You Had One Job
Epsilon Theory
January 27, 2020·19 comments·Politics
A government that spends trillions on foreign conflicts suddenly can't charter a single plane to extract trapped citizens. The contradiction isn't about resources or capacity. It's about choice. Something about how governments prioritize protection has shifted, and it's exposing which lives count.
- Japan is evacuating all its citizens from Wuhan who want to leave. The U.S. is evacuating a limited number and charging them for the flight, with repayment due in 30 days. The difference isn't logistical.
- There are roughly 1,000 Americans trapped in and around Wuhan. A Boeing 767 holds 230 seats. The math suggests this isn't about insufficient transportation but about insufficient will.
- The repeated emphasis on repayment terms in the evacuation announcement feels deliberate. The details about cost recovery appear twice in the article. It's hard not to notice what's being communicated alongside the rescue.
- Some Americans won't make it onto that flight. If there's a pecking order that determines who leaves and who stays, it exists somewhere between the official announcement and the actual boarding. That invisible hierarchy is the real story.
- When a system won't perform its most basic function, what breaks first. Protecting its own citizens is the only job that matters. Is it the government that breaks, or the people's willingness to accept it. This isn't about impeachment or partisan theater. This is about whether competence at the most fundamental level still matters.
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Amen. Reminds me of not getting aid to Puerto Rico…you know, because it’s an island and there’s water (!). If something basic like finding a few planes can’t be done, then the whole system is broken. WTF
Stressed systems expose the rot. That Spanish Flu book that came out 15 years ago: “The Great Influenza” talked about how as the pandemic spread to cities and towns they shut down for 2 weeks - we’re seeing that now on much larger scale - if this truly becomes a pandemic (seems like that’s what’s going to happen…but I’m no expert!) people won’t care about their political loyalties (as much) if the response is inadequate. A nationwide “Katrina” will expose poor governance and people won’t tolerate their government not protecting their safety - especially if there are different responses for rich people and everyone else. Amen.
All I can say is: JFC indeed.
You wrote that “Japan is getting ALL of its people out” but that is not quite accurate. Japan said it would evacuate “any of its citizens who want to leave”.
There may well be some Japanese and US citizens who do not feel the need to leave Wuhan. It is still quite early and we learn more about this outbreak daily/hourly, but we know so far that most deaths have been from older individuals who may have had other health challenges. The mortality rate (reported so far) is about 5% (76 out of 1,423 confirmed infections in Hebei province). In the 2003 SARS outbreak, 773 people died, according to the CDC, or roughly a 10% mortality rate. 17 years have passed since then and now we have more advanced tools and medicines to help out, as well as greater awareness and faster spread of information.
Last winter, about 80,000 people in the US died from the flu (according to CDC). Just saying, let’s keep this unfortunate coronavirus outbreak in context.
We know from the CDC that the virus does not survive for more than a few hours on surfaces at room temperature so that it is unlikely to spread widely in that fashion.
It may well get much, much worse. But as of now that is mere speculation.
BTW, here is a neat map that the folks at Johns Hopkins have produced to track the epidemic:
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
I’d like to be able to think that this is the case but in reality, and maybe I’m just a cynic, but as long as the food stamps…oh, excuse me, EBT cards, keep getting reloaded, the people of this country will keep on living fat and happy while laughing at the ones that die due to governmental malfeasance
I mean … I’m not saying we should kidnap Americans who want to ride out the storm. I’m saying that any Americans who are trapped in Wuhan (and make no mistake, they are trapped) and want to leave should be evacuated. I’m saying that we should charter as many Boeing 767s as are necessary to do that. I’m saying that this is what Japan is doing.
In a system with artificially inflated money (assuming we have true democracy,) power doesn’t go to those who best manage the balance between taxes and spending. Power goes to those who best manage the balance between money and debt creation and distributing the assets to your power base.
These are different balancing acts, and tend to attract different types of ‘leaders,’ but they’re both balancing acts.
What I mean is, each dollar that goes to doing something actually good is a dollar not going to strengthening one’s power base. Those two ends are not often the same in an inflated-money society, and those who can’t tell the difference tend not to be in power for long.
Yeah I hear you. Being a little provocative.
Putting my survival mode cap on, if I had the choice between being enclosed in a completely full airplane for 8+ hours with others who just might be infected, sharing bathrooms with all of them, and re-breathing the same airplane air that is only marginally filtered, or staying in Wuhan, I would stay in Wuhan.
I can agree to this only if the evacuees are quarantined (not at home, in a facility) for a minimum of 14 days. Otherwise they are endangering the rest of the country, and as sympathetic as I am to their plight, that’s not in the country’s best interests. All of the articles about the Boeing evacuation flight being routed to California via Ontario are curiously silent/vague as to the planned quarantine measures for the passengers (or lack thereof).
Something felt off about the constant mention of paying back uncle sam but I couldn’t quite place it. This rant is a solid explanation of why that felt off.
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