COVID-19

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Riggerjack
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Riggerjack »

It's not Ebola, it doesn't kill healthy fertile age people in any significant numbers, we've lived with endemic diseases much more deadly than this; really society (or at least some societies) are just freaking out at returning to the distant normality of all settled human life before the 1960s, where cancer (as one example) isn't the only improbable but not-vanishingly-improbable cause of death before general systems collapse from age.
Yeah, if it was Ebola, we wouldn't have to listen to people desperate to pretend C19 is no big deal.

Now I agree with everything you said, C19 has been far less deadly than initial reports suggested.

And if one's concern is that young folks are still breeding, no worries, that's showing no signs of slowing down.

On the other hand, if one is concerned about the society we will age into, a disease that seems to kill the grandparents, and give heart issues to the rest is going to have serious degrading effects.

What do we collectively learn from our aged? What do we lose with them?

Many here in one form or another has complained about balance of grasshoppers and ants (of Aesop's fables) in our society.

How does increased mortality at all ages, but increasing with age affect that balance in the future? Does anyone think this is a good thing? Or even an insignificant change?

How does heart problems for a significant portion of the population change society? How does it change the economy? Surely there will be positive changes, but I can't think of any that come close to balancing the harm.

But sure. People have outbred disease burdens in the past. Economies have grown despite disease burdens. And even when most of us die, many will fill in the places freed up by our passing. But don't think they will thank us for dropping this ball, or live better for having one more burden to carry.

At some point, I would love to hear someone try to compare the costs of prevention with the costs of incubation. When I look at it, prevention looks cheap and easy by comparison to carrying this burden into the future.

classical_Liberal
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Re: COVID-19

Post by classical_Liberal »

Riggerjack wrote:
Wed Aug 12, 2020 5:54 pm
and give heart issues to the rest is going to have serious degrading effects.

How does heart problems for a significant portion of the population change society?
This is pure speculation at this point. There may be some deleterious cardiac effects a few weeks post infection. Based on the study provided upthread. Those effects may or may not be similar to any serious viral infectious disease, because we don't normally run these tests on people who have been very sick from a virus. They may or may not last longer than a few weeks post infection resolution defined by negative PCR tests.

What we know for sure is that lifestyle issues in the US have direct causative evidence of serious cardiovascular diseases. Yet that evidence is still not enough to encourage lifestyle change in a majority of the population. So, even if COVID proves to have some long term cardiac effects to some people, how much lifestyle change do you think people will tolerate to prevent it? How do you think it'll change society? Well, we already have an analogous situation, so I'm guessing not too much.

nomadscientist
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Re: COVID-19

Post by nomadscientist »

The ship has sailed on prevention. Maybe China can prevent it forever, at the cost(?) of isolating their country from the dunderhead West. The only ways out would be herd immunity and vaccination, both of which depend on lengthy immunity periods. Without lengthy immunity periods, coronavirus will be around forever.

Assuming coronavirus will remain around forever (the argument of the passage I quoted, but not yet certain) eternal restrictions to reduce its impact are just yet more conspicuous consumption by an unpragmatic society.

Evolution really does not care if grandparents live to 80 or 82; historically, most did neither. It does care that restrictions are social sterilisation for the young.

At least we've established by a peer review that Black Lives Matter protests never spread coronavirus, so maybe they'll replace church, the office, and finally tinder as the main place families are formed. Since they'll be the only place. :lol:

Historically, lots of diseases were just around forever, diseases like smallpox, polio, and tuberculosis (which is surely coming back as well).

shemp
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Re: COVID-19

Post by shemp »

I'm convinced covid-19 will eventually be remembered more as a social than health phenomenon.

Technological changes have long been making it easier for elites to control masses. Surveillance technologies, in particular. At a subconscious level, elites everywhere simultaneously realized that this year was the right time to consolidate power tightly in their hands, or lose power forever in favor of other elites with less scruples. Of course, there are usually divisions among the elite and infighting among elite subgroups, so the process isn't clearcut, nor is the process coordinated between countries, and a few countries may even be temporarily moving in the opposite direction. Final result is that most countries will be much more unequal than prior to covid, with power more tightly consolidated at the top, and all sorts of new surveillance and security apparatus in place to eliminate possibility of future resistance by the masses. Covid as a bodily disease no more significant than a particularly bad strain of flu. Real significance of covid is as an excuse to speed up power consolidation process that was already underway.

Those who support this power consolidation process (cheering for lockdowns and masks at all times, for example) are the usual lickspittles and toadies trying to go on record as being "team players", in case of future reprisals, and otherwise get on good terms with the elites and their security apparatus underlings. During early AIDS, when there was no treatment for HIV, these same lickspittles and toadies who cheer for lockdowns reacted with fury to the idea of closing gay bathhouses. Putting entire society under indefinite house arrest is okay, but quarantining a tiny group of people with HIV is a monstrous attack on human rights. Testing at borders for covid is okay, but not testing for HIV. Churches are hotbeds of covid transmission, but not BLM protests. Etc, etc.

Those who resist the power consolidation process are doomed to fail: time for resistance has long since passed.

Middle classes in the developed world are likely to face a severe reduction in their standard of living in the years ahead, as the elite see less and less need to appease the middle class with high living standards. It's not so much that the elite will want to consume more themselves, as that they will focus society's resources on strengthing their grip on power versus economic activity that benefits the masses. Alternatively, we could say the elite do want to increase their share of the consumption pie, but that what elites most want to consume is security, versus traditional consumption goods and services. Lockdowns are a fine example of this kind of thinking: so what if GDP drops 30% and there is mass unemployment and mass bankruptcy of small business and perhaps even mass starvation in Africa and India? As long as elites and their security underlings feel more secure than ever, there is no problem.

Those living the ERE lifestyle will do better than those with a high consumption lifestyle, since they have less distance to fall. Having children will be more expensive than ever, as the elites increasingly see large populations as more threat than asset. Plus robots replace many workers in the future and essential workers (sociopathic security underlings, in particular) can be imported. Financial Investments will do poorly, as the elites will increasingly siphon off corporate profits into their own hands rather than allowing it to reach the non-elite via dividends or bond interest. This siphoning will be accomplished by a combination of inflation, tax code changes, controls on capital, lax attitude towards fraud and other forms of management theft, etc.

Hristo Botev
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Hristo Botev »

@Shemp, I think I'd enjoy grabbing a beer with you.
shemp wrote:
Wed Aug 12, 2020 11:22 pm
Real significance of covid is as an excuse to speed up power consolidation process that was already underway.
Was listening to the most recent Argument podcast on the walk into work this morning (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opin ... covid.html), where they had the EXACT SAME left (Frank and Jeneen) vs. right (Ross) argument about COVID--what should we do, what should we have done, how much has the US "failed" in fighting COVID, who/what is to blame--that we've been listening to since April; nothing has changed. And this discussion ALWAYS seems to boil down to: (a) the right having to remind the left that the US, unlike almost every other Western democracy, still pretends to have a federalist system of government, where subsidiarity is supposed to be the default; and (b) the left faulting their despised Trump for not being authoritarian enough, for not grabbing more power in the form of patent overrides, the defense production act, using local county and municipal health officials as if they are defacto employees of the CDC, etc. It's exhausting. That said, while Trump no doubt could have done more to battle this thing without overreaching into power properly held by state and local officials, I shiver to think about how a technocratic elite like a Bloomberg would have used this disease to consolidate more power in the hands of the federal level, in the way FDR did with the Great Depression, or the way LBJ did with his ineffectual war on poverty.

7Wannabe5
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Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

So, if you are affluent and well-educated, but you like beer and football and dislike masks then you aren’t a member of the elite? :roll:

I agree that there are some disturbing second order effects of global meritocracy, but it seems to me that the mix of factors that are promoting relatively fast spread of Covid in the U.S. are both red and blue. This also holds for human population issues in general.

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

Containment was only ever a joke at best and more likely power grab at worst. The elites love the virus, it is the gift that keeps giving. The 2008 crash was because of speculation and so we need to get serious but hey, the stimulus will not work unless we wear masks, let’s shut down again and bail out Wall Street- again. Temporary measures to address emergencies becomes permanent, but a permanent emergency? Even better. Look at NZ, shutting down again. You go Jacinda! What a joke.

Threw off the virus in a few weeks. My heart is beating just fine and my erections are as robust as ever.

nomadscientist
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Re: COVID-19

Post by nomadscientist »

Western countries never set out a concrete aim for their COVID policies, against which any plans or outcomes could be judged.

In the early days there was some flimflam about "not overwhelming healthcare systems", but it's clear there's no intention to relax restrictions up to the edge of healthcare capacity. Nor was there ever any evidence that medical management significantly reduces the death rate*.

The revealed preference is now for as close as possible zero transmission until a vaccine, a strategy that's both high cost, because zero transmission is vastly more expensive than "don't overwhelm ICU" transmission, and high risk, because there's no guarantee on vaccine timeline or that vaccines will even work. It's a strategy few would actually endorse if it were plainly described publicly, which is probably why the early Swedish and UK plans - the only ones constructed by scientists without political input - didn't resemble it.

The Asian states that reacted very violently at the start are in a different position. They only have to keep their borders closed. This turns out to not actually be that much of a cost. But closing borders was never really an option in the Woke environment that prevails in the US and the West; like permitting BLM, the system ultimately prefers that people die than that borders are closed, even while clinging to its own wildly skewed standards of willingness to pay to save one life for most other activities.

Elites didn't plan this. They aren't competent enough. They are gleefully cashing in and the instant flips and plain contradictions of the "toadies" have been more visible in the past months then any previous point in my lifetime. They'll never change, because it's a personality trait or rather personality type, not a logic error to be corrected. But I can only hope fewer people take them seriously going forward. Elite competition has been destroying the seed corn of Western society for decades now. There is no law of physics saying America rules and is not ruled. Are people actually freer in America than Belarus or China? If freedom creates economic strength which creates military strength, how much longer will this continue? Not that a foreign suzerain would necessarily have any interest in reversing the process rather than accelerating it.



*wildly varying evidentiary standards for action in different cases based solely on political considerations and self-reinforcing social desirability bias being the hallmark of this crisis and the "scientific" responses to it

CS
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Re: COVID-19

Post by CS »

Mister Imperceptible wrote:
Thu Aug 13, 2020 1:10 pm
Threw off the virus in a few weeks. My heart is beating just fine and my erections are as robust as ever.
Yeah, that's not how long term inflammation works. Keep an eye your heart just in case.

jacob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jacob »

nomadscientist wrote:
Thu Aug 13, 2020 3:03 pm
Western countries never set out a concrete aim for their COVID policies, against which any plans or outcomes could be judged.
Western countries with a few notable exceptions (Sweden and US) have followed a strategy of containment (failed), mitigation (effective lockdown), followed by reopening with suppression and contact tracing. It was already clear in the beginning (Feb/March) that the free democracies in western countries would fail at the containment stage being unwilling to close borders or restrict travel in any meaningful way. There was also a general belief that "it can't happen here" which is part and parcel of the human condition. So unlike the Asian countries many of which had previous and recent experience with SARS, the virus was let in where it spent a few months taking hold.

The lockdowns happened at different rates and stages in different western countries usually in a reactive manner. The aim was to avoid overwhelming the health care system. Sweden took a different path believing that its health care system would never be overwhelmed. (It hasn't been.) Either way, this effort succeeded in all countries except the US which gave up about halfway through.

Here success was measured as bringing the R0 under 1 and creating enough testing and contact tracing capacity to move to the suppression strategy. While I haven't looked in detail for each and every country to see if there are specific metrics or governments are responding as new things are learned, some countries and US states have such plans which have guided the order in which the countries and states have opened up their economies.

They're usually pre-written guidelines e.g. "no assembly over 10, 25, 50, ...", "middle schoolers first, then senior, ...", "gyms but not bars", ... stuff like that. These are usually formulated as "stages" like stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, etc.

Meanwhile R0 and positive test rates are monitored and insofar numbers creeps up again, the stages will be rolled back.

So basically, yeah, the concrete aim other than Sweden and the US has been to reach a suppression/tracing strategy in which the economy can be reopened as much as possible while cases are handled on an individual basis.

This is different from the overall US (+ certain states) and Swedish strategies which follow a mitigation strategy of not overwhelming the health care/ICU system eventually relying on a vaccine or herd immunity.

In any case, I don't know if that meets your definition of "concrete" but western countries did and do have strategies with the specific goal of handling the disease with suppression/tracing and avoid the (>60/100k people) death rates seen in Spain and Italy. With the exception of Belgium (I don't know what's going on there) they all succeeded in that. You can argue that they don't have herd immunity and that they're therefore only one patient zero away from losing control. However, as long as the public health machinery is online, the idea is that infection chains get contained pretty quickly. In short, the strategy of most western countries is to do what the Asian countries showed would work. They just had to learn it the hard way.

It is conceivable that the remaining "mitigation"-strategists might hit the reset button at some point in the future using the mother of all lockdowns (in the US for the second time, in Sweden for the first time) and pursue the same strategy. It could also happen that the "suppression/tracing"-strategists get tired of all the nose swabs, etc. normalizing the disease and going for mitigation instead. Especially if treatment becomes routine and acceptable.

We shall see. Meanwhile ... it's certainly fodder for the US culture wars :-P

nomadscientist
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Re: COVID-19

Post by nomadscientist »

jacob wrote:
Thu Aug 13, 2020 5:12 pm
So basically, yeah, the concrete aim other than Sweden and the US has been to reach a suppression/tracing strategy in which the economy can be reopened as much as possible while cases are handled on an individual basis.
This brand of flimflam was also mentioned a bit at that time although pushed much less strongly, probably because it committed to specific actions with measurable outcomes. It is also lacked the moral punch of "help out doctors and nurses."

Trace and suppress has two preconditions which are:

1. closed borders

2. zero (not "zero if you squint") transmission

In other words they require the Asian strategy of total shutdown including food stores, border posts and airports [and welding people in their houses?]. Europe never did that and they knew at that time that they weren't doing it. European countries have not suppressed transmission to zero, they've just suppressed it to a level where it's ignorable given the indefinite continuation of major restrictions but still endemic to all parts of their countries: "zero if you squint."

This is a variant on "protect the healthcare system" but with a maximum tolerable ICU admissions rate that is a tiny fraction of the capacity and with no intent to expand the capacity (the UK, initially implementing its scientific plan, rapidly and drastically expanded capacity and then shut it down again after the lockdown strategy was introduced for politics reasons). No one has even tried to explain what is the merit of this approach.

Some European countries have half-hearted efforts to at least create a tracing app, only several months after the Asians made such apps with less preparation time, but there's no serious effort to introduce the apps or enforce their use, and that makes sense because tracing is useless without the preconditions they aren't even trying to satisfy. European countries have rushed to reopen their borders, not introduce tracing.

The US approach, though still rudderless when you look at how it was devised, is more logical than the EU approach in that it's a "protect the healthcare system"/herd immunity strategy that at least has a chance of reaching herd immunity within this century. That's from the gross data. Zoom in and you see that the US net moderate transmission rate is just an artifact of gluing states hit early and hard (NY, CT, NJ) to states hit late (TX, FL) within one country, and don't reflect the situation on the ground in any given location. The states hit early and hard have EU transmission rates, EU lack of interest in transitioning to trace/suppress, endlessly stalled lockdowns, and yet outcomes no better than those of Sweden. All of the US will eventually end up there.

The only real achievement of these measures is "acclimatise the workforce to living under house arrest with hard labour." And that seems to be all that's desired, even if it wasn't a pre-mediated plan. Certainly no one with a public voice is particularly bothered that there's no aim, no strategy, and no end in sight. Meanwhile, inhabitants of "authoritarian" non-immigration countries are mostly living normal lives.

George the original one
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Re: COVID-19

Post by George the original one »

Free mask distributions...

My county has offered free masks during a mid-month distribution day. First one was back in June. You drive to a fire station on the designated day, between 4p & 7p, hold up fingers for how many you want, and get handed a bundle. First round the bundles were 5 masks to a bag. Second round had 10 masks to a bag. This round were boxes of 20 masks!

I'm vaguely wondering if this will be the final distribution, as it feels like they're trying to get rid of any remaining stock. Apparently a public-private partnership that our county health department cooked up. One of the other coastal counties also has distributed masks this way, but I've not heard of any other counties doing free mask distribution in Oregon.

These are high quality HN95 disposable masks that are reasonably comfortable to wear and last for quite awhile. Much better than the blue surgical masks where the straps break if you look at them cross-eyed.

shemp
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Re: COVID-19

Post by shemp »

If you want to see the endgame, not the endgame of covid but rather of the power consolidation process, watch Belarus. This is yesterday's latest from a YouTube channel I follow. It's in Russian, but you get the general idea from the images. (Of course, the truly serious beatings occur behind closed doors, so no images but you can imagine.) Are they showing such images from Belarus on USA television? Why not?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uDE_8zpXIu8

As in most countries other than the USA, there is not widespread private ownership of rifles in Belarus, only hunting rifles in rural areas and those hunting rifles are registered, so the protesters could never hope to win with violence and were peaceful from the start. All the violence is from the security forces. But the real issue is information control. Those clips are from a few days back. Now the internet in Belarus is being cut, they'll likely soon jam radio waves, then send security underlings to collect the hunting rifles, then use modern technology to impose a much stricter police surveillance state than was possible in Soviet times.

Or maybe not. Lukashenko is a truly stupid leader, about as stupid as Trump, so it's conceivable some colonels in the military might decide to stage a coup. If the protests in Belarus succeed in overthrowing Lukashenko, it sends a message of hope. Otherwise, it's an foretaste of what we will see elsewhere eventually. Namely, tighter and tighter grip on power by a small elite of rulers for life (Lukashenko is apparently preparing his son to succeed him, thus establishing an hereditary elite, which is part of what set off the protests), any attempt to get rid of the elite beaten down by secuity underlings, worsening economic conditions for everyone except the elite and their security underlings.

The success of Asian countries in coping with covid should be compared with the success of Belarus, which never locked down and whose leader Lukashenko called the panicky lockdowns elsewhere "mass hysteria". Note the well-controlled infection and death rate charts at worldometer for Belarus. Easy to show success when you have a good grip on information flow. Perhaps the well-controlled charts from China also result more from control of information flow than what is happening in reality:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... y/belarus/

BTW who's really behind worldometer? We've already seen that Twitter and YouTube censor all information that doesn't fit the leftist narrative while Fox has always been a source of right-wing misinformation, propaganda and often outright lies. Is all the news fake? How can you really know? What you actually see with your own eyes is almost nothing. Most of what you know comes from media sources, which can be centrally controlled. I'm 99.9% certain ERE is really run by Jacob, and Jacob is who he says he is, but there's still that .1% of uncertainty. Control of information flow is even more important than control of rifles and other weapons.

7Wannabe5
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Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

You can go visit Jacob in Chicago. You can read an introductory textbook on virology or epidemiology. You can track the numbers for your region yourself, based on both hospital and government reports. The internet provides fantastic access to original source material behind any news reports or pop-op writing for anybody willing to take the time or trouble to do their own research to their own satisfaction.

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

@7

While I understand you *can* do those things, as said before it is not reasonable to expect everyone to do that, there should be leadership. As late as February, publications such as NYT and WaPo were dismissive of the virus. Now people are thrown out of work and have their businesses destroyed and made to be dependent on government handouts. People scrambling to feed and house themselves and their families do not have time to become virologists. The mistrust is justified.

You cannot give trillions to Wall Street and throw crumbs to the poor and then ask why everyone does not just Netflix and chill. Either write everyone a check for $25,000 so we can all go home as the technocrats say we should, or deal with the pushback. Cannot have it both ways.

7Wannabe5
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Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@MI:

If leadership equals “somebody to do my thinking for me” I’ll pass.

OTOH, I am currently reading Yang’s “The War on Normal People” (almost nobody on this forum qualifies as “normal”/median or below on any of the metrics differentiating from “elite”) and although I don’t buy everything he is selling, I think something like UBI is a good idea. It even solves the problem of lack of incentive for lower wage work vs means-linked aid, so should help Main Street businesses. There is infinite work to be done everywhere you look including “right in front of your nose”, but the notion of the “job” is quickly becoming obsolete, and the Covid crisis is accelerating this process.

JL13
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Re: COVID-19

Post by JL13 »

jacob wrote:
Thu Aug 13, 2020 5:12 pm
reopening with suppression and contact tracing.
Is there any govt that has successfully contact traced the majority of cases, or this a theoretical goal? In my city, R0 has been below 1 for a couple months, we have the manpower to contact trace 100% of cases, yet we can only identify less than 5%.

Conjecture: This may be because there are so many asymptomatic (not presymptomatic) people moving the virus around the community. But it could also be due to the lag between infection and positive result I suppose?

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Jean
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Jean »

Or maybe lukashenko is the only sensible leader in Europe, and hé really won the élection, and thé woke west ist staging a coup there.

tonyedgecombe
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Re: COVID-19

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Jean wrote:
Fri Aug 14, 2020 11:15 am
Or maybe lukashenko is the only sensible leader in Europe, and hé really won the élection, and thé woke west ist staging a coup there.
Garbage like that is ruining this forum.

nomadscientist
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Re: COVID-19

Post by nomadscientist »

No Slavic country is particularly well governed by the best of world standards, but I'm not sure which CIS country I'd rather live in than Belarus 1990-2020 with the assumptions I will have average aptitude and income and no path to emigrate. Someone has just noticed last Thursday that this guy who dresses like Stalin and has been in office for 26 years isn't playing democracy entirely by the rules. Whatever.

Shemp, I have a lot of sympathy for your POV but please consider the other side which is that once the state is fully secure in power it no longer has to sell its national seed corn to buy security. Singapore is much the same sort of country as Belarus - dictatorship, but neither eeeevil nor totalitarian - and it's more prosperous and safer place to live than America or most countries for that matter. I'm not putting it up the best possible model for a state but it's hard to think of any country with unstable power where people are safe or free. And without safety or freedom, hard to invest money to build an economy.

Of course strong states, or dictators, can be mild or they can be mad; the problem with monarchy is always to find a strong, wise, and good king without the selection mechanism becoming a new constitution. Some countries like the UK (for a time) combined an entirely secure state with a string of more or less good governments that permitted private property and private opinion. America looks like an insecure state that is increasingly disallowing opinion in a desperate scramble for security, a process all thinking people should fear will spill over into property rights. As it inevitably will if not somehow stopped.

Locked