Debt Rattle April 14 2020
- This topic has 40 replies, 18 voices, and was last updated 4 years ago by
.
-
Posts
-
John M. Fox Garcia Grande newsstand, New York 1946 • Getting A Coronavirus Test In Wuhan: Fast, Cheap And Easy (R.) • South Korea Confirms 111
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle April 14 2020]“Stupid is as stupid does. Come autumn, you’re going to need food. Underpaying essential workers will not help. Raise their wages, and you may even attract a few Americans.”
I did migrant labor agricultural work in the early 80s in Yakima, WA. Picked fruit. Paid by the bin (maybe 4′ x 4′ x 3′). Very hard labor, and I was in uncommonly good shape and used to hard labor.
The last of the Steinbeck generation of Caucasian fruit pickers was almost gone in 1980. a few diehard hippies, a few lingering 3rd generation Okies and Arkies. Hispanics ruled the orchards. They could outpick me 2 to 1. Plus, husband and wife often worked together while their kids hung around the fields, played, and helped mom and dad. A major asset to the economy, those people.
Paying people real wages to do this work is likely to raise the price of produce considerably. Paying them via piecework will teach anyone reduced to this extremely physical, dusty, and presumably pesticide-drenched labor a new meaning of both work and value and will turn their image of reality upside-down and inside-out — and still raise the cost of produce substantially.
As for slaughterhouses: I never worked in one but had friends who did. It was also back-breaking labor, not without danger, to say the least.
And then there’s the psychological toll of taking an entire populace’s life-for-death karma and placing it on… survey says… 500K USA workers. While we buy a large chunk of our meat from abroad, I assume most of it is still rendered over here.
I’ll add 500K foreign meat workers here just for easy rounding’s sake, and call it 1 million USA and foreign souls experiencing daily the horrific muders of living animals or the merely desensitizing rendering of their meat, for 330 million Americans. That’s a 330 to 1 karmic ratio before we begin counting animal souls, at which point the karmic debt resembles the Fed in a Rumplestilskin costume.
The price of animal protein is bound to rise several hundred % in the next few years, along with the cost of dairy, which has been artificially low, practically functioning on life support, for a long time.
It’s time for beans, beans, beans… in ten years, America will have the world’s first form of viral pneumonia spread mostly by public farting. I can hardly find beans at the store right now. The shift is already underway.
And that’s before we consider the inevitable petrodollar collapse/reset.
Oh well. Life’s a Funny Thing
It will be interesting to see if, when big meat suppliers run out, people rush to the small guys. A challenge for small abatoires is that many of them too have closed due to economic pressures. Then what?
I had the opportunity to tour a small local abatoire run by a proud second generation owner -saw the whole place starting from where the animals are kept waiting for “their turn”. Gut wrenching and it would be good for all of us meat-eaters to see this. Of course dairy relies on endless supply of babies, so it is tied into this process too. We don’t seem to have a way in many cultures to acknowledge the life that has been sacrificed in order for us to eat these foods.
On the fruit front, over several years we have tried pretty much every angle to get people to come help on our organic (real organic as in no nasty chemicals) small mixed fruit farm. We decided not to host WWoofers anymore because on an environmental front it seemed to make no sense to hire people jetting around the world to work on farms that are trying to be environmentally conscious. However, without them, no one up to now was willing to work in exchange for fruit and we are too small to pay straight wages. I am guessing this might change a bit this year…I’ve got to back up, you can’t be the Devil’s Advocate with tunnel vision.
Here’s something I was looking for:
“In the movie “The Big Short,” one of the characters predicted that for every 1% increase in unemployment, some 40,000 people would die an early death. It could be suicide, drugs, alcohol, spousal abuse, heart attacks, but being out of work and poor kills a lot of people. So if we go to 32% unemployment as the Federal Reserve predicts, how many people must die?”
Now that’s obviously a slippery number. How early a death? Is it overcome by being illegally placed under endless house arrest? Etc. But roughly, these are the scale of numbers to compare: 20,000 deaths, probably at peak, vs 40,000 x say +10(%) or 400,000 deaths.
So do you want more or fewer people killed? Your choice.
“You can’t ask the people of this state or this country to choose between lives lost and dollars gained,’ New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said ” https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-do-you-choose-between-economic-deaths-of-despair-and-coronavirus-victims-economists-lawmakers-grapple-with-a-moral-conundrum-2020-03-26?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
Yes, you you can, Andy. I’m sorry but that is exactly the situation life has presented you. That is exactly what you’re doing, and that we all do every day, when we drive that extra car, and eat that extra cream puff.
” …. Raise their wages, and you may even attract a few Americans.”
The farmer cannot afford to install a bench in the shade for people to watch the workers doing the picking.
I tried picking blueberries, at 50 cent /lbs. Eventually, I acquired the skills to keep up with the older regular pickers. Beans might supply enough energy for me to survive, but a days picking did not produce enough income to pay for an oil change for my car.
I would not want to try to make a living as a care worker for seniors.
Coughing, and spitting kills more people than lead.
Well said Dr. D. – policy makers and politicians make these kinds of decisions all the time. Policy makers cutting health budgets, food policies that permit the use of toxic chemicals, policy makers who allow substandard wage levels and on it goes. Unfortunately the human toll of these decisions is invisible to many people.
On another front, in Quebec Canada there is a significant move back to intentional relocalisation of various necessary items -a good offshoot to the virus.DILEMMA
If the virus can re-infect people, and if the spread of the virus is not affected by hotter temperatures, then it seems it will become endemic.
While the lockdowns may slow the infection rate to allow health authorities to keep up, lockdowns can not last forever.
The price of the lockdowns is very high, particularly in the US with 10% of their workforce are suddenly unemployed [17 million], massive numbers of businesses are threatened with bankruptcy, huge numbers of people are unable to receive normal healthcare [leading to thousands of deaths], and now threats to the food chain where supermarket shelves become empty and are not refilled.
There will be carnage! There is a quote to the effect that civilsation dissolves into anarchy when there is no food in the supermarkets for three days.
I feel we need to move to the Swedish idea where those at risk should self-isolate, but everyone else can carry on as normal.
The alternative could be anarchy!
“So do you want more or fewer people killed? Your choice.”
False dichotomy with this crowd. The economy was going to crash anyhow. If you don’t believe that, fine. Most everyone here does. Need to change the algorithm. Wrong vector angle.
” ‘You can’t ask the people of this state or this country to choose between lives lost and dollars gained,’ New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
***
”Yes, you you can, Andy. I’m sorry but that is exactly the situation life has presented you. That is exactly what you’re doing, and that we all do every day, when we drive that extra car, and eat that extra cream puff.”How you mangled that logic is almost delightful to watch. Somehow the consumers get blamed for the producers/owners/renters deciding to make money selling toxic wasteful environmentally disastrous buillshit that also needlessly endangers said consumers. The producers/owners/renters do this using their closer connexion to cheap loans and other corp welfare subsidies to continue an economic paradigm that is destroying its fundamental constituents.
But then, someone here recently said: “Nah, you could just go out. Life is dangerous. You might die someday. All you get to choose is whether you die like a rat or a man.”
There’s a thing called living too. It generally precedes dying. It takes up the vast majority of the lives of most people, except those (like me) who have weird wasting diseases that periodically put them into something very much like death until the blood requickens enough to resume the process of living day by gradual day rather than dying day by gradual day. Po po pitiful me. There. I feel better now. 🙂
This living thing involves a bit more than action movie hero decisions. It involves a thousand countless acts of kindness or at least courtesy.
And always remember and never forget: when it comes to the Big Picture, you can’t win. Doc D told us so. The Masters rule; we drool. They control EVERYTHING. But when it comes to the little pictures like, say, my life or that of my wife, then it’s our fault for being weak, ignorant, stupid, and morally inferior. Because Yahweh said so. Or someone. Or maybe Mao. Or Ayn Rand. Howdy Doody Squarepants. I dunno. I just shut up and eat my gruel and act grateful, cuz Doc D said so.
Blame the fat cats for oppressing the little people.
Blame the little people for being oppressed.
Blameblameblameblameblame.Rhymes with Russiarussiarussia if you squint your ears just right.
It’s everybody’s fault… except Doc. D.’s. Cuz he’s been telling us since the Darpanet was born, and it ain’t his fault that we didn’t listen, so he is therefore exonerated.
The Virus seems to be putting us at a philosophical crossroad.
I was listening to some governor on C-Span this morning, who mentioned the use of plasma injections to bestow antibodies from a recovered person into someone who hasn’t been exposed.
Question: Should the State have the right (power) to milk plasma from someone for this purpose?Of course- at first- many people would be happy to participate in this noble endeavor. But upon realizing they would need to be sequestered to prevent other infections from other sources, they may soon tire of being so noble.
There are a lot of people to inoculate. There probably aren’t very many who make good donors.The rights of one vs the needs of many. The needs of one vs the rights of many.
FWIW, it isn’t The Economy at stake- at least not the one symbolized by The Markets. It’s the economy- the interactions of humans in trading, sharing, working, thriving.
And it isn’t The Health of of the pieces of meat we all call home at stake as much as it is the health of the minds that drive those bodies.Lockdown: A hideous and apt word. Social distancing for unspecified lengths of time: It’s bad for the soul.
Grim cartoon: man tries to dislodge debris pinning his neighbor in his collapsed house after a tornado has torn through their area. The 2X4 remnant he uses, luckily, is six feet long.
So Dr. D’s “a priori” assumption to his logic is a line from a movie?! He then extrapolates that baseless assumption to make an argument that multiples of that (assumption) would lead to early deaths for 400k people (what ever some vague meaning of “early death” might mean from the movie itself). He asserts the equivalent of it would lead to fewer deaths to just let the virus wash over us like the Cheeto has suggested. Never mind that the health care system will crash because even those insured would overwhelm it. Industry would collapse because no one is going to go to work without some modicum of an expectation that they can do it without dying. If we all had a supply of N95 masks to wear and protective clothing we might have some ability to expand beyond where we are but we don’t have near enough even for the medical community itself. The VA system reportedly is said to have enough if they stick to the guidelines of changing them out once a week. The death rate is as low as it is because of the restrictions that have been put in place to limit the spread. Talk about anti-logos BS.
The historical facts are counter intuitively just the opposite from Dr D’s assertion. Except for a 2% overall increase in suicides the mortality rate actually goes down during economic downturns with high unemployment. Great Depression and Great Recession being notable examples of studies done. An example….
https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290
“Analysis of various indicators of population health shows that population health did not decline and indeed improved during the Great Depression of 1930–1933. During this period, mortality decreased for almost all ages, and gains of several years in life expectancy were observed for males, females, whites and nonwhites—with the latter group being the group that most benefited. For most age groups, mortality tended to peak—over and above its long-term trend—during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the deep recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with generalized declines in mortality rates and peaks in life expectancy. The only exception to this general pattern was suicide mortality, which increased during the Great Depression, but suicides account for less than 2% of all deaths. Overall, our results show that years of strong economic growth are associated with either worsening health or with a slowing of secular improvements in health.”
“The Big Short” was an extensive book before a movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short By Michael Lewis , a high-profile longtime financial journalist, including editor, Vanity Fair, schooled at Princeton and London School of Economics and a career at Solomon.
But here, National Institute of Health:
“Losing Life and Livelihood: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Unemployment and All-Cause Mortality” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/Roughly: “According to one meta-analysis of 42 studies involving 20 million people, the risk of death increases 63% when you lose your job.” That sounds bad.
But if bad economies increase health and life expediency, we’ve being doing it wrong: we need to crash the economy right away and keep it down for good. So the bad economies of Argentina and Mexico lead to what? The sudden bad economy of Russia in 1994, and their change in mortality rates after they began to recover? The mortality of East and West Germany? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486873/
But as Bosco says, that was always going to happen. Sure, it was, and now they can divert the blame. But beyond that, they are preventing any economy, that is, us, you, from making actions that help ourselves, while they help themselves to quite a lot of free cash, tests, unchecked power, and medical care.
Good point about Sweden: it’s not that they’re doing nothing, but they’re doing what people have done about disease for centuries: the vulnerable quarantine themselves, and every man voluntarily takes the risk they are personally willing to. So a small number are quarantined, with a large number working, instead of a large number quarantined with a small number working. It may be we’ve always done that because, as we see, food supplies quickly fail if no one’s working, and lack of food is not good. Masks aren’t made. Roofs cave in. Burglary rises 75% in NYC. http://thejewishvoice.com/2020/04/store-burglaries-up-75-in-nyc-as-possible-civil-unrest-has-many-concerned/ Maybe this way was a good idea. Certainly I’m cooperating with it because “we” seem to have chosen it. However, I can tell you it’s not cost free. It has consequences that are expensive and irrevocable. Like most decisions.
The rates we see again today with meat packing and NYC teachers, both are 0.02% death rate. That number comes up regularly, although without tests, everything is too anecdotal. What is our cost-benefit? Who pays the costs, and who gets the benefits? Right now the young are paying the costs, and generally the old are getting the benefit. The poor are paying the costs and the rich are getting the benefit. The powerless are paying the costs, and the powerful are getting the benefits. Is this what we wanted? How do we improve?
Earlier health authorities here have said the virus was highly likely to have been reactivated, instead of the people being reinfected, as they tested positive again in a relatively short time after being released from quarantine. They also said the COVID-19 virus may remain latent in certain cells in the body and attack the respiratory organs again once reactivated.
Does this mean we’re basically dealing with an airborne HIV? Once we get it, it’s for life?
” ….. They also said the COVID-19 virus may remain latent in certain cells in the body and attack the respiratory organs again once reactivated.”
Question: Is this something that has happen?
Shingles is a viral infection that causes a painful rash. Although shingles can occur anywhere on your body, it most often appears as a single stripe of blisters that wraps around either the left or the right side of your torso. Shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus — the same virus that causes chickenpox.
From my observation of the photos shown at the top of TAE daily blog posts, those pictures of people wandering across the country homeless and with only the clothes on their backs – I would assume do not represent the ones whose health improved?
If you are going to say that crashing the economy is going to make everyone healthier, I guess we can stop worrying about when the big crash is coming…. Sorry but I don’t buy it. Riddle me this:why do poverty and poor health so often go together? It may be that circumstances have changed since the 1930’s when a greater chunk of people lived a subsistence existence. (My dad, whose family lived a subsistence life, has spoken of looking at the poverty line income levels in his youth and whistfully thinking how great it would be if only they had that much money. ). Unfortunately our current economic policies make everyone into wage slaves, and that translates into much greater vulnerability in an economic downturn because we don’t have capacity or access to resources to look after our needs without money.Per the study mentioned by Dr. D. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/
“The study is a random-effects meta-analysis and meta-regression designed to assess the association between unemployment and all-cause mortality among working-age persons.”
“Despite its extensiveness, only one systematic review of the unemployment literature has been conducted (see Jin, Shah, & Svoboda, 1995). This review, however, was qualitative in nature and examined multiple health outcomes. A systematic, quantitative review of the association between unemployment and mortality, arguably the most important outcome, has not yet been conducted.”
A mean hazard ratio of 1.63 for studies done over 40 years (which is the figure you’re quoting) does not translate into massive deaths of the nature and scale you want people to subscribe to. If your theory were correct we would have seen a massive number of deaths after the Great Recession. Will we see a .63 rise in the mean hazard ratio over the next 40 years? Perhaps! Meanwhile people are dying in very significant numbers right now.
“Every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?”
“There are roughly 162 million workers in the US, therefore a 1% increase in unemployment corresponds to 1.62 million workers losing their jobs. According to this CDC data, for every 100,000 people aged 25-64 roughly 400 of them will die in a given year. That number comes from averaging the mortality rates for the age groups I assume make up most of the labor force. Therefore, for a given sample of 1.62 million working age people, we expect 6400 of them to die in a given year. This meta-analysis indicates that your risk of death increases by 63% when you lose your job. This means that 10,000 people will die instead of 6400, an increase of 4000 Americans per year. In order for this claim to be true, the increased death rate would have to be 630% instead of 63%.”
“Many researchers continue to argue that the unemployment-mortality association is spurious. These scholars argue that health selection into unemployment operates through health behavior variables rather than in a direct manner (i.e. the “latent sickness hypothesis”) (Jusot et al., 2008).”
“In more plain English, people with unhealthy behaviors may be more likely to lose their jobs; Alcoholism can get you fired and lead to an early grave, but getting fired wasn’t what killed you.”
Dr. D’s cure is a recipe for disaster.
I’m with Dr D on this.
Ilargi has become emotively attached to his position from all the posting on the subject.
In NZ a new group of well-informed leaders has emerged promoting “Plan B” over the current sledgehammer quarantine approach.
Unlike 99% of the rhetoric on this topic, in a rational world management of Covid response is not a choice between across-the-board lockdown or lasseiz-faire fatalism.
Here in NZ we have nationwide lockdown for a month, with inside rumour this period will be extended. Across the Tasman in Australia they have a more nuanced set of restrictions. The broad outcomes of both countries are very similar. So to what benefit is taking a nationwide extremist approach, as opposed to a nuanced approach targeted at high population density areas and/or at-risk parts of the population? Absolutely none at all.
This comparison reminds me of the economic reforms of the 80’s. NZ adopted the IMF’s recommended sledgehammer approach to restructuring the NZ economy. Australia took a more careful and nuanced approach. Roll forward three decades and the Australian economy is significantly stronger the NZ’s. (yes there are many causes for this) But even the IMF in subsequent studies admits their advice was extremely flawed and NZ suffered unnecessarily for decades afterwards (nb: as with now it’s “all care, no responsibility” for the advice providers. The IMF have no liability for promoting their idealogical idiocy of the 80’s, and the current medical modellers and politicians will have zero liability for the costs of their idealogical lockdown.
My personal metaphor is road speed limits, where risk vs benefit mandates we have different limits in different places. We are fully capable of constructing similar graduated risk mechanisms for managing the Covid risk. I would advocate based on population density (atr a crude level rural vs urban risk) and underlying personal risk (a personal risk score based on medical records held by a person’s GP and correlated with underlying morbidities at risk from Covid).
Our management systems just don’t have to be the crude blunt instruments we are currently applying.And for data, here’s a study comparing the NZ and Australian responses:
Comparing the New Zealand and Australian states’ responses to COVID-19
On one hand, we can point out that people with obesity and other bad-lifestyle health vulnerabilities, along with people kept alive past their sell-by, and other “weaksters” like children and those with wasting conditions (like me) are most likely to catch this or any other bug and get seriosuly sick, even die, from same.
We can use this perspective to blame the death on pre-existing conditions and somehow excuse the virus that actually finished them off.
This also lets us blame the existing culture in which we live for creating such people. (We create each other in a society. We are each others’ keepers: this is the essence of mutually protective society, like those with armies and physically defined borders. It takes a village to raise people. (Y!M!C!A! 🙂 )
We can also blame the people whose lifestyles, however culturally inculcated, are nonetheless their personal responsibility in the end.
We can blame poverty for reducing peoples’ access to the healthier things in life. Poverty, being an abstract concept, has no feelings nor responsibilities nor volitional powers, so it’s an especially easy target.
We can then blame the socioeconomics that create this poverty. We can also say: “Sure, it (economy) was (very nigh collapse), and now they can divert the blame. But beyond that, they are preventing any economy, that is, us, you, from making actions that help ourselves, while they help themselves to quite a lot of free cash, tests, unchecked power, and medical care.”
We can say that although doing so indulges a crass falsehood: “they are preventing any economy, that is, us, you, from making actions that help ourselves”
Apparently, a bit of quarantine prevents us from doing things. Doing things, you see, is how we uh, do things, including survival. Just because we take certain precautions, for a short or even very very long while, to prevent something like we saw in Wuhan (who are not reporting nearly as many deaths as are really happening!, I’ve heard dogmaticvally and absolutely said around here) doesn’t render us helpless. Such periods in fact foment independence and inquiry and new awareness and dialog between neighbors precisely because they’re all sharing this weird new thing, the Time of Corvid. (It’s from an old Tolkien clone fantasy book. 😉 ) Such periods also, at least as claimed in centuries old uncontested epidemiologic theory/history, help save many lives and proviude a better restart to a temporarily subdued economy.
But, since we are no longer diligently obeying cultural orders* to work 9-5 we are of course incapable of creating anything like personal livelihoods. All we can do is continue obeying Mammon even as the merry Mammonites “help themselves to quite a lot of free cash, tests, unchecked power, and medical care” at our expense unless they’ve finally genetically engineered geese who lay golden eggs and elephants who pee gasoline. We can die like a rat or a man but we certainly lack any initiative or pluck under fire. We are all just fluff in Donald’s hairflow wind, all we are is fluff in the wind…
*(except you suckers with crazy schedules or worse, gig economy jobs! you losers work whenever we tell you or you’re lucky enough to get a gig!)
We can blame people for being enslaved fools of Mammon.
We can blame people for not going to work for Mammon even as Mammon told everyone to ignore this virus and keep going to work until the bodies piled up, whereupon we (return to top of page and blame pre-existing conditions, and then repeat the list).
I’ve surely missed some of the steps in this dance called the Blame Game, but there are enough for us to figure the rest out. After all, it’s got a bad beat that’s easy to blame to.
“Our management systems just don’t have to be the crude blunt instruments we are currently applying.”
This is plausibly true, but it doesn’t relate to what’s happening in what VN Vet calls the Western Empire. Here in the WE, blunt instruments of various stripe are being applied too little or too late while too many people argue if it’s an NWO meisterplan or just the consequences of collective human action. In other words, chew-toying another false dichotomy for sake of armchair quarterbacking.
Here in the WE, blunt instruments, along with those of nuance and subtle finesse, are being chronically MISapplied.
Poor Ilargi, so helplessly, emotively attached to his perspective… to being an incredibly patient decent chap while people throw ad hominem jello at his windshield and then call him a victim of personal bias, which of copurse is so not a drive-by sliming, an injury to which insult is possibly added by the frightfully high chance that the slimer doesn’t realize that he is sliming. It happens.
Poor Ilargi, so helplessly, emotively attached to his perspective… while some of us are downright Vulcan in our clear cool Spockian logic detached from all personal emotional bias.
It would be funny if it wasn’t such a disservice to a fine forum with an especially fine pedigree going way back to one Jay Hanson aka The Claw to a few old Brainfooders.
boscohorowitz
Careful with your use of the written word. Your skills will leave the blue collar worker behind.
——
Don’t get your shoes shine with spit and polish.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/27/politics/undocumented-immigrants-coronavirus-stimulus/index.html
Millions of workers in the US won’t be getting stimulus checks
Catherine Shoichet-Profile-Image
By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNNUpdated 3:17 PM ET, Fri March 27, 2020
Ingrid Vaca says this is her third week without work, and there’s no end in sight.
“It’s extremely difficult right now. I don’t know what I’m going to do. … I know I’m not going to have enough to pay my rent,” the 57-year-old Virginia housekeeper says.
“The government is making us invisible. The fact that I’m a person without documents in this country does not mean that I’m not a human being, that I’m not hungry,” she says. “The government uses us when it needs us. … We keep their houses clean, we take care of their children and their elders. And we do it with a lot of love.”
“This is a crisis moment for hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and families that don’t have any sort of a basic work protections, like sick leave, like unemployment insurance,” says Sarmiento of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
Lopez says he has enough money for two or three more days. After that, he’s not sure what the future holds. But he knows he won’t be getting any money from the government to help. Instead, he’ll be turning to his friends and adapting however he can.
“That’s what we do. … We have to stick together,” he says. “We have to turn to each other.”zerosum: it takes all kinds of voices to make this world run aground.
One never knows, do one?
Speaking of Sweden’s approach…
Sweden: 22 Scientists Say Coronavirus Strategy Has Failed As Deaths Top 1,000
(Forbes, April 14, 2020)In an opinion piece published today in Dagens Nyheter, the group of researchers from a range of top Swedish universities and research institutes make harsh criticism of the Swedish Public Health Agency and their present coronavirus strategy. They say that elected politicians must now intervene with “swift and radical measures.”
The researchers say the agency has claimed on four different occasions that the spread of infection has levelled out, despite evidence to the contrary. They point out the slowdown in infections and deaths in Finland, which has implemented much more restrictive measures.
Jeez boscohorowitz, you sure can spin a helluva lotta words around a paucity of material..
For the record, I have tremendous respect for Ilargi, and there was no drive-by sliming intended or delivered. What I’ve observed over the past few weeks has been that on this topic Ilargi has adopted a strong and vocal position that has varied negligibly despite the variety of new information arising each day. That’s often a strong indicator of an idealogical attachment to a fixed perspective. On THIS topic.
FWIW,
As of today, Sweden’s death toll from Covid-19 (deaths per million of total population) is 30% higher than in the USA.
Source: Worldometer
Huskynut
“… idealogical attachment to a fixed perspective. On THIS topic.”
What you say is irrelevant to the decision makers.
They are not listening. Nobody is listening to us.“For the record, I have tremendous respect for Ilargi, and there was no drive-by sliming intended or delivered. What I’ve observed over the past few weeks has been that on this topic Ilargi has adopted a strong and vocal position that has varied negligibly despite the variety of new information arising each day. That’s often a strong indicator of an idealogical attachment to a fixed perspective. On THIS topic.”
I like words. I like Ilargi. Maybe you should ask him what he thinks rather than tell him. Like I said, sometimes people don’t realize what they’re doing.
To make it clear: “Ilargi has become emotively attached to his position from all the posting on the subject.” is an absolute declarative sentence. You didn’t even render the courtesy of saying that *you* think Ilargi etc…
We are being told to deny what is an essential part of being human: THINGS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY TO MENTAL HEALTH- hugging, laughing, kissing, talking face to face, gathering, romping, socializing… for the sake of those who may want to forego these things to stay healthy- or they may not. We are being denied our humanity to protect a group whose parameters are ill-defined at best. Vulnerable? Decide for yourself and stay home. Or take your chances. WE USED TO HAVE A CHOICE. Not enough hospital space? That’s a different problem, isn’t it? There are still thousands and thousands of empty hospital beds waiting for patients. Gas is cheap.
If you cannot see that when a guy in charge tells us we should never ever ever ever shake hands again- is that okay? That world is okay with you? Aren’t the facts bit muddy for that future?
How are you doing not seeing your grandchildren? How are you doing not seeing your friends? Your lovers? Your associates? Just fine? Oh, you noble person! More power to you as the food chain shuts down; when there is a real shortage of the things you truly need.
Consider the recent tornadoes: they didn’t set up the usual relief tent. What scares me isn’t that the urge to do so no longer exists-it does- it’s that the authorities said “no” and the good-hearted people said, okay.
Somethin’s happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.And the button says: SUBMIT
my parents said know
Poignant post.
We have been targeted to received a blizzard of fear by intention. We’re not supposed to think rationally but reactively.
It’s an organized campaign of control through fear of life and limb.
We here at The Hermitage are used to a somewhat solitary existence, but not total isolation.
Last week a seamstress (and friend) we know made us some masks; her mother is 700k north of here in the hospital and Nit cannot visit because of the quarentine; she cried, and my wife and I both gave her a hug; verbotten, I know.
Some times humanity prevails…
Don’t let the bastards get you…The situation is, sumac.c, fucked. There are many perspectives on what’s most f’d up about this passage.
Some fear loss of civil liberties. I should, perhaps.
Some fear economic crash. I should, p’haps.
Some fear sickness even unto death. I should, p.
Some fear the loss of contact between our fellows which makes us human. I don’t, because I see people reaching out to others in new ways. Isee my children being forced to confront realities they wouldn’t otherwise, and doing so without me around, which is the reality they’ll have most of their lives. Perhaps I should fear this distance, but I don’t.
Later on, I may well see people reaching out kindly to each other. Later, I may see them reach out to each other hostilely. Some fear this. I should, p.
There are many other fears one could add to this package, all of them valid.
My personal fear is being trapped in one perspective, particularly involving fear, that becomes so central to my sense of understanding that it obscures my awareness of other critical aspects.
I keeps me options open that way. I rather hate doing what I “should”. I prefer to let the options inform me as they avail rather than tell them when and how to become apparent or apprehensible.
You should do what you think is right, even if others don’t share your perspective on what’s most important, most right, most wrong. Maybe you should even do what I tell you to do, but I highly doubt that.
Meanwhile, I Feel So Good
Why not? I’ve literally nothing better to do than be happy. I’ve tried the other options. Happy’s the one.
Hullo gang,
I’m not actually back (having never actually gone away) , but have been lurking faithfully Lo these many years. Thought it might be a good time to start talking again, however, as there seems to be a nontrivial chance that what we humorously call a civilization is on a defective Chinese ventilator. Hopefully we can have keep ourselves occupied talking about what the hell is going on while there’s still something going on to talk about.Today was the day of risk, breaking quarantine, by going out for food and meds.
Toronto grocery shelves are slowly being restocked while many shelves remain completely bare. Milk is still in short supply as dairy farmers continue to dump milk.
In Ontario, common meds like blood pressure, cholesterol, etc are now only being issued in 30 day amounts rather than the usual 90 day amounts. Clearly there are now shortages of common meds.
That means for my wife and I, more frequent calls to renew prescriptions and much more frequent outings just to obtain meds. About 8 times a year before now 24 times a year now. That entails more exposure to virus risks mandated by government!
Noticed about 2/3rds of people shopping are now wearing masks and gloves. Most grocery store employees are not wearing masks. Outside line ups are getting longer too. Cashier lines ups are few, long, and slow too. Shopping takes 2 to 3 times longer, again increasing exposure risks again mandated by government.
So yes, I can see some people’s argument that governments create more problems than they solve. Governments are setting the stage for their power grab to collapse of its own weight. Just like in the end communism always collapses.
At some point people will say “enough is enough”! That time period however can be many generations! For Russia, it took about 3 to 4 generations.
On the subject of writing.
When it comes to my ability to write, the only encouragement I ever received, was from my Father!
“Don’t worry, you will make a good engineer!”
I failed English and Spelling every year in grade school. Teachers always voted thumbs down on me to repeat! No doubt being hard of hearing played a role in all of this.
My Father always twisted their thumbs to the upwards position! Hard to argue with a man whom you know is your intellectual superior! My Dad was quiet, but you knew as soon as you met him!
I had many good English teachers who tried their level best to pound the English language into my skull! They would have all cringed mightly, if they had known my future!
One I remember, in grade 10, was Mr. Black! A man who knew English inside and out! I was terrified of him!
Well not of him personally but rather of his great knowledge of the English language! I used to sit in the last row slumped down low in the chair, in he hopes he wouldn’t ask me what the hell a certain word’s function in the English language was!Was it a noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb and all their related cousins?
“Please don’t ask me Mr. Black because I don’t know and besides I am already having a really bad day, so please don’t make it worst by asking me a question for which I don’t have the answer to!”
Somehow I managed to survive and escape the terrifying Mr. Black!
Then in my last semester, I had a technical writer professor. He said if we didn’t know what a noun or verb was, he couldn’t help us, but if we wanted to know how to glue words into sentences and paragraphs, he could help. I am still not sure exactly what he did to me but he did do something terrible to me!
Then I got a job as a service engineer with a Milwaukee mining equipment manufacturer. Being out in the field, the company demanded weekly job reports so they could keep track of what the hell we were doing!
You got to remember this was in the good olde days of snail mail and teletype machines. In other words, in the days before instantaneous communications!
God, I so hated writing these weekly reports! Because I didn’t want to embarrass myself, I spent hours and hours writing these reports which then got read by my many higher ups! Especially if there were problems. There were always problems!
I wrote weekly job reports for eight long bloody years before they finally kicked me to the curb and put me out of my misery! That was the end of my world wide mining career!
I returned to Toronto and started working for a plastics injection molding manufacturer.
I was testing new injection molding machines on the shop floor. The operational sequence of the molding machines was displayed on red LED readouts. It was very tricky to relate the readout numbers to what step the molding machines was performing. So I made and drew up a simplified diagram on a single sheet of paper, to corealate the two functions. I gave copies to the other testers.
One day a guy shows up with a copy of my diagram! He wanted to know if I made it! Next thing I know I am a technical writer, writing machine and robot manuals!
You can see where this is heading! Not good!
A guy who can’t write, writing complex technical manuals! The only thing I know about writing, is a picture is worth a 1,000 words! Imagine earning a living writing! Manuals translated into every major language in the world!
I swear to God, that God has had it in for me!
Because I can’t write, he has been punishing me ever since, by making me write on the chalk board, a million times, I will learn to write even if it kills me!
Honestly, I know I still can’t write very well! I can only glue a string of words together.
P.S. And another thing! I still can’t spell worth beans! Spell check usually can’t figure out what word I am trying spell. And dam Auto-correct! I don’t need your help to mess things up! I do very nicely all on my own, thank-you!
People should stay home and demand a jubilee. If there is an unlimited supply of money for the banks (there always is) and the miltary (there always is), then there is enough money to give everyone a six month stay at home paid vacation. Of course some people will need to be working as the economy goes into deep freeze, but most of us should stay at home and refuse to go back. Nobody should go back to work until this corrupt system gets rebooted. The Fed needs to be gutted. The health care system needs to be rebuilt. The FIRE economy needs to be cut down to size. Government support should be redirected to individuals and main street. The military needs to be downsized. Edward Snowden needs to be pardoned. And someone needs to let Julian Assange out of jail.
Yes, individual unemployment is bad for the soul and bad for health, but it is en entirely different situation when everyone is in the same boat. That’s when social bonds can become even stronger. Collective action becomes possible, and that is exactly what the elites fear.
The hamsters are not on their treadmills. The horror! They are not paying rent. They are not paying their mortgages. If they were all isolated, they would be terrified of eviction. But not now. No, now they are enjoying life.
Whoa, I was at work today planting and mulching trees and missed a whole lot of good arguments. I think I am falling with Huskeynut – We are fully capable of constructing similar graduated risk mechanisms for managing the Covid risk. I’ve been thinking to myself for weeks or months now – How can we spend all our energy money and time modelling only one thing – namely flattening that curve? We have no media attention of how those models interact with society. It’s like factory farming – we have a problem (pests or viruses) so we go nuclear with Monsanto or whatever and never look at the broader impacts and certainly do not model them. What are the effects on soil biology? plant health? long term human health? etc.
And Bosco – I am a big fan of you and your take on things but blame gets allocated sometimes. Sure Dr D likes to neg out and is oft times quite the contrarian (but we kinda love him for it) but he offers a really needed Devils Advocate side to things.
How can we move forward if we don’t ask – Why is the roof leaking? Well it’s leaking because one of the sheets of tin lifted in the wind. That is blame. I blame the tin. I blame the wind. Now I know I have to fix the roof and blaming only serves us so long ( that roof has to get fixed) but if I don’t try and work out why the roof is filling with water then I’m staying wet.Anyway, thought I would weigh in.
Peace out homiesI’ve literally nothing better to do than be happy. I’ve tried the other options. Happy’s the one.
That’s why you are a lighthouse my friend.
You know what they do.
You know who they serve.
Cos we are at sea and think we are lost. But we are like the little waves who think they are all alone and do not know we are the ocean“Sure Dr D likes to neg out and is oft times quite the contrarian (but we kinda love him for it) but he offers a really needed Devils Advocate side to things.
How can we move forward if we don’t ask – Why is the roof leaking? ”I am all for finding and exposoing problems. In the process, one should try to not be a problem oneself… and one should especially try not to contradict oneself or repeat obvious falsehoods.
That’s all.
I am particularly grateful to WES for his “slice of daily life” observations on what is going on in his immediate environment. He’s in Toronto. I’m a couple hours from St. Louis, and know something about the “normal” conditions and relationships twixt the two places. So, from his report I can (with ‘fuzzy logic’) quickly infer a Scientific Wild Assed Guess (SWAG) about how the machinery of civilization is running in our general ‘north central sector’ of the North American Branch of the Great Western Empire. Conclusion : VERY creaky but not yet dire (mostly). Rationed Meds are due to 80 % of our meds being manufactured In China. If war comes that rationing will tighten and then stop altogether. Advice: cut dosage (with your doctors permission and advice), stockpile the remainder & start practicing a better healthstyle. Grocery Store failure to restock certain items is a quite alarming. The initial “panic buying” phase is long over with . Indeed, foot traffic and sales are down, not up, so if supply chains were normal then those shelves would have been restocked weeks ago. Trucking hasn’t stopped, so what’s going on? My best guess is that staple foodstuffs like wheat, milk, eggs, processed meats and vegetable based proteins are becoming scarcer and scarcer. The U.S. has no Strategic Grain Reserves (as in none, zero, nada, all-gone-now). That would include various grain based animal feed. That’s not insurmountable. We are all too fat anyway, and besides harvest is just 5 or 6 months away, unless something seriously disrupts planting and harvest. Like a pandemic for example.
My best nightmare is that China knows it must either move now, or put off its dreams of hegemonic world domination for at least another generation. How crazy is Xi ? Fairly rational, actually, too bad he’s not the one calling the shots. That would be our old friends who counterfeit all of our money, own practically everything and tell us what is and what ain’t in the effluvium called “The Media”. Here’s the CCP’s basic calculation : freak now or forever hold their peace. To go toe to toe with the U.S. China requires food, fuel and cannon fodder (of those, fuel is of course the weak link). To prevail in such a conflict the West ( the U.S., basically) needs food money and beachheads.
Crash the economy and spoil the North American harvest and the Commies could actually pull it off.
I don’t think they should try it, and I do think they will fail, but I didn’t predict they would preemptively strike with a world spanning bio warfare crime either. “Fool me once … blah blah blah”
The unthinkable is only unthinkable to those who can’t think (or are in denial.)
China’s formidable propaganda “machine” far far far exceeds mere weasel words in the fully suborned mainstream media. It penetrates every level of commerce, academia, politics and even Intelligence Services. And the entire focus and thrust of that giant machine has now ONE singular purpose : keep the world (and particularly the United States) in “Denial” for as long as possible.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.