Sweden has an intact economy, a citizenry with greater immunity to COVID-19, and a death rate per million lower than Italy's — all with no lockdown.

http://www.webcitation.org/5s27yft7v // I once asked a president of the Central African Republic, Ange-Félix Patassé, to give up a personal monopoly he held on the distribution of refined oil products in his country.

He was unapologetic. "Do you expect me to lose money in the service of my people?" he replied.

That, in a nutshell, has been the problem of Africa. Very few African governments have been on the same wavelength as Western providers of aid. Aid, by itself, has never developed anything, but where it has been allied to good public policy, sound economic management, and a strong determination to battle poverty, it has made an enormous difference in countries like India, Indonesia, and even China.

Those examples illustrate another lesson of aid. Where it works, it represents only a very small share of the total resources devoted to improving roads, schools, heath services, and other things essential for raising incomes.

Aid must not overwhelm or displace local efforts; instead, it must settle with being the junior partner.

Because of Africa's needs, and the stubborn nature of its poverty, the continent has attracted far too much aid and far too much interfering by outsiders. //

But the truth is that most of Africa's growth -- based on oil and mineral exports -- has not made a whit of difference to the lives of most Africans.

Loans to Kodak will allow the United States to produce 25 percent of the ingredients needed for pharmaceutical production.

There are very few things in life more annoying than someone who is at once condescending and wrong. Included therein are people who pretend they are helping us – while they’re screwing us. Or even worse: They know we know they’re screwing us – and they continue to pretend they’re helping us while they screw us. The condescension of thinking we don’t know – is... //

Here is a truth of life from Roger Scruton – destructive Leftists fail to grasp:

“Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed – but not easily created.”

Intellectual Property is a very good thing.

There a thousand ways to very easily destroy it.

Creating it – ain’t quite so easy.

We must protect these miracles whence they occur.

Goodwill.com Hunting

A Graphical Analysis of Women's Tops Sold on Goodwill's Website

by J. Peter

After 10ish years of second-hand shopping, I've started to ask myself a lot of questions about the clothes I've been buying, like, "Did someone die in this?" or, "Have thrift stores always been this pricy?" (the answer to the former being, "yeah, probably"). In the absense of any conclusive answers, I tried to get the data myself.

I set up a script that collected information on listings for more than four million women's shirts for sale through Goodwill's website, going back to mid-2014. The information is deeply flawed—a Goodwill online auction is very different from a Goodwill store—but we can get an idea of how thrift store offerings have changed through the years. There's more info on data collection method below.

1. Are Used Clothes Getting More Expensive?

In short, yes. Or rather, maybe.

Josh Lerner, Jean Triole

NBER Working Paper No. 7600
Issued in March 2000
NBER Program(s):Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling. This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source software. We highlight the extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on career concerns,' can explain many of these projects' features. Aspects of the future of open source development process, however, remain somewhat difficult to predict with off-the-shelf' economic models.

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum pose for photo during the welcoming ceremony of the World Economic Forum on ASEAN at the National Convention Center in Hanoi Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2018.

Everything 'flattening the curve' represented has been abandoned and now thousands have needlessly died, millions are out of work, and cities are burning. //

Flattening the curve made two assumptions. First, it assumed that a certain amount of deaths and infections were inevitable and the best we could do was delay the process. No one promoting flattening the curve talked of stopping the disease; there were no graphs showing that if we locked down, infections would go straight to zero.

Second, flattening the curve was always shown with the same level of flattening: just enough to not overwhelm the health-care system. This was a tacit admission that flattening the curve would be painful and that it would not be beneficial to flatten the curve beyond the level needed to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.

Flattening the curve was the bait. Next came the switch.

It didn’t take long for the “flattening the curve” storyline to be abandoned. For example, California had more than 26,000 hospital beds available for coronavirus patients, but they locked down when they had about 200 coronavirus hospitalizations on March 20. That was less than 1 percent of their coronavirus hospital capacity. It quickly became clear that the California hospital system was not under threat, yet the lockdowns remained and “flatten the curve” was abandoned in favor of “suppress at all costs.” //

The narrative of flattening the curve was almost silently replaced with “lockdowns save lives.” Many early shutdowns resulted in over-suppression, which meant any subsequent opening would be accompanied by an increase in cases and hospitalizations.

Yet, since the flatten-the-curve notion that infections were inevitable has been abandoned, any uptick in cases is now spun by most of the media as apocalyptic. This can be seen in Florida, where cases are surging and ABC, CNN, and CBS all frequently report record numbers of cases. This ignores the fact that Florida has more hospital beds available now for potential patients than before the pandemic started. //

The greatest tragedy associated with abandoning flattening the curve to suppress at all costs is the massive number of non-coronavirus deaths that are a direct result of the lockdowns. The New York Times found that almost one-third of the excess deaths in New York and New Jersey were not from coronavirus. It’s almost impossible to make a reasonable estimate at this point, but my calculations put this number around 30,000.

Flattening the curve was sound logic when it was originally presented, and remains so today. That’s why so many people across the political spectrum originally bought into the idea. The change from flatten-the-curve to stop-the-virus-at-all-costs, however, has been a disaster. More than 40 million people have lost their jobs. The related angst and associated lack of social opportunities created a dry forest that exploded in flames when George Floyd was killed. Moreover, deaths of despair and child abuse are both likely rising as a result.

We must reject the largest, most destructive bait and switch ever enacted and return to the principles of flattening the curve. We must accept that nature can be brutal and more infections will happen. Yet we must push through. We must strive to reopen our society as much as possible and only implement mitigation efforts to the extent needed to avoid a clearly imminent threat of overwhelming hospitals.

The U.S. is slowly opening back up for business. But we’re far from coming out of this tunnel. About 20 million Americans remain unemployed compared to just six months ago.

Despite this sobering number, we can take heart in a silver lining: The U.S. will recover, and it’ll recover before China, the place of origin for the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Recovery can mean a lot of things. Generally speaking, let’s assume it’s a return to pre-COVID-19 levels of gross domestic product and regaining at least 80% of economic activity lost during the first half of 2020. 

To reboot the abruptly halted economy, America needs to advance pro-people, pro-free enterprise economic policies.

In short, the Great Society, although well-intended, has produced a worse society. Which brings us to the Great Reset. Recently announced by the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset is the 21st century version of the Great Society on steroids. The Great Reset’s grand ambitions are so outlandish, they make the Great Society’s objectives seem trivial.

Before embarking on the Great Reset, perhaps we should look back at the shortcomings of the Great Society. After all, as the saying goes, if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

Riots and arson that followed protests of George Floyd's death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color. //

The riots and arson that followed protests of Floyd’s death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color. Destruction from the south side’s Lake Street to West Broadway Avenue in north Minneapolis has hit immigrant- and minority-owned businesses already struggling amid the pandemic-induced shutdown.

Now, ethnically diverse neighborhoods are grappling with the loss of jobs, services, and investments.

Riots may excite the keyboard revolutionary, but they won’t bring racial equality. The opposite, in fact. Not only are the anarchists who burn and loot stores subjecting many of their neighbors to a dehumanizing experience, they are destroying poor and minority neighborhoods.

Big businesses might be able to afford to fix the smashed windows and ransacked supply room, but family-owned ones are going to struggle.

Chain stores have insurance, but the individuals and smaller manufacturers who depend on them for their livelihoods also are threatened.

The big stores themselves will be paying higher insurance rates, and some of them may decide to never come back to these poorer neighborhoods.

To get—and keep—Beijing’s attention, Washington needs to target the regime with meaningful measures.

The numbers will blow your mind. //

When I say shocker, I mean it here.

The jobs report was released this morning with the expectation being that we’d see a 20% unemployment rate. The New York Times and Politico were already warming up, putting out tweets predicting doom.

The actual numbers turned out to be so far off their predictions that you have to wonder what good these “experts” are at this point.

Instead of losing 7.8 million jobs, we gained 2.5 million. The unemployment rate, instead of rising to 19.5%, dropped to 13.3%. This looks to be the beginning of the V-shaped recovery some more optimistic onlookers have talked about. //

−
Avatar
UpLateAgain
2 hours ago edited
"the V-shaped recovery some more optimistic onlookers have talked about."

'more optimistic onlookers': Read: TRUMP

Once again, it is starting to look like Trump was right... even when virtually everyone else (including myself... I expected a MUCH slower recovery) claimed otherwise.

At some point, I'm just going to have to start planning for things based on the concept that when Trump predicts something, he's going to be right... even when all logic tells me otherwise.

While electricity availability doesn’t guarantee wealth, its absence almost always means poverty.

Juice takes viewers to Beirut, Reykjavik, Kolkata, San Juan, Manhattan, and Boulder to tell the human story of electricity and to explain why power equals power.

The defining inequality in the world today is the disparity between the electricity rich and the electricity poor. In fact, there are more than 3 billion people on the planet today who are using less electricity than what’s used by an average American refrigerator.

Electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy. To illuminate its importance, the Juice team traveled 60,000 miles to gather 40 on-camera interviews with people from seven countries on five continents. Juice shows how electricity explains everything from women’s rights and climate change to Bitcoin mining and indoor marijuana production. The punchline of the film is simple: darkness kills human potential. Electricity nourishes it.

Juice explains who has electricity, who’s getting it, and how developing countries all over the world are working to bring their people out of the dark and into the light.

Paul Krugman does his best to mislead the American people - again. //

Paul Krugman
✔
@paulkrugman
Repeat after me: debt is money we owe to ourselves. It doesn't make the nation as a whole poorer. https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1263787928230211585 …

Adam Tooze
@adamtooze
Dramatic charts from @ChrisGiles on surge in UK gov debts.
But puzzled why he thinks this detracts from “nation’s wealth”. Obviously, COVID-driven collapse in GDP subtracts from monetary income. But gov debt shows up as asset in balance sheet. H/t @GeneralTheorist https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1263742196605431808 … //

Ted Cruz
✔
@tedcruz
Only if by “ourselves” you mean China. //

FIFY: Repeat after me. The national debt is money the U.S. Government must repay (or refinance) at a specified date in the future. When the government borrows additional funds and spends the money, the nation as a whole becomes poorer.

We've seen this movie before and we don't like the ending //

As we come out of the greatest self-inflicted wound by any nation with the possible exception of Operation BARBAROSSA, the same people who were the prime movers behind this current nonsense are attempting to stoke panic by creating a specter of a resurgence of the virus in the fall and with that, the necessity of a return to ‘social distancing’ and lockdowns. As my colleague Michael Thau pointed out yesterday, there is no evidence that any of the measures we have taken have accomplished diddly squat beyond destroying lives and burning through the nation’s wealth like a Kuwaiti oil fire. [READ The Hardest Thing About This Lockdown May Be Admitting to Ourselves That It Accomplished Absolutely Nothing.

https://www.redstate.com/michael_thau/2020/05/21/839511/

While those obvious lessons seem lost upon our self-proclaimed intelligentsia, they are not lost on President Trump.

“People say that’s a very distinct possibility. It’s standard. And we’re going to put out the fires. We’re not going to close the country. We’re going to put out the fires,” Trump told reporters during a tour of a Ford manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., when asked if he was concerned about a second wave of COVID-19.

Trump expressed confidence in the country’s ability to contain future outbreaks, referring to them as “embers.”

“Whether it’s an ember or a flame, we’re going to put it out. But we’re not closing our country,” the president continued.

We know this virus is not some Andromeda Strain virus that will kill humanity. While I’m skeptical that a vaccine will ever materialize, we have learned much, much more about how the disease spreads, treatments are being developed, and we’ve learned that you really aren’t at risk if you are relatively healthy and under 60.

Giving a firm message that the federal government will not participate in any shutdown, no matter what some governors may do, sends a strong message and will definitely up the political cost of a Michigan or Pennsylvania or New York or California going bonkers…again.

There has been much back-and-forthing over whom should and shouldn’t get money from the CARES Act.

A new Deutsche Bank survey shows 41 per cent of Americans will not buy ‘Made in China’ products again, while 35 per cent of Chinese will avoid US goods.

By John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and Richard Levine

May 19, 2020

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” King Lear enjoined, but this we must do to upend the wrath that has emanated from the most powerful foe America has faced. As terrible as the coronavirus crisis is, we must imagine a world ten or 20 years from now, in which the People’s Republic of China’s nominal gross domestic product is 50 percent larger than that of the United States.

What power would an unconstrained China wield? What force of arms would they muster to intimidate and to control?

If China’s actions in the coronavirus catastrophe offer any window into this communist regime’s machinations, deceitfulness, and debasement of human life, it is that the threat they represent is unlike anything America has faced.

At the inception of World War II, many strategists conjectured that both Germany and Japan were destined to lose the war; their populations and economies were too small, and their access to raw materials too tenuous, to be able to wage a protracted war against the Allies. Later, the Soviet Union posed a great challenge.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, CIA analysts predicted the Soviet economy would surpass America’s. This calculus drove many costly American decisions. Today, America’s GDP is at least 12 times Russia’s. China, however, is seemingly destined to outpace the United States in GDP during the next 20 years. Indeed, China has plausibly already overtaken the United States, if GDP is measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

It is ironic that four American actions enabled this ascent: first, American scientific aid to end famine in China; second, President Carter’s diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and his commitment that the U.S. government engage with elements of the PRC; third, President Clinton’s facilitation of the PRC’s ultimate ascension to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and his expansion of Chinese access to dual-use (civilian/military) technology; fourth, President Obama’s embrace of the PRC as a non-adversarial peer state, which completed the PRC’s envelopment of America’s institutions. //

It is logical to assume that after some initial point, Chinese political, military, and intelligence officials realized this outbreak of a new virus could be used to damage the economies of the West and thus facilitate Chinese hegemony. Given China’s history of pandemics, its political establishment must have had planning documents in place to serve the Communist Party of China’s interests, should such a scenario of a novel pandemic unfold. Manipulating data would be central to any such operational plan.

On May 7, the PRC recorded its dead in Hubei Provence, whose capital is Wuhan, at 4,512, out of 4,637 for the entire country. According to Chinese authorities, 125 fatalities occurred in all other provinces, which comprise 1.38 billion people.

If the virus did experience exponential growth, and doubled every day, in 28 days it should have infected 268 million people. A 1 percent mortality rate would thus result in millions of deaths, not fewer than 5,000. Even if the PRC underreported its losses by a factor of ten or twenty, these figures do not make sense.

Are there scenarios that explain these numbers? One explanation would involve an accidental release from the virology lab at Wuhan that was almost immediately recognized, engendering swift and firm containment procedures within China, but denied to the rest of the world by China’s continuance of international travel from the virus’s point of origin.

The second scenario is related, but crueler. Given China’s research into biological warfare, it is conceivable that entities within China may have sought a naturally occurring virus that would be just transmissible and virulent enough to cause massive disruption in Western countries, but could be limited and mitigated, given the regime’s foreknowledge, within China. Allied intelligence must determine if either scenario took place. //

China appropriates national assets worldwide in loaded energy and development deals. The pandemic will only accelerate this unless countervailing action ensues. In Djibouti, China holds 77 percent of debt. Kenya, Angola, Nigeria, and Zambia were all on the cusp of asset appropriation before the present crisis.

China has lent African nations $124 billion from 2000 through 2016. The largest portion of each loan is not generally provided to the borrower, but spent in China to finance Chinese-made inputs and trained labor. The recipient country, in effect, finances jobs and manufacturing in China. The reward for targeted countries is to have their assets appropriated, due to loan non-performance.

If the West slides into steep recession, developing nations may sell whatever they can in national riches to China for cents on the dollar. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative will thus be realized. This avarice is the PRC’s Achilles’ heel.

America must exploit this weakness by offering African and developing nations an alternative to the BRI. Facilitating opposition to Chinese aims among these nations must be a central component of a new U.S. strategy. America must exploit China’s susceptibility to client-state erosion. We must innovatively marshal hard and soft power to unseat the PRC from its footholds in Africa and elsewhere. //

10 Actions the United States Must Take

The problem is not the Chinese people, nor their proud heritage that stretches back thousands of years. It is communism. We must challenge China:

1. Return all production of our medicines, medical supplies, and equipment to the United States or to countries that are our allies;
2. Enact severe limits on Chinese graduate students in all scientific subjects; shutter all Confucius Institutes at American universities until they be stripped of their propagandistic mission;
3. Entrench principles and restrictions so that China can buy no more of our corporations, universities, or national assets;
4. Help deny, across the world, the ability for China’s Huawei to deploy its 5G networks, systems, phones, and devices, as tools for espionage, industrial and otherwise, could be implanted in these systems;
5. Threaten to extend tariffs substantially if the PRC does not make all virus data and sites available to our scientists, so that we may understand fully the genesis and the spread of the present pandemic; the PRC must also release any COVID-19 whistleblowers and eliminate all wet markets;
6. Put into law criminal penalties for any American company or individual who shares proprietary or sensitive information with China, when such information has application to our defense, high-technology, or energy-related industrial base;
7. Accelerate Freedom of Navigation passages and exercises through waters that China falsely claims, with maximum U.S. naval power expressed; in this, we should include, when possible, ships of the British, the Australian, and the Japanese Navies;
8. Undertake determined efforts to deny China’s Belt and Road Initiative, especially in Africa; extend alternative terms to key nations on the brink of asset appropriation due to China’s predatory lending practices;
9. Announce a new military package to reinforce Taiwan’s defensive capabilities. To this end, we should consider the sale of the F-35 due to the deployment of the advanced Chengdu J-20 fighter by China. This sale would either be as a replacement for the pending transfer of less-advanced F-16Vs to Taiwan or as a supplement to this force;
10. Radically reduce IP theft. Explicate that China’s economic expansion would have been impossible without their theft of American technology; produce and distribute lists of American technologies and products stolen or copied by China; urge other free countries to do the same, so that the world will recognize this danger. //

During the present pandemic, China’s most abhorrent exports may be fear and disinformation. Twice before this crisis, and in the living memory of many Americans, our nation has experienced pandemics. According to the CDC’s website, during the 1957 Asian Flu, “The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.”

The U.S. population in 1957 was 172 million; thus, adjusted for our present population, the Asian Flu would have killed 222,000 Americans. Of the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, the CDC has written, “The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.” America’s population in 1968 was 201 million; adjusting for today, the Hong Kong Flu would have killed 164,000 Americans. Neither pandemic altered American economic life. //

The way we have answered this pandemic is not repeatable: our array of actions cannot be mounted if another wave or pandemic strikes. This is our gravest sin: we have shown China, Russia, and Iran, as well as terrorist actors, that our nation may be brought low if faced with a new pathogen.

To establish deterrence so a future malevolent actor sees our capacities both to endure and to respond, America must exact a high price from the People’s Republic of China. In this cause, we must seek the support of all the free nations of the world.

If America had done a tenth of what China has done to the world, even given the most charitable view of their acts, the PRC would do anything to make us pay. If we are not willing to act, and decisively, we are leaving the field to an unhindered, unremorseful, and ravenous state with a degree of relative economic power that we have not faced since the War of 1812.