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Capitalism in the Time of Covid-19

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ionizer! See 99.99%. Photo from CBSNews.com.

Who said our economy shut down during shelter-in-place? Based on the nature of advertisements, businesses seem to be thriving–businesses targeted at selling masks, toilet paper, and chloroquine tablets, in particular. The innovation of greed has been a marvel to behold as this pandemic created, in just a few weeks, a whole sub-industry of quackery preying on people’s needs, fears, and hopes.

Counterfeit: Rascal Rollover

Despite the gutting of budgets for critical government health agencies like the CDC and FDA, the handful of people there are kept very busy posting about bogus companies. For example, the Wall Street Journal last week wrote about how thousands of overseas medical suppliers were using a fake Delaware registry as their representative. Pop over to the CDC, and you can easily find a handy list of how to tell if a company is falsely claiming their product is endorsed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Hint: they might misspell NIOSH.

What’s crazy isn’t so much that an Asian company might market a product in the U.S. with the fancy label “Air Queen,” or that they might sell a lot of masks which aren’t medical-grade. What’s crazy is that they bothered to create a fake Letter of Approval from the NIOSH, which the NIOSH then has to post with a “We Don’t Endorse this Crap….” label. Instead of working to design and manufacture whatever they would need to make masks that are medical-grade, it’s obviously much cheaper to create a fake letter of endorsement. But since American consumers wouldn’t care whether the letter has the correct government agency on it, there must be a middle-market supplier who needed to be convinced, which requires someone to be on top of determining what the transport paperwork looks like for such agencies. That’s damn elaborate!

However, as the founder of Quackwatch Dr. Stephen Barrett told NPR, when the AIDS crisis arose, those who touted fake cancer cures started touting fake AIDS cures. He called it “Rascal Rollover.” With Covid-19, the Rascals roll on.

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Not Playing Ball

Sports Fan, the Word of the Day is avarice. That seems to cover it well at least for fans, network executives, owners, and players. Some owners and some players anyway, as how professional sports purveyors are planning to address opening of their sport in our Covid-soaked world varies dramatically by sport. If, like me, you are desperately greedy to watch some games besides a 13-2 baseball donnybrook from 2015 or the Doritos Cornhole Championships, then let me give you a rundown of plans for some of the national sports leagues. How those leagues differ in approach reveals a lot about their industry.

A new revenue stream for sports franchises! Photo from NBAStore.com. Made in China.

Let’s also agree that we don’t want anyone playing who might risk getting Covid-19. I’m not in the camp that thinks we can achieve herd immunity by letting the disease burns its way through or that only weenies wear masks. Any of these players and leagues could decide as they move forward–as they did on March 12th–that it’s too dangerous to risk the health of players, coaches, and surrounding support workers. We don’t yet know if any sport is safe enough. What is true is that this disease won’t discriminate between a linebacker and a knuckleball set-up pitcher.

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Absence of Evidence

Graphic of telepathy from Pinterest.

Shepherd: It’s my belief that those sheep are laborin’ under the misapprehension that they’re birds. Observe their behavior. …witness their attmpts to fly from tree to tree. Notice that they do not so much fly as… plummet. (Baaa baaa… flap flap… thud.) …One thing is for sure, the sheep is not a creature of the air. They have enormous difficulty in the comparatively simple act of perchin’. (Baaa baaa… flap flap… thud.)
…
Tourist: But where did they get the idea from?
Shepherd: From Harold. … He has realized that a sheep’s life consists of standin’ around for a few months and then bein’ eaten. … He’s patently hit on the idea of escape.
Tourist: Well why don’t you just get rid of Harold?
Shepherd: Because of the enormous commercial possibilities should he succeed.

Could there be ESP? Can sheep fly? Monty Python speculated about it…

The topic of Extra-Sensory Perception came up yesterday, and my initial reaction was that it was too broad to write about and that it hadn’t affected me personally, so I had nothing to say. I then got it into a hot debate with my spouse about the limits and definitions of ESP–does it include ghosts? is telepathy part of ESP and therefore BS whereas telekinesis might be possible so it’s not BS? what about twin studies? and so on. This led me down the Internet rabbit hole; what exactly is the research? I realized that I never have nothing to say.

This Provocative Question was asked by blogger Fandango (in summary): “Do you believe in ESP, defined as 1) Telepathy; 2) Clairvoyance; and 3) Precognition?”

Fair enough. For definitional purposes, let’s not include all unexplained phenomena, no ghosts, traveling back from the dead, global consciousness, or UFOs. Let’s get even simpler. Telepathy, and its corollary, telekinesis. Moving and communicating with just your mind.

Belief is the Wrong Word

While assessing whether ESP is possible might seem a simple question, I have to start by picking at the word “belief.” Belief can be a function of drawing a conclusion based on facts, even though the dictionary suggests that “Belief=confidence in truth of something without proof.” Proof is a bit dodgy, since it could be limited to what I’ve observed, but ought instead to be limited to what has been developed by experiment. This is important: Belief in scientific fact can’t be limited to what you have personally experienced.

I believe the world is round based on photos I’ve seen and textbooks I’ve read. I haven’t personally seen the “roundness.” I believe there is a sub-atomic world. I believe that there were giant sloths (we have the bones). I believe there could have been unicorns.

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