical conditions. The economist Paul Frijters roughly estimates that Italians lost perhaps an average of three years of life. And that’s very different from a younger person losing 40 years of life or 60 years of life.

Similarly, the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson has estimated that “as much as half to two-thirds” of the people who will die from COVID-19 in the U.K. would have died “anyhow” by the end of the year because deaths from the disease are concentrated among people who are old and/or have serious preexisting medical conditions.

Another participant in the New York Times forum—Zeke Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania—reinforces Singer’s point. “I am a big believer in using life-years saved, rather than just number of deaths avoided, as the goal,” he says, noting that allocation of scarce medical resources such as ventilators and organs routinely takes that factor into account. Emanuel argues that COVID-19 restrictions could be loosened in June if appropriate testing, surveillance, and contact tracing is possible by then.

Singer emphasizes that the economic cost of aggressive control measures is morally important and not simply a matter of elevating crass financial concerns above issues of life and death (the way that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, among many others, has misleadingly framed the issue):

If we’re thinking of a year to 18 months [the projected amount of time required to develop and deploy a vaccine] of this kind of lockdown, then we really do need to think about the consequences other than in terms of deaths from COVID-19. I think the consequences are horrific, in terms of unemployment in particular, which has been shown to have a very serious effect on well-being, and particularly for poorer people. Are we really going to be able to continue an assistance package to all of those people for 18 months?

That’s a question each country will have to answer. Maybe some of the affluent countries can, but we have a lot of poor countries that just have no possibility of providing that kind of assistance for their poor people. That’s where we’ll get into saying, “Yes, people will die if we open up, but the consequences of not opening up are so severe that maybe we’ve got to do it anyway.” If we keep it locked down, then more younger people are going to die because they’re basically not going to get enough to eat or other basics. So those tradeoffs will come out differently in different countries.

The economic cost, Singer notes, go far beyond the immediate impact on people forcibly deprived of their livelihoods:

We need to think about this in the context of the well-being of the community as a whole….We are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need—better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren’t in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs. The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

I think that we’re losing sight of the extent to which that’s already happening. And we need to really consider that tradeoff.

The “false debate,” in other words, is not the discussion that considers the enormous human cost of suppressing economic activity. It’s the discussion that pretends there is no such tradeoff.

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The ‘False Debate’ About Reopening the Economy Is the One That Ignores the Enormous Human Cost of Sweeping COVID-19 Control Measures

Singer is equally frank in discussing the weight that should be assigned to COVID-19 deaths, whether they are prevented by current control measures or allowed by loosening those restrictions:

This is killing mostly older people. I think that’s really relevant. I think we want to take into account the number of life years lost—not just the number of lives lost.

The average age of death from COVID in Italy is 79½. So you do have to ask the question: How many years of life were lost? Especially when you consider that many of the people who have died had underlying medical conditions. The economist Paul Frijters roughly estimates that Italians lost perhaps an average of three years of life. And that’s very different from a younger person losing 40 years of life or 60 years of life.

If we’re thinking of a year to 18 months [the projected amount of time required to develop and deploy a vaccine] of this kind of lockdown, then we really do need to think about the consequences other than in terms of deaths from COVID-19. I think the consequences are horrific, in terms of unemployment in particular, which has been shown to have a very serious effect on well-being, and particularly for poorer people. Are we really going to be able to continue an assistance package to all of those people for 18 months?

That’s a question each country will have to answer. Maybe some of the affluent countries can, but we have a lot of poor countries that just have no possibility of providing that kind of assistance for their poor people. That’s where we’ll get into saying, “Yes, people will die if we open up, but the consequences of not opening up are so severe that maybe we’ve got to do it anyway.” If we keep it locked down, then more younger people are going to die because they’re basically not going to get enough to eat or other basics. So those tradeoffs will come out differently in different countries.

The economic cost, Singer notes, go far beyond the immediate impact on people forcibly deprived of their livelihoods:

We need to think about this in the context of the well-being of the community as a whole….We are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need—better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren’t in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs. The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

I think that we’re losing sight of the extent to which that’s already happening. And we need to really consider that tradeoff.

The “false debate,” in other words, is not the discussion that considers the enormous human cost of suppressing economic activity. It’s the discussion that pretends there is no such tradeoff.

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What Have the Media Gotten Wrong (and Right) During Coronavirus?

Once-a-century pandemics may place the most acute stress on the infected and those who care for them, but every sector of government and civil society come under strain too. So how has the Fourth Estate performed during these nationally and personally challenging times? The record is decidedly mixed, argue Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on the new Reason Roundtable podcast.

So is the record of the government that those journalists cover. The gang discusses zero-tolerance enforced-distancing madness from Michigan to Mississippi, from Pennsylvania to the beaches of southern California. They also take a peek at proposed post-lockdown surveillance states to come. At least we all have time to read dystopian fiction about pandemics while watching The Prisoner!

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

‘Over Time’ by Audionautix is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Relevant links from the show:

“No, NYC Is Not Running Out of Burial Space Due to COVID-19,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“U.K. Media Lobby Wants Government To Force Advertisers to Support Coronavirus Coverage,” by Scott Shackford

“Donald Trump’s Experiment in Radical Press Transparency Is Ugly and Praiseworthy,” by Nick Gillespie

“Why You Shouldn’t Trust Anyone Who Claims 80 Percent of America’s Drugs Come From China,” by Eric Boehm

“Religious Freedom Clashes With Public Health Enforcers,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Trump Has Secret Emergency Powers?” by Ronald Bailey

“Banning Alcohol Sales During the COVID-19 Pandemic Is a Terrible Idea,” by Baylen Linnekin

“The Surveillance State Thrives During the Pandemic,” by J.D. Tuccille

“Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley Will Do Everything Necessary To Combat Coronavirus (Unless It Involves Deregulation),” by Christian Britschgi

“Will Coronavirus Fears Lead to an Assault on Gun Rights?” by J.D. Tuccille

“Florida City Closes Barbershops Because of Coronavirus, but the Cops Are Still Getting Haircuts,” by Robby Soave

“3 Ways New York Botched the Coronavirus Response in March,” by Matt Welch

“As More Death Data Becomes Available, COVID-19 Looks Less and Less Like the Flu,” by Ronald Bailey

“Flawed Economic Policies Will Exacerbate the Pandemic,” by Veronique de Rugy

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Gold Jumps As Stocks & Oil Dump From Exuberant Open

After the best week in decades for stocks…

Consumer sentiment just suffered the largest single-month decline on record as Americans became increasingly rattled by thousands of business closings and millions of layoffs across the country. Not only did the University of Michigan’s main gauge of confidence take a big hit from the swift reversal of fortunes, but so did a measure of buying conditions. The share of respondents who said times were “good” plunged in April to the lowest level since May 1980… despite the biggest surge in The Fed Balance Sheet ever…

Source: Bloomberg

What a let-down!

The message from the markets for “interventionists” is clear…

A “historic” OPEC+ deal utterly failed to inspire…

And The Fed’s “unprecedented” action from Thursday has now been completely erased from The Dow’s memory…

Nasdaq And Small Caps managed to hold on to gains, Trannies and The Dow were worst… a late-day liftathon helped rescue some of the gains but the last few minutes saw an ugly hit…

Nasdaq was the only major index to close the day green, Small Caps were ugly…

Virus-Fear was resurrected today…

Source: Bloomberg

Notable plunge in ‘value’ factor today…

Source: Bloomberg

Last week was the biggest weekly short squeeze ever and so it is perhaps not a total surprise that the rampers ran out of ammo…

Source: Bloomberg

Even Fed-Sponsored junk debt fell further today…

Treasury yields rose today, steepening with the long-end up 4-5bps, short-end up 1-2bps…(NOTE – bonds were bid into the EU close)…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold prices surged to new cycle highs…

And the decoupling between London spot (physical) and COMEX futures continues…

Source: Bloomberg

Copper outperformed on the day while silver ended lower…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ended lower for the 5th day in a row…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos took a dive overnight…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, we return full-circle to the start of today’s wrap. Bloomberg notes that as stocks posted their biggest weekly gain since 1974, skeptical Wall Street veterans shook their heads in amazement. But exchange-traded fund investors did what they always do – they piled in.

Source: Bloomberg

In only seven trading days this month, equity ETFs took in more than $16.5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The torrid pace puts inflows on track to exceed the monthly total of $42.5 billion in December, when stocks rallied during what ended up being the tail end of an 11-year bull market.

And, as Bloomberg details, assuming a bear market in U.S. stocks has ended because the S&P 500 Index has rallied 25% from its March low, a milestone reached Thursday, flies in the face of recent history. Gains of more than 20% interrupted the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 bear markets, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Source: Bloomberg

The S&P 500 climbed 21% between September 2001 and January 2002, and then tumbled 34% from January’s peak before reaching a low nine months later. There was a 24% advance between November 2008 and January 2009, followed by a two-month drop of 28%. LPL Financial looked at bear-market rallies in a report last week.

And don’t forget earnings start tomorrow with the big banks…“We’re in for a tough year,” said Savita Subramanian, head of U.S. equity and quantitative strategy at Bank of America Corp. in a Bloomberg Television interview. Earnings are going to be down “by about 30%,” she added.

Source: Bloomberg

Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/13/2020 – 16:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3ejOOK0 Tyler Durden

Builders In ‘Denial’

Authored by Douglas French via LewRockwell.com,

The year 2006 seems like a lifetime ago. The housing boom seemed to be going full throttle, but danger lurked. I wrote on LewRockwell.com in March of that year, concerning a Las Vegas real estate seminar, that “nary a discouraging word was spoken.”

But, despite the happy talk coming from the podium that day, pleasing the 1,300 attendees, I was hearing something different, “builders I talked to at the Outlook don’t believe [Dennis] Smith’s numbers. They say their traffic numbers are half what they were last year and cancellations are soaring.” A builder described the market as a bloodbath.

Again, that was 2006, home prices would peak in June of that year.

Two years later, we know what happened.

In between, the conventional wisdom was the market ship would right itself and all would be well. Not quite.

The spread of Covid-19 in 2020 has brought out the ham-handed instincts of government at all levels. The current housing boom surely is over.

But, construction is deemed an essential business in Nevada and the building of houses, apartments, and most importantly, Allegiant (Raiders) Stadium goes on.

Andrew Smith has taken the helm from his father Dennis at Home Builders Research and reports an 18 percent increase in permits pulled for the construction of single family homes this February as opposed to the same month a year ago. For the same month, resale closings were 20 percent above last year.

But since then, the governor shut down the casino industry and has ordered us to stay home. New home communities are only showing models by appointment or by video conferencing. Resale listings dropped by over 12 percent two weeks ago and another 13 percent last week.

While rumor has it KB Home has bailed out of all land purchases the company had in escrow, the beat goes on for other builders. In a piece extolling the virtues of home builder Lennar, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer writes, “Lennar says it’s taking some of the same countermeasures it deployed in 2006-08, by reducing outlays on land, land development and construction.”

But, “As for the current tumult,” writes Grant’s, “it’s a little concerning, according to the afore-quoted [Marvin] Shapiro, who buys and develops raw land for a living, that not a few builders are in denial about the severity of the downturn.”

Mr. Shapiro told Grant’s, “In each market we are in, dealing with the local representative or local divisional president, they are still gung-ho under the circumstances.” Shapiro anticipates a different point of view coming from homebuilder home offices. “But I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. At some point the national office is going to call and say, ‘We are going to make project-by-project decisions,’ and we’ll see where that ends up.

A conversation with a Las Vegas architect confirmed Shapiro’s experience with local divisions. Knowing he draws plans for a large homebuilder and a number of apartment developers, I asked, “Are they pumping the brakes, slamming on the brakes, or going on as before.”

“Oh, they believe this will last maybe a month or two and then things will go back to normal,” he said.

“Zoning packages for later this year or 2021 can’t wait.” My friend the architect’s view is “this thing will be over, the stock market will explode, and people will flood back to Las Vegas.”

Meanwhile, Home Builder’s Research’s Andrew Smith writes that new home sales traffic dropped 79 percent in March, while cancellations increased from just under 8 percent at the beginning of the month to over 35 percent at the end of the March.

Back in ‘06, cancellations were rising but Dennis Smith wasn’t concerned, “Historically, [builders] told their sales people if you don’t have a cancellation rate over 20 percent, you’re not selling enough homes.”

Rising mortgage rates helped pop the housing bubble in ‘06 and mortgage trouble may create problems again this time. Rates are low, but, as mortgage broker Dan Draitser told Wolfe Richter of WolfStreet.com,

“All of those exotic loan programs, such as bank-statement for income and stated-income and lower-credit score programs have all ceased. Done!

“All investors buying that paper are gone! No one remains.

“Lenders are tightening up loan quality for government loans, such as FHA and VA loans. And for conventional loans as well.

“Now it’s higher credit scores, more down, lower debt to income ratios.

“Nobody has any taste for any risk at the moment.

“It is a quickly changing market with everything reverting to low-risk quality loans, which leaves credit extension limited.

“‘Non-QM,’ or basically any loan outside of Fannie, Freddie, FHA and VA, is toast. No longer exists. Being felt industry wide.”

The Kübler-Ross model, or the five stages of grief are; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

This year, as in 2006, the real estate industry is in denial.

Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/13/2020 – 15:50

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“Perilously Close To Meat Shortfalls”: World’s Largest Pork Producer Shutters Key Factory After COVID-19 Outbreak

Operations at one of Smithfield Foods’ key U.S. factories have been brought to a halt after a coronavirus outbreak among employees. Smithfield is the world’s biggest pork producer.

Now, the company is warning that meat supplies are “perilously close to the edge of shortfalls,” according to Bloomberg.

The company is shuttering its Sioux Falls, SD plant, which accounts for 4% to 5% of U.S. production. The news comes after more than 200 cases of Covid-19 were reported among employees.

Smithfield had planned on closing their plant for 3 days, but South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem asked them to extend the closure to 14 days.

The situation at Smithfield is a challenging one. They’ve self-imposed a 3-day shutdown of the plant. And while I applaud them for that, more decisive action is needed.

That’s why we’ve asked Smithfield to close the plant for two full weeks. (7/8)

— Governor Kristi Noem (@govkristinoem) April 12, 2020

The plant has 3,700 employees who will continue to receive pay for at least two weeks during the shutdown. The plant won’t re-open until Smithfield gets the nod from local, state and federal authorities.

The news again highlights how fragile the world’s supply chains are during a global pandemic, especially as worried citizens hoard food items and clean out grocery stores. There have also been bottlenecks with trucks and ports, exacerbating efforts to get food from producers to consumers.

Worker safety also remains an issue, especially after deaths have been reported at meat factories owned by JBS SA and Tyson Foods. Workers not only share workspace in many of these factories, but are also in close quarters in break rooms and locker rooms.

The risk at these plants remains among the employees and not with the end-consumer, since Covid-19 isn’t a foodborne illness. But when an employee gets sick, the plant needs to be quarantined and closed for deep cleaning, which costs valuable time, money and resources.

Sullivan continued:

“Unfortunately, Covid-19 cases are now ubiquitous across our country. The virus is afflicting communities everywhere. The agriculture and food sectors have not been immune. We have continued to run our facilities for one reason: to sustain our nation’s food supply during this pandemic.”

“We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of Covid-19,” Sullivan concluded.

Recall, back in late March, we wrote an article noting that the people responsible for handling the world’s food supply at places like Smithfield were starting to get sick.

Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/13/2020 – 15:35

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Jim Kunstler Exposes “The Most Atrocious Racket The World Has Ever Seen”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The ruins of Mary McClellan Hospital stand on hill overlooking the village of Cambridge, New York, in what was a “flyover” corner of the country until the planes stopped flying. The hospital cornerstone was laid July 4 1917. The USA had entered the war against Germany a few months earlier. The “Spanish” flu pandemic kicked off in January, 1918. The hospital opened in January 1919. The flu burned out a year later. The hospital shut down for good in 2003.

I’ve lived around here for decades and never actually got a look at the place until I went up there on a blustery spring Saturday before Easter to look around. I like to read landscapes and the human imprint upon them. This one is a ghost story, not just of the bygone souls who came and went here, but of an entire society, the nation that we used to be and stopped being not so long ago.

This is the old main building today. It’s astounding how quickly buildings begin to rot when the human life within them is gone. The style was Beaux Arts Institutional, seen everywhere across America in that period in schools, libraries, museums, and hospitals, an austere neoclassicism that radiated decorum in a confident and well-run society – because that is what we were then. Note especially, the entrance and the beautiful bronze marquee above it. The message is this: You enter through a portal of beauty to a place of hope and trust.

This is Mary McClellan Hospital not long after it opened.

The site itself, on its hill, with views east across the state line to the Green Mountains, speaks of authority and command.

The America of 1919 was a deeply hierarchical society. Today we regard hierarchy as a bane and a curse. The truth is, it is absolutely required if you expect to live in a well-run society, and proof of that is the disordered mess of bureaucratic irresponsibility we live in today, with virtually every institution failing – well before the Covid-19 virus arrived on the scene – and nobody called to account for anything anymore.

Hierarchy must be fit to scale to function successfully. In small institutions like this, everybody knows who is responsible for what. That’s what makes authority credible.

These are the ruins of the nursing school associated with the hospital (and also associated with Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, 25 miles west).

The nurses lived here, in Florence Nightingale Hall.

In the early 20th century, the profession favored young, unmarried women whose allegiance and attention to the patients would not be distracted by the needs of a family.

Was that exploitation? Or was it simply an intelligent way to organize a hospital subculture? The nurses lived here very comfortably. The institution cared for them, literally.

There’s no record available of what exactly these buildings were for. The one in the foreground has a cut stone sign that says “The Junior” on it. I infer that this may have been where a couple of young, staff, resident physicians lived, young men probably, just out of their internships, close at hand and on-call for emergencies. The building in the background is a rather grand country cottage, possibly the residence of the chief surgeon or the hospital director. The hospital was, after all, a community unto itself, and it was important that authority have a visible presence there all the time. Both buildings display architectural grace-notes that humanized and dignify that resident authority. We no longer believe in grace-notes for the things we build, so is it surprising that we live in a graceless society?

This is the power plant for the whole operation, on the premises, ensuring that the electricity would stay on at all times. In the early 20th century, electric power was the new sine qua non of advanced civilization. America’s rural electrification program really didn’t get underway until the 1930s, so it’s likely that many of the farms outside the village were not hooked up to a grid. The hospital generators must have been driven by coal, or perhaps oil. Somebody had to attend to all that machinery. The laundry – hospitals produce a lot of that – was also on-premises, as was all the meal preparation. The hospital maintained a large garden to furnish some of the food. All these tasks required crews of people working purposefully and getting paid. The hospital was a complex organism, a world within a nation within a world.

Things rise and self-organize beautifully into fully-formed systems and after while they run down, even while they over-grow; authority starts working more and more for its own sake and its own benefit; hierarchy breaks down into disrespect, lack of trust, fear; and then society loses its vital institutions, which is exactly what happened at Mary McClellan Hospital in little Cambridge, New York.

It dwindled and then quickly collapsed. The town lost a part of itself, the part that welcomed people in a particular kind of trouble and cared for them, as it cared for those who did the caring. By the way, in 1919, a private room was $7-a-day (a bed on a ward was $3). Imagine that! The town also lost a vital component of its economy. And that was all of-a-piece with its decline into the flyover place it became in our time.

American health care, as we call it today, and for all its high-tech miracles, has evolved into one of the most atrocious rackets the world has ever seen. By racket, I mean an enterprise organized explicitly to make money dishonestly. This is what we’ve become, and the fact that we seem to be okay with that tells you more about what we have become. The advent of Covid-19, along with the extreme economic disorders it has triggered, will probably be the beginning of the end of that racket. We have no idea how medicine will re-organize itself, but I’d guess that it will happen at a much more primitive scale – because that’s usually what happens when human societies overshoot badly. Alas, history is not exactly symmetrical.

But read these photos and meditate on what we were once capable of putting together in this land, and maybe you will find some clues about what was truly admirable about the American condition before we stopped caring.

Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/13/2020 – 15:20

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What Have the Media Gotten Wrong (and Right) During Coronavirus?

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

‘Over Time’ by Audionautix is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Relevant links from the show:

“No, NYC Is Not Running Out of Burial Space Due to COVID-19,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“U.K. Media Lobby Wants Government To Force Advertisers to Support Coronavirus Coverage,” by Scott Shackford

“Donald Trump’s Experiment in Radical Press Transparency Is Ugly and Praiseworthy,” by Nick Gillespie

“Why You Shouldn’t Trust Anyone Who Claims 80 Percent of America’s Drugs Come From China,” by Eric Boehm

“Religious Freedom Clashes With Public Health Enforcers,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Trump Has Secret Emergency Powers?” by Ronald Bailey

“Banning Alcohol Sales During the COVID-19 Pandemic Is a Terrible Idea,” by Baylen Linnekin

“The Surveillance State Thrives During the Pandemic,” by J.D. Tuccille

“Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley Will Do Everything Necessary To Combat Coronavirus (Unless It Involves Deregulation),” by Christian Britschgi

“Will Coronavirus Fears Lead to an Assault on Gun Rights?” by J.D. Tuccille

“Florida City Closes Barbershops Because of Coronavirus, but the Cops Are Still Getting Haircuts,” by Robby Soave

“3 Ways New York Botched the Coronavirus Response in March,” by Matt Welch

“As More Death Data Becomes Available, COVID-19 Looks Less and Less Like the Flu,” by Ronald Bailey

“Flawed Economic Policies Will Exacerbate the Pandemic,” by Veronique de Rugy

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Kids Missing School Because of Coronavirus? Don’t Worry Too Much

Many people are finding it hard to parent in the age of COVID-19. They’re trying to supervise their children and work from home at the same time, a combination made yet more difficult when they’re being asked to ensure that the kids spend sufficient time and effort on their online classes.

Some frustrated parents are admitting defeat. One mom, archeologist Sarah Parcak, tweeted that she had informed her son’s first-grade teacher they no longer had the time or patience to participate in a virtual classroom. “His happiness trumps crappy math worksheet management,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, education officials are worried that the children of inattentive parents could be falling behind. Some school districts are discussing mandatory remedial summer school for all kids once the pandemic has passed. The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board endorsed such a measure, claiming that “there’s no good argument against mandatory summer school. CPS and parents—and the Chicago Teachers Union—must do whatever it takes to get school kids back on track.” The New York Times reports that education officials around the country have been considering “summer sessions, an early start in the fall, or perhaps having some or even all students repeat a grade once Americans are able to return to classrooms.”

These are stressful times, but parents and teachers shouldn’t be overly worried about students falling behind. Mental health and happiness should come first.

Indeed, there’s a strong argument to be made for letting many kids simply enjoy this extended summer break.

“There will probably be some falling behind, but people are likely to catch up,” says Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University. “People do get lost over the summer and then make it up.” Studies show that kids typically lose some of their academic skills over long breaks: summer learning loss is a real thing. But studies also show that most students forget much of what they learn in school, period. “Many young people who learn the material forget it soon anyway,” says Caplan. “The idea there’s going to be some noticeable permanent deficit is weak.”

Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, tells Reason that the extended break might leave some kids unprepared to pass their standardized tests in the short term but probably wouldn’t do lasting damage to their brains.

“I don’t think the time away from school will impact kids’ intelligence,” he says. “There are real questions about how truly important a lot of material is—will it have a major impact on someone’s life if they miss modern British poets?—but they will miss out.”

According to McCluskey, younger kids are more at risk of falling behind than older kids, since the most valuable skills—reading and basic numeracy—are taught at an earlier age. “A considerable part of the problem is that our system has to largely batch-process kids based on their ages, which makes falling behind a major problem,” says McCluskey.

And of course, students of all ages who rely on school for non-academic purposes, like supplemental nutrition or a respite from an abusive home life, will be poorly served by this unusually long period away from school.

But it would be shortsighted to pretend that every moment away from formal schoolwork is some missed opportunity for child enrichment. Reason‘s Lenore Skenazy notes in The Washington Post that unstructured free time can make room for mental and emotional growth:

Though not every youngster will become an Einstein while quarantining, many seem to be turning into the kids they would have been if they’d grown up a generation or two earlier, with more time to discover their real interests and hobbies (remember those days?), before childhood got so structured and busy.

What I mean is: It’s all okay. Our kids are not going to seed even if they are sleeping, gaming and bingeing on YouTube. In fact, they’re growing, simply because kids are always growing and learning from everything—houses of cards, Nerf guns, Barbies, baths, videos, but most of all from that vital resource more rare and precious than toilet paper: free time.

My advice for would-be coronavirus helicopters? Think of the quarantine as an AP class in chilling. You can help your kids ace it by stepping back.

Many stressed-out parents would undoubtedly improve their own mental health if they took Skenazy’s advice.

Similarly, education officials should explore non-coercive options, such as supplemental tutoring for those who think they need it. Forcing every kid to repeat the grade or attend summer school would be a punishment that most students did nothing to deserve.

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