SELECTIVE MERCY: No Clean Slate for Karens! Progressives demand a second chance for perpetrators of violent crimes, but they consider one unwoke comment to be unforgivable.

NO, A LOCKDOWN WOULDN’T HAVE HELPED: Understanding the Deaths in Stockholm. Proponents of lockdowns have seized on the large number of deaths in Stockholm’s nursing homes to criticize Sweden for not shutting down its economy. But it’s doubtful that a lockdown would have made much difference. Residents in nursing homes are particularly vulnerable to infection, as Chris Pope has explained in City Journal, because they live in a group setting and require so much hands-on care from health-care workers who are treating other people. They also typically suffer from other chronic illnesses that make them likely to die in less than a year once they enter a nursing home in Stockholm, as Charlotta Stern and Daniel Klein calculate. The researchers conclude:

Most Covid-19 victims had already been in the nursing home for some time. The disease tends to strike down the most vulnerable, and the disease takes some time. From all considerations, it is reasonable to say that those who died of Covid-19 in Stockholm’s nursing homes had a life-remaining median somewhere in the range of 5 to 9 months. . . .

The overall number of deaths of people in nursing homes in Sweden has not, in fact, been much elevated, compared to recent years. Over the period January through April 2020, the number of deaths among those in nursing homes was about 11,000, whereas for the previous year it was about 10,000. And that previous year was unusually low, partly because the 2019 flu season was relatively mild. It is possible that come 2020 the nursing-home population was even more vulnerable than usual.

Sweden’s approach is looking better and better.

A PROPER MEMORIAL DAY: The Tradition Goes On. Despite the lockdown, a Pennsylvania city’s Memorial Day rituals endure thanks to volunteers who decorated 1,500 graves.

BAD NEWS FOR LOCKDOWN PROPONENTS: The Results of Europe’s Lockdown Experiment Are in. Elaine He of Bloomberg crunches the numbers for 17 European countries and concludes that “the relative strictness of a country’s containment measures had little bearing” on the death rate.

OIL STILL RULES: The Global Economy’s Fuel Gauge. Oil powers almost all transportation — and Covid-19 will only intensify its dominance. The open-plan office will fall out of favor, but people will still be driving to work as the suburbs and exurbs keep growing (and as mass transit becomes even less appealing).

THREE FEET SOUNDS A LOT BETTER: There’s little “science” behind the six-foot social-distancing rule.  A U.K. expert says that the country’s two-meter rule is based on “very fragile evidence” and is probably excessive. Sweden, Norway, Austria and Finland are getting by with one-meter distancing, which makes it much easier for restaurants and other businesses to reopen.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Academic Descent. Fred Siegel reviews two excellent new books on the triumph of ideology over ideas on campus: The Lost History of Western Civilization, by Stanley Kurtz, and The Breakdown of Higher Education, by John M. Ellis.

EVERYTHING IS PROCEEDING AS HE HAS FORESEEN:  The Politics of Fear. Nobody understands politicians’ power grab during this pandemic better than Robert Higgs, who should have already won the Nobel in economics for his work. In Crisis and Leviathan, he famously demonstrated the “ratchet effect” of government growth, which mostly occurs in spurts during wars, financial panics and other crises, real or imagined. Higgs also identified the underlying psychological cause: the negativity effect, which is the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly good ones, a cognitive bias that politicians and journalists exploit to foment fear and promote bigger government.

Roy Baumeister and I drew on Higgs’ work in our book on the negativity effect, The Power of Bad, to argue that the greatest problem in politics is what we call the Crisis Crisis — the never-ending series of hyped crises that lead to cures worse than the disease. The pandemic is just the latest and scariest example, in Higgs’ view. “I have an overwhelming feeling,” he told me, “that I am reliving a bad experience I’ve lived through several times before, only this time it’s worse.”

RUNNING OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: California’s Budget Bust-Up. Facing the largest budget deficit in the history of any state, $54 billion, California’s politicians are blaming their woes on the coronavirus. But give credit where it’s due: the state’s progressive policies.

JAMES BOVARD: Hacksawing the Economy: How Lockdowns Are in the Tradition of Civil War Surgeons. 

Surgeons justified fetching out their hacksaws, because otherwise many soldiers would die from their gangrened wounds. It didn’t matter how many soldiers died from unnecessary or botched amputations as long as surgeons didn’t get blamed for deaths from gangrene.

Politicians in many states are justifying their COVID-19 shutdowns with rationales that resemble those surgeons’. It doesn’t matter how many individuals lose their jobs, businesses, or robust health due to the shutdowns. As long as politicians claim that things would be worse if they had not amputated much of the economy, they can pirouette as saviors.

Actually, there is a closer analogy between the Civil War surgeons and contemporary politicians. Politicians have razed much of the economy purportedly to prevent anyone from getting infected at some unknown point in the future. This is like a Civil War surgeon sending his assistants to roam the countryside to seize hapless young men and saw off their arms in order to prevent them from being casualties in future battles.

Here’s how New York governor Andrew Cuomo justified shutting down his state’s economy and confining almost 20 million people to their homes two months ago: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” At the time of Cuomo’s decree, five or fewer people had tested positive for coronavirus in most counties in New York State. Cuomo’s formula exemplifies how politicians reap media applause for dramatic actions that have little or nothing to do with public safety.

The 1860s media no doubt published glowing profiles of the surgeons, too.

WHAT, ME HELP? AOC Discovers America. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggests Americans choose a “different path” and try something unprecedented during a disaster: voluntarily helping their neighbors. As usual, her ignorance is appalling, but to be fair,  helping someone else is probably unprecedented for her and her comrades.

HOW TO FILL THE SEATS AGAIN: Ticket to Cancel. To lure their customers back, airlines and theaters and arenas need to offer fully refundable tickets.

THE GEEZER FALLACY: What do the Covid9-19 Antibody Studies Mean? They yield vastly different fatality rates ranging from 0.05 percent in Iceland to 1.3 percent in northern Italy. Jacob Sullum analyzes the differences and says that some of the lower estimates look plausible. He also offers encouragement for the elderly from Alan Reynolds of Cato Institute, who notes that at least 99 percent of the people who died in New York City had underlying medical conditions.

“The absolutely critical and widely misunderstood point here is that ‘underlying conditions’ are THE only risk that virtually all fatal cases of COVID-19 had in common—not age,” Reynolds writes. “That misunderstanding arose because old people are far more likely to have one or more of these conditions (and because more old people die of this and almost every other fatal risk). But it’s about time to stop echoing the fallacy that this virus kills old people, rather than sick people.”

Good, because there are plenty of healthy old people.

NO, IT’S NOT: “The Moral Equivalent of War.” The war rhetoric surfaces once again in peacetime — and will lead to no good, as usual. “If we allow Covid-19 to kill our economy, then the virus will have won.”

THIS TIME IT REALLY IS DIFFERENT: Un-furloughing the Economy. Instead of forcing companies large or small to rehire workers they can’t use, we should focus on helping them survive. “The ‘Main Street-vs.-Wall Street-vs.-households’ narrative is a false characterization—everyone is in this together.”

THEY SHOULD MAKE MORE NOISE: Youth in Quarantine. Young people ride out the pandemic obediently, without the generational war that the boomers might have started. But they’ll pay the biggest price economically.

IDEALLY ONE YOU CAN DO DURING A LOCKDOWN: Make Your Own Job. The promise of entrepreneurship education.

NOW AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC IS OVER: The smart way for cash-strapped cities to save money and protect workers: Stop recycling. Howard Husock calculates that New York City could save nearly $200 million annually by scrapping its recycling program and sending stuff straight to the landfill. And it would spare trash collectors and other workers from the risk of handling recyclables with Covid-19 and other pathogens. If Bill di Blasio and other mayors want their pleas for federal aid to be taken seriously, they need to show they’re serious about eliminating waste.

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT: The Unexamined Model Is Not Worth Trusting. An epidemiologist’s critique of the Imperial College model, whose doomsday projections for the pandemic frightened leaders into imposing lockdowns. “Blind trust in an untested, shoddily written model is not scientific.”

ONE MAN CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE: Richard Gilder’s American Legacy. Remembering the New York philanthropist who rescued Central Park (by essentially privatizing it) and fought to restore the instruction of American history in secondary schools, among many achievements.

A FEDERAL PROGRAM THAT ACTUALLY WORKED? In Defense of the PPP. Criticisms notwithstanding, the federal aid program for small businesses is largely meeting its stated objectives.

APOCALYPSE POSTPONED (LIBERAL PUNDITS HARDEST HIT): An Orgy of Plague Death, Deferred.  Caseloads have declined in Florida and Georgia since the lockdowns were eased by Republican governors who were denounced for ignoring “the science.”

In the Atlantic, Amanda Mull’s dispatch anticipating Georgia’s apocalyptic future was entitled simply, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” According to her reporting, though Georgians chafed under lockdown, there was no serious insurrectionary sentiment among the people when Kemp announced his intention to relax restrictions on service industries. “Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine,” she wrote, “sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.”

“Public health experts fear coronavirus will burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman,” read a florid analogy from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. His tongue-in-cheek piece, “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination,” toyed with the notion that Peach State residents were dying to work out at their local gyms including “CrossImmunity” and “Superspreader” boot camp. Cosmetologists could perform a “deep lung-tissue massage.” Restaurant-goers could enjoy “wet-market-to-table restaurants to experience a growing sampling of zoonotic dishes.” This columnist clearly enjoyed the time he spent crafting witty prose around the prospect of plague.

Those who did not strike either an authoritative or flippant tone struck a more somber note. “Mark this day,” Ron Fournier wrote on April 20. “Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands. And as Georgians move around the country, they’ll spread more death and economic destruction.”

Florida’s DeSantis was, according to state Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, “reckless, premature, and irresponsible” to allow municipalities to reopen their coasts in mid-April. When stores began reopening, the Miami Herald editorial board accused the governor of serving up his state’s citizens as a sacrifice in return for some imagined “political favor” from the president. As recently as this week, the Washington Post’s Ben Terris and Josh Dawsey described DeSantis as the prototypical “Florida Man”—a “devil-may-care and slightly oafish, beloved but not admired” cliché of a human being.

Actually, Florida Man is more admired than the mainstream media. And apparently has a better grasp of “the science.”

NO, AS THE CDC DIRECTOR KNOWS FROM EXPERIENCE: Is There a Penalty for Those Who Fan Flames of Pandemic Hysteria? Before you take doomsday warnings from the CDC’s Robert Redfield too seriously, remember that he was a leading promoter of the myth of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in America during the 1980s.

PUTTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO SHAME AGAIN: Getting Distance Learning Right. While public schools eliminate grades and let most students languish during the pandemic, the Success Academy charter schools in New York have transformed themselves into fully functional digital schools serving the poorest neighborhoods in the city. They’ve provided every student with a Chromebook and maintained full days of instruction and the usual rigorous monitoring of students’ progress.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Therapeutic Campus. Why are college students seeking mental-health services in record numbers? The therapeutic bureaucracy is flourishing as “safe spaces” expand into woke spas for the most privileged neurotics in history.

Underneath the essential oils and yoga mats, the woke spa mental-wellness crusade is accomplishing an even more profound transformation of university life.The assumption that emotional threat and danger lie just beyond the spa is the product of an increasingly female-dominated student body, faculty, and administration. That assumption is undermining traditional academic values of rational discourse, argumentation, and free speech.

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