RE: Virus
Geopolitical consultant George Friedman (formerly founder of STRATFOR) has written a new book, "The Storm Before the Calm," in which he writes of a current struggle in the USA between expertise and common sense, a struggle that he expects to come to a head within the next decade.
I think academics seem to favor theory and expertise, whereas the "real world" seems to favor practice and common sense. As an example, expertise says a tomato is a fruit, common sense says you don't put a tomato in a fruit salad. Or in the words of that great philosopher, Lawrence Peter Berra, "In theory, theory works well in practice; in practice, it doesn't."
In the case of CV-19, I think that struggle has been evident. The experts have been wrong a surprising amount of time--understandable in a way, since this is such a novel virus about which nobody was really an expert until we developed more information. We had a lot of public health bureaucrats running things, with little or no representation from actual responders, like practicing physicians, local emergency responders, and commercial providers, and we got a very bureaucratic response. The much ballyhooed "Roadmap" was almost entirely oriented toward bureaucratic response. I think the people in charge were out of touch with the actual providers, to too great an extent, and that caused problems.
Where I think Trump did well was taking a lot of the response away from the experts and giving more of it to state, local, and private interests. He did it too late, but at least he did it eventually. Where I think he did poorly was relying too much on experts for too long.
The big problem that this exposed--as did Katrina, Maria, the BP blowout, and countless other events--is that we have no standing or standby emergency response capability--be it hurricane, earthquake, wildfire, tornado, medical, environmental, or any other emergency. We seem to assume that they will never happen, so we don't need to be prepared. They do, and we do. Right now, everything is ad hoc, and as a result we always seem to get off to a slow start. We can't afford to maintain a standing capability 24/7/365, but we can afford to have a standby capability identified, trained, equipped, and ready to go. I would repurpose the primary mission of the National Guard from a backup Army reserve to civil defense and emergency response.
FWIW, I think Lad and 93 come down on the expertise side, and OO and Tanq and Hambone and I come down on the common sense side of that divide.
(This post was last modified: 08-11-2020 09:42 AM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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