The biggest scandal coming out of the Wu Flu epidemic is the Nursing Home Scandal. It appears that many states set as policy that COVID patients released from hospital should be transferred to nursing homes.
Now everybody is saying that this was cruel and heartless of Govs Cuomo in New York, Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania, and Karen Whitmer in Michigan. But they are wrong.
Back at the beginning of the Wu Flu epidemic crisis "experts agreed" that the big problem was that hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients. Why did they think that? It was because "scientists agreed" from their reading of epidemic models that there would be millions of COVID cases.
President Trump responded to this judgement of "experts agree." He sent two US Navy hospital ships to the two biggest US cities, New York, and Los Angeles to help avoid, or at least reduce, the demand on hospital beds.
Only, it turned out, the computer models on which the "scientists agreed" were wrong. The demand on hospitals was about ten percent of the forecast.
But nobody thought to change the policy with regard to nursing homes, not until thousands of nursing home patients had been infected with the virus. So, it turns out, the overwhelming majority of COVID deaths in blue states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been elderly residents at nursing homes.
The problem is not that New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan had a cruel policy to send COVID patients to nursing homes to recuperate. The problem is that they failed to adapt their policy fast enough in light of the reality that hospitals were not going to be overwhelmed.
Now, I get the feeling, reading about the WuFlu thingy from day to day, that our lefty media seems to think that science and expertise is a "thing." Listen to the experts, they say, and wait to be told what to do.
But if you have read the books that I have read, you might think that knowledge and science and expertise are not Holy Writ, but a fudge. They are useful, but not divine.
See, what I have come to believe is that the Universe is way more complicated and hard to understand than we can imagine, or ever can imagine. Our knowledge and our science of which we moderns are do proud is but a paltry attempt to understand the daunting complexity of the reality.
Moreover, we do not accumulate knowledge in a noble and sophisticated attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." We create knowledge because we have a problem. Indeed, as F.S.C. Northrop wrote many moons ago, "knowledge begins with a problem." If there is no problem, there is no need for knowledge, and no need to leave off wiving and thriving and partying.
This means that the point of knowledge is simply that it is a way to take the data flooding in every moment and decide which data is important and which data should be a guide for action and what action is warranted, given the data and the interpretation based on knowledge and science.
The best understanding of this process is the OODA loop, a concept developed by a USAF pilot, Col, John Boyd.
When you are fighting a battle -- against another army or against a virus -- you are continuously going through a process of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And the faster and the better you can do it, the quicker you will defeat your foe -- or avoid defeat.
But our educated Gentry seems to think of knowledge and expertise as a static thing, a status thing -- better left to the experts. It is rather like the old days of computers. You would punch up your deck of cards and submit them to the computer operator, who would stick the deck in the card reader and return your results from the printer, all in good time, peasant.
And, of course, the folks in an expert bureaucracy are not in the game of action; they are in the game of status. They acquire their education and their degrees and their titles not because they want to solve problems but because they want status. We see this with the transgender Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine taking time out from the vital task of fighting Wu Flu to reprimand a media person for "misgendering" her.
First things first!
I will tell you. It is because modern progressive politics is not about protecting people or taking action, it is about moral posturing.
And we moderns know better. We know that the way to get things done is through the market and its price signaling and its rewards for the guy that solves a problem, any problem, before the next guy. The market doesn't care what college you went to, what degree you got, what your title is, or what your race is. It just cares about what you have done for the consumer lately.
You can see that many of the Democratic politicians are really at sea in the current epidemic. They did not go into politics to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, again and again, but to sit upon a golden throne, make pronouncements, and receive the adulation of their courtiers.
I suppose this is true of all mature political and religious and cultural regimes. Everyone is completely engaged in the proper practice of the ritual, and has completely forgotten the problem that the ritual was invented to solve.
With the virtue of hindsight we can say of the Nursing Home Scandal that someone in the health bureaucracy below the exalted rank of Governor or Health Secretary needed to have the responsibility and authority to act on nursing homes.
Guess what. The Germans figured that out a century ago in the carnage of World War I. Given the chaos of battle and the fact that everyone was hunkered down in the trenches hey realized that they needed to push responsibility down as far as possible and empower junior officers and NCOs with the responsibility to act, based on their individual knowledge of developing local events. Thus Gen. Hans von Seeckt proclaimed his intention
[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.
How many of your modern experts are completely"verantwortungsfreudig?"
And then there is the advice of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Britain at the turn of the 20th century, on the question of experts.
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury was notable for conducting foreign policy out of his back pocket and completely ignoring the foreign policy experts at the British Foreign Office.
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