boscohorowitz
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WES/V. Arnold: thanks for the encouragement. As of midnight, she seemed to be on the mend. There are many ways to develop a fever with major body aches, fatigue, and a dry cough other than the current virus du jour, but I prefer to think we’ve been thoroughly exposed to the virus and have weathered it well because we’d trimmed our sails for rough weather beforehand.
My wife came down with, in order, a rapidly encroaching fatigue, followed by major body aches, and a desire to sleep a lot.
She had a dry cough this morning but that has disappeared. I’d been hyper-nourishing both of us for some time before the virus became publicly known, and ramped up a few weeks ago: Airborne, electrolyte hydration supplements, and now, Zicam. I pull her out of the TV every two hours and mandate NEST: Nekkid Enforced Snuggle Time.
She isn’t coughing this afternoon. We shall see if this is a long grind or if our preparation let us meet the virus strong enough to keep it minimal.
I’ll just leave this here:
DB Smith:
“Show me a math geek who isn’t sweating bullets and I’ll show you a drug user.”
Make-a me laff and smile.
is me. Please look me up an it please ye.
I been looking for a smart guy to teach me something.
Anyone else wanna email too, I’d be happy to hear from you.
ROast feet are considered a delicacy by some, DB SMith but I decline.
I’ll leave this because it’s way userful, imo.
D Benton Smith: the world blesses you. God smiles on your shadow. The stars wink your way.
Why? Because reading your remarks, I feel as if my work in this town is done, at least for awhile, and everyone can relax from the look of my text.
“An event, like Event 201 coronavirus pandemic, makes that controlled-financial-reset possible on a global scale.I think history will have it otherwise.The level of resource extraction to supply the elites and the current system is too high to sustain. That is the core problem forcing reset.”
Nice work. John.
Tried to edit my mess above but the dit function has decided to act up again.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“I don’t expect to see a study that would hint that “the flu shot” makes seniors get and die from covid-19”
A test revealiong/admitting just that would hardly be out of the ordinary. It is acknowledged that vaccines have risks and that those risks are greater with frail people like geriatrics and very young children. Some years the risk is greater than others just as some years the vaccine is more spopt-on in addressing anticipatewd mutations than others. Your efficacy/adverse side effects may vary, and this is a canonic tenet of vaccinology as I’ve encountered it.
I believe I described myself as ‘open-minded’ yesterday. I wonder if the following is an example of said ‘open-mindedness’, an aspect of myself that often functions like, and is mistaken for, naivete.
It’s not *quite* naivete. To be naive requires one not be aware that one is naive. Rather like insanity. Insanity isn’t so much differing from normal or normative cognition or behaviors. Those aspects can place one in a psych ward, sure. A different kind of jail, a place for sequestering people who, on the streets, too much disturb our sense of safety and vehicular traffic flow.
What makes nuts nuts, and naivete naive, is not being able to distinguish one’s nuttiness/naivete from one’s normalcy/wisdom.
So trust me, I know it sounds both nutty and naive when I say that maybe what’s horribly wrong with Russia’s cov19 #s is that it is perhaps the one nation in town getting a reasonably accurate count of its infected populace?
A mind that open needs regular sweeping out during quiet weather, and has to batten down the hatches awhile during rough weather. Doing so allows it to propose ‘obviously idiotic’ questions like ‘Maybe Russia’s problem is that they’re doing government/healthcare’s most critically important job at this stage of the game right?’
In support of this crazy notion, and fessin’ up front I’m a bit of a Russophile, being someone who does not conflate with the large historic arc that is Russia with its 20th century tangle with utopian politics and the bitter painful obscene mess this made (predictable in hindisght, how most of our predictions work outside functional physics), I now close this equally tangled sentence and cite this link. .
And this link: As of April 18, 2020, approximately 1.95 million tests for coronavirus (COVID-19) were conducted in Russia
Other headlines today include this corker: “Contamination at (USA) CDC lab delayed rollout of coronavirus tests (today’s WaPo, no link, fuck them)
And this: google search results for USA faulty covid-19 tests
Compare that with this: google search results for Russia faulty covid-19 tests
My naive logic is that to assume Russia’s spike in reported cases is the result of them doing something very wrong conflicts with the logic bemoaning the lack of accurate testing and how that leads to under-reportage and greater inflation.
While Russophobic antagonism is prevalent in just about any Western Empire reportage of Russia, this paragraph from: Russia’s growing coronavirus outbreak and its challenge to Vladimir Putin, explained is presumably technically accurate?“Covid-19 tests had to be conducted with a locally made device many viewed as faulty. All completed tests had to be sent to a single lab in Siberia for results, causing a massive backlog at the facility. This allowed Russians to continue living their normal lives without knowing if they carried the disease or not, and blinded the Kremlin from tracking the spread.”
However, the links cited bear only partial relation to its claims.
The article containing the above-cited paragraph has links for the words ‘locally made device’ ‘single lab in Siberia’ and ‘massive backlog’.
‘Locally made device’ The new coronavirus is finally slamming Russia. Is the country ready? mentions no complaints to corroborate ‘many viewed as faulty’.
‘single lab in Siberia’ mentions that “Swabs initially had to be shipped to Siberia for analysis at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR. Russia’s Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor)—the country’s analog of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has just expanded testing to its regional laboratories and the Anti-Plague Research Institute.” (article dated march 26)
‘massive backlog’ went ‘pay-or-die’ dark on me before I could steal any of its obviously anti-Russian slanted info, but it’s from Foreign {Policy magazine, so I expect that it too doesn’t earn the claims made by the Vox article containing these links.
I suppose I could go on deconstructing this stuff. The links don’t even refer to what their hyper-linked words claim, and when they do, don’t substantiate the darkly negative emphasis of the article’s claims. Euromerican press unitedly despises and lies about Russia, and that’s about that. An example is The New Yorker from 3 weeks ago: “The fact that a certain regime is headed for a dead end in the long run doesn’t mean it may not have some advantages on the tactical level.” Melita Vujnovic, the W.H.O. representative in Moscow, recently told CNN, “Testing and identification of cases, tracing contacts, isolation—these are all measures that W.H.O. proposes and recommends, and they were in place all the time.” Whoa. Regarding this ubiquitous Russia-hating, I’ll quote some smart guy (Valery? Shaw?) who said (paraphrase alert): ‘When everyone knows a thing is so, it is almost certainly wrong.’ I think the word is canard. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably a hologram of a man in a duck suit?
Just for fun, here’s someone saying something reasonable about the inevitable flaws in Russia’s first covid-19 tests. Not inevitable because they’re Russian but inevitable because everyonre makes mistakes especially on their first attempts at a new thing. Here’s why the numbers don’t necessarily tell the real story of the COVID-19 pandemic (scroll down to “Faulty Russian Testing Tool?”)
Not that Russia isn’t in deep shit. The whole world is. But Putin-era Russia has earned my respect and even admiration for a) dealing with the world and itself as the imperfect flop-houses they are, and b) doing so with considerable honesty in terms of (CAPS alert) ACTUALLY ADDRESSING ISSUES AND WORKING TO RESOLVE THEM NOT SHOVE THEM UNDER THE RUG. It learned not to do that from both its USSR years and the crash years of the 90s. SO it may be that this nasty rise in reported infections in Russia is due to that rare thing: public officials and their corporate cohorts actually doing their job. Imperfectly, with the inevitable slowness that ALL bureaucratic responses entail, but nonetheless doing them rather than saying they are while doing the same old shmooze’n’snooze.
I invite skeptics to tear it apart.
“But not to worry. It’s when they stop even bothering to lie at all that I will duck and cover.”
+++
“Politics are the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.” Frank Zappa
It looks to my ignorant eyes like you’re on to something, my parents.
Doctors have been trying to get me to take statins for years. (And anti-depressants, and, and…)
I stick to safe stuff. Good food, all the kindness and love I can earn, and good old-fashioned illicit street drugs. But now that weed is legal where I live, I buy it in the store and show my ID so I can get crummy ads on my salephone once my debit card info is parceled out by the data miners.
“dreaded™”
Now I get it. It’s kind of an ad hominem appeal-to-anti-authority false dichotomy.
Keeping an open mind and holding to one’s own counsel confuses to many people: ‘He doesn’t support my view so he must support the views that I disbelieve.’
the Middle of the Road… is a tricky place to stand. You get it both ways. But you can see clear down the track both ways without getting run over by all the mutually opposing traffic.
Yeah, Chrissie Lynde is great, but for my money, the drummer makes this band.
A closing thought for the day:
If there is one reason why this round of mutant flu virus has become the centerpiece of global consciousness, it saure seems to be that China shut down one of its major manufacturing centers because people were getting very sick and dying. I can’t think of any other reason for why it got everyone’s attention.
I know that this event is what caused me to remark here that the wuhan “kung flu” (as we called it for awhile) sure seemed to be the Black Swan we have been anticipating.
So, if someone is looking for puppet strings behind all this, those strings’ pivotal yoke would be that an entire city was quarantined even though it hurt the fortunes of China in a very damaging way.
Now that the existence and impact of COVID-19 is a (increasingly wearisome) household notion, I think we perhaps forget that simple fact: however dubious the alarm over the bug seems, it started with a very real and powerfully consequential event.
I do have an abundance of time on my hands. 24 hours a day, reliably. An awful lot of people do lately. Don’t know why that should inspire curiosity.
But I’m not sure what Sponsored(TM) content implies, so I can neither confirm nor deny uour speculation without more specific info. If it means ‘graphomaniac’, that’s a close fit.
Also, I like posting songs:
The Revolution Should Not Be Televised
cuz TV bad (true) and one can hardly watch and *do* at the same time.
I’m not sure but I think they’re arguing conspiracy theories. 😉
One last thought before Saturday sweeps me away: if this is an intentionally introduced pathogen per some master plan, that plan might be to test the various parameters of global reaction to a perceived pandemic. A test run to see how well authroty structures hold up to such a threat.
Such a test would naturally include an economic collapse, but were I an arrogant self-percieved superheroic rich genius, evil or not, I would know that the economy entered 2020 a mere feathered push from collapsing anyway.
fwiw, this makes sense in terms of encroaching totalitarian rules aimed at resolving this perceived pandemic. Said rules could be sapplied to gauge public response, then lifted once the pandemic by itself faded out, leaving the CIC more informed as to what das sheeples will tolerate and so forth.
Around 2002-2003, Ilearned via online anecdote from someone on a news aggregator forum like this one, of an event wherein someone was arrested for breakinbg the law because they’d climbed down onto the subway tracks, an act which signs specifically outlawed, in order to rescue someone.
The point being that authority in a society of Rule by Law under a Monopoly on Violence, naturally tends to enforce the law regardless of exonnerating circumstances. Leaders almost always believe that more rules and more enforcement is what’s needed (except for them and their peers, of course).
So I’ll humbly submit (really! real humility! they had a sale at Costco!) that there needn’t be a covid-19master plan behind the CIC wanting more power over us and privilege for themself while lying and evading and double-talking and about-facing. This is what they do with pert near everything, best I can tell.
I’m intrigued by the influence of perspective on perception.
For example, a perspective focused on They’re Lying To Us, like the OffGuardian article on criminalizing dissent posted by the reserved Bill 7, who appears to be one of the Numbered People prophesized by the prophet John Smith # 38* (“He did! He did! He did prophecize it!”). I only skim-read it, but what I saw seemed to rely on, er, reliable data. But do its conclusions about the untrustwortiness of the WHO, and similar points made by the article, justify the conclusion that if they are lying, the risk of covid-19 is therefore exaggerated? The Dire Consequence projected and anticipated therefore being major loss of our already dwindling civil liberties.
For counterpoint example, there’s the perspective that Raul is often associated with, which is that the virus is a real danger, and that despite seemingly inflated claims of mortality by various authorities, said authorities aren’t doing nearly enough to prevent the virus from attaining a result closer than not to its potential worst, a lack of competence that this poerspective typoically attributes to greedy dogmatic incompetence? The Dire Consequence projected and anticipated being an overwhelmed health system, a colossal collapse* of our extremely top-heavy & unsustainable global economy, an uncommonly unpleasant number of very sick, or dead, people, leading to both massive civil disruption and/or massive authoritarian crackdowns.
*38 There really was such a person.
*those who see a ‘triggered demolition’ metaphor in this are not without justification
Burkhas are gonna be big, looks like. Let’s get some advert jingles underway:
cuz ravioli cures The New Flu.
“The Stanford study concludes that Covid-19’s mortality rate among infected people would be on par with, or even less, than the seasonal flu. Lockdowns are pointless.”
That’s first-order linear thinking.
Add a second-dimension: the “average flu” is highly symptomatic in most seasons. You know when you have The Flu (caps to indicate the concept of ‘getting the flu’ having been successfully enshrined in popular Euromerican culture to the point where we don’t think of it as something to worry about except the frail, elderly, and very young — the usual exceptions).
With normal The Flue, you may be contagious for a day or three until the symtpoms appear, but don’t spread it around for a week or three as with asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19. This makes it de facto much much much more contagious than most pathogens. This vastly increases its chances of infecting those people who are susceptible to it.
It is not just about known fatality/severe illness %s alone. It is about how many people get the bug, period (and how soon, the velocity aspect of the necessary two-fold equation: ‘how fast? how dense?’). If a virus is 90% successful in infecting the populace, but has a 1% moratality rate, that’s more people than a virus with a 2% mortality rate that only infects 30% of the population.
The velocity of contagion spread is how we control the density at a given moment, that place where reality actually happens and hospitals are overwhelmed along with morgues and so forth. Think of ultimate mortalioty/severe illness asa bandwidth issue, if it helps.
The fact that the majority of a populace might be able to carry this thing contagiously and not have a clue is NOT a good thing.
“Again, why do we care who “has” it if it has no effects?”
You’re not even trying. You’re no fun anymore, says bosco, pouting like a pelican’s pouch with no fish.
“Coyotes can run 10 miles per hour faster than road runners. ”
It’s revisionist history like this that keeps me awake at nights.;)
^^^A semi-informed question/conjecture:
if COVID-19 is as asymptomatic as the proponderance of evidence I’ve seen suggests, could this mean it was running around considerably earlier than the officially noted Wuhan outbreak?
“In my humble (well, to be honest, I’m not really all that humble) opinion the baddies made their play, it was evil enough but not big enough, and now they are going to pay.”
I like that. I like that a lot. I like the cadence of the syntax, the bounce of the prose, I just like it. I think it’s, like, the perfect point spread on the probability range of various interpretations of events.
I’ll add that it looks to me like Putin gets the catbird seat view of it all. Whatever the bloody plague does to his population etc., the economy whose rebuilding he has strongly presided over will recover much faster than most any nation or region.
Modern jazz has become ancient dead history. My my:
THISis pert near proof positive of why we don’t need a master plan run by a buncha evil rich geniuses to let a runaway virus ruin things for pert near all of us, although there’re always a few lucky dogs somewhere. (Ask Kurt Vonnegut.)
“Governors Divide By Party On Trump Plan To Reopen Businesses Shut By Coronavirus”
One can argue that our congressional clowns are able to bark in unison synch to the bouncing ball of lobbyist cash in a way that would serve alleged master plan. It’s possible. But simple corrupt daisy-chains of doing the same old shitty thing the same old way forever and ever amen suffice just as well and fit Occam’s Razor better.
My marker is on this explanation: things really have gone that far to shit. The CIC can neither sink nor bail out our Titanic. As the stern rises high, they cheer for yet another stock market rally and the rising tide that will sink all boats.
Stupid is as stupid does. With evil genius like this, who need stupid lazy greed?
“Unearned unhappiness
That’s all right I guess”Sort of a thought experiment in chaos management or something:
like our closest behavioral relatives, the ants and bees, we build vast networks around enormous hives. Farm, enslave, war, the usual. And like them, we do it all in the service of an enormously bloated central ruler (BCR) whom we occasionally remove, but the BCR often attempts the reverse (which mostly turns out badly for them):
Queen Ant Will Sacrifice Colony to Retain Throne (a fascinating read)
We are the next generation of socially regimented large-herd species, however. We have compounded and interlinked our hives and queens (suck it, Bezos) so that almost all the parasites now rule over all the hives in some kind of manifold monstrosity.
Question: do all the bloated parasites act in concert when things tighten? or do they attack each other? do they sacrifice their colony to save their throne when they hardly rule their own colony, doing so mostly in name and exploitation access alone? do they sacrifice each others’ ? do they even notice when the worker ants start biting and spraying them? or do they remain oblivious until it’s too late?
“The worker ants weren’t fooled, however, as they could sniff out a selfish queen, the researchers found. The queens that were most fertile had the stronger chemical cues (and thus stronger odors), which made them more likely to be spared execution by workers.
“Execution of the most selfish ant queens by workers would increase the incentive for queens to be team-players that work hard to help the colony,” Holman said. “This rudimentary ‘legal system’ could have helped ants to evolve their highly advanced societies, just as in humans.”
Speaking of herds and instincts:
Ants More Aggressive When in Gangs
We’re watching the initial traces of gang formation. Right now it’s still in embryonic form, countless eggs still forming their core blastocysts. In a few months they’ll have recognizable features.
…that the above is an arrangement thereof.
Ever feel like it’s just one thing after another?
Same song, but played live by the band, for those who want to see how it’s done:
Positive group sentiments are so dang corny… but we can’t live without ’em. We approach a time soon where the very best thing we can do is hold (well-washed) hands and sing kumbaya.
This guy is, I think, The One to show us The Way. Anyway, I like the cut of his rig. Talk about a low-rider:
MIsstatement:
‘Like the models Doc and others so deride, said opinions are flawed before they start owing to the data from which they’re extrapolated.’ pls insert ‘lack of matching relationship between’ ‘to the’ & ‘the data’.
I have meant to tell zerosum that I enjoy his minimalist approach. Incrementally, it builds to something much bigger than the sum of its parts.
Thanx, PlanCit. It’s a msytery to me. Only reason I address it is that new people presumably visit here every day.
Some are credulous/naive/under/mis-informed. Others are skeptical/wise/well-informed.
The former are susceptible to those recurrent fallacies. This misinforms them and tends to draw in a certain kind of hyper-ventilating zealot.
The latter are repulsed by those recurrent fallacies.
I am all for letting anyone post here so long as they can address the basic issues thematic to TAE and aren’t absolute trolls. ‘Keep the peace’ forum moderation inevitably dumbs a joint down. So I’m all for Doc D/whomever having at it. Likewise, mah seff.
Irrelevant pleasantness (but when is pleasantness ever irrelevant?)
Oh and this: “It’s “a “scandal” to “loot American taxpayers”?? Listen, those were the only people in the whole U.S. that paid any taxes. The bottom 50% pay zero. GE, Amazon, pay zero. They’re looting Themselves to pay THEMSELVES. Small business, million-scale are also the only people who net hire anyone. Microsoft buys the million-dollar businesses and fires everyone. Xerox collapses whole industries into dust. Only small business does anything in all America besides sucking lobbyist teat, as I’ve posted the charts before. So I know it hurts, but the million-dollar level is where that is now. Why?”
is true… but doesn’t fit with this:
“The changes included in the CARES Act would allow wealthy taxpayers to use losses in certain years to avoid paying taxes in other years. The day after Senate passage of the CARES Act, the JCT published a document estimating that the provisions together will reduce government revenue by $195 billion over ten years. Together, the changes are among the costliest provisions in the bill.” (from this
“Darn them for keeping small businesses open so they will still exist next year to rehire people!!! Darn you all to heck! We want every one of those sole proprietors dead, dead, dead, so you can only work at Home Depot and Amazon and get hauled out in an ambulance at minimum wage instead.”
(referring to this article): Rentiers Rule, Employers Drool which mentions this:
“The act allows pass-through businesses — ones taxed under individual income, rather than corporate — an unlimited amount of deductions against their non-business income, such as capital gains, the Washington Post said. They can also use losses to avoid paying taxes in other years….Hedge-fund investors and real estate business owners are “far and away” the ones who will benefit the most, tax expert Steve Rosenthal told the Washington Post.”
I can’t even disagree with Doc D’s opinbions because there’s so little relation between them and the facts, and I generally don’t bother disagreeing with opinions built from vaporwre. They’re untestable. Like the models Doc and others so deride, said opinions are flawed before they start owing to the data from which they’re extrapolated.
“But I wouldn’t get saucy about it: you can say it’s not important to put on roofs or harvest crops for a while until it rains and the granaries are empty. ”
We’re still employing people to raise and pick our fruit:
I’m curious, Raul. THe above link is to a page of google search results? Is that the kind of linking you complained about me making? I don’t know. Asking for my Invisible Friend. If so, now I know, and won’t do it again.
“If nobody works, everybody dies.”
Good thing that isn’t happening. Good thing that even the most severe quarantine lockdown proposals don’t include “nobody work(ing)”
It’s kind of like those useless jobs at the Pet Rock Espresso Factory that our economy can shed and actually benefit from losing as we transition from a Plenty Oil to a Peak Oil world in which people have no choice but to do real work or die. Useless, nay, destructive jobs like posting numerous straw dog fallacies day after day after day… but it’s a job, I suppose.
