boscohorowitz
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“The trade deal should be the least of Beijing’s worries by now.”
I read earlier that China is slashing tariffs. To the extent that social cohesion is crucial to dealing with a pandemic, and to the extent that maintaining certain levels of employment is critical to social cohesion, China may not be so irresponsible or foolish to spend energy on this matter.
So the alleged Dem candidate frontrunner is a gay man whose last name starts with Butt. Reminds me of how Obama rhymes with Osama. Apparently, thay have high hopes for this individual.
And the infowars are in full swing, eh? It’s like we get to watch a show of a show. Very unique time in history.
“EVERYONE agrees we don’t need ‘luxury’”
Excellent points. Now try this exercise: the fantastic waste we produce to stay warm, eat, etc., and consider that such exorbitant waste of finite resources amid a growing megapopulation is luxurious beyond comprehension. It’s likwe God taking out the garbage level waste.
Inbetween lies a fuzzy living landfill of smartphones out walking their owners, a mountain of Cheetos in neon plastic bags and dumbass “smath pahk” cars…
“then you just intend to tear it all down and wreck it, and replace it with I-have-not-yet-planned-what, warlords historically, and this is quite what they say. It’s what ‘revolutionary’ means. They are not kidding you about being revolutionaries any more than they are kidding about being Socialists. They say it and have the membership card. Why would I disbelieve them?”
I agree but with this caveat: they don’t know what revolutionary or big or small s Socialism is. They confuse those notions with the megacorpitalist booby traps they call policy. They, I assume, believe they’re big people reshaping the world with a righteous hand. (Go along with me on this, please, indulge the illusion that they believe this. Imagine their Magic Mirror prepping them for today’s news conference. They must hypnotize themselves before they hypnotize us. Look in Schiff’s eyes. he’s his own sock puppet. Insert joke joke about inserting… oh, never mind.;) )
So while they’re desperately scramblng to stay out of jail or public shame spectacles of a truly disgusting Epsteinian fragrance, they’re also telling themselves they’re the Mr & Mrs Rogers of modern political reality, let us envision.)
The trouble with a riff as good as your Anti-Logos tirade flag, Doc, is that it sometimes turns to horror when you realize that it’s the literal truth, that these people really are that mentally inverted along with the bligatorily perversions.
“Um, guys? So…you think Bernie Bros are going to go all-in for #MayorCheat, #NeverWarren or whatever? What are you smoking? ”
Agreed. Totally. Oh, anything can happen, a buttefly’s wings, blah blah, maybe even a flock of cute robotic sparrows on the podium, but odds are way against that movement taking it to the goal line. I do hope it goes most of the distance, cuz Whoopi does an awesome Bernie imitation and the vids’ll be on youtube ere soon.
One needs hope in these times. A current hope of mine is the Bernie’s Revenge concept Doc laid out a few days ago. Watching Hillary freak out again, maybe with a chorus line of twerking gay male office aids, no balloons, just lots of lasers…. head asplode!
“Grace, Nancy. It has a place. You lost your gamble, and the way you take your losses tells people a lot about you.”
Oh, the depths a politician must go to keep the show going. Better than being in jail. Better than people finding out with certainty that you have no problem with someone like Ghislaine Maxwell, the network she ran (and probably still runs if on a reduced power basis), and its relationship to the special club you lead with your tidy toy hammer rapping the podium.
“The oil market looks set for at least four months of depressed demand because of China’s coronavirus outbreak, with a large crude surplus not expected to clear at least until August, analysts and traders said.”
That sounds great for Russia. Vlad has their budget streamlined enough not to need go-go-go sales to maintain a steady course, and the stuff he keeps in the ground now only grows in value each year due to its relatively high EROI and all the complementary energy source Russia has developed to soften the cost of the inevitably lowering EROI factor in fossil fuelishness.
Not so good for USA oil. Good for USA consumers in the short run; in the longer run, a service economy nation can hardly afford a meltdown of the hospitality industry sending a bunch of the lower classes onto the streets, some truly homeless, others marching in protest. (cues La Marsaeilles, dons eye patch, realizes he doesn’t have a single yellow vest in his closet). After that, I’ll need one of Raul’s graph arrays to have a clue. Except that lowered demand for USA oil now affects the USA dollar since the Evil Empire’s members have worked out more than not how to sell stuff to each other without USA dollars.
Kind of a paradox: if we buy cheap foreign oil it helps our consumers keep rolling to the stores and other consumption sites, but it bankrupts a very large renascent oil industry, and the waves from that hitting our basic currency valuation will have uncommon symbolic weight, since oil sales are the primary traffic defining the USA dollar day by day.
If we buy our own oil, we have to raise energy prices through the roof to salvage the companies/infrastructure that make the oil. That will be a heavy blow to the Bubble.
Yeah, you hot dog short-sellers. If ever there was a time to let your nuts hang in the wind on a major bear run, this seems to be it. When the answer to What Could Possibly Go Wrong? is Pert Near Everything, short-selling seems solid.
COntinuing with Bertrand:
Matter in motion, which used to seem so unquestionable, turns out to be a concept quite inadequate for the needs of physics.
“Nevertheless modern science gives no indication whatever of the existence of the soul or mind as an entity; indeed the reasons for disbelieving in it are very much of the same kind as the reasons for disbelieving in matter. Mind and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown; the end of the battle is not the victory of one or the other, but the discovery that both are only heraldic inventions. The world consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties. Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations. If the causal relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may be called a physical object, and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event that occurs inside a man’s head will belong to groups of both kinds.
“Well, maybe not any event; to take drastic example, being shot in the head.”
from What Is the Soul?
Miss O’Day was flying exceptinally high that day, coasting the sweet spot of heroin addiction before the descent curve of that ballistic arc. Watching her, I feel like I’ve never really lived. Or something like that.
“more than 25,000 flights to, from or within China will be canceled this week”
In a crazy way, the above is perhaps the most uplifting datum I’ve seen concerning this. It’s a negative updraft; the cessation of so many flights is an impressive reduction in vectors, especially the globe-trotting kind. But wait! it’s better! but worse! That is toi say that the thrill I got, the uplift, was mostly my astonishment at the actual figures. Seeing how many jets full of people are in the air at any time stunned me even though I know that way back in early 911 days, the quotable average was that any time, a population the size of a large town or small city (150k) was aloft in transit.
One wonders how many espionage post-neo-cyberpunk authors are locking into their keyboards this Pac NW am working into their next novel the now freshly revitalized weaponized virus gone rogue motif (motif is a more powerful and useful term now that meme has been smeared all over the semiotext world). Quick! See the movie version before the next plague hits!
In his later years, just crossing into early geriatrica, no one could sell sanitation hoods like Kiefer Sutherland. His eyes were so in on the joke, twinkling over their 5-ply Fatima(r) veil.
Speaking of globetrotters, the imagery and semiotics of this thing, the historical semiotics or maybe it’s the semiotics’ historicity?, is so weirdly disturbingly apt:
Don’t Make Me Break Out Josie & the Pussycats
Now that you’re in hypnotic comatose seizures from the above, here’s a cure:
In case you need electroshock resuscitation:
***
“Let us begin with the body. The plain man thinks that material objects must certainly exist, since they are evident to the senses. Whatever else may be doubted, it is certain that anything you can bump into must be real; this is the plain man’s metaphysic. This is all very well, but the physicist comes along and shows that you never bump into anything: even when you run your hand along a stone wall, you do not really touch it. When you think you touch a thing, there are certain electrons and protons, forming part of your body, which are attracted and repelled by certain electrons and protons in the thing you think you are touching, but there is no actual contact. The electrons and protons in your body, becoming agitated by nearness to the other electrons and protons are disturbed, and transmit a disturbance along your nerves to the brain; the effect in the brain is what is necessary to your sensation of contact, and by suitable experiments this sensation can be made quite deceptive. The electrons and protons themselves, however, are only crude first approximations, a way of collecting into a bundle either trains of waves or the statistical probabilities of various different kinds of events. Thus matter has become altogether too ghostly to be used as an adequate stick with which to beat the mind.” Bertrand Russell
But electrons, whoa. You can flail a brain like lightning on a winter night with some good old electrons. Yee-HA! Pass me that there remote, Aint Bea.
“I thought for sure they would blame the Russians but instead they blamed Iowa!”
*snigger-snorkle*
The states of the United States of America meddled in the election and stole the election from the government!
There is nothing left to do but weither build a wall between each state (Trump’s new platform)… or blame Canada!(Hillary’s scheme)
Upcoming imaginary events:
The Million Homeless Man March/Hiway Shakedown Brigade
The Noveau Poor/Perma-Squatters Movement
Landfill Wars
Ghost Satellites
Survival BUnker Dumpster Diving
“And everyone gets a Participation Trophy!”
Damn straight. I want something to put in my swag bag form playing their game.
This seems relevant:
“A controversial group currently in the crosshairs of the establishment, which was also discussed at Event 201, is known as the Anti-Vaccine Movement. And now we see the UK Government working on a new law to jail people who spread “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda” online. Currently, people are protected from prosecution if they sincerely believe the misinformation or propaganda is real, but the government is looking to reform this provision and make it a criminal offense to post anything online, particularly social media, which is deemed to be “Anti-Vaccine.”
“Where does the CDC stand on this issue? Well, when we examine a CDC document published at the National Academies website, we see what they call, “A Recipe for Fostering Public Interest and High Vaccine Demand.”
“The CDC document appears to contain outright talking points and a strategy to be carried out and propagated to the public via health officials and the media.”
Whatever devious, Cthullic agenda might inform such actions behind the dark curtain, it is only to be expected in the light of so many viral pathogens currently ruckusing the planet.
The only alternative I’ve seen to serious massive civil unreast of a highly destructive nature is an increase in authoritarianims bordering on totalitarianism. It remains to be seen if our government can pull this off, at least in a manner less destructive than good old fighting in the streets.
“So far the death rate is going down not up.”
It should.
1) People are paying more attention to symptoms and taking better care as soon as they feel the first touch of illness.
2) Professional medical acumen for effective treatment should be increasing.
The lowering of the floating average death rate is not entirely good. One good thing about Ebola is it kills so well it tends to burn itself out. It has a 90% kill rate. Even though its latency ranges from 2-21 days, a wide ambiguous spread, once it takes hold it in an area it makes itself admantly known, and authorities take major measures that people generally go along with because they don’t want to die bleeding internally and out their bodily orifices.
It ramps up mighty fast and then ramps down fast, in terms of contagion, because it is so obvious. With a 90% mortality rate, nobody fucks around and debates whether its worth quarantining the area. People evading quarantine risk getting shot not just by authorities but people outside the quarantine. Most folks realize and accept their bad luck in being inside the quarantine zone during the outbreak.
Increased lethality spurs cooperation. Just ask the mafia.
The kids are still alright:
“Conservative and liberal capitalists often attack a supposed lack of gratitude among the disaffected. Among the young, among environmentalists, socialists, take your pick. It’s said that they don’t appreciate the pleasures and securities that the modern world affords them. Their dissatisfaction is a mark of lack of awareness.
“But this seems to me to be a coded attack, which uses ‘gratitude’ to wrap up and disguise servitude. The attack isn’t really on a lack of awareness, but on a lack of conformity and subservience.
“I know of no one more appreciative of warm duvets than the most dedicated eco-activists I know. When you’ve spent days or weeks up a tree in February to prevent it being cut down, or huddled in a dank tunnel to protest an airport expansion, your gratitude for creature comforts inevitably dwarfs the numbed appreciation of the willing slave to modern life.
“Ever since I began to fully appreciate the perilous trajectory of our voracious dependence on fossil fuels, I’ve never been able to ease myself into a hot bath without a deep, reflexive surge of gratitude. No bath is taken for granted; each one conjures images of futures without such luxuries. This consciousness works to both reduce my use of luxuries, and to intensify my appreciation of them.”
One could add this to reasons to be conerned about kung flu:
“U.S. suicide rate highest among wealthy nations – U.S. outspends other high-income countries on health care but has lowest life expectancy”
Not unlike our current, hyper-priced, misused, and increasingly impotent military defense system. If taken at face value, this means that China has a more effective health care system than we do.
“Without vaccination, the contagion rate will steadily ramp upward because we have no vaccine”
Without PREVIOUS vaccination, the contagion rate will steadily ramp upward because we have no vaccine YET AVAILABLE TO BEGIN VACCINATIONS. and it looks like it’s a tricky one to mace vaccine from.
“Bosco, what was the point of the Dave Gardner bit?”
I just think he’s a mostly forgotten unique bit of treasure. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but to some ears, a source of unusual joy. Joy is self-explanatory. Nothing to do with any current hot button issues.
But I felt it did shed warm clear light on commonly perceived certain liberal/conservative stereotypes, for both stereotypes existed within dear Brother Dave.
“Death rates will likely change as more numbers come in but so far it looks like one has more to fear from the usual seasonal flu than from 2019 nCoV.”
Not if you’ve been vaccinated. Vaccination doesn’t always work, but still… one would think that most of the flu infections this year happened to non-vaccinated people.
We don’t have a vaccine for the coronavirus.
Now, look at that spike:
About two months in, the hospitalization crosses over to the vertical axis side of things.
Without vaccination, the contagion rate will steadily ramp upward because we have no vaccine and coronavirus has a long latency period with no apparent symptoms while nonetheless being infectious. However, as big a problem as actual infectins/illnesses/deaths, etc., is the impact on the global economy at such a fragile time.
I certainly do not wish to sow panic even with the hardest forecast outlooks. Panic is for suckers. But panic is already steadily being sown. Panic sells news, shows, mags, rags, ads. Panic is *intersting*, and the populace is fascinated by things that are “big” and “scary”.
AIDS was a very bad mofo. But when oit broke out, it was the “queer disease”. It took p[olitically-minded Hollywood movies to get to=hrough people’s denialism that this thing infected anyone who fucked anyone who has it, and homo saps are always fucking everyone they can get their hands on, often secretly, drunkenly, even forgottenly.
This is an airborne virus spread by things as mindane aas hand to doorknob to hand contact, sneeses, maybe even farts. So people have no cognitive bluffers on this. Panic herd behavior is a very likely prospect, and very likely to happen pretty soon.
We didn’t shut down airline routes because of AIDS. We didn’t even shut down gay bathhouses. But China has shut down an entire city and has the military dispensing supplies and maintaining curfews/quarantines. Even if this is martial rule opportunism (I doubt it), it’s panic fodder.
Question: if we had the National Guard dispensing necessities in a national emergency, how quick would you be to assume our boys were involved just so they could rip off their fellow Americans?
There are periods in a nation’s periodic cycles when the military is blatantly corrupt internally. The Civil War in the USA comes to mind. (It being a Civil War in a morally schizophrenic national era practically guaranteed such corruption.) There are periods when the military feels like its doing what it must to protect the homelad. WWII comes to mind. Of course, parasites exist at any time.
China is currently in a cycle of great national pride, whatever its faith in its ruling establishment is or isn’t. I think it’s too easy to expect the worst of the Chinese military in a case where their own people are simply trying not to die of an illness that could –and will — easily kill military personnel. It’s always fun to throw stones and assume the worst motive.
Would you rather trust the insanely corrupt Chinese business community?
Some times people do the right thing for the right reason. They rarely do it very well, because humans are fuckups, but sometimes they actually mean well.
Cynical skepticism is not the same thing as automatically assuming the worst. Accusing parties of wrongdoing without sound factual reason only gives them more reason to prove you right since you obviously insist in believing they’re wrong.
It’s like the situation with today’s constabulary. Corruption has always been a problem with cops since they hold so much authority with so much free license. But some times are worse than others, like now, after many decades of militarizing police as if they were occupying troops in a hostile foreign populace, while setting standards aimed at preventing candidates with IQs higher than 110 to become cops. With racial profiling quotas amid a growingly corrupt government on all levels. SOme times assuming the worst is only logical.
But China went through its worst times in that regard. The Cultural revolution is not as old in China as USA’s last period of uber-corruption at home (the 20s black market corruption via Prohibition and 30s corruption via too much poverty). The Chinese are looking to be better than their ancestors were, and compared to that awful past, not doing too badly. This is a nation shattered to dust 80 years ago now rebuilding itself, however foolishly in the long term, since then.
Maybe, just maybe, the bulk of Chinese military involved sees this as the sort of thing they don’t want to evilly profit from. We certainly wouldn’t trust the Chinese constabulary, which is still mired in its secret police licentiousness. I’m hardly a fan of our military abroad, but at home, I tend to see them as our friend. Part of their essential job description and conditioning.
So maybe we should not point the finger at them, especially when our domestic situation is so rotten.
““My estimate is that Bernie Sanders won Iowa, then the state Democratic party establishment ginned up a “systems failure” to deny him”
I fear they may be right. He was maybe 6% ahead going in.”
Being someone who was very involved with and observant of Bernie’s ’16 campaign, I can say that he has kicked their butts in just about every poll done once his campaign gained steam. Of course he won that caucus.
Tulsi is smart to have stayed outside the ring.
But I’m curious: why the concern on whether the coronavirus is bioweaponry or not? We have no control over our government. We have no control over free-range microbes. We only have control over ourselves, limited as that control is. The virus is loose. It will call the shots.
Here’s a nuanced mini-bio of Brother Dave that supports, in my mind, the notion that what caused his Dark Period (see how our culture inherently enshrines lighter tones? a love of light is healthy but darkness is just as important lest ye go sunblind and be sunburnt unto oblivion) was a combination of rejection by a hypocritical white racially bigoted entertainment industry as well as by a hypocritical racially bigoted Southern community, a whole buncha money (he was pretty swank for awhile) inflating the inevitable narcissism that comes from too much booze and speed, and being caught up in the usual Libertarian fever dreams (see his relationship with Texas oilman H.L. Hunt) like that sold today by folks like the Koch Bros while they themselves practice corporate socialism.
Miles Davis gets a lot of post-mortem heat for his bitterness toward white dominance of society and the music industry, but if you’d gone through what he’d gone through, you’d probably feel similarly.
As for his self-admitted physical abuse of women, something he tried to justify in his autobiography, what can I say in his defense? Nothing. But I can say this: women ought to take a baseball bat to men who smack them around like that. It only takes once for a bully man to learn. Just because men on average are larger and have greater upper body strength is no excuse to lie down and take it.
“Big man beat a little man every time if he’s in the right and keeps on coming.” (allegedly an old texas Ranger expression) I think this applies to little women versus big men too.
Kinda like Little David and Great Big Goliath:
Brother Dave was beyond category. While he catered in some respects to narrow-minded, vindictive, bigoted Southern attitudes, he started off doing so in a way aimed to lift them above their native surroundings and see beyond. Eventually, his Southern audiences turned on him for denouncing LBJ and making open criticisms of cherished Dixie notions. Likewise, he got in trouble in the north for using drugs.
Being a child of the South raised in the North, I take a more nuanced view of such things than most people, or so it seems to me. (Subjective objectivity is a motherhummer.) People reflect the attitudes prevalent where they were raised. We stand where we sit, said someone important enough for it to become an academic proverb. How they respopnd to those attitudes is what is most important to me, and to expect people to flatly reject their upbringing is to expect people to deny their roots, which are a part of whom they are. Easier said than done.
In the late 60s, when he was bitter and staying seriously high, his act purportedly became openly and crudely racially bigoted. I believe this was true but haven’t heard the material myself. But then, during the 70s when he was seriously strung out on cocaine, David Bowie was a huge Hitler fan. I can envision a bitter Dave Gardner pandering to the cruder common denominators of his Southern base partly because he’d been done the way they’d done Lenny Bruce. Getting shot down from being on TV because you were busted for pot, and blacklisted from much of your Southern audience because you dared knock LBJ’s Holy War in Viet Nam that was suppoed to “fight communism”, can lead a bitter renegade to decide he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb while simultaneously rubbing his Southern audience’s nose in their own racially bigoted shit.
But he was also this guy:
“Yeah, times change, as do tastes. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Gardner was considered to be “the Lenny Bruce of the South,” and was popular with white and black audiences. Later on, though, he became much more strident and openly racist, some say because of his drug and alcohol use. Still, As a kid in Mississippi in the early ’60s, I remember trading Gardner’s punch lines in dialect with my black friends, much to the amusement of their parents.”
Anyway, Brother Dave is hilarious in a kind-hearted way, and sheds unique light on social attitudes at the turn of the 60s. Keep an open mind and remember that we’re all human, and you’ll find this time capsule uncommonly revealing about the South’s chronic inferiority/guilt complex called “Southern Pride”, while also experiencing moments of transcendental brotherly love between bizarre giggle fits.
Bonus vintage comedy trivia:
“(Jonathan) Winters was schizophrenic, so much so that he spent some time on (as he so appropriately put it) “the funny farm.” He was actually committed to an institution for the mentally ill a couple of times.Reportedly, the first time he was committed, he was stark naked and climbing the mast of a schooner in San Francisco harbor, saying as he looked skyward, “Wait! Wait! I’m coming!”
I can only admire and applaud. That’s the way you do it if you’re gonna get yourself committed.
That.is.fascinating. The tall bldg/econ crisis correlation. Well, looking at it from a poetic metaphor perspective. Rationally, it’s logical that when there’s too much illusory wealth easy had, it will go up because there’s a) literally no room, and b) hubris tends to aim skyward.
If we put that energy into building underground, we’d have something worth the effort.
Looks like we’ll be out or Iraq ere long:
While I have no use for skyscrapers and the thinking behind them, the image of the Lakhta Center takes my breath away, partly from acrophobia emerging as I age. (Young, I delighted in heights.) Thanx for the thrill.
Not to mention the risk of going blind in the all-seeing eye surrounded by the hair in your palm:
“Risky masturbation kills 80 to 100 Germans a year, claims a Brandenburg physician who is shining a light on the unpredictable and often clandestine killer. Dr. Harald Voss estimates that one to two people per one million inhabitants are killed by risky masturbation techniques annually, all of them in search of an elevated experience that the vast majority already deem quite satisfactory.
“Asphyxiation is cited as the most common form of masturbation death, says Voss, along with electric shock, however it’s difficult to get a truly accurate reading of just how many people have lost their lives this way… for a number of reasons.”
Something in our favor is our obsession with cars and privacy. While cars are a disaster and our privacy is de facto social alienation that is dissolving societal bonds, they do reduce intimate vector crossings compared to public transportation. One reason the Spanish flu was so bad was people living in crowded tenements, gobs of guys crammed into Army barracks, the dominant prevalence of public transport, etc.
However, we offset this somewhat by increasingly having plain old MD offices in the same giant megaplex building housing local hospitals. Portland’s OHSU is monstrous and incompetent, and also naturally packs sick people together in shared breathing spaces, including elevators. See below:
And we like to drive our cars to buildings where low-paid workers, who often live in more crowded quarters than not, make food and hand it to us out of windows. Unless we’ve got some spare jingle and go to The Olive Garden, which kind of establishment is a natural vectoral node for anything spread by contact or airborne transmission.
These modern tendencies also make it harder to track down and isolate contagions outbreak locations: everyone/everything’s a moving target that periodically gathers in groups in small quarters where microbes run rampant.
German measles aka rubella virus
In the late 50s, I fought this thing over and over to the point the doctors gave me a tonsillectomy at 2 & 1/2 years old. (Probably cuz how the lymph nodes act up?) For whatever reason, the recurrent relapses stopped. (My earliest childhood memory is being in that hospital, and the memories are fun: escaping from giant metal ribbed cribs to run rampant with my buddy in the sickward until I’d run smack into a pair of white-stockinged nurse’s knees and get put back in the crib. Probably it was the adventurous fun that healed me of recurrent rubella?)
By the late 60s, vaccination programs in the USA against rubella virus coincided with a massive decline in rubella infections in the USA. Just one of many cultural props sustaining our over-burgeoning population. I find it amusing how people blame vaccines for autism rather than the enormous increase and intensification of information and stimuli overloading certain kinds of minds.
Being “on the spectrum” 300 years ago wasn’t such a big deal, I suspect. Your brain wasn’t constantly bombarded by deliberately invasive information like ads, squealing L-train wheels, cars roaring by whenever you leave your house, going to school with a buncha squally brats your age while a teacher forces you to focus on boring shit… seems like Isaac Newton, for example, was fairly Aspergersoid, but he wasn’t raised in frony of a TV and then shoved into public school.
If this coronavirus is the result of intentionally releasing a weaponized microbe, this indicates staggering stupidity on the part of those giving the orders. It’s like deciding to use a boomerang to deliver a nuclear warhead.
“…seems to suggest that pretty near everything we are told about influenza and pandemics is made-up bullshit.”
I’d emphasize “seems to”. There’s ample ambiguity in something as new as modern epidemic statistics methodology. Calling it made up bullshit is more than a bit harsh. I’d consider the article (which I skim read on certain hot-button terms like vaccines) itself an ambiguous extrapolation that one should take with several grains of salt, as one should all such statistical analysis involving open systems like populations, microbe populations, vaccines, transportation, housing, genetic predispositions, hospital access, etc., etc., etc.
It’s a new science, and new sciences are rife with errors, but also rife with previoopusly unavailable data, axioms, concepts, and conclusions.
re: The Economic Collapse blog. *sigh* Rapturology gives me hives. God is someone to pray to in faith, not use as a sock puppet from your scripture of choice.
You know, crap like this:
“It will never be acceptable for any U.S. president to try to divide up the land of Israel. That land was given to the people of Israel by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and any politician that attempts to carve up the land will only find himself fighting against God.”
It’s kind of hard to hear the still small voice with all these people bellowing about What God Wants/Plans etc.
No wonder so many people feel like this guy. I can hardly blame them:
“It has been estimated that one out of every four pigs in the entire world has already died, and this crisis is far from over.”
It sucks to be a non-hominid fleshy animal these days. We argue whether the holocaust happened while we run a gazzillion sentient beings through terrifying food factories before running them through terrifying death factories. Like I often say, how conveninet it was during the Final Solution to have all those cattle cars available for transporting humans to death factories.
As we treat the least among us, so we treat each other.
I don’t fear death. I fear losing my soul before I die in this soulless world.
“He must be the lone survivor of the coronavirus, dancing with joy.”
Looking for a girl. Raiswe some kids, start a new religion. Like he should oughta:
“With wacko weather regardless of whether its “noram” or not:”
Uh, normal. I’ll be glad when I’m no longer Mr. Mucus Head. Fucks with my typing andthe patience needed for proper proofreading.
Checking back, I see you were referencing the USA with that 10K mortality rate (which has to be an avberage of flus over many years, I would think).
If the 13k figure you cite is the number of reported cases, than your logic is off. That’s for influenzas in a nation with annual vaccine programs so popular they’re now demonized fore not being perfect. If all 300 million USA folks contracted the average flu, that would mean that roughly 240,000 people would die.
That’s with a 0.1% fatality rate. With a 2% mortality rate like the coronavirus, the death rate if every person contracted the coronavirus would be 240K times 10 times 2. About 5 million people. Now, that mortality rate is currently based mostly on people who receive intensive hospital care. We know we have only a small fraction of the hospital resources needed to provide all serious infections. We have only a small fraction of resources needed to assess how serious an infection might be. We have only a small fracrtion of resources to even determine who has it even if they’re coughing and feeling lousy.
And that’s just those who die (under maximum infection rates, which won’t happen, so this is worst case scenario). Let’s cut the infection rate down to 1 out of five. Just 60 million people infected, and 1 million dead. But 60 million people suffering the flu in a few month’s time is an economy killer.
This thing looks pretty big. During an insane political season. With lunatics in the Pentagon prevented from kicking off something uncomfortably close to WWIII prevented from doing so by a lunatic-in-charge. With wacko weather regardless of whether its “noram” or not: it’s currently wacko. With the USA dollar held up by FED prayers and digital data representing imaginary wealth everyone needs to believe in else they’ll learn that the emperor and themselves are naked.
I’d say that this is the year that the USA lost whatever it still retains of its global colossus crown and learns to live within its means, primarily by seeing up close how much dying can happen when you blow that much smoke up your ass for this long.
Something tells me this guy won’t be among any coronaviral 2%:
“The number are 10,000 out of 13,000,000”
I was going by the rough population of the USA. Must’ve picked the wrong country.
Out of 13 million it’s 1300 who dies of the flu per that stat..
“I survived the encounter ”
It’s nice to be lucky.
I’ve had a case of the flu. Whole family did. Wicked shyte, oy vey. We survived.
Some influenzas are worse than others. Some people are stronger than others. Some years find us stronger and more resistant than others. The very nature of such statistics is a description of one’s chances at being more lucky or more unlucky.
With the coronavirus, the long latency period is the kicker. A vector can infect dozxens of people before real;izing they’re sick. That increases the number of people who toss their dice against the 2% rate.
The reason I take this so seriously is because our economy in the States is based on people interacting with people, typically in closed buildings moving the air rapidly. This time of year up north, the air usually very dry inside such places, even in soggy old Portland.
The only way to keep the size of that 2% from reaching painfully large proportions (like a proportion that touches you or a loved one) is to clamp down on contact. It’s an economic shutdown, that process. In a nation where people can’t afford to miss a week much less a month of work. In an economy based on ‘just enough/just in time’ inventory dependent on massive importation, particularly from Pacific Rim nations. In a society raised on immunization and junk food. Not exactly the most robust immune system profile belongs to the USA population, I should think, or Euromerica in general.
There’s only one way the USA government can deal effectively with such circumstances, and that is something resembling martial law. That thing we tend to speak of as if it is unique to China for some reason although our history is rife with same.
