Rebane's Ruminations

‘I want Trump to die’

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Da Shadow do!

George Rebane

That wish by the president’s opponents and enemies has been reported numerous times since he tested positive for Covid-19 and was admitted to Walter Reed.  Many commentators, led by Tucker Carlson of FN, immediately reacted to such remarks with condemnation, citing moral strictures and other value statements, supposedly both communal and personal.  The bottom line was that all such wishes were evil in and of themselves, and most likely those who expressed them were also evil persons.

However, there is another perspective to be had on such statements from the Left.  A correspondent and RR reader questioned the automatic attribution of ‘evil’ to both the wish itself, and more strongly to the wishers.  The argument offered is based on how a nation’s military is motivated and trained to kill when its members carry out the legitimate orders of its government.  In the combat arms branch of every military service, the fighter is motivated to kill by being told that the enemy wishes to destroy his country and everything that is dear to him should that enemy prevail.  Therefore, to prevent this, the fighter is taught to fight and kill the designated enemy.  And during this process there is no moral deficit that is attached to such killings.  On the contrary, this kind of killing is celebrated, and the bravest and most successful killers are recognized, congratulated, often decorated, and always appreciated for carrying out a task of great and unquestioned benefit to the fighter’s society – nation, way of life, culture, … - in short, the fighter is a defender of all that is good, and a patriot of high order.

Upon deeper examination, the rationale for such justified killings and sentiments that promote your enemy’s death is that the enemy’s survival endangers the survival of things that you value (starting with your own life), hold dear, and the succor of the environment in which you and yours want to live.  When your hopes or actions are motivated by such beliefs, then such hopes and actions are not attributed to be evil.

Now stepping back to a peacetime political environment; if a group of people sharing an ideology and worldview which holds that the ascendancy/survival of a politician will result in a disaster for their country and its citizens, a disaster that will give rise to uncounted subsequent deaths of innocents through tyrannical and/or negligent public policies, then is it evil to hope for the early and imminent demise of the so-identified dastardly political leader?  From that group’s perspective such a hope is socially just and a responsible sentiment.  For all of them see a benefit to the nation’s common good were that politician to die.

A counter argument might be that only governments can be morally justified in wanting, preparing for, and carrying out the death(s) of its enemies (individuals, armies, cities).  But such sentiments, let alone acts, are denied, nay proscribed, to smaller groups or to individuals no matter their strong beliefs about dire consequences.  Killings by appropriately sized collectives are then seen to rise unblemished above the moral boundaries that contain and restrict lesser cohorts and individuals.

So what are we to make of those who wish President Trump dead?

America’s Economic Recovery Narrative

George Rebane

The Dems are trying to bolster their Big Lie about Trump’s disastrous economy by pointing out that growth measures are slowing down.  (For you techies this is appealing to earliest derivative of a function that makes your case; in this case it’s the second derivative of, say, job creation or GDP, since the first derivative is still positive.)  For the nation’s innumerates, citing such data may well make a cynical impact that serves to detract from Trump’s luster, because most such folks have no means to understand what’s happening or scope out the real nature of the Big Lie.

The anti-Trumpers are communicating that since the cited growth metric is slowing down, the economic recovery is not going to happen, and therefore it illustrates another failure of the Trump administration.  What the masses miss is that we are witnessing a natural progression that describes countless dynamic processes native to our universe, economic recoveries being among them.

All complex processes that transit from one level to another higher (or lower) one start their journey slowly, then pick up speed until they reach about the mid-point of their destination level.  After that they start slowing down and decreasing their growth rate until the metric levels off and the recovery is over.  When plotted, such a process traces out a curve (function) called a ‘sigmoid’ which I’ve drawn in Figure 1 below.

In the figure we see a typical sigmoid representing the growth of some metric like employment or consumer confidence during a recovery.  It starts off slowly, reaches its maximum growth rate around time t_A at level A which is about half way to its destination level B.  At t_A the growth curve starts bending down (the second derivative turns negative) while still growing, until it flares out at level B.  This traces out a typical sigmoid of natural growth.  A similar sigmoid may represent a decreasing metric - say, unemployment rate (here) – that starts out high and then decreases while picking up speed, and again flaring out at the bottom near an unemployment rate that results at what is known as the ‘full employment’ level.  

For those wanting a closer look at sigmoids and their role in describing Covid pandemic processes, I refer you to my post on the topic, ‘Sigfor: A Data Driven Pandemic Response Policy Evaluation Tool’.

The alternative to the sigmoid that comprises the Dems’ Big Lie here is that they are telling their constituent naïfs that a recovery looks like what is shown in Figure 2 above.  Here we see the recovery rate curving ever upwards and increasing its pace until it hits its destination ‘recovered’ level and slams to a halt right then and there (technically a ‘hard limit’).  No real process behaves like that.  They all slow down before reaching their ‘saturation level’.  But a factual explanation like that does not serve the Left’s national narrative, so the Big Lie continues to be broadcast day in and day out during these weeks before the election.

Another of the many ways the Dems are misleading the American public is lying to them that we know how C19 behaves, and therefore we know how to respond correctly to the pandemic – a response about which they remain silent.  The truth is, as witnessed by the president’s C19 diagnosis and treatment now transferred to the Walter Reed Medical Center, that we are still learning.  The president is at Walter Reed because he is the nation’s high value patient and his response to the disease is still unknown.  Therefore, he needs to be within minutes of the treatments that the nation’s best clinicians can administer as they are already giving him drugs that have yet to clear Phase 2 testing.  The risk related probabilities dictate that he should be given this treatment before it even enters Phase 3 trials in order to provide him with the most effective response known to date.

The dastardly Democrats deny this truth, and continue to tell their dimwit constituents a story about Covid response possibilities that is pure fantasy and fiction.  They do not care about how many additional lives such perfidy will eventually cost, nor the impact it will have on our economic recovery and the livelihoods of millions of Americans.  The Democrats’ bet is that they and their lamestream lackeys will be able to successfully blame it all on President Trump.  That is the choice that we face in November.